“She doesn’t think as you do,” Antonia went on, in a carefully steady voice. “I mean, her belief is much more definite than yours; much deeper; for she’s always believed, and you, I think, from what you told me, haven’t;—and, oh, passionate. I can’t express to you how I felt that. A white flame of certitude.”
“Ah,” Bevis murmured. He knocked the ash from his cigarette and examined the tip. “No; I’ve no white flames about me.”
She did not pause for his irony. “And we spoke of Malcolm. We never have spoken of him before. I asked her if she expected to see him again, as she knew him here; unchanged. And she does. No; expect is not the right word. She is sure of it. And she told me something else. Malcolm believed like that. He and she had talked about it; twice. Once when he was hardly more than a boy. And once before he went to France, on the last night he spent here, with her and his mother. He was sure, too. He believed that he was to see me, and her, again. Cicely cried and cried in telling me. I never saw her cry before.”
“Did Malcolm ever talk to you about it?” Bevis asked her after a moment. If he had computed and analyzed new hopes last night, how much more, this morning, he found himself analyzing and computing new difficulties. He had more than Tony’s fluidity to deal with now. Like a tragic, potent moon, Miss Latimer drew her tides away from the rest and safety of the shores he stretched for them.
“No,” she answered, still in the careful, steady voice. “Never like that. Though I remember, in looking back, things he said that meant it.”
He recognized then, and only then, when she answered with such unsuspecting candour, the treacherous suggestion that had underlain his query. Could he really have wanted to hint that Malcolm’s deepest confidence had been given to his cousin and not to her? Could he really have hoped that a touch of spiritual jealousy might help him? How complete her trust in her husband, and how justified, was further revealed to him, for his discomfiture, as she went on: “It was of me they talked that last night; of our love for each other. He wanted to thank her, again, for having helped him to win me.”
They were silent for a little after that; he cast down upon the sofa beside the fire and Antonia on her settee, her hands holding it on either side, her eyes fixed before her, a new hardness in their gaze. She was, this morning, neither the frightened child nor the helpless lover. She had withdrawn from him, and whether in coldness or control he could not tell. But it was not with her own strength she was armed. She had withdrawn in order to think, without his help, and with the help of Miss Latimer.
“Well, what does it all come to for you, now?” he asked, and he heard the coldness in his voice, a coldness not for her, but for that new opponent he had now to deal with.
“It makes it all more terrible, doesn’t it?” she said, sitting there and not looking at him.
“You mean her belief has so much more weight with you than mine?”