Part 99 (1/2)
”I don't know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I've got to be educated somewhere,--in France, perhaps,--I don'tknow where; but I shall be glad to go away.”
”I shan't like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie, is it really true you're going? Then these holidays will be the last I shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I wish----”
The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking gra.s.s-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and the milk-white sea beyond.
”I wish,” she said, after a pause, ”that I could see you again sometime.
You wish that, too?”
”Yes, but it would have been better if--if--you had--shot straight over there--down by the breakwater.”
Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy who only ten days before had decorated Amomma's horns with cut-paper ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.
”Don't be stupid,” she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct attacked the side-issue. ”How selfish you are! Just think what I should have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I'm quite miserable enough already.”
”Why? Because you're going away from Mrs. Jennett?”
”No.”
”From me, then?”
No answer for a long time. d.i.c.k dared not look at her. He felt, though he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.
”I don't know,” she said. ”I suppose it is.”
”Maisie, you must know. I'm not supposing.”
”Let's go home,” said Maisie, weakly.
But d.i.c.k was not minded to retreat.
”I can't say things,” he pleaded, ”and I'm awfully sorry for teasing you about Amomma the other day. It's all different now, Maisie, can't you see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of leaving me to find out.”
”You didn't. I did tell. Oh, d.i.c.k, what's the use of worrying?”
”There isn't any; but we've been together years and years, and I didn't know how much I cared.”
”I don't believe you ever did care.”
”No, I didn't; but I do,--I care awfully now, Maisie,” he gulped,--”Maisie, darling, say you care too, please.”
”I do, indeed I do; but it won't be any use.”
”Why?”
”Because I am going away.”
”Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say--will you?” A second ”darling” came to his lips more easily than the first. There were few endearments in d.i.c.k's home or school life; he had to find them by instinct. d.i.c.k caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of the revolver.
”I promise,” she said solemnly; ”but if I care there is no need for promising.”