“We are all going away together? You will really rest?”
“All going away. Yes; I will rest.” Still she did not look at him, but around at the room. “I shall never see Wyndwards again.”
“Forget it, Tony, and all it’s meant. That’s what I am going to do. I am to travel with you?”
She hesitated; then, “Of course. You and I and Cicely,” she said.
“And I may see you in London? You’ll take a day or two there before going on?”
“A day or two, perhaps. But you must not try to see me, Bevis dear.” He had risen, still keeping her hand as he went with her to the door, still feeling himself the bereft and terrified child who seeks pretexts so that its mother shall not leave it. And he thought, as they went so together, that their lives were strangely overturned since this could be; for until now Tony had been his child. It had been he who had sustained and comforted Tony.
“Why do you go?” he repeated. “You can rest with me here: not saying anything; only being quiet, together.”
“No, Bevis dear; no.” She shook her head slowly, and her face was turned away from him. “We must not be together now.”
He knew that it was what she must say. He knew the terror in her heart. He saw Malcolm, mourning, unappeased, between them. Yet, summoning his will, summoning the claim of life against that detested apparition, expressing, also, the sickness of his heart as he saw his devastated future, “You mustn’t make me a lonely curlew, too,” he said.
He was sorry for the words as soon as he had uttered them. It was a different terror they struck from her sunken face. She stood for a moment and looked at him and he remembered how she had looked the other day—oh! how long ago it seemed—when he had frightened her by saying he might get over her. But it was not his child who looked at him now. “I have broken your heart! I have broken your heart, too!” she said.