"Yes, I suppose your work----"
She left an eloquent gap.
"There, of course, one"s fortunate," said Mr. Brumley.
"I wish," said Lady Harman, with a sudden frankness and a little quickening of her colour, "that I had some work. Something--that was my own."
"But you have----There are social duties. There must be all sorts of things."
"There are--all sorts of things. I suppose I"m ungrateful. I have my children."
"You have children, Lady Harman!"
"I"ve _four_."
He was really astonished, "Your _own_?"
She turned her fawn"s eyes on his with a sudden wonder at his meaning.
"My own!" she said with the faintest tinge of astonished laughter in her voice. "What else could they be?"
"I thought----I thought you might have step-children."
"Oh! of course! No! I"m their mother;--all four of them. They"re mine as far as that goes. Anyhow."
And her eye questioned him again for his intentions.
But his thought ran along its own path. "You see," he said, "there is something about you--so freshly beginning life. So like--Spring."
"You thought I was too young! I"m nearly six-and-twenty! But all the same,--though they"re mine,--_still_----Why shouldn"t a woman have work in the world, Mr. Brumley? In spite of all that."
"But surely--that"s the most beautiful work in the world that anyone could possibly have."
Lady Harman reflected. She seemed to hesitate on the verge of some answer and not to say it.
"You see," she said, "it may have been different with you.... When one has a lot of nurses, and not very much authority."
She coloured deeply and broke back from the impending revelations.
"No," she said, "I would like some work of my own."
--3
At this point their conversation was interrupted by the lady"s chauffeur in a manner that struck Mr. Brumley as extraordinary, but which the tall lady evidently regarded as the most natural thing in the world.
Mr. Clarence appeared walking across the lawn towards them, surveying the charms of as obviously a charming garden as one could have, with the disdain and hostility natural to a chauffeur. He did not so much touch his cap as indicate that it was within reach, and that he could if he pleased touch it. "It"s time you were going, my lady," he said. "Sir Isaac will be coming back by the five-twelve, and there"ll be a nice to-do if you ain"t at home and me at the station and everything in order again."
Manifestly an abnormal expedition.
"Must we start at once, Clarence?" asked the lady consulting a bracelet watch. "You surely won"t take two hours----"
"I can give you fifteen minutes more, my lady," said Clarence, "provided I may let her out and take my corners just exactly in my own way."
"And I must give you tea," said Mr. Brumley, rising to his feet. "And there is the kitchen."
"And upstairs! I"m afraid, Clarence, for this occasion only you must--what is it?--let her out."
"And no "Oh Clarence!" my lady?"
She ignored that.
"I"ll tell Mrs. Rabbit at once," said Mr. Brumley, and started to run and trod in some complicated way on one of his loose laces and was precipitated down the rockery steps. "Oh!" cried the lady. "Mind!" and clasped her hands.
He made a sound exactly like the word "d.a.m.nation" as he fell, but he didn"t so much get up as bounce up, apparently in the brightest of tempers, and laughed, held out two earthy hands for sympathy with a mock rueful grimace, and went on, earthy-green at the knees and a little more carefully towards the house. Clarence, having halted to drink deep satisfaction from this disaster, made his way along a nearly parallel path towards the kitchen, leaving his lady to follow as she chose to the house.
"_You"ll_ take a cup of tea?" called Mr. Brumley.
"Oh! _I"ll_ take a cup all right," said Clarence in the kindly voice of one who addresses an amusing inferior....
Mrs. Rabbit had already got the tea-things out upon the cane table in the pretty verandah, and took it ill that she should be supposed not to have thought of these preparations.
Mr. Brumley disappeared for a few minutes into the house.
He returned with a conscious relief on his face, clean hands, brushed knees, and his boots securely laced. He found Lady Harman already pouring out tea.
"You see," she said, to excuse this pleasant enterprise on her part, "my husband has to be met at the station with the car.... And of course he has no idea----"
She left what it was of which Sir Isaac had no idea to the groping speculations of Mr. Brumley.
--4
That evening Mr. Brumley was quite unable to work. His mind was full of this beautiful dark lady who had come so unexpectedly into his world.
Perhaps there are such things as premonitions. At any rate he had an altogether disproportionate sense of the significance of the afternoon"s adventure,--which after all was a very small adventure indeed. A mere talk. His mind refused to leave her, her black furry slenderness, her dark trustful eyes, the sweet firmness of her perfect lips, her appealing simplicity that was yet somehow compatible with the completest self-possession. He went over the incident of the board again and again, sc.r.a.ping his memory for any lurking crumb of detail as a starving man might sc.r.a.pe an insufficient plate. Her dignity, her gracious frank forgiveness; no queen alive in these days could have touched her.... But it wasn"t a mere elaborate admiration. There was something about her, about the quality of their meeting.
Most people know that sort of intimation. This person, it says, so fine, so brave, so distant still in so many splendid and impressive qualities, is yet in ways as yet undefined and unexplored, subtly and abundantly--for _you_. It was that made all her novelty and distinction and high quality and beauty so dominating among Mr. Brumley"s thoughts.
Without that his interest might have been almost entirely--academic. But there was woven all through her the hints of an imaginable alliance, with _us_, with the things that are Brumley, with all that makes beautiful little cottages and resents advertis.e.m.e.nts in lovely places, with us as against something over there lurking behind that board, something else, something out of which she came. He vaguely adumbrated what it was out of which she came. A closed narrow life--with horrid vast enviable quant.i.ties of money. A life, could one use the word _vulgar_?--so that Carpaccio, Della Robbia, old furniture, a garden unostentatiously perfect, and the atmosphere of _belles-lettres_, seemed things of another more desirable world. (She had never been abroad.) A world, too, that would be so willing, so happy to enfold her, furs, funds, freshness--everything.
And all this was somehow animated by the stirring warmth in the June weather, for spring raised the sap in Mr. Brumley as well as in his trees, had been a restless time for him all his life. This spring particularly had sensitized him, and now a light had shone.
He was so unable to work that for twenty minutes he sat over a pleasant little essay on Shakespear"s garden that by means of a concordance and his natural apt.i.tude he was writing for the book of the National Shakespear Theatre, without adding a single fancy to its elegant playfulness. Then he decided he needed his afternoon"s walk after all, and he took cap and stick and went out, and presently found himself surveying that yellow and blue board and seeing it from an entirely new point of view....
It seemed to him that he hadn"t made the best use of his conversational opportunities, and for a time this troubled him....
Toward the twilight he was walking along the path that runs through the heather along the edge of the rusty dark ironstone lake opposite the pine-woods. He spoke his thoughts aloud to the discreet bat that flitted about him. "I wonder," he said, "whether I shall ever set eyes on her again...."
In the small hours when he ought to have been fast asleep he decided she would certainly take the house, and that he would see her again quite a number of times. A long tangle of unavoidable detail for discussion might be improvised by an ingenious man. And the rest of that waking interval pa.s.sed in such inventions, which became more and more vague and magnificent and familiar as Mr. Brumley lapsed into slumber again....