“In the thicket.” She clapped her hands, and the bird flew out.
“There,” she said, and saw him suddenly pleased and changed.
Then he said:
“Wonder what that chap Carston’ll make of it?”
“Make of what?”
They were looking at the other out of the corner of their eyes. Picus paddled one hand in the stream.
Scylla said:
“There is one thing which may have surprised him already. His room’s between ours.”
“Well, that ought to interest him.”
“Only,” she said, “if he wanted me.”
“He may be wanting you. Perhaps you’d better sleep with him. It would be better than his coming down here. Where nothing has been spoiled, love.”
“I see. Mais comme tu taquines éternité.”
She thought again: I have no business to be glad that Clarence does not know, nor ask if he will be taken here. I came first.
This was an excuse, not only in honour, but in letting life alone.
He got up and drew her on to her feet. He walked her along the grass between the thickets and boulders, so that her feet never touched a stone. Up the landslide she hardly felt the slant of the earth, held as if he were walking with a tree. At the top of the cliffs he gave her no time to look back. In their triumph they walked alone a little separate from each other.
At a gate he caught her up.
“What y’ thinking about?” She saw his head on one side.
“Carston and the cup. That ought to get him going more than us.”
“Perhaps it will.”
“Picus, demon, where did you hide it?”
“Hush! love.”
XII
After an accident in the sea with a small octopus he would sooner have avoided, Carston returned to the house. Felix had not talked to him, said that it would be wiser not to talk, because there might be big magic about. Could not Carston feel it cooking up? Convinced that the boy was enjoying himself, he went up to his room. And what was there to do but think of those two, up somewhere high in air, kissing, or finding some strangeness in Nature and forgetting to kiss. He lay staring and fretting, until with slow alarm growing like a dream, he saw the lost cup, by itself, on the end of his mantelpiece. And earlier in the day, they had passed in and out of his room looking for it there.
His first impulse was to run downstairs with it, crying. Crossing the room to take it, he slipped on the glassy boards, and the fall and anger from pain turned him. He did not want to touch it. There might be something about it after all. Working a splinter out of his hand, it occurred to him that they had put it there; that the morning had been a farce played for his benefit, a vile joke to make a fool of him. Those people who made love under his eyes, who had lost him on a moor. They had not let him into their lives. They would not believe his innocence. Under the shock of his fall, his imagination galloped reeling. He felt very lonely. He was very lonely. It did not cross his head that they would believe what he told them. Still less that it did not matter whether they believed him or not. Behind this, a dead fever reviving in the blood, was the literal fear of the cup, that it was uncanny, taboo. He passed a dreadful minute, staring at its impressive antiquity. His sensitive intelligence raced through a variety of panics, till the shock of his fall subsided and he began to arrange alternatives. To go down to tea with the cup and say: “I found it in my room. I don’t know how it got there.”
To hide it in his baggage. In the house. To put it somewhere—say, in Picus’s room. To destroy it.
The first would make a fool of him, the second a thief, the third impossible, the fourth a trickster; the fifth might bring him to a bad end. This was what had come of his nosing round for power. Scylla would be coming in, burnt with kisses. Perhaps she had played off this trick on him. How many years had he been living in this Chinese box of tricks? If he could have believed in their belief of the possibility of a possible sanctity, gone down to them and said: “Here is something that may be precious,” he would have walked into their hearts. But that would not have served him, because he did not want their hearts. Did not want hearts. Wanted scalps.
On a final sweep of rage he went downstairs with a cup in his hands to Felix and Clarence and Ross. He said: “Here’s your cup. I should like to know which of you played this off on me. I should like to know who put it in my room.”
“Oopsey daisy,” said Felix.
“If that’s your notion of hospitality, it doesn’t coincide with mine.”
Clarence said: “If you don’t like us, what d’you come down here for?”
“What we mean, is,” said Ross, “that we don’t understand why you should think such a thing.”
“Are you trying it out on me that the thing got there by itself, and that none of you knew?” Felix said:
“If we had known, why should we have spent a morning perspiring over it?”
Carston cried at him:
“I’d not put it past you. The day I turn my back on you all will be the best I’ve spent. I can tell people then what I think of you.”
Felix answered: “And we might as well tell the world that your thirst for antiquities led you to steal a family chalice. Nice kind of mind you’ve got. You know none of us put it in your room.” That was what he did not know. What he could not have done, others could do. There was a stupid, broken
