But at the moment of parting Mrs. Harcourt became again that one who had waited, impatient of wasting time in formalities. Her smile glanced out from the past, revealing the light upon her earlier days. It was a greeting for tomorrow rather than a good night.
Going up to the little bedroom that was now merely a refuge offstage, she found it brightly lit in readiness for her coming, summery bright all over, the light curtains drawn and joining with the unvarnished wood to make an enclosure that seemed to emulate the brightness of the Swiss daylight. The extravagant illumination, the absence of glooms and shadows, recalled the outdoor scene and something of this afternoon’s bliss of arrival and the joy that had followed it, when music sounded up through the house, of homecoming from long exile. Switzerland waited outside—enriched by her successful début—with its promise that could not fail. Meanwhile there was the unfamiliar enchantment of moving comfortably in a warm bedroom, not having the wealth one brought upstairs instantly dispersed by the attack of cold and gloom. The temperature was lower than before, pleasant, no longer oppressive; and more hospitable than a fire whose glow was saddened by the certainty that in the morning it would be an ashy desolation.
The moment the basket chair received her the downstairs world was about her again; circling, clamorous with the incidents of her passage from lonely exposure to the shelter of Mrs. Harcourt’s so swiftly offered wing, from beneath which, with its owner assured of the hardness of what it sheltered, she could move freely forth in any direction.
The two Le Mesras—that was her pronunciation of Le Mesurier?—Three Chators. Mrs. Sneyde and Maud Something at the little table behind … Hollebone. Maud Hollebone. The American, leaving. Interest hesitated between Harry Vereker already a little diminished, and the Russian: the reincarnated, attractive, ultimately unsatisfactory Tansley Street foreigner?
Someone was tapping at the door. She opened it upon Mrs. Harcourt offering a small tray, transformed to motherliness by a voluminous dressing-gown.
When she had gone she vanished utterly. There she was, actually in the next room, yet utterly forgettable. And yet she threw across the days ahead a strange deep light.
The steaming chocolate and the little English biscuits disappeared too quickly, leaving hunger.
The French window was made fast by a right-angle hand-piece, very stiff, that gave suddenly with a dreadfully audible clang. The door creaked open. Racing the advancing air she was beneath the downy billow before it reached her. It took her fevered face with its batallions of needles, stole up her nostrils to her brain, bore her down into the uttermost depths of sleep.
III
From which she awoke in light that seemed for a moment to be beyond the confines of earth. It was as if all her life she had travelled towards this radiance, and was now within it, clear of the past, at an ultimate destination.
How long had it been there, quizzically patient, waiting for her to be aware of it?
It was sound, that had wakened her and ceased now that she was looking and listening; become the inaudible edge of a sound infinitely far away. Brilliant light, urgently describing the outdoor scene. But she was unwilling to stir and break the radiant stillness.
Close at hand a bell buzzed sharply. Another, and then a third far away down the corridor. People ringing their day into existence, free to ring their day into existence when they pleased. She was one of them; and for today she would wait awhile, give the bell-ringers time to be up and gone down to breakfast while she kept intact within this miracle of light the days ahead that with the sounding of her own bell would be already in process of spending.
But perhaps there was a time-limit for breakfasts?
Screwing round to locate the bell with the minimum of movement she paused in sheer surprise of well-being. Of the shattering journey there was not a trace. Nor of the morning weariness following social excitements.
Sitting up to search more effectually she saw the source of her wakening, bright gold upon the mountain tops: a smiling challenge, as if, having put on their morning gold, the mountains watched its effect upon the onlookers.
She was glad to be alone on the scene of last night’s dinner-party; to be in the company of the other breakfasters represented only by depleted butter-dishes and gaps in the piles of rolls, and free from the risk of hearing the opening day fretted by voices set going like incantations to exorcise the present as if it had no value, as if the speakers were not living in it but only in yesterday or tomorrow.
And when there came a warning swift clumping of hobnailed boots across the hall, across the room, she demanded Vereker, oddly certain that even at this late hour still somehow it would contrive to be he.
And there he was, lightly clumping round the table-end to his place, into which he slipped smiling his greeting, boyishly. Not at all in the self-conscious Englishman’s manner of getting himself seated when others are already in their places: bent, just before sitting down, forward from the waist and in that pose—hitching his trousers the while—distributing his greetings, and so letting himself down into his chair either with immediate speech or a simulated air of preoccupation. Vereker flopped and beamed at the same moment, unfeignedly pleased to arrive. Knickerbockers; but that was not the whole difference. He was always unfeignedly pleased to arrive?
He began at once collecting food and spoke with gentle suddenness into a butter-dish:
“I hope you had a good night?”
His talk made a little symphony with his movements which also were conversational, and he looked across each time he spoke, but only on the last word; a swift blue beam. In the morning light he seemed younger—perhaps a champion skier at the end of his day is
