“Yes, and I came to find you.” She blurted out the truth like an unsophisticated girl.
Was it moonlight, the magic of the night, the throbbing song of the nightingale that made him seem as young as she?—No. What then? And as he looked into the eyes of that girl and caught his breath at her disturbing femininity and disordering sense of sex and the sublime unself-consciousness of a child, without challenge and without coquetry, he knew that it was something to be summed up by the words “the rustle of silk,” which epitomized beauty and softness and scent, laughter, filmy things and love. And he thanked his gods that not even Feo and the wear and tear of politics had left him out of youth.
And he thanked her for coming to break his loneliness and led her through the sleeping flowers, and those figures which had died again since life had come amongst them, to the arbor made of yews where he had slept that afternoon. And there, high above the sweeping valley among whose villages little lights were blinking like far-off fireflies, they sat and talked and talked, at first like boy and girl, meeting after separation, telling everything but nothing, shirking the truth to save it for a time, and then, presently, with no lights left below and all the earth asleep, like man and woman, reading the truth in eyes that made no effort to disguise it; telling the truth, in broken words; learning the truth from heart that beat to heart until the moon had done her duty and stars had faded out and up over the ridge of hills, reluctantly, a new day came.
[PART VII]
I
Fallaray was to meet Lola at the gate in the wall at four o’clock. He wanted to show her how the vale looked in the light of the afternoon sun. But it was a long time to wait because, instead of going to bed after he had taken Lola to Lady Cheyne’s cottage at the moment when a line in the sky behind it had been rubbed by a great white thumb, he had walked up and down the terrace and watched the dawn push the night away and break upon him with a message of freedom.
He paced up and down while the soft blur of the valley came out into the clear detail of corn fields, rolling acres of grass, sheep dotted, a long white ribbon of road twisting among villages, each one marked by the delicate spire of an old church, spinneys of young trees and clumps of old ones, gnarled and twisted and sometimes lonely, standing like the sentinels that receive “the secret whispers of each other’s watch.”
He stood up to the new day honestly and without shame. Like a man who suddenly breaks away from a Brotherhood with whose creeds he has found himself no longer in sympathy, he rejoiced in his release. Lola had come to him at the moment when he was lying on his oars at the entrance to a backwater. He had been in the main river too long, pulling his arms out against the stream. He was tired. It was utterly beyond argument that he had failed. He had nothing in him of the stuff that goes to the making of a pushing politician. He detested and despised the whole unholy game of politics. In addition, he had come to the dangerous age in the life of a man, especially the ascetic man. He was forty. He had never allowed himself to listen to the rustle of silk. He had kept his eyes doggedly on what he had conceived to be his job, wifeless. And when Lola came, the magnet of her sex drew him not only without a struggle but with an insatiable hunger into the side of life against which Feo had slammed the door, leaving him stultified and disgusted. He had welcomed in this girl what he now regarded as the unmet spirit of his adolescence, and he fell to her as only such a man can fall. The fact that she loved him and had told him of her love with the astounding simplicity of a child gave the whole thing a beauty, a depth and permanence that made him regard the future with wonder and delight, though not yet with any definite plan. At present this volte face was too astonishing, too new in its happening, to be dissected and balanced up. For a few days at least he wanted irresponsibility, for a change. He wanted, like a man wrecked on the shore of Eden, to explore into beauty and dally, unseen, with love. The time was not yet for a decision as to which way he would go, when, as was certain, some one would discover the wreckage and send out a rescue party. He had promised himself a holiday and all the more now he would insist upon its enjoyment. Whether at the end of it he would refuse ever to go back into the main stream, or go back and take Lola with him, were questions that he was not yet formulating in his mind. But as to one thing he was certain, even then. Lola was his; she had brought back his youth like a miracle, and he would never let her out of his sight.
He breakfasted in his library, ignoring the papers. Their daily story of chaos made more chaotic by the lamentable blundering of fools and knaves, seemed to deal with a world out of which he had dropped, hanging to a parachute. He went smiling through the morning, watching the clock with an impatience that was itself a pleasure. He felt the strange exhilaration of having lived his future with all his past to spend, of returning as a student to a school in which he had performed the duties of a Master. And there were times when he drew up short and sent out a great boyish laugh that echoed through his house, at the paradox of it all. And once, but only once, he stood outside himself and saw that he was placing his usefulness upon the altar of passion. And before he leaped back into his skin and while yet he retained his sanity and cold logic, he saw that he loved Lola for her golden hair and wide-apart eyes, her red lips and tingling hand, her young sweet body,—but not her soul, not the intangible thing in a woman that keeps a man’s love when passion passes. But to this he said, “I am young again. I have the need and the right. When I have had time to find her soul, she shall have my quiet love.”
And finally, at three o’clock, with an hour still to drive away, he went down to the gate in the wall, eager and insatiable to wait for the rustle of silk.