The Tower of Oblivion Part 58

"Then," I said by and by, "why aren't you bicycling--or walking--this afternoon?" I wanted to have the position quite clear. If she could spend three days with him in succession, why not a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth?

"I had to give that note to you," she said.

"Ah, the note! I forgot that.... Have you any idea what's in it?"

She blushed crimson, flamed with reproach. All the same, I contrasted her shameless deception of her parents with this point of honour about peeping into an unsealed note to myself. These heaven-born young beauties draw the line in such odd places.

"I never thought----", she said, biting her lip; and I hastened to set her right.

"Good heavens, Jennie, you can't think that I meant _that_! I meant in a general way, what the subject of it is."

"I know what he thinks," she said, the fierce colour slowly retiring again.

"Well, what does he think?"

"He thinks you were perfectly ripping to him the other night, about not doing anything till you saw him again, and when I told him you were ill he was awfully upset, and tore a page out of his sketch-book and wrote the note that very moment."

The devil!... But I went on.

"So he was sketching, and you went with him?"

"Yes. He did a sweet sketch, with me in it," she breathed, her eyes softly shining.

Only to see her and to go for bicycle-rides with her--only to speak to her and to paint her among the glowing sarrasin, the green translucence of the woods, the golden seaweed of the rocks or wherever it was----

"Oh, he did! And where was this?"

It was neither among the sarrasin, nor in the green woods, nor on the sh.o.r.e.

"It was miles and miles away, right past Saint Samson, nearly at Dinan, at a chateau called La Garaye," she said softly. "I never saw anything so lovely. There's a huge wide avenue of beeches like a tunnel--it's all in the middle of a lovely beechwood--and there's a lovely soft gra.s.s-ride right down the middle. Then at the bottom there are two great ma.s.ses of ivy that used to be the chateau gates. And past them are the little white bits of the ruins. And there was an enormous loud humming everywhere, like a hundred aeroplanes. That was them thrashing at the farm with four horses that went round and round. We rode our bicycles down the green ride and put them up by some farm-buildings. They don't a bit mind your going anywhere you like, and they said he could paint if he wanted to. So he got out his things and I watched him. He didn't want me for the picture at once, because he had all the other to do first.

Then he made me lie down in a frightfully nettley place, but he only laughed and said I'd got to be just there because it was where he wanted me. My hands are all nettled yet, look. So he painted me, Uncle George, and that horse-thing never stopped humming, and oh, it was so hot and blue and drowsy--I nearly went to sleep once. But the loveliest thing of all was afterwards. We climbed about among all those stones and ivy, and then there was a tower. Just like a castle tower, Uncle George, but not a hole or a window anywhere, except a place at the bottom just big enough to creep through. And what it was was an old pigeon-place, where they used to keep pigeons. All honeycombed inside with holes for thousands and thousands of pigeons. But, of course, there weren't any pigeons there, only an old sitting hen among the nettles that scurried round and round and then clucked away. It was like being at the bottom of a kiln or something, with gra.s.ses and flowers and things round the top and the sky _e_-ver so blue! And all those thousands of pigeon-holes, all grown up with birch and ivy and nettles and that silly old hen! I picked a bit of herb-robert. Oh, it was a heavenly place!"

Heavenly indeed, I thought grimly. Heaven enough inside that columbarium, with only a small hole to creep in at, and the m.u.f.fled drone of that horse-gin, shut out by the walls that had once been filled with the cushing of a thousand doves and only G.o.d's blue looking down on them from the top!

Heavenly enough to make your heart ache when you remembered that there, in that ruined place of dead doves, he conscientiously sought to keep his promise to me--while she had given never a word to take back. Oh, I saw it all right. No question about that. She took very good care that I should see it....

For I was being as softly cajoled and canva.s.sed and propagandised as ever I was in my life. Derry, piloting me from shop to shop into the Dinard Bazaar, had taken me by the arm; but she wound herself in among my very heartstrings. And her plan was to upheap me with unasked confidences before I could say her nay. After that, if I guessed her thoughts rightly, there would be nothing for me to do but to respect the sacred but unwanted enc.u.mbrance. I should then be enlisted against Alec and Madge. Those of us whom the years have perhaps mellowed a little are ever at the mercy of calculated guile of this sort. To tell somebody something they don't want to know--and then to put them upon their honour not to divulge it!

The boy, the father of the man, indeed! Save us from the machinations of the maiden who is mother of the woman!

For she was a woman. In little more than a week or two she had almost visibly altered, shot up into maturity. I had no doubt that he would keep his word to me; but--_only_ to see her, _only_ to speak to her!

Only! Though it were but looking, what inch of beauty was there about her of which I could dare to say, "His eyes have not embraced that, his glance has not been as his very lips upon it?" Though it were but hearing, what tone was there in the sweet gamut of her voice of which I could tell myself, "His ears at any rate have not heard that?" Not one.

And under the homage of his gazing, under the flattery of his hearing, the last particle of her girlhood had turned and altered. That hair, so recently a ruddy plait to be "put up" on occasion, was now a bride's single garland, its golden strands to be unwound again on an occasion that was not even her parents' concern. Disdain was now all that young Charterhouse, young Rugby had from those pebble-grey eyes. And that tongue of hers, lately so petulant with the world, was now her subtlest weapon, to get under my guard, to seduce me with her confidences about pigeon-towers and what not, and by and by (I had not the slightest doubt) to say with a touching and heartfelt sigh, "Oh, what a comfort it is to have one person one can tell everything to!"

But this was all very well. Quite excellent to pat my pillow, and ask me whether my flowers had been changed, and to fuss about pouring out tea for me. But, while I had more or less got their measure singly, I had no idea what double-dealing they might not be capable of together. So as she still sat with shining eyes, dreaming again of that columbarium, I pressed to the next point.

"So he painted you. All in one sitting?"

She dropped the eyes. "I think he said it might take three or four."

"In fact it might be cheaper in the long run to buy the bicycle instead of hiring it?"

She was demure. "Oh, I don't think so, Uncle George."

"What do they charge for the hire of a bicycle?"

"I don't know, Uncle George. I haven't paid anything yet."

"Then you still have it? Haven't they asked any questions about it?"

She looked quickly and innocently up. "Father?... Oh, it isn't here! You see the tram's almost as quick to St Briac."

"Oh! Then it's at St Briac?"

"Yes. In the kitchen."

"The kitchen where Coco lives?"

"Yes. That one. But, of course, Coco's outside except when it's raining.

And he has sung 'Quand je bois mon vin clairet.' He sang it beautifully."

"I'm sure he did," I a.s.sented grimly.... "Now tell me a little more of what Monsieur Arnaud said when he was so grateful to me for not doing my plain duty."

Her eyes were full on mine, with an expression I did not understand.

Somehow the pretty scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose seemed to give the look an added directness. Her lips parted, but not in a smile.

"You needn't call him Monsieur Arnaud," she said.

"What then?" I asked quickly. "What do you call him, if I may ask?"

At her reply the teacup almost dropped from my hand.

"That's really what he said I had to tell you this afternoon," she said.

"Of course I call him Derry, like you."

VII

I was hardly ill enough to have a temperature-chart over the head of my bed; had there been one heaven knows how high into the hundreds it must have leaped. I had been prepared for progression, development. Swiftly as things seemed to have advanced, from taking a single bicycle ride with him to keeping a bicycle in his kitchen was after all only a matter of degree. But this, of so totally different a piece, positively stunned me.

"Derry!" I echoed stupidly. "Derry what?"

"Rose, of course." Then, rushing almost breathlessly to forestall me, "But of course I know it's the most _fr-r-right_-ful secret! I know that only the three of us know. And it's splendid of you, darling Uncle George, to have stuck up for him the way you did! I wouldn't breathe a single word, not if they were to stick knives into me!"

Her eyes brimmed with thanks for my loyalty, disloyalty or whatever it was. But what, in G.o.d's name, had he been mad enough to tell her?

Everything? Had he told her the whole story rather than strangle her on the spot?

"Tell me what he said," I moaned in a weak voice. Better know the worst and get it over.