Hildegarde bent toward him, with wildly beating heart.
“We were just on the point of chartering our ship, when one evening—” He looked through the peat wall a thousand leagues.
“One evening—what?”
“I saw a face. A girl’s soft face, but it cut the cables of my ship and set her afloat—drifting, derelict, for all I cared. A little doll’s face. But it shut out everything else under the skies!”
Oh, Bella, Bella, was it yours—that face? “Go on,” breathed the girl at the door.
“When her people said she should never marry a man who might any day go off on one of these protracted voyages, I looked at the face, and I said I would never explore again.” The glazed eyes turned to Hildegarde, but it was the old bright vision they saw, not this newer, softer presence, with wet cheeks, by the door.
“I told my Russian to draw on me for half the funds, and to find another fellow-traveler. But she was too young to marry, they said. We must wait a year. I said I would wait. When the year was half gone, I was in London—because the face was there.” Still looking through the wall he groped for the cup. Hildegarde rose, and put it in his hands. Oh poor, poor hands! No need to turn shuddering away. They were softly wrapped from her sight in a mist of pitiful tears.
He gave her back the cup. “We had been to a skating party,” he said. Something grotesque conjured by the contrast of that light phrase wafted out of a butterfly world to fall in such a place at such an hour made for the unreality, not of far-off London, nor of parties where pretty ladies play at being in a world of ice—the conjuration merely lifted the dim hut and its wild occupant into the realm of the phantasmagoric. The girl saw all in a wavering dimness, shot dazzlingly with splinters of sunshine. But the man went on in that level tone: “I remember her saying it was the first party given in London on artificial ice—an absurd affair. But she said: ‘Wasn’t it nice of me to get you an invitation, too? It will seem quite like going to your horrid North Pole.’”
How plain Bella’s voice sounded in the room. That was why he was smiling. Bella could always bring that look into the eyes of men.