“Am I mad?” he demanded of himself outside the door with some amazement, then characteristically shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the thought.
He hated Nina’s weeping, and had chosen the first means of consoling her which had occurred to him.
It was not Morris’s way to envisage the consequence of his own impulses until actually confronted by them, and in the urgencies of departure both he and Nina found a salving for many things.
If, in the months that ensued, neither Morris nor Nina Severing found that a momentary common impulse was to prove an enduring link between them, the knowledge weighed lightly on Morris, to whom no enduring link that humanity can forge would ever equal the glamour of a new enthusiasm.
To Nina, the fundamental resemblance between them would hold out eternal lures, and promises of a new understanding. That these should fail as often as they should renew themselves, would never succeed in permanently disturbing Mrs. Severing’s treasured conception of her own motherhood.
XXIX
LUDOVIC ARGENT sometimes thought that the understanding of Mrs. Tregaskis seemed hardest of all to Rosamund. Had she anything at all left of her very own?
He found himself wondering.
He went across the valley on many days, and Mrs. Tregaskis always welcomed him with eager cordiality. It was only after a time that Ludovic admitted to himself that he sought another welcome than hers with an insistence which surprised him vaguely. One day in the autumn his halting step came slowly up the narrow garden path where Bertha Tregaskis, in the short, dark tweed of determinedly unconventional widowhood, was crouching over a border. She raised herself briskly enough at the sound of his stick upon the gravel.
“Splendid!” she cried exuberantly, showing a pair of earthy palms. “I can’t shake hands—too grubby. But you’ll help me tie up these poor dear things, won’t you?”