She smiled again into space. Aspasia clasped her and kissed her. It was the first time since the voyage her aunt had spoken to her openly of her hidden thoughts. And now she spoke as if confidence had always existed between them, as if she were merely continuing the thread of an interrupted discourse.
Baby's heart began to sink with an uneasy sense of awe as before something unnatural, and of her own incapacity for meeting it. She wished her kiss could stop the lovely smiling lips from further speech. But Lady Gerardine went on:
"We were married quite early, in the little Alverstoke church. I used to hate it when I went there Sunday after Sunday; but it was a new place to me that morning, holy and beautiful, all in the dewy freshness, grey amid the green, with stripes of sunlight yellow upon it, and the dancing shadows of the trees. The whole church was full of the smell of white narcissus; it was like incense. When I came up the nave, he turned where he stood at the altar rail, and looked at me. I can see him now, just as he looked; his eyes dark, dark, and his face quite pale for all it was so bronzed. Baby, I can smell the narcissus now, as I stood beside him and he put this on my finger."
She raised her hand and kissed the ring.
"I shall never take it off," she said, as if to herself. And unhappy, practical Baby, could have laughed and cried together with the despairing ejaculation: "Poor Runkle!"
The night was pressing up against the windows; only the firelight now fought the darkness in the wainscoted room. Upon the panel opposite the bed, the life-size portrait of Captain English, in its strong relief of black and white, began to assume a ruddy tint; in the shifting of the shadows the expression of the face seemed to change. It assumed startling airs of life. Baby caught sight of this and gave a faint scream.
"Oh, oh," she said, burrowing her face against Rosamond's neck, "he almost looks alive!"
Lady Gerardine had seen, too; but there was no terror in her soul.
"Why should he not look alive?" said she, in a soft confidential whisper, "he's not really dead, you know."
The astounding words had scarcely fallen upon Baby's alarmed consciousness, when there was a crunching of wheels below the window, as if the night without had suddenly engendered some ghostly visitor in state. A violent peal rang through the silent house; a new but very tangible fear was upon Aspasia. With a shriek she sprang to her feet.