“Oh, where are they?” she cried. “Why don’t they come back? He can’t make the lightning just sit on his finger like the thrush. Shall we go to meet them? Oh, go to meet them, Mr. Dundas!”
“And leave you alone?” he asked.
Madge’s wits had thoroughly deserted her.
“No, don’t do that,” she cried. “Let’s go indoors, and pull down the blinds and do something. What was that game you suggested once, that you should go out of the room while I thought of something, and that then you should come back and try to guess it. Anything, draughts, chess, surely there is something.”
Evelyn felt strangely master of himself. At least, he knew so well what was master of him that it came to the same thing. He had certainty anyhow on his side.
“Yes, let us come indoors,” he said. “I know my way about the house. There is a room on the other side; we shall see less of it there; I hate thunder too. But you need have no earthly anxiety about Lady Ellington. They may get wet, but that is all. There then, stop yours ears; you will hear it less.”
But he had hardly time to get the words out before the reverberation came. Again clearly, business was meant, immediate business too; the thunder followed nervously close on the flash. And at that Madge fairly ran into the house, stumbling through the darkness in the little narrow hall, and nearly falling over the bag that Evelyn had left there. True though it was that she disliked thunder, she did not dislike it to this point of utterly losing her head in a storm. But, just as her nerves were physically upset, so, too, her whole mind and being was troubled and storm-tossed by this unexpected meeting with Evelyn, and the two disorderments reacted and played upon one another. Had there been no thunderstorm she would have faced Evelyn’s appearance with greater equanimity; had he not appeared she would have minded the thunderstorm less. But she braced herself with a great effort, determined not to lose control completely over herself. And the effort demanded a loan from heroism—physical fear, the fear that weakens the knees and makes the hands cold, is hard enough in itself to fight against, but to fight not only against it but against a moral fear, too, demands a thrice braver front.
She, too, remembered in their tour over the house the room of which Evelyn had spoken. It looked out, as he said, in the other direction, and she would, at any rate, not see here the swift uprush of the storm. It was very dark, not only from the portentous sootiness of the sky, but because the big box hedge stood scarcely a dozen yards from the window. Here Evelyn followed her, and, striking a match, lit a couple of candles. He also had by now got a firmer hand over himself, but at the sight of Madge sitting there, a sort of vision of desolateness, his need for her, the need too that she at this moment had for comfort, almost mastered him, and his voice was not wholly steady.
“There, you’ll be better here,” he said, “and candles are always reassuring, are they not? You will laugh at me, but I assure you that if I am alone in a storm I turn on all the electric light, shut the shutters, and ransack the house for candles and lamps. Then I feel secure.”
Madge laughed rather dismally.