It was, he saw it now, what he had expected, and his heart stood still to hear it. Then he said: “You mean that she tells you she sees him; that she thinks she sees him; since he’s come just as you led her to expect he would, and just where.”
She shook her head gently and her downcast face kept its curious, considering look. “It wasn’t I, nor you, nor Cicely. He was with us. We could see nothing, you and I. He could not show himself to us; we had put ourselves too far from him. But when we left her alone, Cicely went to the window and saw him standing in the moonlight. He was not looking up at her, but down at the fritillaries. She and he planted them there together, before we were married. And all the while she looked, he stayed there, not moving and plainly visible. I knew it. I knew he was there when I looked, although I could see nothing.” She spoke with an astonishing and terrifying calm.
“And she came at once and told you this? That night?”
“Not that night. She went down into the garden. She thought he might speak to her. But he was gone. And when she came back and looked from the window, he was gone. No; it was next morning she told me. She tried not to tell; but I made her.”
“Curious,” said Bevis after a silence, “that she could have talked to me yesterday afternoon, and given me my tea, as if all this had never happened.” But he knew as he spoke that it had not been so with Miss Latimer. Something had happened; he had seen it when she was with him; and he now knew what it had been.
Gibes and scepticism fell as idly upon Antonia as faint rain. She was unaware of them. “No; she would never speak to you about it. There was no surprise in it for her, Bevis. She has always felt him there. When we went to the window she thought that we should surely see him, and when we did not, she pretended to sleep, purposely, so that we should go and leave her to look out. It comforted her to see him. It was only for me she was frightened.”
“Yes; I rather suspected that,” he muttered. “That she was shamming. I didn’t want to leave her there alone.”
“You couldn’t have kept her from him always, Bevis,” Antonia said gently. “If it had not been then, she would have seen him last night, I am sure; because I am sure he intended her to see him, meant and longed for it. But it was only the one time. Last night he was not there.”
He left the fire and took a turn or two up and down the room. His thoughts were divided against themselves. Did he feel, now, when, after all, the worst had happened, less fear, or more, than he had felt? Did he believe that Miss Latimer had lied? Did he believe Malcolm had appeared to her? And if Malcolm had, in very truth, appeared, did it make any difference? After all, what difference did it make?
“Tony,” he said presently, and really in a tone of ordinary argument, “you say it was only for you she was frightened. What frightened her, for you?”