Chapter IV: Book II: IX (1)

The next day, during the journey through the hot Veneto and up into the mountains, the Wheater children and their problems were still so present to Boyne that he was hardly conscious of where he was going, or why.

His last hours with his friends had ended on a note of happiness and security. The new yacht, filled and animated by that troop of irrepressible children, whom it took all Miss Scope’s energy and ubiquity to keep from falling overboard or clambering to the mast-head, seemed suddenly to have acquired a reason for existing. Cliffe Wheater, in his speckless yachting cap and blue serge, moved about among his family like a beneficent giant, and Mrs. Wheater, looking younger than ever in her white yachting skirt and jersey, with her golden thatch tossed by the breeze, fell into the prettiest maternal poses as her own progeny and the “steps” scrambled over her in the course of a rough-and-tumble game organised by Boyne and the young tutor.

The excursion had not begun auspiciously. Before the start from the _pension_, Bun and Beechy, imprisoned above stairs during Lady Wrench’s irruption, had managed to inflict condign punishment on Zinnie for not having them fetched down with Blanca, and thus making them miss an exciting visit and probable presents. Terry’s indifference to the whole affair produced no effect on the irascible Italians; and as Zinnie, when roused, was a fighter, and now had a gold necklace with real pearls to defend, all Judith’s influence, and some cuffing into the bargain, were needed to reduce the trio to order; after which Boyne had to plead that they should not be deprived of their holiday. But once on the deck of the “Fancy Girl” all disagreements were forgotten. It was a day of wind and sparkle, with a lagoon full of racing waves which made the yacht appear to be actually moving; and after Beechy had drenched her new frock with tears of joy at being reunited to Chipstone, and Blanca and Zinnie had shown Lady Wrench’s presents to every one, from the captain to the youngest cook-boy, harmony once more reigned among the little Wheaters.

Mr. Ormerod, with whom Terry was already at ease, soon broke down the reserve of the others. He proved unexpectedly good at games which involved scampering, hiding and pouncing, especially when Joyce and Judith took part, and could be caught and wrestled with; and Cliffe Wheater, parading the deck with Chip, whom he had adorned with a miniature yachting cap with “Fancy Girl” on the ribbon, was the model of a happy father. He pressed Boyne to chuck his other engagements and come off down the Adriatic as far as Corfu and Athens; and Boyne, lounging there in the bright air, the children’s laughter encircling him, and Judith perched on the arm of his chair, asked himself why he didn’t, and what better life could have to offer. “Uncle Edward would certainly have accepted,” he thought, while his host, pouring himself another cocktail from the deck-table at his elbow, went on persuasively: “We’ll round up a jolly crowd for you, see if we don’t. Somebody’s sure to turn up who’ll jump at the chance. Judy, can’t we hustle around and find him a girl?”

“Here’s all the girl I want,” Boyne laughed, laying his hand on hers; and a blush of pleasure rose to her face. “Oh, Martin—if you would—oh, can’t you?” But even that he had resisted—even the ebb of her colour when he shook his head. The wandering man’s determination to stick to his decisions was strong in him. Too many impulses had solicited him in too many lands: it was because, despite a lively imagination, he had so often managed to resist them, that a successful professional career lay behind him, and ahead—he hoped—comparative leisure, and the haven he wanted.

He had tried to find a farewell present for Judith—some little thing which, in quality if not costliness, should make up for her disappointment at being done out of Lady Wrench’s. Judith’s frank avowal of that disappointment had been a shock to him; but he reflected again what a child she was, and called himself a prig for expecting her standards to be other than those of the world she lived in. After all he had had no time to search for anything rare, and could only push into her hand, at the last moment, a commonplace trinket from the Merceria; but her childish joy in it, and her way of showing that she valued it doubly because it came from him, made the parting from her harder. And now, alone in the dusty train, he was asking himself why he had not stayed in Venice.

As a matter of fact there were several reasons; among them the old-fashioned one that, months before, he had promised to meet Mrs. Sellars in the Dolomites. In a world grown clockless and conscienceless, Boyne was still punctual and conscientious; and in this case he had schooled himself to think that what he most wanted was to see Rose Sellars again. Deep within him he knew it was not so; at least, not certainly so. Life had since given him hints of other things he might want equally, want even more; his reluctance to leave Venice and his newly-acquired friends showed that his inclinations were divided. But he belonged to a generation which could not bear to admit that naught may abide but mutability. He wanted the moral support of believing that the woman who had once seemed to fill his needs could do so still. She belonged to a world so much nearer to his than the Wheaters and their flock that he could not imagine how he could waver between the two. Rose Sellars’s world had always been the pole-star of his whirling skies, the fixed point on which his need for permanence could build. He could only conclude, now, that he combined with the wanderer’s desire for rest the wanderer’s dread of immobility. “Hang it all, you can’t have it both ways,” he rebuked himself; but secretly he knew that that was how the heart of man had always craved it....

Had all that happened only forty-eight hours ago? Now, as he sat on the balcony of the _châlet_, over against the mighty silver and crimson flanks of the Cristallo group, the episode had grown incredibly remote, and Boyne saw his problems float away from him like a last curl of mist swallowed up in the blue behind the peaks.

Simply change of air, he wondered? The sudden rise into this pure ether that was like a shouting of silver trumpets? Partly, perhaps—and all that had chanced to go with it, in this wonderful resurrection of a life he had secretly thought dead.

“Bethesda is what you ought to call this,” he murmured to himself. It was so like Rose Sellars, the live Rose Sellars who had already replaced his delicately embalmed mummy of her, to have found this _châlet_ on the slope above the big hotels, a place so isolated and hidden that he and she were alone in it with each other and the mountains. How could he have so underrated his old friend’s sense of the wonder of the place, and of what she owed to it, as to suppose that, even for two or three weeks, she would consent to be a number in a red-carpeted passage, and feed with the rest of the numbers in a blare of jazz and electricity? The _châlet_ was only just big enough for herself and her maid, and the cook who prepared their rustic meals; had there been a corner for Boyne, she assured him that he should have had it. But perhaps it added to the mystery and enchantment that to see her he had to climb from the dull promiscuity of his hotel into a clear green solitude alive with the tremor of water under meadow-grasses, and guarded by the great wings of the mountains.

“You do really like it?” she had asked, as they sat, the first evening, on the balcony smelling of fir-wood, and watched the cliffs across the valley slowly decompose from flame to ashes.

“I like it most of all for being so like you,” he answered.

She laughed, and turned an amused ironic face on him—a face more than ever like one of those light three-crayon drawings of which she had always reminded him. “Like me? Which—the _châlet_ or the Cristallo group?”

“Well, both; that’s the funny part of it.”

“It must make me seem a trifle out of drawing.”

“No; first aloof and aloft, and then again small and sunny and near.”

She sighed faintly, and then smiled. “Well, I prefer the last part of the picture. I’d a good deal rather be a sunny balcony than a crystal peak. But I enjoy looking out on the peak.”

“There you are—that’s what I meant! It’s the view from _you_ that I’ve missed so, all these years.”

She received this in a silence softened by another little laugh. The silence seemed to say: “That will do for our first evening,” the laugh: “But I like it, you know!”

Aloud she remarked: “I’m glad you came up here after Venice and the millionaires. It’s all to the good for the mountains—and for me.”

Their first direct talk about themselves had ended there, drifting away afterward into reminiscences, questions, allusions, the picking up of threads—a gradual leisurely reconstruction of their five years apart. Now, on this second evening, he felt that he had situated her once more in his own life, and established himself in hers. So far he had made no allusion to his unsatisfied passion. In the past, by her own choice, her sternly imposed will, their relation had been maintained in the strict limits of friendship, and for the present he found it easier, more natural, to continue on the same lines. It was neither doubt nor pride that held him back, nor any uncertainty as to her feeling; but simply his sense of the wellbeing of things as they were. In the course of his life so much easy love had come his way, he had grown so weary of nights without a morrow, that he needed to feel there was one woman in the world whom he was half-afraid to make love to. Rose Sellars had chosen that he should know her only as the perfect friend; just at first, he thought, he would not disturb that carefully built-up picture. If he had suspected a rival influence he would not have tolerated delay; but as they travelled together over her past he grew more and more sure that it was for him the cold empty years of her marriage had kept her. Manlike, he was calmed rather than stimulated by this, though he would have repudiated more indignantly than ever the idea that she was less desirable because she was to be had. As a matter of fact, he found her prettier and younger than when they had parted. Every change in her was to her advantage, and he had instantly discarded his sentimental remembrance of her—dense coils of silvery-auburn hair, and draperies falling to the ankles—in favour of the new woman which her hair, dressed to look short, and her brief skirts, had made of her. Freedom of spirit and of body had mysteriously rejuvenated her, and he found her far more intelligent and adaptable than he had guessed when their relation had been obscured by his passion and her resistance. Now there was no resistance—and his passion lay with folded wings. It was perfect.

Every day they went off on an excursion. Sometimes they hired a motor, leaving it, far afield, for a long climb; but neither could afford such luxuries often, nor did they much care for them. Usually they started on foot, with stick and rucksack, getting back only as the great cliffs hung their last lustre above the valley. Mrs. Sellars was a tireless walker, proud of her light foot and firm muscles. She loved all the delicate detail revealed only to walkers: the thrust of orchis or colchicum through pine-needles, the stir of brooks, the uncurling of perfumed fronds, the whirr of wings in the path, and that continual pulsation of water and wind and grasses which is the heart-beat of the forest. Boyne, always alive to great landscape, had hitherto been too busy or preoccupied to note its particulars. It was years since he had rambled among mountains without having to look at them with an engineering eye, and calculate their relation to a projected railway or aqueduct; and these walks opened his eyes to unheeded beauties. It was like being led through the flowered borders of an illuminated missal of which he had hitherto noticed only the central pictures.

Better still were the evenings. When he first came a full moon held them late on the balcony, listening and musing, and sent him down dizzy with beauty through the black fir-shadows to his hotel. When the moon had waned, and the nights were fresh or cloudy, they sat by the fire, and talked and talked, or turned over new books and reviews. Boyne, with his bones and his brain so full of hard journeys and restless memories, thought he would have liked to look forward to an eternity of such evenings, in just such a hushed lamplit room, with a little sparkle of fire, reviews and papers everywhere, and that quiet silvery-auburn head with its mass of closely woven braids bending over a book across the hearth. Rose Sellars’s way of being silently occupied without seeming absorbed was deeply restful. And then her books! She always managed to have just the ones he wanted to get hold of—to a homeless wandering man it was not the least of her attractions. Once, taking up a volume they had been talking of, Boyne recalled Judith Wheater’s wistful: “Perhaps you might lend me some books.” From what fold of memory had the question—and the very sound of the girl’s voice—come back to him? He was abruptly reminded that it was a long time since he had given a thought to the little Wheaters.

There had been so many years to cover in the exchange of reminiscences that he had not yet touched on his encounter with them; and Mrs. Sellars seemed to have forgotten the description of the little band which had amused her in his letters. But now he was reminded, with a pang, of the contrast between her ordered and harmonious life (she always reminded him of Milton’s “How charming is divine philosophy!”) and the chaotic experiences of the poor little girl who for a moment had displaced her image. Inconceivably vulgar and tawdry, sordid and inarticulate, under all the shouting and the tinsel, seemed that other life and those who led it. Boyne would have brushed the vision away with contempt but for the voice which had called to him out of the blur. With a sigh he put down the book he had opened. Mrs. Sellars, who sat at the table writing, looked up, and their eyes met. “What were you thinking of?”

He had a start of distrust—the first since he had been with her. Would she understand if he tried to explain; if she did, would she sympathize? He shrank from the risk, and evaded it. “Seeing you so hard at work reminds me of all the letters I haven’t written since I’ve been here.”

She arched her eyebrows interrogatively, and he was sure she was thinking: “Why doesn’t he tell me that he’s no one to write to when he’s with me?” Aloud she said: “You know I’m burdened with any number of fond relations who are consumed with the desire to know how I’m spending my first holiday.”

“You’re a wonderful correspondent.”

As if scenting irony she rejoined: “So are you.”

“I haven’t been since I came here.”

“Well, come and share the inkpot.” She made the gesture of pushing it over to him, but he shook his head and stood up. “The night’s too lovely. Put on your cloak and come out on the balcony.”

She held her pen suspended, her eyes following his. “On the balcony? But there’s no moon—”

“_Because_ there’s no moon,” he insisted, smiling.

At that, smiling too, she drifted out to him.

X

“DARLING MARTIN,

“It’s lovely here and very warm. Weve been baithing at the Lido and
weve been out on the yaht again. Buondelmontes wife the lion taimer is
dead and he has maried a rich American airess and Beechy and Bun are
very much exited they think theyle get lots of presents now like
Zinnie got from her mother and the one I was to get but Blanca took
it, but I do like yours a hundred times better Martin dear, because
you gave it to me and besides its much more orriginal.

“Ime worried because Buondelmonte mite want Bun back now hese rich and
it would kill Beechy if Bun went away but I made him sware again on
Scopys book he wont go whatever hapens.

“Mother and father had a grate big row because Mother wanted Zinnia
and Lord Rench invited on the yatch and father said he woudnt it was
too low, so she said why did he mind when she didn’t. She wants to
know the Duke of Mendip whose with them and Zinnia invites Gerald
every day to lunch and dine and that makes Joyce fureaous. You will
say I ought not to tell you this dear Martin then what can I do if
there is a Row between them about Gerald Terry will loose his tutor
and its too bad so I want to get away with the children as quick as we
can.

“Terry said he must see this before I send it to you because I spell
so badly but I wont let him because hed stop me sending it.

“Please Martin dear I do imploar you write and tell father to send us
off quickly. Terry’s temprature has gone up and Ime worried about
everything. How I wish you were here then theyde do what you say.

“Your Judith who misses you.”

“P.S. Please dont tell the Wheaters that Ive written.”

Boyne’s first thought, as he put the letter down, was that he was glad it had come after what had happened that very evening on the balcony. There had happened, simply, that the barriers created by a long habit of reticence had fallen, and he had taken Rose Sellars into his arms. It was a quiet embrace, the hushed surface of something deep and still. She had not spoken; he thanked his gods for that. Almost any word might have marred the moment, tied a tag to it, and fitted it with others into some dusty pigeon-hole of memory. She had known how to be different—and that was exquisite. Their quiet communion had silently flowered, and she had let it. There was neither haste nor reluctance in her, but an acquiescence so complete that what was deepest in both of them had flowed together through their hands and lips.

“It will be so much easier now to consult her—she’ll understand so much better.”

He didn’t quite know why he felt that; perhaps because the merging of their two selves seemed to include every claim that others could have on either of them. Only yesterday he might have felt a doubt as to how Mrs. Sellars would view the Wheater problem, what she could possibly have in common with any of the Wheaters, or their world; now it was enough that she had him in common, and must share the burden because it was his.

He went over Judith’s letter again slowly, imagining how Mrs. Sellars’s beautiful eyes would deepen as she read it. The very spelling was enough to wring her heart. He would take the letter to her the next day.... But the next day was here already. He pushed back his window, and leaned out. In the cold colourless air a few stars were slowly whitening, while behind the blackness of the hillside facing him the interstellar pallor flowed imperceptibly into morning gold. His happiness, he thought, was like that passing of colourless radiance into glow. It was joy enough to lean there and watch the transmutation. Was it a sign of middle-age, he wondered, to take beatitude so quietly? Well, Rose, for all her buoyancy, was middle-aged too. Then he remembered their kiss, and laughed the word away as the sun rushed up over the mountains.

All that day there was too much to do and to say; there were too many plans to make; too many memories to retrace. Boyne did not forget Judith Wheater’s letter; her problem lay like a vague oppression in the background of his thoughts; but he found no way of fitting it into the new pattern of his life. Just yet—

It was decided that he and Mrs. Sellars should linger on in the mountains for another month—a month of mighty rambles, long hours of summer sunlight, and nights illuminated by a waxing moon. After that, Boyne’s idea had been that they should push on at once to Paris, and there be married as quickly as legal formalities allowed. It was at this hint of an immediate marriage that he first noticed, in Mrs. Sellars, the recoil of the orderly deliberate woman whose life has been too vacant for hurry, too hopeless for impatience. Theoretically, she told him with a smile, she hated delay and fuss as much as he did—and how could he question her eagerness to begin their new life? But practically, she reminded him, there were difficulties, there might even be obstacles. Oh, not real ones, of course! She laughed that away, remarking with a happy blush that she was of age, and her own mistress. (“Well, then—?” he interjected.) Well, there were people who had to be considered; who might be offended by too great haste: her husband’s family, for instance. She had never hit it off with them particularly well, as Boyne knew; but that was the very reason, she insisted, why she must do nothing that might give them cause.... (“Cause for what?”) Well, to say unpleasant things. She couldn’t possibly marry within a year of her husband’s death without seriously offending them—and latterly, she had to admit, they had been very decent, especially about straightening out Charles’s will, which had been difficult to interpret, Mr. Dobree said.

“Mr. Dobree?”

“He’s been such a friend to me through everything, you know,” she reminded him, a shade reproachfully; and he remembered then that Mr. Dobree was the New York lawyer who had unravelled, as much as possible to her advantage, the tangle of Charles Sellars’s will—the will of a snubbed secretive man whose only vindictiveness had been posthumous. Mr. Dobree had figured a good deal of late in Mrs. Sellars’s letters, and she had given Boyne to understand that it was he who had brought the Sellars family to terms about the will. Boyne vaguely remembered him as a shy self-important man with dark-gray clothes that were always too new and too well-cut—the kind of man whose Christian name one never knew, but had to look up in the “Social Register,” and then was amused to find it was Jason or Junius, only to forget it again at once—so fatally did Mr. Dobree tend always to become Mr. Dobree once more. A man, in short, who would have been called common in the New York of Boyne’s youth, but now figured as “a gentleman of the old school,” and conscientiously lived, and dressed, up to the character. Boyne suspected him of being in love with Mrs. Sellars, and Mrs. Sellars of feeling, though she could not return the sentiment, that it was not ungratifying to have inspired it. But Boyne’s mind lingered on Mr. Dobree only long enough to smile at him as the rejected suitor, and then came back to his own grievances.

“You don’t mean to say you expect me to wait a whole year from now?”

She laughed again. “You goose. A year from Charles’s death. It’s only seven months since he died.”

“What of that? You were notoriously unhappy—”

“Oh, _notoriously_—”

He met her protest with a smile. “I admit the term is inappropriate. But I don’t suppose anybody thinks your marriage was unmitigated bliss.”

“Don’t you see, dear? That’s the very reason.”

“Oh, hang reasons—especially unreasonable ones! Why have you got to be unhappy now because you were unhappy then?”

“I’m not unhappy now. I don’t think I could be, ever again, if I tried.”

“Dear!” he rejoined. She excelled at saying nice things like that (and was aware of it); but her doing so now was like putting kickshaws before a hungry man. “It’s awfully sweet of you,” he continued; “but I shall be miserable if you insist on things dragging on for another five months. To begin with, I’m naturally anxious to get home and settle my plans. I want some sort of a job as soon as I can get it; and I want _you_,” he concluded, putting his arm about her.

Obviously, what struck her first in this appeal was not his allusion to wanting her but to the need of settling his plans. All her idle married years, he knew, had been packed with settling things, adjusting things, adapting things, disguising things. She did see his point, she agreed at once, and she wanted as much as he did to fix a date; but why shouldn’t it be a later one? There were her own aunts too, who had always been so kind. Aunt Julia, in particular, would be as horrified as the Sellarses at her marrying before her year of mourning was over; and she particularly wanted to consider Aunt Julia.

“Why do you particularly want to consider Aunt Julia? I seem to remember her as a peculiarly stupid old lady.”

“Yes, dear,” she agreed. “But it’s just because she _is_ peculiarly stupid—”

“If you call that a sufficient reason, we shall never get married. In a family as large as yours there’ll always be somebody stupid left to consider.”

“Thanks for your estimate of my family. But it’s not the only reason.” Her colour rose a little. “You see, I’m supposed to be Aunt Julia’s heir. I found it out because, as it happens, Mr. Dobree drew up her will; and the doctors say any one of these attacks of gout—”

“Oh—.”

He couldn’t keep the disenchanted note out of his voice. The announcement acted like a cold douche. It ought, in reason, to have sent a pleasant glow through him, for he knew that, in spite of Mr. Dobree’s efforts, Mrs. Sellars had been left with unexpectedly small means, and the earnings of his own twenty years of hard work in hard climates had been partly lost in unlucky investments. The kind of post he meant to try for in New York—as consulting engineer to some large firm of contractors—was not likely to bring in as much as his big jobs in the past; and the appearance of a gouty aunt with benevolent testamentary designs ought to have been an unmixed satisfaction. But trimming his course to suit the whims of rich relations had never been his way—perhaps because he had never had any rich relations. Anyhow, he was not going to be dictated to by his wife’s; and it gave him a feeling of manliness to tell her so.

“Of course, if it’s a case of choosing between Aunt Julia and me—” he began severely.

She raised her eyebrows with that soft mockery he enjoyed so much when it was not turned against himself. “In that case, dear, I should almost certainly choose you.”

“Well, then, pack up, and let’s go straight off to Paris and get married.”

“Martin, you ought to understand. I can’t be married before my year of mourning’s out. For my own sake I can’t; and for yours.”

“Damn mine!”

“Very well; I have my personal reasons that I must stick to even if I can’t make you understand them.” Her eyes filled, and she looked incredibly young and wistful. “I don’t suppose I ought to expect you to,” she added.

“You ought to expect me to understand anything that’s even remotely reasonable.”

“I had hoped so.”

“Oh, dash it—” he began; and then broke off. With a secret dismay he felt their lovers’ talk degenerating for the first time into a sort of domestic squabble; if indeed so ungraceful a term could be applied to anything as sweetly resilient as Rose’s way of gaining her end. Was marriage always like that? Was the haven Boyne had finally made to be only a stagnant backwater, like other people’s? Or was it because he had been wandering and homeless for so long that the least restraint chafed him, and arguments based on social considerations made him fume? He was certainly in no position to quarrel with Mrs. Sellars for wishing to better her fortunes, and the discussion ended by his lifting her hand to his lips and saying: “You know I want only what you want.” The coward’s way out—and he knew it. But since he had parted with the substance of his independence, why cling to the form? He felt her eyes following his inner debate, and knew that the sweetness of her smile was distilled out of satisfaction at his defeat. “Damn it,” he thought, “what cannibals marriage makes of people.” He suddenly felt as if they were already married—as if they had been married a long time....

During their first fortnight not a cloud had shadowed their comradeship; but now that love and marriage had intervened the cloud was there, no bigger than the Scriptural one, but menacing as that proverbial vapour. She was kinder than ever because she had gained her point; and he knew it was because she had gained her point. But was it not his fault if he had begun thus early to distinguish among her different qualities as if they belonged to different vintage years, and to speculate whether the quality of her friendship might not prove more exquisite than her love could ever be? He was willing to assume the blame, since the joy of holding her fast, of plunging into her enchanted eyes, and finding his own enchantment there, was still stronger than any disappointment. If love couldn’t be friendship too, as he had once dreamed it might, the only thing to do was to make the most of what it was....

Judith Wheater’s letter had been for over a week in Boyne’s pocket when he pulled it out, crumpled and smelling of tobacco.

He and Mrs. Sellars were reclining at ease on a high red ledge of rock, with a view plunging down by pine-clad precipices, pastures and forests to illimitable distances of blue Dolomite. The air sang with light, the smell of crushed herbs rose like incense, and the hearts of the lovers were glad with sun and wind, and the glow of a long climb followed by such food as only a rucksack can provide.

“And now for a pipe,” Boyne said, in sleepy beatitude, stretching himself out on the turf at Mrs. Sellars’s elbow. He fumbled for his tobacco pouch, and drew out with it the forgotten letter.

“Oh, dash it—”

“What?”

“Poor little thing! I forgot this; I meant to show it to you days ago.”

“Who’s the poor little thing?”

For a moment he wavered. His old dread of her misunderstanding returned; and he felt he could not bear to have her misunderstand that letter. What was the use of showing it, after all? But she was holding out her hand, and he had no alternative. She raised herself on her elbow, and bent her lustrous head above the page. From where he lay he watched her profile, and the subtle curves of the line from ear to throat. “How lovely she still is,” he thought.

She read attentively, frowning a little in the attempt to decipher Judith’s spelling, and her mouth melting into amusement or compassion. Then she handed back the letter. “I suppose it’s from the little Wheater girl you wrote about? Poor little thing indeed! It’s too dreadful. I didn’t know there really _were_ such people. But who are the Wheaters she speaks of in the postscript, who are not to be told?”

Boyne replied that those were her parents.

“Her parents? Why does she speak of them in that way?”

He explained that in the Wheater circles it was the custom among the children to do so, the cross-tangle of divorces having usually given them so many parents that it was more convenient to differentiate the latter by their surnames.

“Oh, Martin, it’s too horrible! Are you serious? Did the poor child really tell you that?”

“The governess did—as a matter of course.”

She made a little grimace. “The sort of governesses they must have, in a world where the parents are like that!”

“Well, this particular one is a regular old Puritan brick. She and Judith keep the whole show together.” And he told her about the juvenile oath on Scopy’s “Cyclopædia of Nursery Remedies.”

“She doesn’t appear to have grounded her pupils very thoroughly in spelling,” Mrs. Sellars commented; but her eyes were soft, and she took the letter back, and began to read it over again.

“There’s a lot I don’t begin to understand. Who are these people that Mrs. Wheater wants to invite on the yacht because they know a Duke, and Mr. Wheater won’t because it’s too low?”

“They’re Lord and Lady Wrench. Wasn’t there a lot in the papers a month or two ago about Lord Wrench’s marrying a movie star? He has a racing-stable; I believe he’s very rich. Her name was Zinnia Lacrosse.”

“A perfect name. But why, in the Wheater world, are movie stars regarded as too low? Too low for what—or for whom?” Her mouth narrowed disdainfully on the question.

“Well, this one happens to have been Wheater’s wife—for a time.”

“His _wife_?”

“Not for long, though. They’ve been divorced for much longer than they were married. So I suppose Mrs. Wheater doesn’t see the use of making a retrospective fuss about it.”

“Practical woman! And who’s the Gerald that she and the other lady are fighting for?”

“Oh, he’s the boy’s tutor; Terry’s tutor. Or was to have been. I’m afraid he’s a rotter too. But Terry, poor chap, is the best fellow you ever saw. I back him and Judith and Scopy to keep the ship on her course, whatever happens. If only Terry’s health holds out.”

“And they get him another tutor.”

“As things go, he’s lucky if he has any.”

Mrs. Sellars again sighed out her contempt and amazement, and let the letter fall. For a long time she sat without moving, her chin on her hand, looking out over the great billowing landscape which rolled away at their feet as if driven on an invisible gale. When she turned to Boyne he saw that her eyes were full of a puzzled sadness. “Don’t the Wheaters _care_ in the least about their children?”

In old days, in their melancholy inconclusive talks, she had often confessed her grief at being childless; and now he heard in her voice the lonely woman’s indignation at the unworthiness of those who had been given what she was denied. “Don’t they _care_?” she repeated.

“Oddly enough, I believe they do. I’m afraid that’s going to be our difficulty. Why should they have taken on the steps if they hadn’t cared? They certainly seem very fond of the children, whenever they’re with them. But it’s one thing to be fond of children, and another to know how to look after them. My impression is that they realised their incapacity long ago, and that’s why they dumped the whole problem on Judy.”

“Long ago? But how old is Judy? This is the writing of a child of ten.”

“She’s had no time to learn any other, with six children to look after. But I suppose she’s fifteen or sixteen.”

“Fifteen or sixteen!” Mrs. Sellars gave a little sigh. “Young enough to be my daughter.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say: “I wish she had been!” But he had an idea it might sound queerly, and instead he stretched out his hand and took back the letter. The gesture seemed to rouse her to a practical view of the question. “What are you going to do about it, dearest?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me.”

This stimulated her to action, as he had known it would. He was glad that he had consulted her: she had been full of sympathy, and might now be of good counsel. How stupid it was ever to mistrust her!

“Of course you must write to her father.”

“Well—perhaps. But doing that won’t get us much forrarder.”

“Not if you appeal to him—point out that the children oughtn’t to be kept in Venice any longer? Didn’t you say he knew the climate was bad for the boy?”

“Yes; and Wheater will respond at once—in words! He’ll say: ‘Damn it, Joyce, Boyne’s right. What are the children doing here? We’ll pack them off to the Engadine to-morrow.’ Then he’ll cram my letter into his pocket, and no one will ever see it again, except the valet when he brushes his coat.”

“But the mother—Joyce, or whatever her name is? If he tells _her_—”

“Well, there’s the hitch.”

“What hitch?”

“Supposing she wants to keep the children in Venice on account of Gerald?”

“Gerald? Oh, the tutor! Oh, Martin—” A shiver of disgust ran over her. “And you dare to tell me she’s fond of her children!”

“So she is; awfully fond. But everything rushes past her in a whirl. Life’s a perpetual film to those people. You can’t get up out of your seat in the audience and change the current of a film.”

“What _can_ you do about it?”

He lay back on the grass, frowning up into the heavens. “Can’t think. Unless I were to drop down to Venice for a day or two, and try talking to them.” To his surprise, he found that the idea opened out before him rather pleasantly. “Writing to that kind of people’s never any sort of good,” he concluded.

Mrs. Sellars was sitting erect beside him, her eyes bent on his. They had darkened a little, and the delicate bend of her lips narrowed as it had when she asked what there could be in the Wheater world that movie stars were too low for.

“Go back to Venice?” He felt the edge of resistance in her voice. “I don’t see of what use that would be. It’s a good deal to ask you to take that stifling journey again. And if you don’t know what to write, how would you know any better what to say?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t. But at any rate I could feel my way. And I might comfort Judith a little.”

“Poor child! I wish you could.” She was all sweetness again. “But I should try writing first. Don’t you think so? Write to her too, of course. Whatever you decide, you’d better begin by feeling your way. It’s always awkward to interfere in family matters, and if you turned up again suddenly the Wheaters might think it rather odd.”

He was inclined to tell her that nothing would seem odd to the Wheaters except what seemed inevitable and fore-ordained to her. But he felt an irritated weariness of the whole subject. “I daresay you’re right,” he agreed, pocketing his pipe and getting to his feet. It was not his idea of a holiday that it should be interfered with by other people’s bothers, and he put Judith’s letter back into his pocket with an impatient thrust. After all, what business was it of his? He would write the child a nice letter, of course; but Rose was right—the idea of going down to Venice was absurd. Besides, Judith’s letter was more than a week old, and ten to one the party had scattered by this time, and the children were safe somewhere in the mountains. “Poor little thing, she’s always rather overwrought, and very likely she just had a passing panic when she wrote. Hang it, I wish she hadn’t written,” he concluded, relieved to find a distant object for his irritation.

Arm in arm, he and his love wandered down the mountain.

XI

“Of course I’ve written to her—I wrote last night,” Boyne assured Mrs. Sellars the next evening. He was conscious of a vague annoyance at being called to account in the matter—as if he couldn’t deal with his own correspondence without such reminders. But Mrs. Sellars’s next word disarmed him. “I’m so glad, dear. I should have hated to feel that our being so happy here had made you neglect your little friend.”

That was generous, he thought—and like her. He adored her when she said things like that. It proved that, in spite of her little air of staidness, she was essentially human and comprehending. He had persuaded her that night—for fun, for a change, after her months of seclusion—to come down and dine with him, not at his own modest hotel, but at the towering “Palace” among the pines below the _châlet_, where he thought the crowd and gaiety of the big restaurant might amuse her, and would at any rate make their evenings at the _châlet_ more delicious by contrast.

They had finished dining, and were seated over their coffee in a corner of the big panelled hall to which the other diners were slowly drifting back. Boyne, seeing Mrs. Sellars, for the first time since his arrival, in the company of women as graceful and well-dressed as herself, noted with satisfaction that not one of them had exactly her quality. But the groups about the other tables were amusing to study and speculate about, and he sat listening to her concise and faintly ironic comments with an enjoyment mellowed by the flavour of the excellent cigar he had acquired from the head-waiter.

“The girl in peach-colour, over there by the column—lovely, isn’t she? Only one has seen her a thousand times, in all the ‘Vogues’ and ‘Tatlers.’ Oh, Martin, won’t it be too awful if beauty ends by being standardised too?”

Boyne rather thought it had been already, in the new generation, and secretly reflected that Mrs. Sellars’s deepest attraction lay in her belonging to a day when women still wore their charm with a difference.

“I’m sure if I owned one of these new beauties I shouldn’t always be able to pick her out in a crowd,” he agreed.

She laughed her satisfaction, and then, sweeping the hall with lifted eye-glass: “That one you would....”

“A new beauty? Where?”

“Beauty—no. Hardly pretty ... but different. The girl who’s just come in. Where’s she vanished to? Oh, she’s speaking to the porter. Now she’s looking this way—but you can’t see her from where you’re sitting. She’s hardly more than a child; but the face is interesting.”

He barely caught the last words. The porter had come up with a message. “Young lady asking for you, sir.” Boyne got to his feet, staring in the direction indicated. He had not been mistaken. It was Judith Wheater who stood there, frail and straight in her scant travelling dress, her hat pulled down over her anxious eyes, so small and dun-coloured that she was hardly visible among those showy bare-armed women. Yet Mrs. Sellars had picked her out at once! Yes, there was something undeniably “different”; just as there was about Mrs. Sellars herself. But this was no time for such considerations. Where on earth had the child come from, and what on earth had brought her?

“Wait a minute, will you? It’s some one I know.” He followed the porter between the tables to where Judith stood in the shadow of the stairway.

“Child! Where in the world have you dropped from?”

“Oh, Martin, Martin! I was so afraid you’d gone!”

He caught her by both hands, and she lifted a drawn little face to his. Well, why not? He had kissed her goodbye in Venice; now he touched his lips to her cheek. “Judy, how in the world did you get here? Have the heads of the clan come too?”

“Oh, Martin, Martin!” She kept fast hold of him, and he felt that she was trembling. She paid no attention to his question, but turned and glanced about her. “Isn’t there a writing-room somewhere that we could go to? There’s never anybody in them after dinner.”

He guided her, still clinging to him, to one of the handsomely appointed rooms opening off the corridor beyond the hall. As she had predicted, its desks were deserted, its divans unoccupied. She dropped down by Boyne, and threw her arms about his neck.

“Oh, Martin, say you’re glad! I must hear you say it!”

“Glad, child? Of course I’m glad.” Very gently he released himself. “But you look dead-beat, Judy. What’s the matter? Has anything gone wrong? Are your people here?”

She drew back a little and turned full on him her most undaunted face. “If you mean father and mother, they’re in Venice. They don’t know we’re here. You mustn’t be angry, Martin: we’ve run away.”

“Run away? Who’s run away?”

“All of us; with Scopy and Nanny. I always said we’d have to, some day. Scopy and Terry and I managed it. We’re at the _Pension Rosenglüh_, down the hill. Father and mother will never guess we’re here. They think we’ve gone to America on the Cunarder that touched at Venice yesterday. I left a letter to say we had. Terry was splendid; he invented it all. We hired motors at Padua to come here. But I’m afraid he’s dreadfully done up. This air will put him right though, won’t it?” She poured it all out in the same tone of eager but impartial narrative, as if no one statement in her tale were more surprising or important than the others—except, of course, the matter of Terry’s health. “The air here is something wonderful, Martin, isn’t it?” she pleaded; and he found himself answering with conviction: “There’s simply nothing like it.”

Her face instantly grew less agitated. “I knew I was right to come,” she sighed in a tired voice; and he felt as if she were indeed an overwrought child, and the next moment might fall asleep on his shoulder.

“Judy, you’re dreadfully done up yourself, and you look famished. It’s after ten. Have you had anything to eat since you got here?”

“I don’t believe I have. There wasn’t time. I had to see the children settled first, and then make sure you were here.”

“Of course I’m here. But before we do any more talking you’ve got to be fed.”

“Well, it would be nice to have a bite,” she confessed, recovering her usual confident tone.

“Wait here, and I’ll go and forage.” Boyne walked down the corridor and back into the hall, where people were beginning to group themselves about the bridge-tables. The fact of finding himself there roused him to the recollection of having left Mrs. Sellars alone with his empty coffee-cup. Till that moment he had forgotten her existence. He made his way back to their corner, but it was deserted. In the so-called “salon,” against a background of sham tapestries and gilt wall-lights, other parties were forming about more bridge-tables; but there also there was no sign of Mrs. Sellars.

“Oh, well, she’s got bored and gone home,” he thought, a little irritably. Surely it would have been simpler and more friendly to wait ... but that was just a part of her ceremoniousness. Probably she had thought it more tactful to disappear. Damn tact! That was all he had to say.... The important thing now was to give Judy something to eat, and get her back to her _pension_. After that he would run up to the _châlet_ and explain.

He found a waiter, learned that it was too late to resuscitate dinner, and ordered ham sandwiches and cocktails to be brought at once to the writing-room. On the whole, he found it simplified things to have Mrs. Sellars out of the way. Perhaps there was something to be said for tact after all.

The first sip of her cocktail brought the glow back to Judith’s eyes and lips, the next made her preternaturally vivid and alert. She must eat, he told her—eat at once, before she began to talk; and he pushed his own sandwiches on to her plate, and watched her devouring them, and emptying first her glass and then his. She sparkled at him across its brim, but kept silence, obediently; then she asked for a cigarette, and leaned back at ease against the cushions.

“Well, we’re all here,” she declared with satisfaction.

“Not Chip?” he questioned, incredulous.

“Chip? I should think so! Do you suppose I’d have stirred an inch without Chip?”

“But what the deuce is it all about, child? Have you gone crazy, all of you?”

“Father and mother have. They do, you know. I warned father we’d run away if it happened again.”

“What happened?”

“Why, what I told you would. But I don’t suppose you ever got my letter? I was sure you’d have answered it if you had.” She turned her eyes on him with a look of such unshaken trust that he stammered uncomfortably: “Tell me all about it now.”

“Well, everything went to smash. I knew it would. And then all the old shouting began—about detectives, and lawyers, and mother’s alimony. You know that’s what the children mean when they talk about mother’s old friend Sally Money. They’ve heard about her ever since they can remember. They think mother sends for her whenever anything goes wrong....”

“And things have gone thoroughly wrong?”

“Worse than ever. They were dividing us up already. Bun and Beechy back to Buondelmonte, because he’s married a rich American. And Zinnia is ready to take Zinnie. Lord Wrench thinks she’s so awfully funny. And father would have had Chip, of course, and we three older ones would have begun to be sent back and forth again as we used to be, like the shabby old books Scopy used to get out of the lending library at Biarritz. You could keep the stupid ones as long as you liked, but the jolly ones only a week.” She turned her burning face to his. “Now, Martin, didn’t I _have_ to get them all away from it?”

The food and wine had sent such a flame through her that he began to wonder if she had fever, or if it were only the glow of fatigue. He took her hand and it was burning, like her face.

“Child, you’re too tired. All the rest will keep till to-morrow. Put on your hat now, and I’ll take you down the hill to your _pension_.”

“But, Martin, you’ll promise and swear to see us through?”

“Through everything, bless you. On Scopy’s book. And now come along, or you’ll fall asleep in your tracks.”

In reality he had never seen her so acutely wakeful; but she submitted in silence to being bundled into her hat and coat, and linked her arm confidingly in his as they threaded their way among the bridge-players and out into the great emptiness of the night. The moon hung low above the western peaks, and the village clock below them in the valley chimed out the three quarters after eleven as they walked down the road between blanched fields and sleeping houses. On the edge of the village a few lights still twinkled; but the _Pension Rosenglüh_, demurely withdrawn behind its white palings, showed a shuttered front to the moon. Boyne opened the garden gate, and started to go up the doorstep ahead of Judith. “Oh, you needn’t ring, Martin. It would wake everybody. I don’t believe the door’s locked. I told Scopy to see that I wasn’t shut out.” She tried the door-knob, which yielded hospitably, and then turned and flung her arms about her companion.

“Martin, darling, I don’t believe I’d ever have dared if I hadn’t known you’d see us through,” she declared with a resounding kiss.

“The devil you wouldn’t!” he murmured; but he pushed her gently in, thinking: “I ought never to have given her that second cocktail.” From the threshold he whispered: “Go upstairs as quietly as you can. I’ll be down in the morning to see how you’re all getting on.” Then he shut the door on her, and slipped out of the gate.

Midnight from the village clock! What would his friend say if he knocked up the _châlet_ at that hour? Halfway to the hotel he left the road and branched upward through the fir-wood, by a path he knew. But there were no lights in the _châlet_.

XII

Before mounting to Mrs. Sellars’s the next morning Boyne went down to the _Pension Rosenglüh_ to gather what farther details he could of the strange flight of the little Wheaters.