“Why are you so sad?” Charlotte asked impulsively.
“Do I seem to you sad? I hope not,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“Well, just now. You’re not old.”
“Old enough to be Timothy’s mother.” They stopped.
Miss Eliot was looking through Mr. Clutterbuck’s telescope at the edge of the terrace. The deaf old man stood beside her, fondling his beard, and reciting the names of the constellations: “Andromeda, Bootes, Sidonia, Cassiopeia. …”
“Andromeda,” murmured Miss Eliot, shifting the telescope slightly.
Mrs. Durrant and Charlotte looked along the barrel of the instrument pointed at the skies.
“There are millions of stars,” said Charlotte with conviction. Miss Eliot turned away from the telescope. The young men laughed suddenly in the dining-room.
“Let me look,” said Charlotte eagerly.
“The stars bore me,” said Mrs. Durrant, walking down the terrace with Julia Eliot. “I read a book once about the stars. … What are they saying?” She stopped in front of the dining-room window. “Timothy,” she noted.
“The silent young man,” said Miss Eliot.
“Yes, Jacob Flanders,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“Oh, mother! I didn’t recognize you!” exclaimed Clara Durrant, coming from the opposite direction with Elsbeth. “How delicious,” she breathed, crushing a verbena leaf.
Mrs. Durrant turned and walked away by herself.
“Clara!” she called. Clara went to her.
“How unlike they are!” said Miss Eliot.
Mr. Wortley passed them, smoking a cigar.
“Every day I live I find myself agreeing …” he said as he passed them.
“It’s so interesting to guess …” murmured Julia Eliot.
“When first we came out we could see the flowers in that bed,” said Elsbeth.
“We see very little now,” said Miss Eliot.
“She must have been so beautiful, and everybody loved her, of course,” said Charlotte. “I suppose Mr. Wortley …” she paused.
“Edward’s death was a tragedy,” said Miss Eliot decidedly.
Here Mr. Erskine joined them.
“There’s no such thing as silence,” he said positively. “I can hear twenty different sounds on a night like this without counting your voices.”
“Make a bet of it?” said Charlotte.
“Done,” said Mr. Erskine. “One, the sea; two, the wind; three, a dog; four …”
The others passed on.
“Poor Timothy,” said Elsbeth.
“A very fine night,” shouted Miss Eliot into Mr. Clutterbuck’s ear.
“Like to look at the stars?” said the old man, turning the telescope towards Elsbeth.
“Doesn’t it make you melancholy—looking at the stars?” shouted Miss Eliot.
“Dear me no, dear me no,” Mr. Clutterbuck chuckled when he understood her. “Why should it make me melancholy? Not for a moment—dear me no.”
“Thank you, Timothy, but I’m coming in,” said Miss Eliot. “Elsbeth, here’s a shawl.”
“I’m coming in,” Elsbeth murmured with her eye to the telescope. “Cassiopeia,” she murmured. “Where are you all?” she asked, taking her eye away from the telescope. “How dark it is!”
Mrs. Durrant sat in the drawing-room by a lamp winding a ball of wool. Mr. Clutterbuck read the Times. In the distance stood a second lamp, and round it sat the young ladies, flashing scissors over silver-spangled stuff for private theatricals. Mr. Wortley read a book.
“Yes; he is perfectly right,” said Mrs. Durrant, drawing herself up and ceasing to wind her wool. And while Mr. Clutterbuck read the rest of Lord Lansdowne’s speech she sat upright, without touching her ball.
“Ah, Mr. Flanders,” she said, speaking proudly, as if to Lord Lansdowne himself. Then she sighed and began to wind her wool again.
“Sit there,” she said.
Jacob came out from the dark place by the window where he had hovered. The light poured over him, illuminating every cranny of his skin; but not a muscle of his face moved as he sat looking out into the garden.
“I want to hear about your voyage,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“Yes,” he said.
“Twenty years ago we did the same thing.”
“Yes,” he said. She looked at him sharply.
“He is extraordinarily awkward,” she thought, noticing how he fingered his socks. “Yet so distinguished-looking.”
“In those days …” she resumed, and told him how they had sailed … “my husband, who knew a good deal about sailing, for he kept a yacht before we married” … and then how rashly they had defied the fishermen, “almost paid for it with our lives, but so proud of ourselves!” She flung the hand out that held the ball of wool.
“Shall I hold your wool?” Jacob asked stiffly.
“You do that for your mother,” said Mrs. Durrant, looking at him again keenly, as she transferred the skein. “Yes, it goes much better.”
He smiled; but said nothing.
Elsbeth Siddons hovered behind them with something silver on her arm.
“We want,” she said. … “I’ve come …” she paused.
“Poor Jacob,” said Mrs. Durrant, quietly, as if she had known him all his life. “They’re going to make you act in their play.”
“How I love you!” said Elsbeth, kneeling beside Mrs. Durrant’s chair.
“Give me the wool,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“He’s come—he’s come!” cried Charlotte Wilding. “I’ve won my bet!”
“There’s another bunch higher up,” murmured Clara Durrant, mounting another step of the ladder. Jacob held the ladder as she stretched out to reach the grapes high up on the vine.
“There!” she said, cutting through the stalk. She looked semitransparent, pale, wonderfully beautiful up there among the vine leaves and the yellow and purple bunches, the lights swimming over her in coloured islands. Geraniums and begonias stood in pots along planks; tomatoes climbed the walls.
“The leaves really want thinning,” she considered, and one green one, spread like the palm of a hand, circled down past Jacob’s head.
“I have more than I can eat already,” he said, looking up.
“It does seem absurd …” Clara began, “going back to London. …”
“Ridiculous,” said Jacob, firmly.
“Then …” said Clara, “you must come next year, properly,” she said, snipping another vine leaf, rather at random.
“If … if …”
A child ran past the greenhouse shouting. Clara slowly descended the ladder with her basket of grapes.
“One bunch of white, and two of purple,” she said, and she placed two great leaves over them where they lay curled warm in the basket.
“I have enjoyed myself,” said Jacob, looking down the greenhouse.
“Yes, it’s been delightful,” she said vaguely.
“Oh, Miss Durrant,” he said, taking the basket of grapes; but she walked past him towards the door of the greenhouse.
“You’re too good—too good,” she thought, thinking of Jacob, thinking that he must not say that he loved her. No, no, no.
The children were whirling past the door, throwing things high into the air.
“Little
