What was to be done with Mr. Briggs? Well, it was his hall; she couldn’t prevent his walking along it.
“I hope,” he said, not able while walking to take his eyes off her, so that he knocked against several things he would otherwise have avoided—the corner of a bookcase, an ancient carved cupboard, the table with the flowers on it, shaking the water over—“that you are quite comfortable here? If you’re not I’ll—I’ll flay them alive.”
His voice vibrated. What was to be done with Mr. Briggs? She could of course stay in her room the whole time, say she was ill, not appear at dinner; but again, the tyranny of this …
“I’m very comfortable indeed,” said Scrap.
“If I had dreamed you were coming—” he began.
“It’s a wonderful old place,” said Scrap, doing her utmost to sound detached and forbidding, but with little hope of success.
The kitchen was on this floor, and passing its door, which was open a crack, they were observed by the servants, whose thoughts, communicated to each other by looks, may be roughly reproduced by such rude symbols as Aha and Oho—symbols which represented and included their appreciation of the inevitable, their foreknowledge of the inevitable, and their complete understanding and approval.
“Are you going upstairs?” asked Briggs, as she paused at the foot of them.
“Yes.”
“Which room do you sit in? The drawing-room, or the small yellow room?”
“In my own room.”
So then he couldn’t go up with her; so then all he could do was to wait till she came out again.
He longed to ask her which was her own room—it thrilled him to hear her call any room in his house her own room—that he might picture her in it. He longed to know if by any happy chance it was his room, forever after to be filled with her wonder; but he didn’t dare. He would find that out later from someone else—Francesca, anybody.
“Then I shan’t see you again till dinner?”
“Dinner is at eight,” was Scrap’s evasive answer as she went upstairs.
He watched her go.
She passed the Madonna, the portrait of Rose Arbuthnot, and the dark-eyed figure he had thought so sweet seemed to turn pale, to shrivel into insignificance as she passed.
She turned the bend of the stairs, and the setting sun, shining through the west window a moment on her face, turned her to glory.
She disappeared, and the sun went out too, and the stairs were dark and empty.
He listened till her footsteps were silent, trying to tell from the sound of the shutting door which room she had gone into, then wandered aimlessly away through the hall again, and found himself back in the top garden.
Scrap from her window saw him there. She saw Lotty and Rose sitting on the end parapet, where she would have liked to have been, and she saw Mr. Wilkins buttonholing Briggs and evidently telling him the story of the oleander tree in the middle of the garden.
Briggs was listening with a patience she thought rather nice, seeing that it was his oleander and his own father’s story. She knew Mr. Wilkins was telling him the story by his gestures. Domenico had told it her soon after her arrival, and he had also told Mrs. Fisher, who had told Mr. Wilkins. Mrs. Fisher thought highly of this story, and often spoke of it. It was about a cherrywood walking-stick. Briggs’s father had thrust this stick into the ground at that spot, and said to Domenico’s father, who was then the gardener, “Here we will have an oleander.” And Briggs’s father left the stick in the ground as a reminder to Domenico’s father, and presently—how long afterwards nobody remembered—the stick began to sprout, and it was an oleander.
There stood poor Mr. Briggs being told all about it, and listening to the story he must have known from infancy with patience.
Probably he was thinking of something else. She was afraid he was. How unfortunate, how extremely unfortunate, the determination that seized people to get hold of and engulf other people. If only they could be induced to stand more on their own feet. Why couldn’t Mr. Briggs be more like Lotty, who never wanted anything of anybody, but was complete in herself and respected other people’s completeness? One loved being with Lotty. With her one was free, and yet befriended. Mr. Briggs looked so really nice, too. She thought she might like him if only he wouldn’t so excessively like her.
Scrap felt melancholy. Here she was shut up in her bedroom, which was stuffy from the afternoon sun that had been pouring into it, instead of out in the cool garden, and all because of Mr. Briggs.
Intolerable tyranny, she thought, flaring up. She wouldn’t endure it; she would go out all the same; she would run downstairs while Mr. Wilkins—really that man was a treasure—held Mr. Briggs down telling him about the oleander, and get out of the house by the front door, and take cover in the shadows of the zigzag path. Nobody could see her there; nobody would think of looking for her there.
She snatched up a wrap, for she did not mean to come back for a long while, perhaps not even to dinner—it would be all Mr. Briggs’s fault if she went dinnerless and hungry—and with another glance out of the window to see if she were still safe, she stole out and got away to the sheltering trees of the zigzag path, and there sat down on one of the seats placed at each bend to assist the upward journey of those who were breathless.
Ah, this was lovely, thought Scrap with a sigh of relief. How cool. How good it
