II
Alice Galleon burst in upon them. “What! Not arrived yet! the train must be dreadfully late. Lights! Lights! No, don't you move, mother!”
She returned with lamps and flooded the room with light. The ladies displayed a feeble protest against her exultant happiness.
“I'm sure, my dear, I hope that nothing has happened.”
“My dear mother, what could happen?”
“Well, you never know with these trains—and a honeymoon, too, is always rather a dangerous time. I remember—”
“I hear them!” Alice cried and there indeed they were to be heard bumping and banging in the little hall. The door opened and Peter and Clare, radiant with happiness, appeared.
They stood in the doorway, side by side, Clare in a little white hat and grey travelling dress and Peter browner and stronger and squarer than ever.
All these people filled the little room. There was a crackling fire of conversation.
“Oh! but we've had a splendid time—”
“No, I don't think Clare's in the least tired—”
“Yes, isn't the house a duck?”
“Don't we just love being back!”
“... hoping you hadn't caught colds—”
“... besides we had the easiest crossing—”
“... How's Bobby?”
“... were so afraid that something must have happened—”
Mrs. Rossiter took Clare upstairs to help her to take her hat off.
Mother and daughter faced one another—Clare flung herself into her mother's arms.
“Oh! Mother dear, he's wonderful, wonderful!”
Downstairs Alice watched Peter critically. She had not realised until this marriage, how fond she had grown of Peter. She had, for him, very much the feeling that Bobby had—a sense of tolerance and even indulgence for all tempers and morosities and morbidities. She had seen him, on a day, like a boy of eighteen, loving the world and everything in it, having, too, a curious inexperience of the things that life might mean to people, unable, apparently, to see the sterner side of life at all—and then suddenly that had gone and given place to a mood in which no one could help him, nothing could cheer him... like Saul, he was possessed with Spirits.
Now, as he stood there, he looked not a day more than eighteen. Happiness filled him with colour—his eyes were shining—his mouth smiling.
“Alice, old girl—she's splendid. I couldn't have believed that life could be so good—”
A curious weight was lifted from her at his words. She did not know what it was that she had dreaded. Perhaps it had been merely a sense that Clare was too young and inexperienced to manage so difficult a temperament as Peter's—and now, after all, it seemed that she had managed it. But in realising the relief that she felt she realised too the love that she had for Peter. When he was young and happy the risks that he ran seemed just as heavy as when he was old and miserable.
“Oh, Peter! I'm so glad—I know she's splendid—Oh! I believe you are going to be happy—”
“Yes!” he answered her confidently, “I believe we are—”
The ladies—Mrs. Galleon, Mrs. Rossiter and Alice—retired. Later on Clare and Peter were coming into Bobby's for a short time.
Left alone in their little house, he drew her to the window that overlooked the orchard and silently they gazed out at the old, friendly, gnarled and knotted tree, and the old thick garden-wall that stretched sharply against the night-sky.
Behind them the fire crackled and the lamps shed their pleasant glow and that dear child with the great stiff dress that Velasquez painted smiled at them from the wall.
Peter gave a deep sigh of happiness.
“Our House...” he said and drew her very close to him. The two of them, as they stood there outlined against the window were so young and so pleasant that surely the Gods would have pity!