“She must really love you to distraction.”
“It’s a rather funny sensation, you know,” he answered, wrinkling a perplexed forehead. “I haven’t the smallest doubt that if I really left her, definitely, she would commit suicide. Not with any ill-feeling towards me, but quite naturally, because she was unwilling to live without me. It is a curious feeling it gives one to know that. It can’t help meaning something to you.”
“But it’s loving that’s the important thing, not being loved. One’s not even grateful to the people who love one; if one doesn’t love them, they only bore one.”
“I have no experience of the plural,” he replied. “Mine is only in the singular.”
“Is she really an Imperial Princess?”
“No, that is a romantic exaggeration of the nuns. She belongs to one of the great families of the Manchus, but they have, of course, been ruined by the revolution. She is all the same a very great lady.”
He said it in a tone of pride, so that a smile flickered in Kitty’s eyes.
“Are you going to stay here for the rest of your life then?”
“In China? Yes. What would she do elsewhere? When I retire I shall take a little Chinese house in Peking and spend the rest of my days there.”
“Have you any children?”
“No.”
She looked at him curiously. It was strange that this little bald-headed man with his monkey face should have aroused in the alien woman so devastating a passion. She could not tell why the way he spoke of her, notwithstanding his casual manner and his flippant phrases, gave her the impression so strongly of the woman’s intense and unique devotion. It troubled her a little.
“It does seem a long way to Harrington Gardens,” she smiled.
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like someone who’s lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don’t want to die, I want to live. I’m beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.”
Waddington looked at her reflectively. Her abstracted gaze rested on the smoothness of the river. Two little drops that flowed silently, silently towards the dark, eternal sea.
“May I come and see the Manchu lady?” asked Kitty, suddenly raising her head.
“She can’t speak a word of English.”
“You’ve been very kind to me, you’ve done a great deal for me, perhaps I could show her by my manner that I had a friendly feeling towards her.”
Waddington gave a thin, mocking little smile, but he answered with good humour.
“I will come and fetch you one day and she shall give you a cup of jasmine tea.”
She would not tell him that this story of an alien love had from the first moment strangely intrigued her fancy, and the Manchu Princess stood now as the symbol of something that vaguely, but insistently, beckoned to her. She pointed enigmatically to a mystic land of the spirit.
LV
But a day or two later Kitty made an unforeseen discovery.
She went to the convent as usual and set about her first work of seeing that the children were washed and dressed. Since the nuns held firmly that the night air was harmful, the atmosphere in the dormitory was close and fetid. After the freshness of the morning it always made Kitty a little uncomfortable and she hastened to open such windows as would. But today she felt on a sudden desperately sick and with her head swimming she stood at a window trying to compose herself. It had never been as bad as this before. Then nausea overwhelmed her and she vomited. She gave a cry so that the children were frightened, and the older girl who was helping her ran up and, seeing Kitty white and trembling, stopped short with an exclamation. Cholera! The thought flashed through Kitty’s mind and then a deathlike feeling came over her; she was seized with terror, she struggled for a moment against the night that seemed agonisingly to run through her veins; she felt horribly ill; and then darkness.
When she opened her eyes she did not at first know where she was. She seemed to be lying on the floor and, moving her head slightly, she thought that there was a pillow under it. She could not remember. The Mother Superior was kneeling by her side, holding smelling salts to her nose, and Sister St. Joseph stood looking at her. Then it came back. Cholera! She saw the consternation on the nuns’ faces. Sister St. Joseph looked huge and her outline was blurred. Once more terror overwhelmed her.
“Oh, Mother, Mother,” she sobbed. “Am I going to die? I don’t want to die.”
“Of course you’re not going to die,” said the Mother Superior.
She was quite composed and there was even amusement in her eyes.
“But it’s cholera. Where’s Walter? Has he been sent for? Oh, Mother, Mother.”
She burst into a flood of tears. The Mother Superior gave her hand and Kitty seized it as though it were a hold upon the life she feared to lose.
“Come, come, my dear child, you mustn’t be so silly. It’s not cholera or anything of the kind.”
“Where’s Walter?”
“Your husband is much too busy to be troubled. In five minutes you’ll be perfectly well.”
Kitty looked at her with staring, harassed eyes. Why did she take it so calmly? It was cruel.
“Keep perfectly quiet for a minute,” said the Mother Superior. “There is nothing to alarm yourself about.”
Kitty felt her heart beat madly. She had grown so used to the thought of cholera that it had ceased to seem possible that she could catch it. Oh, the fool she had been! She knew she was going to die. She was frightened. The girls brought in a long rattan chair and placed it
