The Brightener Part 33

When we came back on deck it was to walk. We had been below for an hour or more, but the girl and the man were still together. As Jim and I pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed those chairs, I could throw a quick glance in their direction without being observed. Mrs. Brandreth's odd nervousness and shy distress seemed to have gone. The two were talking so earnestly that a school of porpoises might have jumped on deck without their knowing that anything out of the way had happened.

Later in the afternoon, the owner of Mrs. Brandreth's chair appeared; but when she would blushingly have given up her place, he refused to take it. "I've only come to say," he explained, "that one seat on deck is the same to me as any other. So why shouldn't I have _your_ chair, wherever it is, and you keep mine? It's very nice for the Major here to have found a friend, and it will do him a lot of good. I'm a doctor, and if I were his physician, such society would be just what I should prescribe for him."

Mrs. Brandreth had a chair, it seemed, though she said she'd come on board so tired that she had stayed in her cabin till this morning.

Whether or not she were pleased at heart with the proposal, she accepted it after a little discussion, and Murray's tragic eyes burned with a new light.

I guessed that his wish had been to see this beautiful girl again before he died. The fact that he was doomed to death no doubt spiritualized his love. He no longer dreamed of being happy in ways which strong men of his age call happiness; and so, in these days, he asked little of Fate.

Just a farewell sight of the loved one; a new memory of her to take away with him. And if I were right in my judgment, this was the reason why, even if Mrs. Brandreth had a husband in the background, these hours with her would be hours of joy for Murray--without thought of any future.

That evening, as Jim and I were strolling out of our little salon to dinner, the door of the cabin adjoining mine opened, and it was with a shock of surprise that I saw Mrs. Brandreth. So _she_ was my mysterious neighbour who cried and moaned in her sleep!... I was thrilled at the discovery. But almost at once I told myself that I ought to have Sherlocked the truth the moment this troubled, beautiful being had appeared on deck.

Mrs. Brandreth was in black, of course, but she had changed into semi-evening dress, and her white neck was like swansdown in its folded frame of filmy black gauze. Over the glittering waves of her ash-blonde hair she had thrown a long black veil of embroidered Spanish lace, which fell nearly to her knees, and somehow, before she could close the door, a gust blew it back, shutting in the veil. The girl was struggling to free herself when Jim said, "Let me help you."

Naturally, she had to thank him, and explain how she ought to have fastened her window, as ours was the windy side of the ship to-night.

She and I smiled at each other, and so our acquaintance began. I guessed from the veil that she was dining in Murray's company, and pictured them together with the deck to themselves, moonlight flooding the sea.

Next day the smile and nod which Mrs. Brandreth and I exchanged won a pleasant look from Major Murray for me. We began speaking soon after that; and before another day had pa.s.sed Jim or I often dropped into the empty chair, if Mrs. Brandreth was not on deck. Murray was interested to know that we would be neighbours of his, and that I was the grand-daughter of the famous beauty his old bachelor cousin had loved.

I remember it was the night after my first real talk with him that I met Mrs. Brandreth again as we both opened our doors. Jim was playing bridge or poker with some men, and hadn't noticed the dressing bugle. I was ready, and going to remind him of the hour; yet I was charmed to be delayed by Mrs. Brandreth. Hitherto, though friendly when we were with our two men, or only one of them, she had seemed like a wild bird trying to escape if we happened to be alone. It was as if she were afraid I might ask questions which she would not wish to answer. But now she stopped me of her own accord.

"I--I've been wanting to tell you something," she began, with one of her bright blushes. "It's only this: when I'm tired or nervous I'm afraid I talk in my sleep. I came on board tired out. I had--a great grief a few months ago, and I can't get over the strain of it. Sometimes when I wake up I find myself crying, and have an impression that I've called out.

Now I know that you're next door, I'm rather worried lest I have disturbed you."

I hurried to rea.s.sure her. She hadn't disturbed me at all. I was, I said, a splendid sleeper.

"You haven't heard anything?" she persisted.

I felt she would know I was fibbing if I did fib, so it wasn't worth while. "I _have_ heard a sound like sobbing now and then," I admitted.

"But no words? I hope not, as people say such _silly_ things in their sleep, don't they?--things not even true."

"I think I've heard you cry out 'Mother!' once or twice."

"Oh! And that is all?"

"Really, that's all--absolutely!" It was true, and I could speak with such sincerity that I forced belief.

Mrs. Brandreth looked relieved. "I'm glad!" she smiled. "I hate to make myself ridiculous. And I'm trying very hard now to control my subconscious self, which gets out of hand at night. It's simply the effect of my--grief--my loss I spoke of just now. I'm fairly normal otherwise."

"I hope you're not entirely normal!" I smiled back. "People one speaks of as 'normal' are so bromidic and dull! You look far too interesting, too individual to be normal."

She laughed. "So do you!"

"Oh, I'm not normal at all, thank goodness!"

"Well, you're certainly interesting--and individual--far more than _I_ am."

"Anyhow, I'm sympathetic," I said. "I'm tremendously interested in other people. Not in their _affairs_, but in themselves. I never want to know anything they don't want me to know, yet I'm so conceited, I always imagine that I can help when they need help--just by sympathy alone, without a spoken word. But to come back to you! I have a lovely remedy for restlessness at night; not that I need it often myself, but my French-Italian maid carries dried orange leaves and blossoms for me. She thinks _tisanes_ better than doctor's medicines. May she make some orange-flower tea for you to-night at bedtime?"

Mrs. Brandreth had shown signs of stiffening a little as I began, but she melted toward the last, and said that she would love to try the poetic-sounding tea.

It was concocted, proved a success, and she was grateful. Perhaps she remembered my hint that I never wanted to know things which my friends didn't want me to know, because she made some timid advances as the days went on. We had quite intimate talks about books and various views of life as we walked the deck together; and I began to feel that there was something else she longed to say--something which rose constantly to her lips, only to be frightened back again. What could it be? I wondered.

And would she in the end speak, or decide to be silent?

CHAPTER III

THE CONDITION SHE MADE

I think she meant to be silent, but desperation drove her to speak, and she spoke.

I had a headache the last day out but one, and stayed in my cabin all the afternoon. It seems that Mrs. Brandreth asked Jim if she might visit me for a little while, and he consented.

I was half dozing when she came, with a green silk curtain drawn across the window. I suggested that she should push this curtain back, so that we might have light to see each other.

"Please, no!" she said. "I don't want light. I don't want to be seen.

Dear Lady Courtenaye--may I really call you 'Elizabeth,' as you asked me to do?--I need so much to talk to you. And the darker it is, the better."

"Very well--Rosemary!" I answered. "I've guessed that you are worried--or not quite happy. There's nothing I should like so much as to help you if I could. I believe you know that."

"Yes, I know--I feel it," she said. "I want your advice. I think you're the only person whose advice I would take whether I liked it or not. I don't understand why that is so. But it is. You're probably younger than I am----"

"I'm getting on for twenty-three," I informed the girl, when I had made her sit down beside my bed.

"And I'm nearly twenty-six!"

"You look twenty-one."

"I'm afraid I look lots of things that I'm not," she sighed, in a voice too gloomy for the half-joking words. "Oh, now that I'm trying to speak, I don't know how to begin, or how far to go! I must confess one thing frankly: and that is, I can't tell you _everything_."

"Tell me what you want to tell: not a word more."

"Thank you. I thought you'd say that. Well, suppose you loved a man who was very ill--so ill he couldn't possibly get well, and he begged you to marry him--because then you might be in the same house till the end, and he could die happily with you near: what would you do?"

"If I loved him _enough_, I would marry him the very first minute I could," was my prompt answer.

"I do love him enough!" she exclaimed.

"But you hesitate?"

"Yes, because----Oh, Elizabeth, there's a terrible obstacle."

"An obstacle!" I echoed, forgetting my headache. "I can't understand that, if--forgive me--if you're free."

"I am free," the girl said. "Free in the way you mean. There's no _man_ in the way. The obstacle is--a woman."