IV
For some seconds the stars seemed to go out of the sky. I seemed to be, not sitting with him on that earth-wall by Le Port gap, but to be standing again in the drive of Ker Annic, with the glare of a touring-car thrown up from the ground and Jennie Aird by my side. I seemed to see again her parted lips, to hear that soft intake of her breath. And his own face seemed to hang again like a beautiful mask suspended in the glow.
And when I had descended from my room again I had found him lurking in the bushes, gazing into the lighted house.
Stars in the night above us! Was that to be the next thing to happen?
Had it happened?
Evidently something had happened, and had happened during the past two hours.
Then, as I strove to grasp the immense possibility, a deep and hapless yearning flooded my heart. The loveliness, the loveliness of it had it been possible! She, with the dreams still unrubbed from her opening eyes, he a December primrose peeping up anew out of the roots of his wrecked and fruitless years--they would have been matchlessly coupled.
Had he in truth been my son I could have desired no more for him than this.
Yet why do I say "had it been possible"? Possible or impossible, something, whether more beautiful or fatal I could not say, had in fact happened. Whether to her or not, it had happened to him. How else explain that treacherous little slip about his money? Up to then his memory had not failed him. Reticence he had shown, a youthful unwillingness to talk about himself, but not in order to conceal an impaired faculty. His account of his movements during the past month had been slight, but complete enough. One gap only--the Julia gap--he found unaccountable, and that was no enigma to me.
But was he now on the eve of yet another transformation? Had one look of eyes into eyes hastened him to another stage? Absolved he was; was he now to be, not merely absolved, but confirmed in all the beauty and liberty of that absolution? Consider it as I tried to consider it, sitting on that thymy earth-wall while Frehel, like a ghostly clock, threw those wavering false dawns across the night.
Julia, by her ruthless act, had But Jennie had now seen him despoiled him of ten years as Julia had seen him more of his life. than twenty years ago.
That act of hers const.i.tuted the But should another gap now come gap that, try as he would, his heart would understand.
he could not account for.
In some dark and hidden way He was now beautiful, grave, Julia had taken upon herself innocent and unafraid.
his burden of sin.
Julia, darkly machinating, was But Jennie, as spotless as he, counting on waylaying him knew nothing of machination.
again, and yet again.
"He _shall_ know what love is; If his question to me meant why should he get nothing anything, a wonder had happened out of his life?" Julia had to him not two hours ago.
pa.s.sionately cried.
On his former pilgrimage he But was Love the wonder now?
had not known Love.
If so, it was Julia"s gift when And it was a gift to Jennie.
she had restored his innocence to him.
But the position was inconceivable, not to be thought of. Experience such as never man had possessed lurked behind that simulacrum of beauty by my side. Young as he was, he was old enough to have been Jennie"s father. He was, he still remained, the man who had written _The Hands of Esau_ and _An Ape in h.e.l.l_, the man for whom I had hunted in questionable London haunts, who had known to the full the sin and shame of his acc.u.mulated years. I knew, Julia knew, what contact with his ruinous uniqueness meant. How was it possible to permit such an error in nature as to allow him to fall in love with Jennie Aird?
Yet if he had already done so, what was there to do?
His voice sounded again softly by my side.
"You haven"t told me who that was with you in the garden," he said.
"Let"s finish with the other things first," I answered.
"Oh, I"m tired of talking about myself, sir."
"That"s one of them. Why do you sometimes call me "sir" and sometimes "George"?"
He gave a start. "Have I been doing that?"
"Didn"t you know?"
I couldn"t catch his reply.
"When you were young I suppose you called older men "sir"?"
"Of course."
"Do you think that at this moment you could repeat, say, half a page of _The Hands of Esau_?" (I had my reasons for choosing that book rather than another.)
"I think so."
"Will you try?"
"Shall you know if I"m right?"
"Near enough for the purpose, I think."
He puckered his brows and fixed his eyes on the road. He began to recite. _The Hands of Esau_ had been written in or before 1912, and the year was now 1920. To remember even your own book textually eight years afterwards is something of a performance; but he was remembering, at nineteen, the words he had written at thirty-eight--a s.p.a.ce of nearly twenty years. I stopped him, satisfied, but he himself immediately took up the running.
"Of course I see what you"re after, but I"ve done all that myself.
Honour bright, that about the furniture was the first slip of the kind I"ve made. But I"ve made one discovery."
"What"s that?"
"You"re starting at the wrong end. That memory"s all right. It"s the other one I"ve sometimes wondered about."
"Ah! The one you call your "B" Memory! Do you mean--it sounds an odd way of putting it, but I suppose it"s all right--do you mean you don"t remember what sort of thing you"ll be doing, say, next year?"
"Not very clearly, George. Sometimes that seems an absolutely unknown adventure. And sometimes it"s like that queer feeling--I expect you know it--that you"ve been somewhere before, or done something before, or heard the same thing before. It lasts for a second, and then it"s gone."
"Do you think it will continue like that?"
"I"ve stopped thinking about it."
"That page you repeated just now. That wasn"t a stock page you--keep in rehearsal, so to speak?"
"No, that was pukka."
I considered my next question carefully. But there was no avoiding it; it had to be put. I watched him deliberately.
"Now tell me one other thing. Do you ever remember hearing or writing these words: "_Je tache de me debrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci?_""