Chapter IX: Part IV: The Girl in the Room (2)

“_What_ about me?” she flirted with him.

“I love powdered hair!” was his quickly gallant response.

“You--sailor!” laughed Aunt Lavvy, fatally.

Doug was a sailor for the rest of that meal.

After lunch, Miss Gregson and Louis walked into the house. “My sister has brought me to say good-bye,” he said, after they had duly been introduced to Aunt Lavvy. “Or rather, to ask your combined advice as to whether I should make my dash for liberty tonight.”

And Ursula, alert for signals, grasped that he was coolly going to discuss plans, and grope for hers, in front of the others; indeed, he had no option but to do so. She waited, amused, for her cue to enlighten him.

Miss Gregson said, “I told him he’d do much better to wait until we had certain news about the strike, and Umberto agrees with me----”

(“That’s the Eye-talian,” murmured Louis to Ursula.)

Doug gave his opinion that a journey to London, under the circumstances, would be no end of a rag.

“They might even let me drive the engine,” Louis agreed heartily. He just glanced at Ursula then, with the air of a man who can bide his time, and who can trust an intelligent woman to annex this same biding as special tribute to her wits, and not as detrimental to her charm.

“Have you ordered Champion’s car to drive you into Gullick?” Ursula inquired. “I wonder----” she paused, doubtfully knitting her brows. Then:

“What do you think, Doug? Shall I go in, too, if Mr. Gregson will give me a lift, and bring out some stores? We’ve two extra in the house now, you know, and the strike may mean a tightness of provisions, if we rely entirely on our Mr. Wright.”

“I wouldn’t fuss,” said Doug, “we can always raid the shop.”

“He has his six-shooter handy,” Christine reminded him, half seriously.

“He has also special and private information about the probable strike,” Louis pattered on in his glib fashion. “So has the post office. So have the coastguards. The coastguards are apparently crystal-gazers in their spare time, for they are always credited, in a place like this, with mysterious advance knowledge. Some say the strike has started, some that it will start at sundown, or at midnight, or on Thursday week, or not at all. My business can’t wait until the day-before-yesterday’s papers come in the day-after-tomorrow. It’s no good clinging round my knees and sobbing, Sister Ann, because I have made up my mind” ... he had done so directly Ursula answered his unspoken “Will you risk it?” by her suggestion of driving into Gullick with him, to bring out stores.

Miss Gregson snapped: “I’ve no intention of clinging round your knees, thanks. You’ve been here a goodish time, my lad, and Umberto and I are tired of you.”

“Mr. Gregson must come to Grey Stone for true hospitality,” purred Aunt Lavvy. “Here, they welcome an old lady without even minding or noticing that she had arrived without any luggage! And yet”--playfully--“luggage is supposed to be a certificate of respectability, isn’t it?”

A chorus of contrition broke from Doug, Christine and Ursula.

“By Jove, nor you had! I _am_ an unobservant beast!”

“I was quite sure, somehow, that it had gone up to your room. I was going to ask you if I might help you unpack.”

“Where did you leave it, Aunt Lavvy?”

“At Gullick Station, till called for. Don’t look so worried, my dear children; of course I couldn’t expect a car to meet me, when I arrive twelve hours before I am expected. I was just wondering how I should cover the ten miles to St. Miniot, when a charming old gentleman with white hair--a General, I think he said, but I have his card--sent me a message by the porter----”

The episode of old-world courtesy to a gentlewoman in distress, acquired, in the telling, that typical Watteau atmosphere which seemed conveniently to attend Aunt Lavvy wherever she went. Even the Gullick porter was translated. Briefly, the General had offered her a lift out in his own car; but his wife’s luggage was so voluminous that Aunt Lavvy’s trunk could not be squeezed in--“And so I wondered, Ursula darling, if you were driving out to Gullick anyhow this evening, for stores, would you mind calling at the station and bringing it back with you? But not if----”

“Of course Teddy will!” Doug promised, settling the matter. “Quite a good notion of yours about stores, Teddy. Don’t forget a few tins of tunah-fish. I like it. They called it tunny-fish once, but during the war and the food shortage it went up in social tone. Tunah-fish!”

“Tunah-fish!” echoed Chris, haughtily.

“We’ll all rattle in with you to Gullick, if you like?” Doug suggested further to Louis, who, without a flicker of an eyelid, murmured that he would be honoured by their united company.

“Bounder!” thought Doug, for the fifteenth time.

“With you and your luggage to go in, Louis, and Mrs. Barrison, and Champion driving, and a fresh lot of luggage and Mrs. Barrison and stores to go back, I should think you’d be as full as you can manage,” Miss Gregson said.

Louis was aware that this argument was so obvious that he could safely acquiesce in Doug’s proposal, and leave somebody else to point it out.

“Will there at least be room for my empty suitcase, going out?” Ursula asked of Louis.

“To bring it home full of tunah-fish? Oh, yes, I think it can be managed. And if no trains run up to town tonight?” Dangerously he aimed his last question full at her; and dangerously she answered him: “Oh--chance it!”

Louis got up to go. He said he would call for her. He said he must pack. He said that he had been delighted to meet Aunt Lavvy. He did not say that knowing now all he wanted to know, there was no further reason to prolong the visit.

[VIII]

THE room was on the first floor back of the second-best hotel in Gullick. The low green hills beyond the window, by day strangely biblical in their quiet outline, were by now a still simpler affair of ups and downs scrawled black on a wash of dim sky. The blind was drawn and the short muslin curtains, and a still further muffler of red stiff curtains. Ursula sat primly on the edge of an upright wooden chair, and waited for Louis to come in. He had gone, after dinner in the coffee-room, to make a last inquiry about a train to London that night; to London, or even as far as Exeter or Plymouth. But she knew already that the inquiry would be futile. The stationmaster had been most discouraging when they had confidently driven up in time for the seven-twenty-three. “We’ve had our orders from the Trades Union. Trains stopped at noon today. By tomorrow, though, I dare say Govemment’ll be runnin’ some,” he added gloomily.

Then Ursula had ordered Aunt Lavvy’s trunk to be lifted on to Champion’s car, and had told him to drive it back to Grey Stone: “I shall take the last bus out,” she said. “The nine-ten. But I don’t want my aunt to wait for her things.”

Doug and Christine and Aunt Lavvy had accepted an invitation from Miss Gregson, on parting that afternoon, to dine with her at Parc Gooth: “And will you join them, Mrs. Barrison, when you get back from Gullick?”

“Thanks very much. I certainly will, when I get back from Gullick ... if I’m not too tired.”

Now--she was waiting for Louis. He would enter presently, expectant and debonair--“knowing his part backwards,” and Ursula’s mouth curved gaily as she reflected that for once a surprise was in store for Lothario.

The setting, too, was somewhat less tropical and exotic than he must be accustomed to, under similar circumstances, along the lines of red roses, gleaming mirrors and silk eiderdowns. The second-best hotel at Gullick did not cater for luxurious clients. Over the hard double bed the white counterpane was like a winding-sheet. The chest of drawers, with its small mirror on top, was mahogany, and so was the washstand. In the basin stood a can of hot water. One armchair was placed on a small yellowish hair rug in front of the fireplace, hidden by a painted glass screen; a shelf supported a few books lopping sideways in a dejected fashion. On the nondescript wall hung some prints of what might have been the Vatican and the Coliseum, if any one were sufficiently interested to inspect them. Ursula was in a vivid dancing mood; the small fidgety discomforts and disappointments of the evening, which might have daunted any girl in a lovelorn condition, only excited her spirit yet more. Her cheeks were scarlet, and her long-shaped lazy grey eyes shone with dark fires under her straight brows. She surveyed herself in the foggy glass, between two tall candle-flames. Her clothes were staid and unconspicuous as usual: a navy blue coat and skirt; a white silk shirt, open at the throat; a pliable grey suède hat of the Whittington shape.

“Poor Louis!” Again she re-seated herself on the stiff chair, and folded her gloved hands in front of her; her feet, in small grey suède shoes, rested on her suitcase, with toes slightly turning in. She lowered her eyelids--“I’m glad he’s common and glib and bold; the sort of dapper little whelp who has made women suffer, and rather boasts of it....”

Louis came in.

“No chance of a train. We must stay here.” He cast round a comical look of distaste. Then, thrillingly: “_Ursula_....”

She did not stir. Only her cheeks’ scarlet faded and faded till she was white as milk. Louis was disconcerted. After all, a man does not expect shyness after a woman has taken all the initiative, thrown herself at his head, one might say, in an ungallant translation of her behaviour.

“I gave our names, downstairs, as Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. Please, will that do?” Her “please” was meekness itself.

“Oh yes, as well as anything”--impatiently. Had she not recognized that the tiresome preliminaries and the mechanism were all over now, and that he had begun the emotional love-scene?

“Let me take off your things and make you comfortable,” Louis suggested, and laid a seductive hand on her coat, giving it a gentle pull. But her whole frame resisted. “Or shall I unpack your suitcase?” Her feet pressed downwards. “I have never seen your hair down yet, Ursula; your beautiful honey-gold hair....”

“Please, I would rather keep on my things”--in the same unaccountably meek voice which reminded Louis of cold moonlight, school-teachers, and lukewarm sago pudding--all good, and all by him abominated.

“For how long?” mocking eyebrows raised.

“Till--till I’m acclimatized, please.”

Louis laughed uneasily. “And how do you suggest we should while away the time, until you’re--acclimatized, please?”

“There are some books on that shelf. If you read to me, I could crochet, couldn’t I?” And with an air of innocent glee, she pulled out her work from her handbag.

Louis slowly crossed the room to the bookshelf.... He could not be happy until he had ousted her from her lordship of the slippery situation, treating it and him in a spirit of dainty buffoonery; and for the moment, he, usually so nimble and astute at solving the woman riddle, was utterly bewildered by this elusive crescent-moon of a girl, slender and pale and swathed in flying clouds of mystery.

Of course a woman _ought_ to be mysterious. It was part of her appeal, her stock-in-trade. Louis had no objection to the conventional Mystery of Woman. He had written sophisticated articles about it. But this Ursula Barrison----

He decided not to force the situation, but to give it time.

“Here is a treatise on physical geography, a psalm-book, ‘Home Influence,’ ‘Happy Thoughts from Day to Day,’ ‘Pigs, the Care and Feeding of,’ and ‘Little Ellen’s Dream,’” he read, from the backs of the volumes on the shelf. “Which will interest you most?” And he began to read aloud, with very precise utterance, a passage from “Little Ellen’s Dream.”

“Kind little Ellen could not bear to see the snow, because she had two pairs of shoes, and perhaps some poor little girl had none. ‘Mama darling,’ she cried, ‘if I am good, may I take my shoes as a present to Nelly Carter, and also some eggs and my nicest hoop? I dreamt that it was her birthday today and she cried because she had no presents.’ ‘Do, my darling,’ said Ellen’s mother----”

Suddenly Ursula buried her head on to her folded arms and began to shake with sobs.

Louis, interrupted in his efforts to entertain her, watched her for a few moments. Then he said, “You’re laughing!”

And she raised a flushed face, its composure broken up into radiant quivering mirth.

“It was your puzzled gloom--and that book--‘Kind little Ellen’ ... and us here in this absurd room.... The way you said ‘_Ursula_’ when you came in. No, I’m not in the very least hysterical.... I’m just amused.... If you would only stop expecting me to fall into your arms, you might be amused too.”

“I think it unlikely,” said Louis. And Ursula, seeing a certain male look, hot and bulging, in his eyes, stopped laughing. She realized that now would come the strain on her boast that Louis must be managed.

“I know,” she said, and her voice was rather breathless. “I know I asked you to take me with you, and you thought I meant it--passionately. And when the strike was declared I still insisted. And I took this room, calling ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. And now I’m here alone with you, and of course you expect--need I be coarse, Louis? I’ve been fencing up until this moment. Now I’ve got to be frank. I don’t love you; not passionately nor tenderly. I don’t even like you. I’ve been using you, that’s all. One is more likely to choose a person for use, whom one doesn’t even like ... rather despises--but anyway, you were the only man handy; and the only man vain enough to believe that woman throws away her all for sweet passion’s sake. You knew so much about women, you see.”

“Yes. And you know nothing about men. For instance, I’m not going to spend the night in conversation, however interesting.... If it were not so melodramatic as to arouse your sense of humour again, my dear Ursula, I should say that you were in my power.”

She sighed. “I was silly to mock at you and make you more angry. Now I suppose we shall have to struggle and dodge about, and the chairs will get disordered, and my hair will come down--and there will be a great bruise on my wrist, just _here_, where you finally grip it----”

“And then?” demanded Louis. He was watching her intently, but the hot bulging look was gone from his eyes.

“I shan’t give in,” she whispered. “But--must we? Must I get the table between me and you, or threaten to hurl myself from the window? I don’t even hate you. I don’t love another man. I haven’t lost my head. It’s nothing of that sort, nothing so stark and simple. I wanted--oh well, it’s no good telling you what I wanted, it would take too long, and you’re anxious to start being mannish.” And mischief still sparkled through her resignation to the inevitable conflict.

Louis, surprisingly, said he would like to hear what she wanted.

“Well----” She paused. The exquisite shape of her pale gold head was motionless as an oval plaque between the two candle-spears on the tall bureau behind her. “Well--can you imagine the miracle--of running away with oneself--cut off all round as though with a sharp clean knife? After one has been clogged and clogged with people. _Men?_... And I’m in love with loneliness.”

Suddenly she flung her hands above her head, the palms upturned and curved as though for water from heaven.... Then slowly sank them again, remembering that the reason she had left her husband was that he loved another girl, and that she desired them to be happy together.

“Forget if I’ve said anything crazy. Quite frankly and simply, Louis, I’ve left Doug because he’s in love with Christine--the thin, brown-eyed child staying with us at Grey Stone. And she’s in love with him. It’s quite a romance, isn’t it?”

“Quite,” Louis assented gravely.

“So you see now where you--where you--I mean, if I made the sacrifice, it had to be done completely. I had to make it easy for him to divorce and marry her. You see--she’s Doug’s happiness.”

“May I ask, quite without prejudice, if she, the thin, brown-eyed child, is Doug’s _first_ happiness--since he married you?”

Ursula flushed. “About the twenty-first; the heart of Doug has many splinters.” And though she laughed at the confession, her eyelids, like Mona Lisa’s, were a little weary....

She returned, with a touch of craftsman’s pride, to relation of her detailed scheme: “I invited Aunt Lavvy, so that she could be in the house when it all happened. That was a good idea, wasn’t it?”

“The charming little Dresden lady with the coo in her voice? You hate her, don’t you, Ursula? Why did you wilfully select as chaperon, Aunt-Lavvy-whom-you-hate?”

Ursula’s glance at him was now frankly admiring. He had wonderful perception, this--carpet-walker! “Why? Because somehow I enjoy building up a--bitterly comic state of affairs. And Aunt Lavvy and I ... and the room ...” She hesitated.

“Sit down,” said Louis. “We have at least seven hours still to get through, in what is, for me in particular, another bitterly comic state of affairs. So, in the truly Russian-novel style, you shall tell me the whole story of Aunt Lavvy--and you--and the room.”

Ursula did not read Russian novels. But it seemed oddly natural that to Louis, of all people, she should be able to talk more naturally than ever before to any one else....

... “And yet people go on living with other people as though it weren’t the most important thing in the world,” said Ursula, by way of conclusion, epilogue, envoi and moral to her tale. “Aunt Lavvy, and our whole family, and Gums, and Stanley Watson, and the servants ... not selected to live together for any _reason_, but because it’s happened like that. It must be the same in millions of houses. Somebody always in a state of bruise through knocking up against somebody else, till we settle down to bruises, and get numb to them, and call the result ‘home’ or ‘family life,’ whichever you please. Do you know that some boarding houses advertise ‘family life’ ... with about thirty haphazard strangers. And nobody sees it’s funny. You choose your clothes with care and your career with care, but misfit houses are chosen anyhow, and rooms and meals are shared anyhow....”

“Sometimes there’s a crisis--and combustion,” suggested Louis. And Ursula took him up jubilantly.

“Yes, sometimes there’s a crisis. Over the last crisis, I lost the room and myself. This time----” she was about to say “this time I regain them both”; but once more she recalled what was undoubtedly a fact, that she was effacing herself so that Doug and Christine might be happy. “And”--her voice shook slightly over the amended version of her behaviour--“this time I’m going to run away, and so give Christine a present of her romance. It’s only decent, isn’t it? You’d say so?”

“I should say,” Louis replied after due deliberation, “that it was the most selfish action you had ever done or are ever likely to do.”

Then he burst into scoffing laughter: “Tit for tat over your laugh at me, my lady humbug! Oh, the pathetic quiver on your lips, your meek eyelids, and your voice cadging for my approbation. _Sacrifice!_ Ursula Barrison, what do you want to do most in all the world? Why, to run away, run away, run away. You’re thrilled by the idea of escape. In love with loneliness--you told me so yourself. Your whole being lightens and is swift to it.... Sacrifice? ‘What’s become of Waring, since he gave us all the slip? Chose land-travel, or sea-faring!’ Own up, Ursula.”

Furious with him at first, she listened--snapped and yielded.

“Oh, I’ll own up. It’s true. It’s all true. What--who is Waring?”

“An invention of Browning’s, I suppose. It doesn’t matter much. He got fed up with the streets he knew and the friends he knew, and suddenly disappeared. They were left wondering--and talking about it. Years later, one of them, sailing on the Adriatic, caught a quick glimpse of him in a little boat, with a boy who sold wine and fruit--

“‘... Then the boat,
I know not how, turned sharply round,
Laying her whole side on the sea
As a leaping fish does; from the lee
Into the weather, cut somehow
Her sparkling path beneath our bow;
And so went off, as with a bound
Into the rose and golden half
Of the sky.... So I saw the last of Waring!’

“Well, Waring of St. Miniot, what are you going to do?”

_“Give them all the slip_ ...” leapt, tingling, from Ursula. “Why do you call me selfish, Louis? Chris and Doug are complete without me--and even if I’m not making a very big sacrifice by dropping out.... My good name is something: This room and you, and leaving Doug to believe ... and divorce me. I detest squalor, and it _is_ all squalid and not very pretty: like squeezing through a dark, stale-smelling alley. But then there’s an archway. And beyond----” Her eyes were filled with the promise of sea and shining space, like the windows of the room, Christine’s room.

“‘What’s become of Waring?’” she murmured, fascinated....

“And you really think you are justified----” Louis began.

“Oh, but need everybody do something pompous and heavy like justifying their existence, or accepting a responsibility, or--or carrying an unsmirched reputation? Can’t just one here and there--me, for instance--run along lightly, as though I left no footprint? As though I didn’t count? It’s so tiring to count. And to be sure of seeing the same people every day, and the same set of habits ... the same old standards ... same old places. You stick on because you love some one, or because of health, or because you lack courage. And words like outlaw and pirate and solitude are not for you ... not for you ... you try not to hear them. But I don’t love any one now, thank God! and I’m strong as the wind, and not afraid of anything except to be crowded.”

“Claustrophobia ...” murmured the up-to-date Louis. She had never heard the word: “Oh, I won’t pretend any more that it’s a sacrifice for me to run away; it isn’t; it’s escape--and not very clever of you to have discovered that! But as it happens, I can be generous to the girl in the room, and yet in the same breath win back the room for myself. I must apologize for dragging you in as a dummy, Louis,” with a whimsical drop from exultation; “but I must at least pretend to elope in more tangible and more sinister company than just my own. They haven’t enough imagination in the Divorce Courts to accept me as the co-respondent as well as the defendant.”

“You can hardly expect it of them, my dear.” In an absent fashion the man paced the room. He had forgotten his own claims and injury; intent on this would-be Undine, who was defying the very existence of her human soul....

“You talk of being generous to the girl in the room,” he broke out, abruptly. “What about your husband? Is he worth your gift?”

“No,” frankly. “That’s why I left him out. Doug--oh, he’s noisy and cheap romantic, and jumps over tea-tables; that’s not the harm in him. But he can’t be faithful. And that goes as deep as _he_ goes. And so he grabs your lonely dreams--and gives back nothing.”

“And so you grab the girl’s lonely dreams, and give her--Doug. You, who have tried him, and found out what he does. You can’t coolly abandon your own mistake without working it out to the end.”

“Don’t--be quiet--I won’t hear....” Ursula’s clenched hands were pushed out as though in fight against his argument; but her eyes, scared and very light round the dilated pupils, were as though suddenly woken from a spell. “I’m going,” she muttered; but he caught her by the wrists and continued ruthlessly:

“In a few years hence, Christine will go through all the torture you’ve been through. Leave her the room with the white walls--and she’ll be luxuriantly and youthfully sorrowful over her lost hero--and forget him. You can’t safeguard the girl any other way than by remaining Doug’s wife yourself.”

“Why should I safeguard her?” cried Ursula.

“Why should you have preserved Hal from damage, nine years ago? You had to, that’s all.”

She pleaded with him now: “I can’t go back to it, Louis, I can’t. Aunt Lavvy’s there, at Grey Stone, in the house, in my bed. And Doug.... I purposely left him easy clues to pick up my elopement, so that he’d have no trouble in getting rid of me. That’s the ridiculous part of it. If I went back--tomorrow--I’d have to let him suppose that when it came to it, I had cared too much for him and too little for you--I should have to be repentant and ask him to be magnanimous and forgive me. And he would. After a fierce struggle. All the rest of my life I’d have to live with Doug and be forgiven. And never be able to laugh out loud. And never to tell him how funny it was....”

After a pause: “Of course I’m not going back,” Ursula decided in perfectly normal and decided tones.

As though Louis’ silence had been a powerful attack, she met it with the fleet retort: “I was able to give up the room years ago, because then I believed that life would somehow be gleaming and lit up afterwards, as a sort of reward. Transfigured. But I know now, I _know_ it’s just the same, only beastlier. Virtue isn’t its own reward, even spiritually. How can I go back knowing that? You wouldn’t ask it, Louis?”

“Yes. From you. That would be a delightfully cosy pink-wadding to the spirit, wouldn’t it, to be sure of abstract heaven after sacrifice?”

“If I went through it, Christine can.”

“There was no one then who had proved Doug, and could warn you.”

“I want the room again--or room again--as much as she does. A thousand times more.”

“So you’d take it at the expense of hers? Pirate?--you’re worse; you’re a robber.”

“My creed is to fling off our mistakes and start again. It’s tameness to abide by them.”

“Your creed doesn’t count while you’re concerned with Christine, and her--symbolically--white walls.”

“I’m _not_ concerned with them?” in a final passion of revolt. “It’s not my responsibility.”

“Yes, it is.” And he added grimly: “God shares responsibility with those who are privileged to see what they’re about.”

Ursula began softly to cry.

And Louis, aware that the tussle was over, mercifully turned his back on her, and gazed out of the window.... His mouth was puckered to a grimace, and his sloe-eyes were unspeakably tender. “We must look grotesquely like an Academy picture called ‘Renunciation,’” was one of the irrelevant thoughts which drifted through his mind, dismally empty of any consolation for himself--or her. “One of those silly problem pictures to make the public wonder which of the two is renouncing and which isn’t....” Then Ursula’s voice startled him:

“Come and talk it over!” Ursula’s voice, clear and merry. “You, of all people, are a queer Figure of Light to have been sent to guide me through my darkness, aren’t you, Louis?”

“You needn’t advertise it,” laughed Louis; but he could more readily have kissed her feet in admiration for the gallant pull-up; her little gold head jauntily tilted towards defeat, instead of bowed down under it. “I prefer my Mephistophelian reputation, thanks. I may be a prig tonight, but I don’t intend to make a habit of it, Ursula Barrison.”

“Your next victim will find you doubly the Evil One, in fact,” she surmised lazily. “And labelled ‘dangerous’ from head to foot.”

Louis’ reply was an unexpectedly savage kick at Doug. “It’s not the man labelled ‘dangerous’ of whom women need beware; if he _is_ easy with his kisses and his innuendoes, they all recognize him.... But your strong romantic figure with a boy’s heart, and speech nobly bitten back, and a great love silently endured--one great love after another---- Oh, Lord, he makes me _groan_! And the harm he does is deadly--every time.”

“Is it possible that you mean my husband?” Ursula mocked. “It needn’t be deadly for Christine.... I can prophesy a charming idyll for Christine, and quite plausible. Would you like to hear it? Aunt Lavvy has taken a fancy to her, you see. And after we have all enjoyed a happy month together at Grey Stone, Christine will be invited down to the Laburnums for Christmas, because the poor brave child needs to be petted and cheered--‘Haven’t you noticed, Ursula, that she’s moping?’ Oh yes, my Aunt Lavvy is quite observant. And at the Laburnums for Christmas will be my handsome brother Hal.”

“Your other rescue? It _is_ an idyll! And they both live happy ever after. They’ll never be grateful to you, Ursula, but _I_ am ... for them. You--you young captain!”

[IX]

CHRISTINE sat huddled on the window-seat of the room, her lashes and mouth curled softly upwards to the round rusty disc of the October full moon. In that wistful attitude, and wearing loose white cotton pyjamas that sagged from her slim body, she looked more like Pierrot than ever. The moonlight touched the sea, and her throat, and burnished the top of her round dark head. She had said good-bye to Doug a few hours ago--oh, not an ordinary good-bye, they would still be seeing each other every day for a fortnight or more. But--_good-bye_! She did not cry ... though she felt very sad (gloriously sad!).

It had all been too romantic for tears.

Romantic--and queer too. Even now there were things about the last twenty-four hours which she did not quite understand.

_Why_ did Ursula not return from Gullick last night? Where had she stayed? What was in the note that Doug had discovered in the cabin, on their return from a jolly evening at Miss Gregson’s?

Oh well, the answers were easy, to anyone with Christine’s experience of life. Ursula had eloped with Louis Gregson--fascinating foreigner (“he’s called Louis and his moustache is awfully foreign,” Chris argued with moon). And the note was to explain matters to her husband.

Doug had not behaved as though the shock had left him broken and stunned and in agony. He had seemed wildly excited, certainly, and his eyes, whenever they met Christine’s, were glowing with ... “Oh, I don’t know,” Christine cried aloud. But such eloquence was intoxicating to remember, afterwards, alone in one’s room....

And he had said, “Plenty of time tomorrow”; and when she had asked innocently: “To fetch her back?” he shouted “_No_, by God”.... And Aunt Lavvy’s smile from her to him had been odd and wise and just the least little bit triumphant. “We must keep the child out of this as much as possible,” Chris had overheard. And Doug’s reply, “Thank God you were here!”

And then--and this was the inexplicable part of it all--the next morning Ursula had returned.

The girl in the room knit her brows in utter perplexity. She supposed that Louis had already jilted her: “But she didn’t _look_ jilted. She looked rather specially beautiful!” Perhaps Gladys Willoughby might be able to clear up the mystery. Only, somehow, Chris did not want to discuss with Gladys any part of her stay at Grey Stone.

Doug and Ursula had talked alone together. And then Doug had come out to her, where she disconsolately crouched, hugging her knees, on the rocks which overhung the purple pools--she named them by the colour of the seaweed. He was very white under his tan. At least, his skin was as bronzed as usual, of course, “but his expression was as though his face were white,” Chris explained to the moon, with a little wriggle of impatience.

Doug had been brief and stern, and quite unlike his usual boyish merry self. Unlike last night, too. He had said: “This is good-bye--in a way, brave little girl. Though I dare say I shall go on seeing as much of you as before. But I’d hoped---- Never mind that. It’s over. Chris, a decent chap has first of all got to stand by his wife when she’s ... down. My poor Teddy--I never dreamt she cared for me as much....” He halted abruptly. “You understand? If you don’t--you will one day. Or forget. So much the better. I want you to be happy. And, oh my God, I could have made you happy, on some South Sea Island, warm white sand sloping down to the lagoon....”

“It didn’t sound so _frightfully_ different from Polpinnock Cove,” reflected Christine. “But then he says he’s no good at words.”

A small black cloud wobbled jerkily across the sun, blotting it out, just at the moment when he bent and kissed her. His farewell kiss. And Christine knew that for her and for him the brightness of life was over.

True, Aunt Lavvy had been a perfect darling, and had said that Christine must come as her guest to the Laburnums for a really jolly home sort of Christmas. Aunt Lavvy was wonderful; for though she must know that no jollity could really cheer Chris after her tragedy, yet it was sweet of her to try and give her something to look forward to.

Two and a half months.... How many of Ursula’s sisters and brothers would be there? Nina and Lottie--Aunt Lavvy had told her a little about the Maxwell family--Not Bunny, he was in New Zealand; but Hal, the eldest boy, he would get a holiday from London.... He was big and handsome, like Doug, only of course not _so_ big and handsome.

Would they give her a pretty room, there? As pretty as this one? At the boarding-house she had always shared a room with Auntie, but it was much nicer to sleep alone ... it was lovely being alone in this room ... even with a broken heart....

Christine sighed contentedly.

THE END

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.