Part 10 (1/2)

The change was quite natural, nothing forced or awkward about it.

The significance had gone its way, but the results remained. They were in the 'sea' together. It 'had to be.' As from the beginning of the world they belonged to one another, each for the other--real. There was nothing about it of a text-book 'love affair,' absolutely nothing. Deeper far than a pa.s.sional relations.h.i.+p, guiltless of any fruit of mere propinquity, the foundations of the sudden intimacy were as ancient as immovable.

The inevitable touch lay in it. And Tom knew this partly confirmed, at any rate, by the emotion in him when she said 'my boy,' for the term woke no annoyance, conveyed no lightness. Yet there was a flavour of disappointment in it somewhere--something of necessary value that he missed in her. . . . To a man in love it must have sounded superior, contemptuous: whereas to him it sounded merely true. He was her boy.

This mother-touch was in her. To care, to cherish, somehow even to rescue, she had come to find him out--again. She had come _back_. . . .

It was thus, at first, he felt it. From somewhere above, beyond the place where he now stood in life, she had 'come back, come down, to fetch him.'

She was further on than he was. He longed to stand beside her. Until he did so . . . this gap in her must prevent absolute union. On both sides it was not entirely natural as yet. . . . Thought grew confused in him.

And, though he could not understand, he accepted it as inevitable.

The joy, moreover, was so urgent and uprising, that it smothered a delicate whisper that yet came with it--that the process involved also-- pain. Though aware, from time to time, of this vague uneasiness, he easily brushed it aside. It was the merest gossamer-thread of warning that with each recurrent appearance became more tenuous, until finally it ceased to make its presence felt at all. . . .

In the entire affair of this sudden intercourse he felt the Wave, yet the Wave, though steadily rising, ceased to make its presence too consciously known; the Whiff, the Sound, the Eyes seemed equally forgotten: that is, he did not realise them. He was living now, and introspection was a waste of time, living too intensely to reflect or a.n.a.lyse. He felt swept onwards upon a tide that was greater than he could manage, for instead of swimming consciously, he was borne and carried with it. There was certainly no attempt to stem. Life was rising. It rushed him forwards too deliciously to think. . . .

He began asking himself the old eternal question: 'Do I love? Am I in love--at last, then?' . . . Some time pa.s.sed, however, before he realised that he loved, and it was in a sudden, curious way that this realisation came. Two little words conveyed the truth--some days later, as they were at tea on the verandah of her hotel, watching the sunset behind the blue line of the Jura Mountains. He had been talking about himself, his engineering prospects--rather proudly--his partners.h.i.+p and the letter he expected daily from Sir William. 'I hope it will be a.s.souan,' he said, 'I've never been in Egypt. I'm awfully keen to see it.' She said she hoped so too. She knew Egypt well: it enchanted, even enthralled her: 'familiar as though I'd lived there all my life. A change comes over me, I become a different person--and a much older one; not physically,' she explained with a curious shy gaze at him, 'but in the sense that I feel a longer pedigree behind me.' She gave the little laugh that so often accompanied her significant remarks. 'I always think of the Nile as the 'stream' where I see the floating faces.'

They went on chatting for some minutes about it. Tom asked if she had met his cousin out there; yes, she remembered vaguely a Mr. Winslowe coming to tea on her _dahabieh_ once, but it was only when he described Tony more closely that she recalled him positively. 'He interested me,' she said then: 'he talked wildly, but rather picturesquely, about what he called the 'spiral movement of life,' or something.' 'He goes after birds,' Tom mentioned. 'Of course,' she replied, 'I remember distinctly now. It was something about the flight of birds that introduced the spiral part of it.

He had a good deal in him, that man,' she added, 'but he hid it behind a lot of nonsense--almost purposely, I felt.'

'That's Tony all over,' Tom a.s.sented, 'but he's a rare good sort and I'm awfully fond of him. He's 'real' in our sense too, I think.'

She said then very slowly, as though her thoughts were far away in Egypt at the moment: 'Yes, I think he is. I've seen _his_ face too.'

'Floating down, you mean--or on the bank?'

'Floating,' she answered. 'I'm sure I have.'

Tom laughed happily. 'Then you've got him to rescue too,' he said.

'But, remember, if we're both drowning, I come first.'

She looked into his face and smiled her answer, touching his fingers with her hand. And again it was not a woman's touch.

'He was in Warsaw, too, a few weeks ago,' Tom went on, 'so we were all three there together. Rather odd, you know. He was ski-ing with me in the Carpathians,'; and he described their meeting at Zakopane after the long interval since boyhood. 'He told me about you in Egypt, too, now I come to think of it. He mentioned the _dahabieh_, but called you a Russian--yes, I remember now,--and a Russian Princess into the bargain.

Evidently you made less impression on Tony than----'

It was then he stopped as though he had been struck. The idle conversation changed. He heard her interrupting words from a curious distance. They fell like particles of ice upon his heart.

'Polish, of course, not Russian,' she mentioned casually, 'but the rest is right, though I never use the t.i.tle. My husband, in his own country, is a Prince, you see.'

Something reeled in him, then instantly righted itself. For a moment he felt as though the freedom of their intercourse had received a shock that blighted it. The words, 'my husband,' struck chill and ominous into his heart. The recovery, however,--almost simultaneous--showed him that both the freedom and the intercourse were right and unashamed. She gave him nothing that belonged to any other: she was loyal and true to that other as she was loyal and true to himself. Their relations.h.i.+p was high above mere pa.s.sional intrigue; it could exist--in the way she knew it, felt it-- side by side with that other one, before that other one's very eyes, if need be. . . . He saw it true: he saw it innocent as daylight. . . .

For what he felt was somehow this: the woman in her was not his, but more than that--it was not any one's. It still lay dormant. . . .

If there was a momentary confusion in his own mind, there was none, he felt positive, in hers. The two words that struck him such a blow, she uttered as lightly, innocently, as the rest of the talk between them.

Indeed, had that other--even in thought Tom preferred the paraphrase--been present, she would have introduced them to each other then and there.

He heard her saying the little phrases even: 'My husband,' and, 'This is Tom Kelverdon whom I've loved since childhood.'

Nothing brought more home to him the high innocence, the purity and sweetness of this woman than the reflections that flung after one another in his mind as he realised that his hope of her being a widow was not justified, and at the same moment that he desired exclusive possession of her--that he was definitely in love.

That she was unaware of any discovery, even if she divined the storm in him at all, was clear from the way she went on speaking. For, while all this flashed through his mind, she added quietly: 'He is in Warsaw now.

He--lives there. I go to him for part of every year.' To which Tom heard his voice reply something as natural and commonplace as 'Yes--I see.'

Of the hundred pregnant questions that presented themselves, he did not ask a single one: not that he lacked the courage so much as that he felt the right was--not yet--his. Moreover, behind her quiet words he divined a tragedy. The suffering that had become sweetness in her face was half explained, but the full revelation of it belonged to 'that other' and to herself alone. It had been their secret, he remembered, for at least fifteen years.