Brenda was not listening with the attention she usually accorded to Theodore Trist, whatever the subject of his discourse might happen to be, and he knew it. She had a strange trick of lapsing into a stony silence at odd moments, and he rarely failed to detect the slight difference. Such fits of absorption were usually followed by the raising of some deep abstract question, or an opinion of personal bearing. It may have been mere chance that caused him to cease somewhat abruptly, and continue walking by her side in silence; or it is possible that he knew her humours as few people knew them. The question of a Russo-Turkish War had suddenly lost all interest, and he might as well have told his opinion to the winds as to this girl, who had, a moment earlier, been a most intelligent listener.
For some time they walked on without speaking. The soft turf of the so-called seawall, which was nothing else than an embankment, gave forth no sound beneath their feet. The tide was out, and the day being still, there came to their ears only a soft, murmuring, continuous song from the little waves.
At last Brenda turned a little and looked at him in her thoughtful, analytical way, as if to read on his features an answer to some question which had arisen in her mind.
“Yes,” said Trist, smiling at her gently. “Go on. You are about to propound one of those very deep theories which invariably suggest themselves to you in the middle of my most interesting observations.”
She laughed rather guiltily as she shook her head in denial.
“No. … I was only … wondering.”
“Wondering—?” he repeated interrogatively, but she omitted to answer his implied question, and he did not press it.
“Do you know, Theo,” she said, after a little pause, “that you are the greatest puzzle I have ever come across?”
“I am sorry,” he murmured, with mock humility.
“Oh, don’t apologize! I dare say it is entirely unintentional. What I cannot understand is your nonchalant way of talking of certain things. For instance, nothing seems to be farther from your thoughts at this moment than the possibility of your being … killed.”
He chipped off the head of a withered thistle with his stick before replying in a low, steady voice, very deliberately:
“And yet nothing is nearer to them.”
“That is what I cannot understand. I think women look farther ahead. They seem to have the power of realizing at the beginning what the end may be—realizing it more fully than men, I mean.”
“I doubt it!” he answered. “I have to make two sets of arrangements, two sets of plans. One takes it for granted that I shall come through it all safely, the other goes upon the theory that I shall be killed. Each is complete in itself, independent of its companion. When I say that I will do something at a certain time, or be in a certain place, there is a D.V. understood, hidden between the lines. Everything is of course Deo volente, but you would not have me drag it in obtrusively.”
“No … naturally not. But what I cannot understand is your power of facing the two possibilities—or, at the least, the latter—with apparent indifference. Is that the difference that exists between the courage of a man and that of a woman?”
“No,” he replied, looking at her very gravely, and speaking in a tone which gave weight to words of apparently small importance; “I think not, for women face possibilities and even certainties with equal pluck. It requires as much courage to remain at home and wait as it does to go out and face the danger, for danger is never so unpleasant as the anticipation of it.”
She remembered these words afterwards, and recognised then the fuller sense he had intended them to convey. In the meantime, however, she held to her point.
“It is not exactly in that way that I mean,” she murmured slowly. “Not from a question of personal bravery at all. I meant …”
She hesitated in embarrassment, and he hastened to remove it.
“Yes—go on.”
“I was wondering whether you ever looked at it from a religious point of view.”
He did not reply at once, and in some way the pause gave a greater gravity to his words.
“Yes, Brenda. You must not think that. Every man has his religion, and I have mine. It may consist in faith more than in works, perhaps, but it is there, nevertheless.”
“But you are half a fatalist.”
“In some degree I am, but I do not go so far as to say that nothing matters. Everything matters! We are intended to do our best, to make the best of our lives; but there is undoubtedly a scheme which is beyond our reach and far above our petty influence or endeavour.”
Brenda was no mean theologist, and she now set to work to demolish Trist’s system of fatalism, while half leaning towards it herself. Somewhat to her surprise she found that his knowledge upon certain points was equal to her own, and in some cases superior; his acquaintance with Eastern lore and Oriental creeds was quite beyond her depth.
In this manner they reached the lighthouse, passed a few minutes with its solitary inmate, and set off homewards again across the marsh. Mrs. Wylie would, perhaps, have been surprised could she have overheard their conversation, which was upon very different topics to what she had expected.
Before they reached the rising ground at the edge of the moor, the sun was low over
