She had not controlled herself, however, from glancing round at the house, in an upper window of which they saw a curtain fall.
“It makes no difference,” she said. “She must know why you are here. She must know that I am very fond of you.”
“You mean she must know how faithless? There’s no point in her thinking you faithless—unless you’re going to be, is there?”
“Why do you gibe at me,” she murmured, “and taunt me, when I need help most of all? Why are you so dry and cold?”
“My dear,” he said, “I’m frightfully tired. You’re twice as strong as I am, and I think my case is safer in your hands than in my own. That’s what it comes to. I’m not dry and cold. Only worn out. What I’d like”—and putting his hand within her arm, indifferent to the possible spectator, he glanced round at her with a smile half melancholy and half whimsical—“would be to be with you in the firelight somewhere, and stillness; and to put my head on your breast and go to sleep, for hours and hours; held in your arms. Is that cold, Tony?”
IV
WAS one not, when one could make speeches like that, to be listened to as Tony had listened to him—was one not, implicitly, an accepted lover? They had hurt and misunderstood each other and their talk had left a strain; yet such hurts, in natures as intimately united as his and Tony’s, only brought one the nearer. After all, in spite of his essential failure with her, he had shown her, in a clear light, the shapes of her half-seen fears. That was all to the good. She must now, for the first time, accept such fears fully; and might she not, as a result, find herself the readier to live with them? And though she had not seen his truth, he had, through his very unkindness, what she had felt to be his gibes and taunts, made her see her own; and Tony’s truth was, simply, that she could never give him up. So he had computed and analyzed during the evening, while Tony had again sung to them and while Miss Latimer sat, her head bent beneath a lamp, and put fine darns into an embroidered tea-cloth. And what most came to him next morning, with the sense of shock, was an awareness of hidden things; of hours in which he had no part, when Tony said to him, “I talked to Cicely last night.”
They were, as usual, in the drawing-room, after breakfast, and Antonia had seated herself on the low cane settee before the fire, for the grey day was chilly and she had, to an unbecoming extent, the look of being cold. When Tony looked least beautiful, she looked most childlike, and it was for her childlike self that he felt, always, his deepest tenderness aroused. And he was aware now, as he meditated her announcement, of the curious check it gave to his tenderness. “Did you?” he said. His tone was dry. He was not glad to hear that Miss Latimer was in their counsels; but it was a more subtle disquiet than that that took his thoughts from Tony’s dear pouting lips and tightened eyelids. Miss Latimer had all sorts of chances that he didn’t have. His love was like a steady vase into which Tony’s fluidity inevitably poured and shaped itself when he was with her. But when he was not there, Miss Latimer had spells that dissolved her again into wistful, wandering water.
“I didn’t tell her, of course, that I was in love with you and was wondering whether I might marry you,” Antonia went on, “though I think she must know it. I said nothing about myself, really. What we talked of was immortality. I asked her what she believed.”
He kept his eyes upon her, though she did not meet them, standing before her, his cigarette between his teeth. And she felt his displeasure in his silence.