“She doesn’t, Bevis. You are the only one who frightens me; when you tell me the truth; when you tell me that I am unfaithful and that I’ve fallen in love with you, although my husband isn’t really dead; and that perhaps, if I go on tormenting you too much, you’ll get over me.” She looked steadily at him while she spoke, though still she tried to smile.
“Do you want another truth, Tony?” he said, putting her hair back from her forehead, doting on her, in her loveliness, her foolishness, her pathos, while he drew her more closely to him; “it’s the last that frightens you most of all, and it never can come true.”
“Never? Never?” she whispered, while she, too, came closer, yielding to his arms. “Nothing can ever come between us? You will be able to take care of me, always?”
“It’s all I ask,” he assured her, with his dry, cherishing smile.
V
HE had learned to distrust Antonia’s recoveries, but that evening it would have been difficult to believe that their troubles were not over. The very drawing-room, as they came back to it after dinner, looked, he felt, like the drawing-room of a lovely young widow who was soon to marry again. It seemed, with clustered candles, and flowers where he had never seen them before, no longer to wait upon events, but to celebrate them, and Antonia herself, standing before the fire and knitting, in absurd contrast to her bare arms and pearl-clasped hair, a charity sock, had herself an air of celebration and decision. It was for him, he felt, that her hair had been so clasped, and, as she knew he loved to see it, tossed back from her brow. For him, too, the dress as of a Charles the First lady, with falls of lace at elbow and the lace-edged cape held with diamonds and pearls at her breast. Long pearls were in her ears—he had not seen them there since before the war—and pearls around her throat, and, beloved and unaccountable creature, why, unless in some valiant reaction to life and sanity, should she show this revival?
“What shall we do to amuse ourselves to-night, Cicely?” she asked. She had never asked it before. It had never before been a question of amusing themselves. But, though Miss Latimer, evidently, had “cried and cried,” she herself was not without signs of the evening’s magic. Her little pre-war dress, pathetic in its arrested fashion, its unused richness, became her. She, too, wore pearls, and she, too, oddly, with the straight line of her fringe across her forehead, recalled, all pinched and pallid though she was, the court of Charles the First. No one could have looked less likely to be amused, yet she struck him, to-night, as almost charming.
“Shall we have some dummy-bridge?” Antonia went on. “Cicely is very good at bridge, Bevis.”
“By all means,” said the young man, smiling across at her from the sofa where he smoked. “Shall I get a table?”
He would really rather, he felt, for a little while, sit and smoke, his hands clasped behind his head, and watch Antonia’s hands move delicately among the knitting-needles.