Mollie, her arm within her husband’s, cast across his unconscious breast a grave, deep glance upon me as he thus quoted his defence of her. What was she to do with Vera, the glance perhaps asked me, too, now that she was to have her? What account of the interview would Vera serve up to Clive? Was not her last state to be worse than her first? I tried, in my answering glance, to reassure and sustain, yet I myself felt uncertainty about this fulfilment of my counsel.
We reached the dream-garden. Vera and Captain Thornton had been there for most of the morning, and books and papers were piled on the seat where the grey and purple cushions denoted attitudes of confident tête-à-tête.
Captain Thornton and I talked about the war, and I saw, with a mild, reminiscent irony, remembering Vera’s sting, that he was perfectly prepared to give me every opportunity for judging him. I felt, indeed, though Vera had so absorbed him, that he had never cared to talk about the war with her. She and the other angels were there to help one to forget, but with me he was glad to remember. It was I who heard Vera’s swift footfall approaching. Captain Thornton, stooping to mark out with books and pencils the plan of a battle, had, I think, almost forgotten the coming interview, and until Vera appeared among the cypresses, flushed above her pearls, he remained unaware. She stood there at the top of the steps for a moment, looking down at us, at Captain Thornton and me, our heads so close together, and at Mollie in her blue and with her unrevealing little face, and I saw from her expression, as she took us all in, that she had not been succeeding so well with Captain Thornton as Mollie and even I had feared. It was a smouldering irritation against him that flared up with her anger against Mollie and me.
“Oh!” she said, a dreadfully significant monosyllable on Vera’s competent lips. It expressed surprise and weariness and the slight embarrassment of the civilized confronted with the barbarian. “Oh!” she repeated, and she descended the steps, Chang trotting after her with his countenance of quizzical superciliousness. “I’m so very, very sorry.” She did not look at any of us now; her voice was exceedingly inarticulate and exceedingly sweet. “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. It’s the other gardens that are for my friends. I’m charmed always to see them there. And there are so many other gardens, aren’t there? But this is my own dream-garden, my very own; for solitude, where I come to be alone. One must be alone sometimes. I get very tired.”
We had, of course, all risen, Clive staring, while, still with those weary, averted eyes, Vera softly beat the desecrated cushions and shook them into place.
“It’s my fault,” Clive stammered. “I mean—I didn’t understand. I thought you and Mollie could have a talk here. She wanted to get to know you better, and I suggested this.”
Vera had sunk down in her corner, patting her silken knee, so that Chang sprang up upon it and settled down among the pearls. “I’m very, very sorry,” she gurgled, with oh, such vagueness! “It’s my one corner. My one place to be alone. I don’t see people here unless I’ve asked them to come.” She took up a review and opened it, and her eyes scanned its pages.
We were dismissed,—“thrown out,” as the Americans say,—and we retreated up the steps, Mollie helping Clive, and down the flagged path and out into the lime-tree alley.
It was a display so complete that it left me, indeed, a little abashed by the success of my manœuvres, while at the same time I felt that I mustn’t let Captain Thornton discern the irrepressible smile that quivered at the corners of my mouth. When we were out on the lawn he turned his startled eyes on me.
“Really, you know, I’d no idea, Miss Elliot—what?” He appealed to me.