"It"s the only old thing in the place," she said--"except for the bits of ruin in the garden walls. There was a border castle here, long ago, and the cedar must have belonged to its later days. I"m glad it"s all so new, aren"t you? I don"t like old places. Not to live in."
It was, perhaps, only as looked down at from the third window that the flagged garden had its uncanniness for her. She seemed quite content to stand there in the sunlight and admire it with him. Any distaste or reluctance was Miss Latimer"s, and he did not know why it was that he divined it beneath her air of detachment. It was she who, presently, moved away, pa.s.sing out into the high-walled kitchen garden, and they followed her.
There were cordon fruit-trees round the vegetable-beds, and daffodils, at one end, grew thickly against the walls. Wide, herbaceous borders ran on either side of the central path, showing already their clumps and bosses of green and bronze.
"Cicely plans it all, you know," said Antonia, going now before them, "and does heaps of the work herself, with spade and fork. Mrs. Wellwood had only the one gardener and a boy. I can"t think how Cicely contrives to keep it all so beautifully."
"It was Mrs. Wellwood who planned it all," said Miss Latimer. But she could not disown the work.
He was seeing her more and more clearly as one of those curious beings whose personalities are parasitic on a place. He doubted whether her thoughts ever wandered beyond Wyndwards. All her activities, certainly, were conditioned by it. It would not be only that she dug and planted, hoed and watered, mulched and staked and raked in the garden. He felt sure, too, acute young man that he was, that she cut out the loose chintz covers for the furniture, superintended the making of marmalade in spring and jam in summer, kept a careful eye on the store-cupboard and washed the dogs with her own hands. There were two dogs: an old Dandie Dinmont and a young fox-terrier; and he had, all the while they walked, a feeling, not a bit ghostly, amusing rather than sad, that they were bits of Malcolm"s soul, detached bits, remaining on earth behind him; the Dandie Dinmont the soul of his happy boyhood at Wyndwards and the fox-terrier the soul of his maturity. Miss Latimer would find in tending them the same pa.s.sionate satisfaction she had in all of it; the place, and the persons it still embodied for her and who for her survived in it, indistinguishably mingled. All of it was her life and she could imagine no other.
Antonia would never be that sort of woman. Places, if not parasitic upon her, at least were mere settings and backgrounds. She made the silvery forms of the distant hills subservient to her beauty as, with the faded silken sunshade, she drifted before them along the paths. She wore still, rather absurdly, though the day was so fine and the paths so dry, her little black satin house-shoes, high-heeled and laced about the ankle with satin ribbon; and as she walked she cast her admiring, un.o.bservant glances to right and left or stooped now and then to pat the dogs. The dogs were very fond of her, racing forward and then returning to look up at her with interrogative delight. That, too, made him think of Malcolm. They were much fonder of Tony than of Miss Latimer, to whom they owed so much.
It was he who had to do all the talking to Miss Latimer, and it was difficult to talk to her and to express his accurate appreciation of her gardening exploits, or his admiration of the changing views of the house that their walk disclosed, since, in answering him, it was always as if she avoided some attempt at intimacy and as if he could make no reference to the place without being too personal. This was especially funny since, behind his praise, was the judgment that what the place lacked was personality; and he hadn"t the faintest wish to be intimate with Miss Latimer.
It was not until after tea that he again found himself alone with Antonia. They were in the drawing-room, the tea-table had been taken away, the lamps lighted, and Antonia was embroidering before the fire.
"Would she hate me if I ever did come to marry you?" he asked. He asked it without seeming to recall the morning and its avowal.
Antonia, following his advice, was selecting a shade of azalea-green to lay against her pearly grey. She had always asked his advice about such matters, and the cushions and firescreens in her London house recalled to him how many summer afternoons before the war when, on week-ends in the country, she had held up her work to ask, "_Is_ that right, Bevis?"
while Malcolm smoked beside them, amused by their preoccupation over the alternative of pink or orange.
"Cicely, you mean?" Antonia asked.
"Yes. Would she resent it? Would she hate me for it?--and you?"
Antonia considered, and he knew while she considered, her eyes on the azalea silk, that he filled her again with deep delight. He and his pa.s.sion were there, encompa.s.sing, yet not pursuing her. She gave nothing and betrayed nothing and she was secure of all.
"I don"t think she could hate me. That sounds fatuous; but I believe it"s true. I don"t know about you. But no; I don"t think she"d resent it. Why should she?"
"Well, caring for him so much and seeing me here in his place."
"How brave you are, Bevis," said Antonia after a moment, drawing out her silk. It was the quality in him to which she most often reverted.
"Am I? Why?"
"You are not afraid to remind me."
"Why should I be afraid? I know your thoughts. But I"m not going to talk about them, or about mine. I want you to explain Miss Latimer."
"There"s not much to explain. She shows it all, I think. She"s deep and narrow and simple. You don"t like her. I can see that."
"I can"t imagine how. I"m constantly making myself agreeable."
"To me; not to her. She knows as well as I do why you take trouble over her. Not that I blame you. I didn"t think I should like her when I first saw her. And then I came to find that I did; more and more; very, very much. Or, perhaps, it is trust, rather than liking," Antonia mused.
"Poor little Cicely. Do you know, I don"t think any one has ever really liked her much. Not old Mrs. Wellwood, really, nor even Malcolm. It hurt me to feel, in a moment, that Mrs. Wellwood liked even me, whom she hardly knew, better."
"I am not surprised," Captain Saltonhall commented.
"No; but that"s not relevant, Bevis; because one doesn"t expect one"s mother-in-law to like one, however charming one may be. What I felt about it was that Cicely had starved her, just as she starved Cicely.
Neither could give the other anything except absolute trust. Cicely was the fonder, I think, for old Mrs. Wellwood was cold as well as shy, cold to every one but Malcolm; even with me she was cold; and even with Malcolm she was, always, shy."
"Dismal it sounds, for all of them."
"No; it wasn"t that. Cheerful and serene rather. But all the same Cicely is pathetic. And the more I think of her, the more I admire her. She"s so individual, yet so impersonal, if one can make the distinction.
There"s no appeal of any sort; no demand. She never seems to need anything or to ask anything; perhaps that is why she doesn"t gain devotion; the more self-absorbed and demanding people are, the more devotion they get, I"m afraid. At all events, she"s absolutely devoted; absolutely selfless and straight."
"What did they do with themselves, she and Mrs. Wellwood, when Malcolm wasn"t here to give them an object? I never saw his mother. He said she hated coming to town."
"Oh, it was miserable to see them in town, as I did once; forlorn, caged birds. Malcolm was their object, you see, even when he wasn"t here. And they lived together just as Cicely lives now alone. There are country neighbours--Mrs. Wellwood was scrupulously sociable--and the village, and the garden. Cicely still goes to read to old bed-ridden women and to take them soup. I thought, in my London ignorance, that the lady-bountiful was a figure of fun to every one nowadays, flouted from the cottage door, and all the rest of it. But I"ve found out that there"s nothing the cottage really loves so well. Independence and committees bore them dreadfully; they have all that here; there"s an energetic vicar"s wife, and she got even poor Mrs. Wellwood on her committee; it bores the village people, but it frightened her. Cicely never would. I can"t imagine Cicely on a committee. She"d have nothing to say, though it wouldn"t frighten her."
He had always savoured Antonia"s vagrant impressionism. "Did they read?"
he asked.
"I should rather think so!" she laughed a little. "They were great on reading. All the biographies in two volumes and all the travels, and French _memoires_--translated and expurgated. Cicely has the most ingenuous ideas about the court of Louis the Fourteenth. Novels, too; but they contrived always to miss the good ones. I don"t suppose they ever attempted a Henry James or heard of Anatole France."
"And never danced a tango, _a plus forte raison_, or saw a Russian ballet."
"They did see a Russian ballet, that once they were up. Malcolm and I took them. I think it bewildered Mrs. Wellwood, and Cicely was very dry about it. And they saw me dance the tango; I did it for them, here,"
said Antonia, and involuntarily she sighed, although she did not look up at her companion. She and Bevis, adepts of the dance, had, before the war, danced together continually. "They liked seeing me do it," she said. "They liked my differences and what they felt to be my audacities.
But they"d have liked anything Malcolm did." And then she came back to his first question. "As far as that goes, my remarrying, if I ever did, as long as it wasn"t too quickly, and some one Malcolm liked, I don"t for a moment think she"d mind."
Captain Saltonhall did not agree with her, but he did not say so. They talked, thus, very pleasantly, till the hour for dressing, and after dinner Antonia sang to him and Miss Latimer. "What shall it be, Cicely?"
she asked, and Miss Latimer said, "The old favourites, please." So that Captain Saltonhall, who had only heard her sing Brahms, Duparc, and Debussy, heard now old English folk-songs and "Better lo"ed you could na" be." She had a melancholy, sweet, imperfect voice, and though her singing had magic it was the flutelike, expressionless magic of the wood-land. She sang indolently, like a blackbird, and the current of the song carried her. But it was a voice that moved him more than any other voice he knew, and as he sat, impa.s.sive, apparently, his hands clasped round his knee, he felt the tears, again and again, rising to his eyes.
Miss Latimer sat staring into the fire. She was dry-eyed. But he felt sure that she, too, was only apparently impa.s.sive. He felt sure that these songs had been Malcolm"s favourites, too.
III
They were sitting next day in a sunny hollow of the moors. Above their heads the spring air was chill, and as they had walked they had felt the wind; but, sunken in this little, sheltered cup, summer was almost with them and the gra.s.s and heather exhaled a summer fragrance. Bevis had insisted on the walk, saying that he could manage it perfectly, and indeed they were half a mile from the house before he had owned that they had gone far enough for his strength; a little too far, he was aware, as they sank down on the gra.s.s, and he was sorry, for he knew from Antonia"s face that she was going to talk to him and that all his strength and resource would not be too much for the interview.
"I"ve been thinking, Bevis," she began at once, sitting a little below him, her hands clasped round her knees. "I want to tell you everything.
In the first place, let me be quite straight. I do love you," she said, without looking round at him. "I am in love with you."
"Yes," he a.s.sented.
"What happened yesterday morning couldn"t have happened had I not been,"
she defined for herself. "Not that I mean it exonerates me."
"Or me?"
"You don"t need exoneration. You are not unfaithful."
"No, I"m not unfaithful; and I don"t think you are. But go on."