“No, I’ve not given her up.” Jerry looked down at the china cat. “I’m going to try to live up to the part of the English lover. It’s only,” said Jerry, “that I see the difficulties.”
CHAPTER IV
Before Giles went back to Oxford a short letter came to Mrs. Bradley from Toppie saying that she was going to stay on in Bath for the present and that her determination to become a nun was unaltered. After that, for many weeks, he heard nothing more of her, and it was not until the end of June that he received a letter telling him that she was at Headington, staying with an old friend of her mother’s before entering her novitiate, and asking him to come and see her. The old friend lived in a little house sunken among the high walls and deep leafage of a garden, and the drawing-room, where Giles waited for Toppie, its long windows opening on a little lawn, seemed part of the garden, it was so full of flowers and sunlight.
Giles stood at a window and looked out and listened to a garden-warbler singing ceaselessly, like a running brook, among the branches. His heart was full of presage, for he had not seen Toppie since the dreadful day that had severed them from the past. Yet the song of the garden-warbler, rippling incessantly over his fear, seemed to dissolve it into a happy melancholy.—“The past is over, not forgotten, but over, over,”—the song seemed to be saying. “This sweetness, this sunlight, this tranquillity is the present. Believe in it, live in it, as I do. She is not angry with you any longer. You have not failed.”
And when Toppie entered, he saw that she was not angry and that he had not failed. More than that; there was much more than that for him in Toppie’s face; but he could not at first determine what it was.
She was changed. So changed that it was almost as if he had forgotten her and was seeing her for the first time again. Perhaps it was that since last seeing her all his thoughts of her had been changed. Personal hopes, personal longings, were gone, and seen without the aching glamour that they had cast about her Toppie was at once less and more beautiful. For never before had he recognized the defects and deficiencies of her face. She was a pale, thin, freckled girl, slightly featured, with dry lips and colourless eyes. Yet in this newly perceived earthliness there was revealed to him the fulfillment, as it were, of that celestial quality he had from the first divined in her.
This was what Toppie was; this was the material that had been given her to work upon; and it was as if he saw her, through the power of prayer, lifting from cold and arid soil flowers and fruit to heaven.
She looked at him sweetly and calmly giving him her hand, and saying: “Dear Giles.”
“I’m so glad.—I’ve so hoped you would see me,” Giles murmured.
“Of course I was to see you. It only wanted a little time—to settle things,” said Toppie. “Let us go into the garden. Isn’t it the dearest garden?—I used to come here sometimes when I was a child.”