“Oh, don’t mind that. You heard, no doubt, the surface things. But no one who knows Miss Gifford can think of them, that’s all.”
“And if I have been betrayed into injustice, I hope that you will reconsider a little more charitably your impression of Mr. Palairet,” said Mr. Best, in whom, evidently, Grainger’s roughness rankled.
Grainger laughed grimly. “I can’t consider him anything but a thousand times too bad for Miss Gifford.”
They had reached the entrance to Cheylesford Lodge on this final and discordant phrase. Mr. Best kept a grieved silence and Grainger’s thoughts passed from him.
He had had in his life no training in appreciation and was indifferent to things of the eye, but even to his insensible nature the whole aspect of the house that they approached between high yew hedges, its dreaming quiet, the tones of its dim old bricks, the shadowed white of paneled walls within, spoke of pensive beauty, of a secure content in things of the mind. He felt it suddenly as oppressive and ominous in its assured quietness. It had some secret against the probes of feeling. Its magic softly shut away suffering and encircled safely a treasure of tranquillity.
That was the secret, that the magic; it flashed vaguely for Grainger—though by its light he saw more vividly his own errand as ridiculous—that a life of thought, pure thought, if one could only achieve it, was the only safe life. Where, in this adjusted system of beauty and contemplation, would his appeals find foothold?
He dashed back the crowding doubts, summoning his own crude forces.
The man who admitted them said that Mr. Palairet was in the garden, and stepping from opened windows at the back of the house, they found themselves on the sunny spaces of the lawn with its encompassing trees and its wandering border of flowers.
Gavan was sitting with a book in the shade of the great yew-tree. In summer flannels, a panama hat tilted over his eyes, he was very white, very tenuous, very exquisite. And he was the center of it all, the secret securely his, the magic all at his disposal.
Seeing them he rose, dropping his book into his chair, strolling over the miraculous green to meet them, showing no haste, no hesitation, no surprise.