can now go to sea for a year or more, to the other side of the world somewhere, leaving you behind. Why! You would vanish ... what little there is of you. Some rough wind will blow you away altogether. You have no holding ground on earth. Well, then trust yourself to me—to the sea—which is deep like your eyes.”
She said: “Impossible.” He kept quiet for a while, then asked in a totally changed tone, a tone of gloomy curiosity:
“You can’t stand me then? Is that it?”
“No,” she said, more steady herself. “I am not thinking of you at all.”
The inane voices of the Fyne girls were heard over the sombre fields calling to each other, thin and clear. He muttered: “You could try to. Unless you are thinking of somebody else.”
“Yes. I am thinking of somebody else, of someone who has nobody to think of him but me.”
His shadowy form stepped out of her way, and suddenly leaned sideways against the wooden support of the porch. And as she stood still, surprised by this staggering movement, his voice spoke up in a tone quite strange to her.
“Go in then. Go out of my sight—I thought you said nobody could love you.”
She was passing him when suddenly he struck her as so forlorn that she was inspired to say: “No one has ever loved me—not in that way—if that’s what you mean. Nobody, would.”
He detached himself brusquely from the post, and she did not shrink; but Mrs Fyne and the girls were already at the gate.
All he understood was that everything was not over yet. There was no time to lose; Mrs Fyne and the girls had come in at the gate. He whispered “Wait” with such authority (he was the son of Carleon Anthony, the domestic autocrat) that it did arrest her for a moment, long enough to hear him say that he could not be left like this to puzzle over her nonsense all night. She was to slip down again into the garden later on, as soon as she could do so without being heard. He would be there waiting for her till—till daylight. She didn’t think he could go to sleep, did she? And she had better come, or—he broke off on an unfinished threat.
She vanished into the unlighted cottage just as Mrs Fyne came up to the porch. Nervous, holding her breath in the darkness of the living-room, she heard her best friend say: “You ought to, have joined us, Roderick.” And then: “Have you seen Miss Smith anywhere?”
Flora shuddered, expecting Anthony to break out into betraying imprecations on Miss Smith’s head, and cause a painful and humiliating explanation. She imagined him full of his mysterious ferocity. To her great surprise, Anthony’s voice sounded very much as usual, with perhaps a slight tinge of grimness. “Miss Smith! No. I’ve seen no Miss Smith.”
Mrs Fyne seemed satisfied—and not much concerned really.
Flora, relieved, got clear away to her room upstairs, and shutting her door quietly, dropped into a chair. She was used to reproaches, abuse, to all sorts of wicked ill-usage—short of actual beating on her body. Otherwise inexplicable angers had cut and slashed and trampled down her youth without mercy—and mainly, it appeared, because she was the financier de Barral’s daughter and also condemned to a degrading sort of poverty through the action of treacherous men who had turned upon her father in his hour of need. And she thought with the tenderest possible affection of that upright figure buttoned up in a long frock-coat, soft-voiced and having but little to say to his girl. She seemed to feel his hand closed round hers. On his flying visits to Brighton he would always walk hand in hand with her. People stared covertly at them; the band was playing; and there was the sea—the blue gaiety of the sea. They were quietly happy together.—It was all over!
An immense anguish of the present wrung her heart, and she nearly cried aloud. That dread of what was before her which had been eating up her courage slowly in the course of odious years, flamed up into an access of panic, that sort of headlong panic which had already driven her out twice to the top of the cliff-like quarry. She jumped up saying to herself: “Why not now? At once! Yes. I’ll do it now—in the dark!” The very horror of it seemed to give her additional resolution.
She came down the staircase quietly, and only on the point of opening the door and because of the discovery that it was unfastened, she remembered Captain Anthony’s threat to stay in the garden all night. She hesitated. She did not understand the mood of that man clearly. He was violent. But she had gone beyond the point where things matter. What would he think of her coming down to him—as he would naturally suppose. And even that didn’t matter. He could not despise her more than she despised herself. She must have been light-headed because the thought came into her mind that should he get into ungovernable fury from disappointment, and perchance strangle her, it would be as good a way to be done with it as any.
“You had that thought,” I exclaimed in wonder.
With downcast eyes and speaking with an almost painstaking precision (her very lips, her red lips, seemed to move just enough to be heard and no more), she said that, yes, the thought came into her head. This makes one shudder at the mysterious ways girls acquire knowledge. For this was a thought, wild enough, I admit, but which could only have come from the depths of that sort of experience which she had not had, and went far beyond a young girl’s possible conception of the strongest and most veiled of human emotions.
“He was there, of course?” I said.
“Yes, he was there.” She saw him on the path directly she stepped outside the porch. He was very still. It was as though he had been standing there with his face to the door for hours.
Shaken up by the changing moods of passion and tenderness, he must have been ready for any extravagance of conduct. Knowing the profound silence each night brought to that nook of the country, I could imagine them having the feeling of being the only two people on the wide earth. A row of six or seven lofty elms just across the road opposite the cottage made the night more obscure in that little garden. If these two could just make out each other that was all.
“Well! And were you very much terrified?” I asked.
She made me wait a little before she said, raising her eyes: “He was gentleness itself.”
I noticed three abominable, drink-sodden loafers, sallow and dirty, who had come to range themselves in a row within ten feet of us against the front of the public-house. They stared at Flora de Barral’s back with unseeing, mournful fixity. “Let’s move this way a little,” I proposed.
She turned at once and we made a few paces; not too far to take us out of sight of the hotel door, but very nearly. I could just keep my eyes on it. After all, I had not been so very long with the girl. If you were to disentangle
