The still summer beauty of the afternoon added to my wretchedness. All round and before me there was luxury and joyousness and sport. The very sea was in a playful mood, lapping at my feet like a tamed, affectionate leviathan, and curling round the ledges in the offing with delicate lace-like spouts of spume. Sea-gulls swooped and hovered with hoarse cries and a lovely effect of silvery wings. Here and there was a sail on the blue, or the smoke of a steamer or a war-ship. Eastons Point, some two or three miles away, was a long, burnished line of ripening wheat. To right and to left of me were broken crags, red-yellow, red-brown, red-green, where lovers and happy groups could perch or nestle carelessly, thrusting trouble for the moment to a distance. I had to bring my trouble with me. If it had not been for trouble I shouldn't have been there. There wasn't a soul in the world who would fight to take my part but Hugh, and I was, in all my primary instincts, a clinging, parasitic thing that hated to stand alone.
There was nothing for it then but crying, and I did that to the best of my ability; not loudly, of course, or vulgarly, but gently and sentimentally, with an immense pity for myself. I cried for what had happened that day and for what had happened yesterday. I cried for things long past, which I had omitted to cry for at the time. When I had finished with these I went further back to dig up other ignominies, and I cried for them. I cried for my father and mother and my orphaned condition; I cried for the way in which my father—who was a good, kind man, du reste—had lived on his principal, and left me with scarcely a penny to my name; I cried for my various disappointments in love, and for the girl friends who had predeceased me. I massed all these motives together and cried for them in bulk. I cried for Hugh and the brilliant future we should have on the money he would make. I cried for Larry Strangways and the loneliness his absence would entail on me. I cried for the future as well as for the past and if I could have thought of a future beyond the future I should have cried for that. It was delicious and sad and consoling all at once; and when I had no more tears I felt almost as if Hugh's strong arm had been about me, and I was comforted.
I was just wiping my eyes and wondering whether at the moment of going homeward my nose would be too red, when I heard a quiet step. I thought I must be mistaken. It was so unlikely that any one would be there at this hour of the day—the servants generally came down at night—that for a minute I didn't turn. It was the uncomfortable sense that some one was behind me that made me look back at last, when I caught the flutter of lace and the shimmer of pale-rose taffeta. Mrs. Brokenshire had worn lace and pale-rose taffeta at the lunch.
Fear and amazement wrestled in my soul together. Struggling to my feet, I turned round as slowly as I could.
"Don't get up," she said in a sweet, quiet voice. "I'll come and sit down beside you, if I may." She had already seated herself on a low flat rock as she said, "I saw you were crying, so I waited."
I am not usually at a loss for words, but I was then. I stuttered and stammered and babbled, without being able to say anything articulate. Indeed, I had nothing articulate to say. The mind had suspended its action.
My impressions were all subconscious, but registered exactly. She was the most exquisite production I had ever seen in human guise. Her perfection was that of some lovely little bird in which no color fails to shade harmoniously into some other color, in which no single feather is out of place. The word I used of her was soignée—that which is smoothed and curled and polished and caressed till there is not an eyelash which hasn't received its measure of attention. I don't mean that she was artificial, or that her effects were too thought out. She was no more artificial than a highly cultivated flower is artificial, or a many-faceted diamond, or a King Charles spaniel, or anything else that is carefully bred or cut or shaped. She was the work of some specialist in beauty, who had no aim in view but to give to the world the loveliest thing possible.
When I had mastered my confusion sufficiently I sat down with the words, rather lamely spoken:
"I didn't know any one was here. I hope I haven't kept you standing long."
"No; but I was watching you. I came down only a few minutes after you did. You see, I was afraid—when we came away from Mrs. Rossiter's—that you might be unhappy."