The Tower of Oblivion Part 48

"If," she said with extreme slowness, "if he told you he was going away, that must have been last night."

I was dumb. I saw her effort to close her inner eyes on the light that broke on them, lest a wonder on a wonder should prove more than she could bear.

"That was _last night_!" the triumphant words rang out.

I suppose there is no such thing as one half of a miracle without the other----

"That was _last night_, and there hadn't _been_ a this morning then, and he hadn't seen me when I was buying my bathing-cap, and if he said he was going away he's changed his mind and he isn't going away at all!

Neither of us is going away! Oh-h-h!" (That "Oh" echoes in my heart still.) "He isn't even thinking of going now! Because we both know now--we knew in the shop--and he loves me too!"

Just to see one another--just to speak to one another--that was all they asked of me.

PART II

THE EVEN KEEL

I

That evening I sat in Ker Annic, alone. Alec and Madge had gone out for an after-dinner walk, taking a silent Jennie with them. Silent too had been our return along the cliff-tops that afternoon. Whether she already regretted having opened her heart to me I could not tell.

I sat at the open window of the salon, looking out over the sea that showed pale milky green against the heavy sunset bank. Inside the room Ganymede and the Eagle had been lighted, and my shadow streamed down the steps and was lost in the darkening garden. It was not a cold evening, and yet I felt a little cold. No fire was laid behind the drawn-down iron shutter where Alec threw his crumpled tobacco packets, and it was hardly worth while troubling a maid. I closed the window, crossed to the shuttered fireplace, and sat down in a striped tapestried chair.

What had become of my illusion that certain things could not exist in this clear atmosphere of Northern France? No man with two memories bathe in that milky green sea I had just shut out? But he had swum it. No man of forty-five masquerade as a quarter of a century younger in this broomy, thymy air? But here he was.... I looked round the little salon, as if its spurious gaiety had misled me. Across the varnished ceiling the lamp-chains threw straggling spider's webs of shadow. In one gilt oval mirror a corner of the lamp was duplicated, in another re-duplicated. Everywhere were bits of inessential decoration, the trophy of Senegalese spears over the door, the fringed and fretted bracket with nothing on it, a bronze fingerplate, a bit of lace or coloured gla.s.s, all the rest of the quick artifice with which that great nation diverts attention from its naked purpose in life--to wring from everything the last benefit the occasion will yield. Or so at any rate it seemed to me that night, as my eyes rested on the wriggling gilt ribbons of the mirrors and Ganymede struggling in the Eagle's clutch.

When Alec Aird had greeted me on Dinard Cale he had glanced at the two suit-cases I had thrown ash.o.r.e and asked me whether that was all the gear I had brought with me. And it is true that one cannot stay many weeks in a place on the resources of two suit-cases. But the length or shortness of my stay was now only part of a wider issue. The question was, not how long I was to stay, but how I was ever going to leave until Derry was ready to come with me. Was he likely to come now? Would anything drag him away? Hardly! Jennie was perfectly right: "He isn't even thinking of leaving, because we both know now--we knew in the shop--and he loves me too!"

A pretty kettle of fish, I reflected, looking at the empty brackets and the spears over the doorway....

For it was all very well to talk about only seeing one another, only speaking to one another. How long was that likely to last? How long had it lasted Julia Oliphant? Just as long as it had taken her to help herself to more. True, Julia was not a sleeping, but a particularly wide-awake beauty. Julia was not Jennie. For the glimmers of starlight that Julia had formerly brought into his life Jennie had now given him the sun itself. Both had known it in that long exchange of eyes in the Dinard Bazaar that morning.

Therefore I feared that, while Julia had produced in him an aberration grave enough but still only of the second magnitude, Jennie might now unwittingly bring about a cataclysm indeed. For he himself had said that his chances of stability lay in an even and unexciting tenor of life. He must sail, so to speak, on an even keel. Calmly and equably he must pick his way through this beautiful and pa.s.sionate wonder. He must lash the wheel of his will lest the lightest of her sighs should drive him rail-under. A glance might mean the loss of years to him, a kiss death.... Others than I have told of loves between two normal creatures, if such in love there be. I am the first, since a mortal fell in love with a G.o.d, to tell of lovers whose lives met as they approached each other from opposite directions.

Yet--only to see one another, only to speak to one another! Who with a heart could refuse them that? Who, only looking at them, he serious and radiant, she as I had seen her among the marguerites that afternoon?

Love was first invented for such as they. Could he but have slept, like Endymion, in his loveliness for ever!... You see what had already become of my momentary anger against him. It was quite, quite gone. He was once more my son, outside whose door I had paused with a sick dread that very morning.

And as love of him re-possessed me the marvel grew that he should so have survived that shock of beauty and emotion that had been his where the cars had stood parked in the transparent gloom. "Who was that with you in the garden, George?" his ardent whisper seemed to sound again.

Was it possible that there were _two_ loves, the one shattering, ruinous, destructive of the few years of his life, but the other full of security, healing and rest? Was there indeed a Love Sacred and a Love Profane? (Yet who would call Julia Oliphant's love for him profane? He himself, since he had always refused it? Surely none other.) And I remembered his own halting surmises as to the origin of his singular fate. He had known heaven and h.e.l.l--had "been too close to the balm or the other thing." G.o.d (he had said) was more than a gland; not a knock on the head in the war, but the contending angels themselves of Good and Evil had brought him to this. The one principle had fetched down his years all clattering about him on that moonlit night when the cracking of a cone on my balcony had brought me out of my bed. Was the opposite principle now about to expunge that other ill, to restore him, and to make him a whole and forward-living man again? He believed that there was a chance of it. Was it too utterly beyond belief after all?

Did it prove to be true, then all was heavenly clear. His new life would be what we all sigh that our lives were not--no blind groping in the night of ignorance and doubt, but the angelic victory over the hosts of darkness. He was nineteen and unburdened of his sin, she seventeen and sinless. They would marry. One marriage such as theirs might at the last be enough to rehabilitate the despairing world. Instead of being in his own person a public peril he might be society's hope and stay.

And--I found my excitement quickening--so far all was well. "_Entrez!_"

the bright voice that might have been silent for ever had called, and I had entered to find him humming over a paint-box.

Surely he knew about himself if anybody did----

And he thought he could keep on an even keel---

There broke in on my musing the sudden sound of voices. The Airds were returning from their walk. Madge tapped at the window, the catch of which I had turned, and she and Alec entered. Jennie walked straight past, and I heard her step in the hall, then on the stairs. Apparently she was going straight to bed.

"Then if he's English what the devil does he wear those clothes for?"

Alec demanded as he closed the window again.

"_Mon ami_, as he hasn't consulted me about his clothes I don't know."

"Where did Jennie pick him up?"

"Don't speak as if he was a germ. And do make a _tee_-ny effort to be a little less insular, my dear. 'When the Lord said all men He included me.'"

"We aren't in heaven. We're in Dinard."

"Among the world, the flesh and the French," said Madge cheerfully. "Why shouldn't he speak good French instead of your eternal '_Donnez-moi_'

and '_Combien_'? Why shouldn't a thing mean something simply because it isn't in English? You'd better go home and go to Lords'.... George, you've been asleep!"

If I had I was very far from being asleep now. If my ears told me truly, since leaving Ker Annic the Airds had met, and had spoken to, Derwent Rose. Alec crossed to the fireplace, lifted the shutter, knocked out his pipe, and took up the running again.

"And what on earth made Jennie speak to him in French?"

"Jennie's quite right to practise her French."

"You don't practise French on a fellow who says he's an Englishman--porter's blouse or no porter's blouse. I can hardly imagine she spoke to him without knowing something about him."

"As you and I were there, very likely not," said Madge dryly.

"Anyway I marched Jennie on ahead," Alec growled. "Confounded mixed foreign company--wish we'd never come here----"

"I," said Madge serenely, "found him entirely and altogether charming, as well as being one of the handsomest boys I've ever seen. And he's coming to have tea with me.... This, George," she turned to me, "is a friend of Jennie's we met while we were out. He'd been making a sketch of the sunset and was just packing up, so we walked along together. Oh yes, I know--I ought to be ashamed at my time of life--but he's the most adorable creature! A good deal like your Derwent Rose to look at--very like him, in fact--though of course the Bear's old enough to be his father. And listen to Alec, just because he was dressed as half the English and American students in Paris are dressed! I don't know whether Jennie's fallen in love with him, but _I_ have!"

"And if he's English what's he called Arnaud for?" Alec demanded with renewed suspicion.

"Dear but simple husband, possibly he had a French father. Such things have been heard of, even in that Rough Island's Story of yours. If you'll make me out a list of the questions you want asked I'll get it all out of him when he comes to tea. In the meantime:--unless George would like to take me on the Casino for an hour--I think I shall go to bed. Feel like a modest flutter, George?"

I shook my head.

"Then bed. I'll dream I won a lot of money. Unless I dream of young Arnaud. Don't let Alec fall asleep in his chair. _Dors bien_----"

She tripped out under the trophy of a.s.segais.

I was hardly five minutes behind her. Slowly I ascended to my room, crossed to the window, and leaned out over the balcony.

So that was that. Simply, and without any fuss at all, his foot was in the door of Ker Annic. The whole thing had taken almost exactly twenty-four hours. In the s.p.a.ce of two revolutions of the clock, he, from the lurking-place of his roadside hotel at St Briac, had contrived to get himself asked to the house to tea. I wondered what he would do about myself. Would he blandly bow, as if our acquaintance began at that moment, or would he advance with outstretched hand, own up to it, and act on the square? If he admitted his acquaintance with me, what questions of Alec's should I not have to answer? How answer them, how explain my concealment? How accept any responsibility whatever for him?

Yet how avoid complete responsibility? Apparently only Jennie and the maid who had announced him knew of his furtive visit to myself the evening before; but Jennie knew, and what more she might learn when they put their heads together I could not guess. Perhaps little or nothing.

Perhaps all....

My thoughts flew to Jennie again and the miracle of the past twenty-four hours for her. The first awakening look of that moment by the cars, the lovely and irreparable surrender in the Dinard Bazaar, her sobs against my shoulder that afternoon, the radiant burst in which she had realised that he too loved her--and then that evening's encounter whatever it had been, when apparently she had taken matters into her own hands, bowed to him, and spoken her first words to him in French, to be answered in English.... No wonder she could not yet realise it. The day before had found her a child, moody, wilful, not knowing what ailed her, but crying to Life to take her, use her and not spare her; now she was a woman, with a strange sweet turmoil in her bosom, and a quite matter-of-fact resolution in the brain beneath that red-gold hair. No need to ask whether she slept! Sleep, with that ache and bliss at war in her breast?

She must be awake at that moment, wondering whether he was awake, knowing that he was awake, lying in her innocent bed with her face turned towards St Briac. His miniature was painted on the curtains of her closed but unsleeping eyes, the echo of his voice was in her ears as she had spoken to him in French, and he had answered--in English.