3
The weather was so warm that after dinner they went and sat out upon the lawn; but about half-past nine the elders found it chilly and went indoors.
“What about a walk?” said Concha, getting up.
“Good scheme!” said Rory.
“Are you coming, darling?” she asked Teresa, going up to her and laying her soft cheek against hers.
“No, Puncher, I don’t think so,” she said, smiling up at her; and she was touched to see how she flushed with pleasure at the old, childish pet-name, grown, these last years, so unfamiliar.
So Teresa and David sat on together, watching Concha and Rory glimmering down the border till they melted into the invisible view.
It was a glorious night. The lawns of the sky were dusty with the may of stars. The moon, no longer flower-like and idle, shone a cold masterpiece of metallurgy. The air was laden with the perfumes of shrubs and flowers. Teresa noticed that the perfumes did not come simultaneously, but one after another; like notes of a tune picked out with one finger—lilac, may, wallflower....
“I can smell sweetbriar!” cried David suddenly, a strange note of triumph in his voice, “it’s like a Scotch tune—‘Oh, my love is like a red red rose’!” and he laughed, a little wildly.
Teresa’s heart began to beat very fast, and seizing at random upon the first words that occurred to her, she said, “Concha’s like a red red rose,” and began to repeat mechanically:
“Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.”
“I wasn’t thinking of her ...” he said. “I wasn’t ... Oh, my love is like the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley ... it’s all the same”; and then, abruptly: “Look! There’s the moon. She’s always the same—Scotland, Africa, in the trenches, here. She’s like books—Homer and the rest—in whatever land you open them, they just say the same thing that they did a hundred years ago.”
Far away a night-express flashed and shrieked through the view; then an owl hooted.
“So you are going back to-morrow,” she said.
“Yes.... Hark! There’s the sweetbriar again,” and he began to sing triumphantly:
“And I will come again, my Love,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.”
He turned and looked at her with strangely shining eyes: “I hear you through the wall, getting up and going to bed every night and every morning. It makes me feel sick sometimes, like the smell of iodoform at the front; that’s a nice way of putting it!” and again he laughed wildly: “like the smell of sweetbriar! like the smell of the mass! Good-night,” and he got up hurriedly and strode towards the house. Then he came back: “Get up and come in,” he said gently; “it’s getting cold and damp,” and he pulled her up with a cool, firm hand.
They went in, lit their candles in the hall and said good-night at their bedroom doors; quietly, distantly.