EPILOGUE
For a moment they stared at one another. He did not at once recognize Connie Edwards, in the puritanical serge frock and with her air of rather conscious sobriety, and he himself stood in the shadow. He thought:
"She's wondering if I'm a tramp." He felt like one, broken and shabby.
"Dr. Wilmot?" he muttered.
She leant closer.
"Oh, hallo—Robert." She corrected herself severely, and held the door wide open. "Dr. Stonehouse—to be sure. Francey's upstairs."
She led the way. It was almost as though she had been expecting him. At any rate, she was not surprised at all. But half-way up the stairs she glanced back over her shoulder.
"I don't usually open the door. I'm her secretary. And a damn good one too. Rather a jest, eh, what?"
"Rather," he said.
And it was really the same room—a fire burning and the faun dancing in the midst of its moving shadows. There was a faint, warm scent of cigarette smoke and a solemn pile of books beside her deep chair. It wouldn't be like Francey to rest under her laurels.
She held both his hands in hers. She wore a loose, golden-brown wrapper such as she had always worn when she had been working hard. She had changed very little and a great deal. If something of the whimsical mysteriousness of her youth had faded she had broadened and deepened into a woman warm and generous as the earth. Her thick hair swept back from her face with the old wind-blown look, and her eyes were candid and steadfast as they had ever been. But some sort of mist had been brushed away from them so that they saw more clearly and profoundly. He thought: "She has seen a great many people suffer. She doesn't go away so often into herself."
He had tried hard, over and over again, to imagine their meeting, but he had never imagined that it would be so simple or that she would say to him, as though the eight years had not happened:
"Why didn't you tell me about Christine, Robert?"
He said:
"It wouldn't have made any difference."
"I've been waiting for you to tell me."
He tried to smile.
"You don't know how difficult it has been to come. I've been prowling past—night after night—trying to think what you'd say to me, if I turned up."
"You might have known."
"I didn't—I don't know even now."
She had made him sit down by the fire and she sat opposite him, bending towards him, with her slim, beautiful hands to the blaze. He felt that she knew, for all the outward signs of his prosperity, that he was destitute. He felt that his real self with which she had always been so much concerned had been stripped naked, and that she was trying to warm and console him. She was wrapping him round with that unchanged tenderness.
"It's—it's the old room!" he said.
But his enmity was dead. He was at peace with it. He had been initiated. He had heard, very faintly it is true, but loud enough to understand, the music to which the faun danced. He was not the outsider any more.
"I wanted it to be the same."
"And the house——"
"I took it as soon as I could get it. I made up my mind to live here, whatever it cost. You see, I was quite sure that you would go past one of these days to have a look at it, and that you would say to yourself: 'Why, there's Francey, after all! I'll go in——'"
But they both drew back instinctively. He blundered into a hurried question. The Gang? What had happened to them all? It seemed that Gertie still lived, defying medical opinion and apparently feeding her starved spirit on the treasures of the Vatican. Howard, who had become a very bad artist and lived on selling copies of the masterpieces to tourists, looked after her.
"But they're not married," Francey said. "Just friends."
He said humbly:
"Well, he's been awfully decent to her."
As to the rest, no one knew what had become of them.
"And you've done splendidly, Robert, better than any of us."
"I've been a failure," he answered, "a rotten failure!"
She accepted the statement gravely, without protest, and that sincerity was like a skilled hand on a wound. It brought comfort where a fumbling kindness would have been unendurable. It made him strangely, deeply happy to know that she would see too that he had failed. "I've never had pity on anyone—not even myself—I've learnt nothing that matters."
For a while they sat silent, looking into the fire, like people who are waiting and preparing themselves for some great event. And presently, without moving, in an undertone he began to tell her about the Marie Dubois who had died, and how he had seen her long ago at the Circus, his first and only circus. He told her about the Circus itself. He did not choose his words, but stammered and fumbled and jumped from one thing to another. He opened his heart and took out whatever he found there, and showed it to her very humbly, just as it was. It seemed certain and imperative that after a little while they should both see the pattern of it all. He told her about his love for his dead mother, and how his father had died and had come back, haunting him in his sleep.
Then he remembered something he had never thought of before—how he had looked up at the window of the room where his father was lying dead, and had wanted to run—run fast.
"But I think I've lived in that dark house all my life," he said, "and I've gone about in it, blustering and swaggering and being hard and strong because I was so desperately afraid—of life, of caring too much, of failing. And now—I've come out."
And then he began to tremble all over and suddenly he was crying helplessly.
She knelt beside him. She drew him into her arms. It was their moment in the green forest over again, but now there was no antagonism in their love. She was the warm, good spirit of the life to which he had become reconciled. They had belonged to one another from the beginning. His fear had stood between them. But she had gone on loving him, steadfastly, because nothing else was possible to her.
"Francey—do you remember—that time we fought one another—over an idiotic stick? I was such a young rotter—I wouldn't own up—that you were stronger than I was."
She took his wet hands and kissed them. It was as though she had said aloud, smiling to herself:
"It's all right now, anyhow, you odd, sad little boy."