Chapter XIX

The rest of the day was barren, and in the knowledge that their visit was so near its end, David chafed at each empty hour. He had seen Hilda for a moment only since the morning. Standing aside as she came down the stairs, he had asked her if she was going to the field again, and she shook her head, saying that she had a letter to write. He thrilled with the fancy that it might be a letter to himself.

How queer to think that she might even give it to him to post! Still queerer to reflect that the thoughts which had so often held him captive, and the blithesome chatter that had rung so false were coin from the same mint. If they had been the strangers to each other that she believed, he would never have divined the gold beneath the small change. For that matter he too had been commonplace; the soul wasn't a jack-in-the-box to jump to order. "Oh, Mr. Thackeray, don't!" breathed Charlotte Brontë disillusioned, when he helped himself again to potatoes; and probably he had said nothing to justify her homage by the time the cheese came. He, David Lee, had _talked_ potatoes. More than likely the girl whom he had found trivial had found him trite.

Ever recurring, and overthrowing his reverie, was a gust of sensation--in part a perfume, in part a sickness, in which it seemed to him that the scent of her hair was in his throat.

Before he left town he had scribbled a few lines expressing his gratitude for the photograph, and now it occurred to him that an answer might be lying at his lodging already. He wished he could read it; he wished he could re-read all the letters here while he was seeing her. He felt that to do so would help him. Without defining his need he felt that the letters, tangible, familiar, would lessen the vague sense of unreality that blew across his mind. During a few seconds he craved more to re-read the letters than to find himself alone with her.

Not so in the morning. He rose eagerly. While he dressed, it seemed to him that he had been unreasonable yesterday; he accused himself of having resented circumstances, of having all unconsciously expected her to accord to Tremlett the confidences she made to Lee. That was absurd. Ostensibly a stranger, a mulatto thrown in her path by chance, how could he hope for her to lift her veil? But let her keep it down--it couldn't hide her from him. Let her yield a finger-tip, after she had bared her heart--he knew her even as she knew herself. He smiled to think that by a word he could transfigure her. It was too soon, he was afraid to speak it; the complexity of the emotion that he foresaw in her warned him back; but the idea of power was sweet to him. He could tear the veil aside and call the real woman breathless to his view, he the stranger! There was a throb of triumph in his delusion.

The day was Sunday, and when he joined her, he found the sisters together. He regretted that the elder had remained at home, although he knew that he had had nothing to hope from a tête-à-tête.

"You don't paint to-day, Miss Sorrenford?"

"No," she said, "I don't paint on Sunday."

"Good gracious!" exclaimed Hilda, "I should think she didn't. What do you suppose the Kemps would say to her? We should be turned out, shouldn't we, Bee?"

"Oh yes, I forgot the Kemps," he said; "it would shock them, of course."--"Bee," he assumed, was a diminutive of "Beatrice." "I've only spent one Sunday here. It was rather depressing; everybody looked so out of place--all the villagers seemed to have gone. Why do they dress up and spoil themselves on Sunday? It was as if a lot of supers in a play had come on in the wrong scene."

Hilda smiled. "They'd think you had very bad taste if they heard you say so. You might as well try to persuade a servant that she looks smarter in a frilled cap and a muslin apron than when she goes out to meet her young man. Poor people always make frights of themselves on Sunday--and they pride themselves on their boots creaking."

"Poor people!" he answered. "And the little children--that was worse still. It made me wretched to see the children; my heart ached for them whenever I went to the door."

"Oh, you noticed them," said Bee, "did you? Yes, it's painful. Their hushed voices, and their sad eyes! They mustn't play; they're forbidden to be happy. They sit in solemn groups, talking in whispers--cursing Sunday I often think. If one of them forgets and laughs, its mother comes out and shakes it--to teach it to love God."

"Bee, don't get on the platform, or we might as well have gone to church. We do go to church, Mr. Tremlett; don't think we never do any better than this, please! But one doesn't feel so religious in the country on Sunday as one does in a town. It must be something in the air."

"Perhaps it's because in the country one feels so much more religious every other day of the week," said David. Bee had frowned, discomfited; she sat silent. In her silence David was sorry for the Beauty--her banter had been so innocent; the frown, the tightened lips seemed to him an undeserved reproach.

Then he talked to the wrong woman while the right woman listened, and he was even a little piqued that his earnestness couldn't rouse the wrong woman to permit him a glimpse of the poetry that was not in her. But once, when her skirt fluttered against his hand, it was not the thought of the poetry in her that sent a shiver up his arm; and it was not the thought of her sensibility that made his heart gallop, as imagination gave him back the tingle of her hair. That was herself, her pretty flesh-and-blood, the potent pink-and-white reality of her.

Something he said, some chance remark, brought a line of "A Celibate's Love Songs" to Bee's mind. Her thoughts darted again to the photograph, and for the thousandth time she wished she could recall her stupid act; for the thousandth time she sought the courage to acknowledge it. The confession from which she had shrunk at the beginning looked by comparison easy: "I am deformed." Well, at least, no one could laugh at that. But "I sent my sister's likeness instead of my own." That was ridiculous, contemptible. And how could she explain the impulse? Wouldn't the man put his own construction on it? Wouldn't he think--wouldn't it be tacitly to admit--that she was in love with him?

Still, did the folly she had committed matter very much? He would never see her, never see her or Hilda either. If he had meant to come, surely he would have come already? Sooner or later the correspondence would die, and she would be alone again. Was it necessary to degrade herself in his sight?

He would think she was in love with him! Once more the question that she was always trying to evade flared through her brain. Did it really mean that--in love with a man she had not met? She said the thing was impossible, and felt it was indecent, and knew it was true. The man had needed an appeal to the senses before he repudiated the term of "friendship"; the woman had no such need. She knew that she loved him, although she refused to own it. She loved him for his mind, for all that was herself in him, for all that was kin to her, but beyond her reach. And now, while her reverie might have borne her far from the conversation at her side, she was forced to listen to him, though she had no suspicion that it was he who talked. The mind that she loved compelled her to listen--for David was striving to make the dainty Hilda lift a corner of the veil.

And there being no veil, she could not lift it; but the woman, whose presence he had half forgotten, felt her sympathies stirred within her strongly, and could have given him thought for thought, and note for note, while she sat there silent and unheeded. There was no veil. He was straining to clutch a phantasm, surrendering to the temptations of his fancied power. And, whilst the poet, pluming himself on power, put forth his intellect to master the girl that there was not, the indolent pink-and-white girl that there was, was mastering him.

"He talks too much, now he has got over his shyness," she murmured, as he moved away. "I'm glad he has gone."

"Are you?" said Bee. "Why? I'm not; he interested me."

"Really? Well, I wish you had joined in, then, instead of sitting there mum. Why didn't you?"

"I don't think he would have been very grateful; he didn't want to talk to me."

Hilda's admirable eyebrows rose just a shade higher than they would have risen if she had been surprised. Because she knew what was meant, she said, "What do you mean?"

"I could see he wanted to talk to _you_. He always does. I think it's rather a good thing we're going home to-morrow."

"Good heavens! don't be so idiotic. Do you suppose for a single moment I could----"

"No; I was thinking of _him_, poor fellow!" said Bee. "I daresay he is unhappy enough without any other trouble."

It was not unpleasant to hear that she was esteemed so dangerous. The girl essayed the languid tone of her favourite heroines.

"What an imagination you have!" she drawled. "Now, he only struck _me_ as a dull person who didn't know when to get up. When a man looks like that, he ought to be very careful what he talks about; so few subjects go with his complexion."

Bee thought--"Oh, the arrogance of beauty! It would even deny to the others the right to have beautiful minds."

In the afternoon a thunderstorm broke over Godstone, and rain fell with more or less violence all the evening. It saved Hilda from being bored by him again, for their train next day was an early one, and after breakfast she was upstairs a good deal, watching the trunks being packed. Once or twice as she tripped to Bee from the sitting-room with a book, or a work-basket, or a packet of labels, he met her in the passage, and she threw him the brave smile of one who was sunny in fatigue; but there was no opportunity for conversation.

To David the shadow of her departure had fallen across Daisymead already. Already he felt desolate in anticipating its emptiness when she had gone. It seemed to him quite a month ago that he had arrived here, and the few scenes of their brief association, now that the end had come, were as dear to his regret as close companionship. Even the period of his bashfulness and despondence had a tender charm in looking back at it. He was eager to flee with his memories to town, instinctively conscious that in no place would he be so forlorn as in the place where she had been; but there would be heavy hours before he was able to go, poignant hours in which to miss her first.

It had been in his mind to walk to the station with them both, but she did not seem to wish it, so he bade them good-bye in the front garden while the porter was making the luggage fast on the truck. The landlady and her daughter had come out too, and at the last minute Mr. Kemp appeared. He had a dead bird in his hand; Hilda uttered an exclamation of pity as she saw it, and Bee was mute.

"Oh, the dear! What bird is it, Mr. Kemp?"

"A green linnet, Miss," he said. "Mischeevious things!"

"A linnet? I thought linnets were always brown; I'd no idea they were ever so pretty as this. Why, it's perfectly lovely! What a shame they aren't all made green."

"Yes, it's a showy thing," admitted Mr. Kemp; "the brown 'un ain't much to look at alongside it, that's a fact." He rubbed his hand on his coat, and put it out to her in farewell. "But the green linnet has got no song."

The sisters went slowly up the road; and David followed the "showy" figure with his eyes until the road swerved.