At that she just glanced at him. He seemed to see the caged prisoner pass behind his bars and look out in passing; and he saw not only what her hate could be, but the dark and lonely anguish that encompassed her.
“People should be true to themselves,” was all she said.
When she was gone, Bevis, characteristically, went back to the table and made himself a proper cup of tea. He had managed to make tea for himself and a wounded Tommy when he had lain, with his shattered leg, in No Man’s Land.
VII
MISS LATIMER did not come to dinner and he was thankful for it, though there was little to be thankful for, he felt, as he sat in the library afterwards and wondered what Tony was thinking of there in the darkness above him, if she were alone and in the dark. The thought that she was not, the thought that Miss Latimer, with her stone-curlew eyes and pallid, brooding face, was with her made him restless. He could not read. He threw his book aside and stared into the fire.
Next morning the rain had ceased and it was cold and sunny. He found Miss Latimer in the dining-room when he went down. She was already dressed for going out and had started her breakfast. “My poor friend in the village is dying,” she said, “and has asked for me. I have a message to you from Antonia. She is still resting this morning, but will come down at three, if you will be in the library then.”
Her courteous terseness put barriers between them; but none were needed. He could not have asked questions or appealed this morning. He imagined, though he had looked at his face in the mirror with unregarding eyes, that he, too, was perceptibly aged, and his main feeling about Miss Latimer was that she was old and ugly and that he was sick of her.
After breakfast he went out into the hard, bright air.
He walked about the grounds and found himself looking at the house with consciously appraising eyes, from the lawn, from the ring-court, from the kitchen-garden. It was a solid, tasteful, graceful structure; mild, with its sunny façade looking to the moors; cheerful, with its gable-ends; but as he had felt it at the first he felt it now more decisively as empty of tradition and tenderness. It had remained, too, so singularly new; perhaps because, in its exposed situation, none of the trees carefully disposed about it had yet grown to a proportionate height. Yes, notwithstanding the passion and grief now burning within its walls, it was impersonal, unlovable; and it would need centuries, in spite of the care and love lavished upon it, to gain a soul.
He knew, as he walked, that he was taking comfort from these reflections and was vexed that he should need them. He had completely placed, psychologically, if not scientifically, the events of the other evening, and it was not necessary that he should be satisfied that Wyndwards was a place to which the supernatural could not attach itself. Yet that desire, indubitably, directed his wanderings, and he could compute its power by the strength of the reluctance he felt for visiting the flagged garden where, if anywhere, the element he thankfully missed might lurk. But when, putting an ironic compulsion upon himself, he had entered the little enclosure, his main impression, as before, was one of mere beauty. It was the only corner of Wyndwards that had achieved individuality; the placing of the fountain, the stone bench, the beds among the flags, was a pleasure to the eye. And like a harbinger of good cheer, he heard, from the branches of the budding wood beyond the garden wall, the wiry, swinging notes of a chiff-chaff, and his own soul as well as the flagged garden seemed exorcised by that assured and reiterated gladness. Ghosts, in a world where chiff-chaffs sang, were irrelevancies, even if they walked. And they did not walk. In sunlight as in moonlight he found the flagged garden empty.