Part 12 (1/2)

My father halted for an instant in his answer, and glanced over his shoulder.

”Wardingham and Baxter share all those coppices,” he remarked. ”They come up to my corner on each side.”

”But the dark heather and pine land beyond. With just the gables of a house among the trees.”

”Oh? _that_,” he said with a careful note of indifference.

”That's--Justin. You know Justin. He used to come to Burnmore Park.”

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

LADY MARY JUSTIN

-- 1

I did not see Lady Mary Justin for nearly seven months after my return to England. Of course I had known that a meeting was inevitable, and I had taken that very carefully into consideration before I decided to leave South Africa. But many things had happened to me during those crowded years, so that it seemed possible that that former magic would no longer sway and distress me. Not only had new imaginative interests taken hold of me but--I had parted from adolescence. I was a man. I had been through a great war, seen death abundantly, seen hards.h.i.+p and pa.s.sion, and known hunger and shame and desire. A hundred disillusioning revelations of the quality of life had come to me; once for example when we were taking some people to the concentration camps it had been necessary to a.s.sist at the premature birth of a child by the wayside, a startlingly gory and agonizing business for a young man to deal with.

Heavens! how it shocked me! I could give a score of such grim pictures--and queer pictures....

And it wasn't only the earthlier aspects of the life about me but also of the life within me that I had been discovering. The first wonder and innocence, the wors.h.i.+pping, dawn-clear pa.s.sion of youth, had gone out of me for ever....

-- 2

We met at a dinner. It was at a house the Tarvrilles had taken for the season in Mayfair. The drawing-room was a big white square apartment with several big pictures and a pane of plate gla.s.s above the fireplace in the position in which one usually finds a mirror; this showed another room beyond, containing an exceptionally large, gloriously colored portrait in pastel--larger than I had ever thought pastels could be.

Except for the pictures both rooms were almost colorless. It was a brilliant dinner, with a predominating note of ruby; three of the women wore ruby velvet; and Ellersley was present just back from Arabia, and Ethel Manton, Lady Hendon and the d.u.c.h.ess of Clynes. I was greeted by Lady Tarvrille, spoke to Ellersley and Lady Hendon, and then discovered a lady in a dress of blue and pearls standing quite still under a picture in the opposite corner of the room and regarding me attentively.

It was Mary. Some man was beside her, a tall grey man with a broad crimson ribbon, and I think he must have spoken of me to her. It was as if she had just turned to look at me.

Constantly during those intervening months I had been thinking of meeting her. None the less there was a shock, not so much of surprise as of deferred antic.i.p.ation. There she stood like something amazingly forgotten that was now amazingly recalled. She struck me in that brief crowded instant of recognition as being exactly the person she had been when we had made love in Burnmore Park; there were her eyes, at once frank and sidelong, the old familiar sweep of her hair, the old familiar tilt of the chin, the faint humor of her lip, and at the same time she seemed to be something altogether different from the memories I had cherished, she was something graver, something inherently more splendid than they had recorded. Her face lit now with recognition.

I went across to her at once, with some dull obviousness upon my lips.

”And so you are back from Africa at last,” she said, still unsmiling. ”I saw about you in the papers.... You had a good time.”

”I had great good luck,” I replied.

”I never dreamt when we were boy and girl together that you would make a soldier.”

I think I said that luck made soldiers.

Then I think we found a difficulty in going on with our talk, and began a dull little argument that would have been stupidly egotistical on my part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making soldiers or only finding them out. I saw that she had not intended to convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. But our minds were remote from the words upon our lips. We were like aphasiacs who say one thing while they intend something altogether different. The impulse that had brought me across to her had brought me up to a wall of impossible utterances. It was with a real quality of rescue that our hostess came between us to tell us our partners at the dinner-table, and to introduce me to mine. ”You shall have him again on your other side,” she said to Lady Mary with a charming smile for me, treating me as if I was a lion in request instead of the mere outsider I was.

We talked very little at dinner. Both of us I think were quite unequal to the occasion. Whatever meetings we had imagined, certainly neither of us had thought of this very possible encounter, a long disconcerting hour side by side. I began to remember old happenings with an astonis.h.i.+ng vividness; there within six inches of me was the hand I had kissed; her voice was the same to its lightest shade, her hair flowed off her forehead with the same amazingly familiar wave. Was she too remembering? But I perhaps had changed altogether....

”Why did you go away as you did?” she asked abruptly, when for a moment we were isolated conversationally. ”Why did you never write?”

She had still that phantom lisp.

”What else could I do?”