For the first time I forgot all the things that annoyed me in these people, and began to like them with pity in my heart.
Were these the claw-marks that the witch Africa put upon those who dwelt in her bosom? Were these the scars of her fierce embrace? Surely not. Surely a witch’s cypher would be finer, more subtle, something secret yet plain as the sunlight to those who could read. What was it? Where was it? I sought it in the faces round me, and after a time I believed I found it, in the nil desperandum air that each flaunted like a flag. It was Hope. God knows what they hoped for—each for something different perhaps—but that was what woke the jest upon their haggard lips and brightened their disillusioned eyes; that was the secret gift the witch put into their hearts, the masonic sign she wrote across their brows. Hope!
“Hope—the heroic form of despair!”
My heart strangely thrilled with the thought that if I had read aright the witch’s symbol then I, too, was of the initiated. I was one of them—if only for a time!
While I thought and felt these things, I was vaguely aware that they watched me in a curious, searching way, as if I had for each of them some hidden message I had not yet delivered. Perhaps it was that coming from “home” and being quite new to the country I had a different look to the rest of them, I cannot tell; but there it was—they jested and laughed and gossiped with each other, but always their eyes came back to me with that wistful, searching glance. And my clothes seemed to have an extraordinary charm for them. One would have supposed I had dropped from some wonderful land from which they were life exiles, and that the glamour of that fair, lost country hung about me still. I saw men’s eyes examining my shoes and the tucks in my gown; even the one great La France rose in my hat had some magic; and the women looked so wistful that I felt tears rising, and was miserably ashamed of myself for having put on my prettiest gown to annoy them. It seemed to me then that even if they had been cats, I had been the worst cat of all. Lord Gerald Deshon said to me boyishly:
“May I sit next to you, Miss Saurin? you smell so nice.” And when the old doctor picked up my glove which had fallen, he gave it a little stroke with his hand before handing it back, as though it were something alive.
The sun sank out of sight at last, disappearing in a billowy sea of wild-rose clouds. Golden day departed, and silver eventide was born.
Gold for silver! I cannot tell why those three little words stole through my mind and settled in my heart, as we walked home under a great canopy of purple haze full of coolness and the scent of evening fires: but it seemed to me suddenly that they were the most beautiful words ever written and the meaning of them more beautiful still.
The entire party conducted Mrs Valetta and me to our doors. The women seemed loth to lose sight of us, and the men talked feverishly of commandeering all the horses in the town for a moonlight picnic. Unexpectedly to me, somehow, Major Kinsella killed this delightful plan by saying quietly: “No, the horses are not available.” The crake in his voice had become suddenly most pronounced; perhaps that was why the men, who had been so keen for the picnic, accepted this dictum without a word, but I thought the fact rather curious. Mrs Brand and Mrs Skeffington-Smythe were the only people who did not abandon the idea immediately.
The latter petulantly demanded reasons and told him that he did not own all the horses in the town, any more than he owned all the hearts. Mrs Brand said sturdily: