Chapter Eleven.
The Objectionable Trask.
Now as I sat there, that still and radiant afternoon, in the sylvan wildness of our shaded resting-place, whose cool gloom contrasted well with the golden warmth of the sunlight beyond, I was rather more disposed for silence than speech. I was thinking, and the subject matter of my thoughts was all unalloyed with any misgiving of foreboding that should tarnish its brightness. I was realising Beryl’s presence, and all that it meant to me. There she was, within a couple of yards of me, and the mere consciousness of this was all-sufficing. I was contrasting, too, this wondrous change which had come into my life—such a joy of living, such a new awakening to its possibilities. It seemed I was hardly the same man. I who had hitherto gone through life in a neutral-tinted sort of way, content to exist from day to day among neutral-tinted surroundings, with, as I thought hitherto, a happy immunity from all violent interests or emotions. And now, by an almost magical wave of a wizard wand, I had been transported to this fair land, to sunlight from gloom, to a golden awakening from a drab slumbrous acquiescence in a bovine state of existence, which supplied the physical wants, leaving all others untouched. And the magic which had wrought this upheaval—
“Well? A penny for your thoughts.”
I turned to the speaker. It was perhaps as well that the child was with us, or I don’t know what I might have been led into saying, probably prematurely, and would thus have tumbled down my own bright castles in the air.
“He’s thinking of his pipe,” said Iris mischievously. “Brian always gets into a brown study too when he’s plunged in smoke. Beryl, I think we must make him put it out.”
“Don’t be a little barbarian, Iris,” I answered, knocking the ashes out of the offending implement. “The fact is, I was thinking of what a blessed instrument of Providence was the prow of the Kittiwake when it knocked my sculling boat to matchwood in mid-Channel and brought me here. That was all.”
“Oh yes. You were thinking you’d like to be back in that smoky old London of yours, and how slow we all are,” retorted Iris. “Trask’s always crowding London down our throats. I hate the very sound of its name. It must be a beastly hole. I always ask him why he doesn’t go back there if he’s so fond of it.”