Chapter VI: Part 6

“Ah, then you knew her?” His voice (or I imagined it) had chilled. It began to say, that faint chill, that if I too were of ‘the set,’ he could not be at ease. But I would not give him time to think awry.

“No, no! Only tonight. But I do know her.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight,” I said and looked at him.

“Then——” his hand tightened on the chair, “you saw? I was right? You _did_ see?”

“I saw—something,” I admitted.

“Some one?”

I nodded.

His face lighted up. He pulled in his chair to me.

“Her hands—did you notice her hands? I have a drawing of them somewhere. I’ll show it to you——” He stopped short: Then—“What is your name?” he asked me.

“Jenny. Jenny Summer.”

He considered that fact for a moment and put it aside again.

“I’d like you to see it. Anita will want it for that damned scrap-book of hers. She’ll be worrying at me—they all will.”

“You won’t let it go?” I said quickly.

He shook his head.

“No. But they can’t understand why. They can’t understand anything. They thought I was mad just now. So I was, for that matter. To see her again, you know—to see her again——”

“I know,” I said.

He laughed nervously.

“Hallucination, of course. Thought transference. What you please. They’d say so. Do you think so? And I’d been thinking of my picture of her. Oh, I admit it. So we must look at the matter in the light of common-sense.”

“But I saw her too.”

His eyes softened, and his voice.

“Yes. You were there. That’s comfort. You saw her too—standing there with her dear hands full of cowslips——”

“A torch,” I said.

“Cowslips——” he checked on the word. “_What?_”

“She was carrying a candle,” I insisted. “It had just been lighted. She was holding it so carefully.”

We stared at each other.

“You’re sure?”

“Sure.”

He fell back wearily in his chair.

“What’s the good of talking? She’s dead. That’s the end of it. I was dreaming. Of course. But when you said that you saw, for a moment I believed——What does it matter? What does it matter anyway? But her hands were full of cowslips.”

I turned to him eagerly. I knew what to say. It was as if the words were being whispered to me.

“That was your Madala Grey. But mine—how could she be the same? Oh, can’t you see? We’ve never seen the real Madala Grey. She gave—she became—to each of us—what we wanted most. She wrote down our dreams. She _was_ our dreams. Can’t you see what she meant to my cousin? Anita toils and slaves for her little bit of greatness. But _she_ was born royal. That’s why Anita hates her so—hates her and worships her. Why, she’s been a sort of star to you all—a symbol—a legend—

“But the real Madala Grey—she wasn’t like that. She was just a girl. She was hungry all the time. She was wanting her human life. And he, the man they laugh at, ‘the thing she married,’ he did love that real Madala Grey. Why, he didn’t even know of the legend. Don’t you see that that was what she wanted? She could take from him as well as give. Life—the bread and wine—they shared it. Oh, and it’s him I pity now, not you. Not you,” I said again, while my heart ached over him. “You—can’t you see what she showed you? Not herself——”

“What then?” he said harshly.

I made the supreme effort.

“But what—a woman—one day—would be to you.”

I thought the silence would never break.

The strange courage that had been in me was suddenly gone. I felt weak and friendless. I wanted to cry. I waited and waited till I could bear it no longer. Then I lifted my eyes desperately, with little hope, to read in his face what the end should be.

I found him looking at me fixedly—_at_ me, you understand, not through me to a subject that absorbed him, but at me myself. It was as if he were seeing me for the first time. No—as if he recognized me at last.

Then the doubts went, and the shame and the loneliness. It made me so utterly happy, that look on his face. I felt my heart beating fast.

He said then, slowly—I can remember the words, the tone and pitch of his voice, the very shaping of his mouth as he said it—

“Do you know—it’s strange—you remind me of her. You are very like her. You are very like Madala Grey.”

The hunger in his voice hurt me. I wanted to put my arms round him and comfort him. I might have done it, for I knew I was still but half real to him. But I sat still—only, with such a sense in my heart of a trust laid upon me, of an inheritance, of a widening and golden future, I said to him—

“Yes. I know.”

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● Transcriber’s Notes:

○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.

○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.

○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.

○ The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in
the public domain.