“Yes, she is a good girl. One can depend on her.”
“Perhaps if she had a little of Thérèse or Mrs. Callendar in her, she’d be safer from being hurt.”
He did not answer her at once, but she knew that in the darkness he was standing there, watching her.
“But that was a silly thing to say,” she murmured. “I don’t suppose you know what I mean.”
He answered her quickly. “I do know exactly. I know and I’m sure Mrs. Callendar knows. We’ve both learned to save ourselves—not in the same school, but the same lesson, nevertheless. But as to Sybil, I think that depends upon whom she marries.”
(“So now,” thought Olivia, “it is coming. It is Sybil whom he loves. He wants to marry her. That is why he has followed me out here.”) She was back again now, solidly enmeshed in all the intricacies of living. She had a sudden, shameful, twinge of jealousy for Sybil, who was so young, who had pushed her so completely into the past along with all the others at Pentlands.
“I was wondering,” she said, “whether she was not seeing too much of you, whether she might not be a bother.”
“No, she’ll never be that.” And then in a voice which carried a faint echo of humor, he added, “I know that in a moment you are going to ask my intentions.”
“No,” she said, “no”; but she could think of nothing else to say. She felt suddenly shy and awkward and a little idiotic, like a young girl at her first dance.
“I shall tell you what my intentions are,” he was saying, and then he broke off suddenly. “Why is it so impossible to be honest in this world, when we live such a little while? It would be such a different place if we were all honest wouldn’t it?”
He hesitated, waiting for her to answer, and she said, “Yes,” almost mechanically, “very different.”
When he replied there was a faint note of excitement in his voice. It was pitched a little lower and he spoke more quickly. In the darkness she could not see him, and yet she was sharply conscious of the change.
“I’ll tell you, then,” he was saying. “I’ve been seeing a great deal of Sybil in the hope that I should see a little of her mother.”
She did not answer him. She simply sat there, speechless, overcome by confusion, as if she had been a young girl with her first lover. She was even made a little dizzy by the sound of his voice.
“I have offended you. I’m sorry. I only spoke the truth. There is no harm in that.”
With a heroic effort to speak intelligently, she succeeded in saying, “No, I am not offended.” (It all seemed such a silly, helpless, pleasant feeling.) “No, I’m not offended. I don’t know. …”
Of only one thing was she certain; that this strange, dizzy, intoxicated state was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was sinister and overwhelming in a bittersweet fashion. She kept thinking, “I can begin to understand how a young girl can be seduced, how she cannot know what she is doing.”
“I suppose,” he was saying, “that you think me presumptuous.”
“No, I only think everything is impossible, insane.”
“You think me a kind of ruffian, a bum, an Irishman, a Roman Catholic, someone you have never heard of.” He waited, and then added: “I am all that, from one point of view.”
“No, I don’t think that; I don’t think that.”
He sat down beside her quietly on the stone bench. “You have every right to think it,” he continued softly. “Every right in the world, and still things like that make no difference, nothing makes any difference.”
“My father,” she said softly, “was a man very like you. His enemies sometimes used to call him ‘shanty Irish.’ …”
She knew all the while that she should have risen and sought indignant refuge in the house. She knew that perhaps she was being absurd, and yet she stayed there quietly. She was so tired and she had waited for so long (she only knew it now in a sudden flash) to have someone talk to her in just this way, as if she were a woman. She needed someone to lean upon, so desperately.
“How can you know me?” she asked out of a vague sense of helplessness. “How can you know anything about me?”
He did not touch her. He only sat there in the darkness, making her feel by a sort of power which was too strong for her, that all he said was terribly the truth.
“I know, I know, all about you, everything. I’ve watched you. I’ve understood you, even better than the others. A man whose life has been like mine sees and understands a great deal that others never notice because for him everything depends upon a kind of second sight. It’s the one great weapon of the opportunist.” There was a silence and he asked, “Can you understand that? It may be hard, because your life has been so different.”
“Not so different, as you might think, only perhaps I’ve made more of a mess of it.” And straightening her body, she murmured, “It is foolish of me to let you talk this way.”
He interrupted her with a quick burst of almost boyish eagerness. “But you’re glad, aren’t you? You’re glad, all the same, whether you care anything for me or not. You’ve deserved it for a long time.”
She began to cry softly, helplessly, without a sound, the tears running down her cheeks, and she thought, “Now I’m being a supreme fool. I’m pitying myself.” But she could not stop.
It appeared that even in the darkness he was aware of her tears, for he chose not to interrupt them. They sat thus for a long time in silence, Olivia conscious with a terrible aching acuteness, of the beauty of the night and finding it all strange and unreal and confused.
“I wanted you to know,” he said quietly, “that there was someone near
