Notwithstanding Part 5

She shook her head. She could hear nothing but his thin thread of voice.

"I am going with it, and this time I shan't come back. Good-bye, Annette."

"Good-bye, d.i.c.k."

His eyes dwelt on hers, with a mute appeal in them. The forebreath of the abyss was upon him, the shadow of "the outer dark."

She understood, and kissed him on the forehead with a great tenderness, and leaned her cold cheek against his.

And as she stooped she heard the mighty wind of which he spoke. Its rushing filled her ears, it filled the little chamber where those two poor things had suffered together, and had in a way ministered to each other.

And the sick-room with its gilt mirror and its tawdry wall-paper, and the evil picture never absent from Annette's brain, stooped and blended into one, and wavered together as a flame wavers in a draught, and then together vanished away.

"The wind is taking us both," Annette thought, as her eyes closed.

CHAPTER VI

"I was as children be Who have no care; I did not think or sigh, I did not sicken; But lo, Love beckoned me, And I was bare, And poor and starved and dry, And fever-stricken."

THOMAS HARDY.

It was five months later, the middle of February. Annette was lying in a deck-chair by the tank in the shade of the orange trees. All was still, with the afternoon stillness of Teneriffe, which will not wake up till sunset. Even the black goats had ceased to bleat and ring their bells.

The hoopoe which had been saying Cuk--Cuk--Cuk all the morning in the pepper tree was silent. The light air from the sea, bringing with it a whiff as from a bride's bouquet, hardly stirred the leaves. The sunlight trembled on the yellow stone steps, and on the trailing, climbing bougainvillea which had flung its mantle of purple over the bal.u.s.trade.

Through an opening in a network of almond blossom Annette could look down across the white water-courses and green terraces to the little town of Santa Cruz, lying glittering in the sunshine, with its yellow and white and mauve walls and flat roofs and quaint cupolas, outlined as if cut out in white paper, sharp white against the vivid blue of the sea.

A grey lizard came slowly out of a clump of pink verbena near the tank, and spread itself in a patch of sunlight on a little round stone.

Annette, as she lay motionless with thin folded hands, could see the pulse in its throat rise and fall as it turned its jewelled eyes now to this side, now to that, considering her as gravely as she was considering it.

A footfall came upon the stone steps. The lizard did not move. It was gone.

Mrs. Stoddart, an erect lilac figure under a white umbrella, came down the steps, with a cup of milk in her hand. Her forcible, incongruous countenance, with its peaked, indomitable nose and small, steady, tawny eyes under tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of having been knocked to pieces at some remote period and carelessly put together again. No feature seemed to fit with any other. If her face had not been held together by a certain shrewd benevolence which was spread all over it, she would have been a singularly forbidding-looking woman.

Annette took the cup and began dutifully to sip it, while Mrs. Stoddart sat down near her.

"Do you see the big gold-fish?" Annette said.

Her companion put up her pince-nez and watched him for a moment, swimming lazily near the surface.

"He seems much as usual," she said.

"It is not my fault if he is. I threw a tiny bit of stick at him a few minutes ago, and he bolted it at once; and then, just when I was beginning to feel anxious, he spat it out again to quite a considerable distance. He must have a very strong pop-gun in his inside."

Mrs. Stoddart took the empty cup from her and put it down on the edge of the tank.

"You have one great quality, Annette," she said: "you are never bored."

"How could I be, with so much going on round me? I have just had my first interview with a lizard. And before that a mantis called upon me.

Look, there he is again, on that twig. Doesn't he look exactly like a child's drawing of a dragon?"

A hideous grey mantis, about three inches long, walked slowly down an almond-blossomed branch.

"He really walks with considerable dignity, considering his legs bend the wrong way," said Mrs. Stoddart. "But I don't wish for his society."

"Oh, don't you? Look! Now he is going to pray."

And the mantis suddenly sat up and appeared to engage in prayer.

Annette watched him, fascinated, until his orisons were over, and he slowly went down again on all fours and withdrew himself into the bougainvillea.

Mrs. Stoddart looked searchingly at her, not without a certain pride.

She had still the bruised, sunken eyes of severe illness, and she rolled them slowly at Mrs. Stoddart, at the mantis, at the sky, at everything in turn, in a manner which exasperated the other occupants of the pension--two ladies from Hampstead who considered her a ma.s.s of affectation. The only thing about Annette which was beautiful was her hands, which were transparent, blue-veined, ethereal. But her movements with them also were so languid, so "studied," that it was impossible for spectators as impartial as the Hampstead ladies not to deplore her extreme vanity about them. To Mrs. Stoddart, who knew the signs of illness, it was evident that she was still weak, but it was equally evident that the current of health was surely flowing back.

"I remember," said Mrs. Stoddart, "being once nearly bored to extinction, not by an illness, but by my convalescence after it."

"I have no time to be bored," said Annette, "even if there is no mantis and no lizard. Since I have been better so many things come crowding into my mind, that though I lie still all day I hardly have time to think of them all. The day is never long enough for me."

There was a short silence.

"I often wonder," said Annette slowly, "about _you_."

"About me?"

"Yes. Why you do everything for me as if I were your own child, and most of all why you never ask me any questions--why you never even hint to me that it is my duty to tell you about myself."

Mrs. Stoddart's eyes dropped. Her heart began to beat violently.

"When you took charge of me you knew nothing of me except evil."

"I knew the one thing needful."

"What do you mean?"

"That you were in trouble."

"For a long time," said Annette, "I have been wanting to tell you about myself, but I couldn't."

"Don't tell me, if it distresses you."

"Nothing distresses me now. The reason I could not was because for a long time I did not rightly know how things were, or who I was. And I saw everything distorted--horrible. It was as if I were too near, like being in a cage of hot iron, and beating against the bars first on one side and then on the other, till it seemed as if one went mad. You once read me, long ago, that poem of Verlaine's ending 'Et l'oubli d'ici-bas.' And I thought that was better than any of the promises in the Bible which you read sometimes. I used to say it over to myself like a kind of prayer: 'Et l'oubli d'ici-bas.' That would be heaven--at least, it would have been to me. But since I have got better everything has gone a long way off--like that island." And she pointed to the Grand Canary, lying like a cloud on the horizon. "I can bear to think about it and to look at it."

"I understand that feeling. I have known it."

"It does not burn me now. I thought it would always burn while I lived."

"That is the worst of pain--that one thinks it will never lessen. But it does."