"Well," she said brightly, "the eggs must be done by now."
She tripped out, to return directly.
"I"ve brought you," she said, "some of the Island cream, and some white currants, if ye"ll have them. You must think well of the Island, and come back."
"How could we help?" laughed Helena.
"We will," smiled Siegmund.
When finally the door was closed on her, Siegmund sat down in relief.
Helena looked in amus.e.m.e.nt at him. She was perfectly self-possessed in presence of the delightful little lady.
"This is one of the few places that has ever felt like home to me," she said. She lifted a tangled bunch of fine white currants.
"Ah!" exclaimed Siegmund, smiling at her.
"One of the few places where everything is friendly," she said. "And everybody."
"You have made so many enemies?" he asked, with gentle irony.
"Strangers," she replied. "I seem to make strangers of all the people I meet."
She laughed in amus.e.m.e.nt at this _mot_. Siegmund looked at her intently.
He was thinking of her left alone amongst strangers.
"Need we go--need we leave this place of friends?" he said, as if ironically. He was very much afraid of tempting her.
She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and counted: "One, two, three, four, five hours, thirty-five minutes. It is an age yet,"
she laughed.
Siegmund laughed too, as he accepted the particularly fine bunch of currants she had extricated for him.
_Chapter 19_
The air was warm and sweet in the little lane, remote from the sea, which led them along their last walk. On either side the white path was a gra.s.sy margin thickly woven with pink convolvuli. Some of the reckless little flowers, so gay and evanescent, had climbed the trunks of an old yew tree, and were looking up pertly at their rough host.
Helena walked along, watching the flowers, and making fancies out of them.
"Who called them "fairies" telephones"?" she said to herself. "They are tiny children in pinafores. How gay they are! They are children dawdling along the pavement of a morning. How fortunate they are! See how they take a wind-thrill! See how wide they are set to the sunshine! And when they are tired, they will curl daintily to sleep, and some fairies in the dark will gather them away. They won"t be here in the morning, shrivelled and dowdy ... If only we could curl up and be gone, after our day...."
She looked at Siegmund. He was walking moodily beside her.
"It is good when life holds no anti-climax," she said.
"Ay!" he answered. Of course, he could not understand her meaning.
She strayed into the thick gra.s.s, a st.u.r.dy white figure that walked with bent head, abstract, but happy.
"What is she thinking?" he asked himself. "She is sufficient to herself--she doesn"t want me. She has her own private way of communing with things, and is friends with them."
"The dew has been very heavy," she said, turning, and looking up at him from under her brows, like a smiling witch.
"I see it has," he answered. Then to himself he said: "She can"t translate herself into language. She is incommunicable; she can"t render herself to the intelligence. So she is alone and a law unto herself: she only wants me to explore me, like a rock-pool, and to bathe in me. After a while, when I am gone, she will see I was not indispensable...."
The lane led up to the eastern down. As they were emerging, they saw on the left hand an extraordinarily spick and span red bungalow. The low roof of dusky red sloped down towards the coolest green lawn, that was edged and ornamented with scarlet, and yellow, and white flowers brilliant with dew.
A stout man in an alpaca jacket and panama hat was seated on the bare lawn, his back to the sun, reading a newspaper. He tried in vain to avoid the glare of the sun on his reading. At last he closed the paper and looked angrily at the house--not at anything in particular.
He irritably read a few more lines, then jerked up his head in sudden decision, glared at the open door of the house, and called:
"Amy! Amy!"
No answer was forthcoming. He flung down the paper and strode off indoors, his mien one of wrathful resolution. His voice was heard calling curtly from the dining-room. There was a jingle of crockery as he b.u.mped the table leg in sitting down.
"He is in a bad temper," laughed Siegmund.
"Breakfast is late," said Helena with contempt.
"Look!" said Siegmund.
An elderly lady in black and white striped linen, a young lady in holland, both carrying some wild flowers, hastened towards the garden gate. Their faces were turned anxiously to the house. They were hot with hurrying, and had no breath for words. The girl pressed forward, opened the gate for the lady in striped linen, who hastened over the lawn. Then the daughter followed, and vanished also under the shady veranda.
There was a quick sound of women"s low, apologetic voices, overridden by the resentful abuse of the man.
The lovers moved out of hearing.
"Imagine that breakfast-table!" said Siegmund.
"I feel," said Helena, with a keen tw.a.n.g of contempt in her voice, "as if a fussy c.o.c.k and hens had just scuffled across my path."
"There are many such roosts," said Siegmund pertinently.
Helena"s cold scorn was very disagreeable to him. She talked to him winsomely and very kindly as they crossed the open down to meet the next incurving of the coast, and Siegmund was happy. But the sense of humiliation, which he had got from her the day before, and which had fixed itself, bled him secretly, like a wound. This haemorrhage of self-esteem tortured him to the end.
Helena had rejected him. She gave herself to her fancies only. For some time she had confused Siegmund with her G.o.d. Yesterday she had cried to her ideal lover, and found only Siegmund. It was the spear in the side of his tortured self-respect.
"At least," he said, in mortification of himself--"at least, someone must recognize a strain of G.o.d in me--and who does? I don"t believe in it myself."
And, moreover, in the intense joy and suffering of his realized pa.s.sion, the island, with its sea and sky, had fused till, like a brilliant bead, all their beauty ran together out of the common ore, and Siegmund saw it naked, saw the beauty of everything naked in the shifting magic of this bead. The island would be gone tomorrow: he would look for the beauty and find the dirt. What was he to do?
"You know, Domine," said Helena--it was his old nickname she used--"you look quite stern today."
"I feel anything but stern," he laughed. "Weaker than usual, in fact."
"Yes, perhaps so, when you talk. Then you are really surprisingly gentle. But when you are silent, I am even afraid of you--you seem so grave."