Brenda, who was occupied with her letters, acquiesced carelessly; but in a few moments she laid the communications aside and took up the newspaper. With singular nonchalance she opened it and went towards the window. There was nothing very peculiar in this action, and yet the girl’s movements were in some slight and inexplicable way embarrassed. It seemed almost as if she did not wish Mrs. Wylie to notice that she was looking at the newspaper. During breakfast there was a furtive anxiety visible in the manner and voice of these deceitful women. Each attempted to rejoice openly over the advent of Theodore Trist, and at the same time carefully avoided seeking a reason for his unusual mode of procedure; for Trist was a man who never invited himself. Indeed, his habit was one of apprehensive self-suppression; except in the battlefield, he was nervously afraid of being de trop.
While the table was being cleared Brenda left the room on some small errand, and Mrs. Wylie literally pounced upon the newspaper the moment the door was closed. With practised hand and eye she sought the column containing foreign intelligence. Eagerly she scanned the closely-printed lines, but disappointment was the evident result.
“Not a word,” she reflected—“not a word. But perhaps that is all the worse. Theo is coming down here for some specific reason, I am sure. Either to say goodbye or … or for something else. War—war—war! I feel it in the air!”
And the good lady stood there in the bow-window gazing through the rime-shaded panes away across the moor, over the green and mournful sea. Her clever gray eyes were half-closed, owing to a peculiar contraction of the eyelids—a little habit she indulged in when thinking in her brave cheery way of those things, my sisters, which you have greater leisure to meditate over than we men—of the happiness and the great joy we seem ever about to grasp, and which with melancholy invariability slips through our earthly fingers, fades from our earthly eyes. I sometimes think that when other women would have wept Mrs. Wylie contracted her eyelids, set her lips, and looked “very courageous and of a good faith.”
Unconsciously she was looking away towards the east, to those mysterious lands, whence so many chapters of the world’s history have been drawn.
X
Diplomacy
It happened that there were some warm balmy days towards the end of March, and on one of these Theodore Trist arrived at Wyvenwich. Mrs. Wylie and Brenda were on the little platform to meet him, and the elder lady, in her practical way, noted the lightness of his baggage and drew her own conclusions.
They walked to Wyl’s Hall through the High Street of the little town, down towards the sea, up a steep path on the cliff, and finally across the moor. All green things were budding, tender shoots and bold weeds alike. Overhead the larks were singing in gladsome chorus. Side by side the three friends walked, and talked of … the weather. I mention it because none of the three took much interest in the matter, as a rule, nor ever talked of it.
“Spring is upon us again,” Mrs. Wylie had said during the first pause.
“Yes,” answered Trist; “this weather always makes me restless.”
“More so than usual?” inquired Brenda innocently.
Trist looked at her sideways.
“Yes,” he murmured, “more so than usual. I suppose a new fund of energy creeps into my somnolent being.”
“Do you really believe,” inquired Mrs. Wylie, with exceeding great interest, “that the weather has so much effect upon one as that?”
“I am sure of it. There is no denying the fact that in the springtime, when all things are beginning to grow, men grow energetic. If they be working, they work harder; fighting, fight harder; playing, play harder. The majority of events happen in the first six months of the year.”
“So the unexpected may be expected before July,” suggested Mrs. Wylie quietly.
“That may be expected at all times.”
Thus they talked on in vague commonplaces, not entirely devoid of a second meaning perhaps. Brenda scarcely joined in the conversation. It was enough for her to listen to these two strangely assorted friends, who seemed to her analytical mind to be rather different in each other’s company than they were before the rest of the world. She never quite lost her youthful habit of studying human minds—picking them to pieces, dissecting them, assigning motives, seeking reasons—and her belief in the influence of one will over another (even at a distance) was singularly strong. She was pleased to consider that Theodore Trist and Mrs. Wylie possessed some hidden sympathies in common beyond the mere ties of friendship; and it is probable that she gained some instruction and perhaps a little benefit in watching their intercourse. Certain it is that each in turn spoke to the other as he or she spoke to no one else. Each possessed a power of bringing out certain qualities in the other, which power was unique. And so Brenda, who was at no time a talkative woman, listened in silence as they walked home to Wyl’s Hall across the deserted moor.
When they had reached the house the girl went upstairs to remove her hat and jacket, leaving her two companions together in the library. This was a good-sized room, with a broad old-fashioned bow-window, of which even the panes of glass were curved, while all round it there was a low window-seat softly cushioned. In the broad fireplace some logs of driftwood burnt slowly and silently, with a steady glow of heat, as only driftwood burns.
Trist went straight to the window and stood in the centre of it, with his strong lean hands hanging idly. His eyes were soft and meek and dreamy as ever, while his limbs seemed full of strength and energy. The old incongruity was still apparent.
Mrs. Wylie followed him, and seated herself by the window at the end of the bow, so that the man’s profile
