“She has no one but me to remember!” he heard his own child voice saying fiercely. Good Lord, it was as if it had been yesterday. He actually gulped something down in his throat.
“You haven’t rested much,” he said aloud. “There’s a conservatory with marble seats and corners and a fountain going. Will you let me take you there when we stop dancing? I want to apologize to you.”
The eyelashes lifted themselves and made round her eyes the big soft shadow of which Sara Studleigh had spoken. A strong and healthy valvular organ in his breast lifted itself curiously at the same time.
“To apologize?”
Was he speaking to her almost as if she were still four or five? It was to the helplessness of those years he was about to explain—and yet he did not feel as though he were still eight.
“I want to tell you why I never came back to the garden. It was a broken promise, wasn’t it?”
The music had not ceased, but they stopped dancing.
“Will you come?” he said and she went with him like a child—just as she had followed in her babyhood. It seemed only natural to do what he asked.
The conservatory was like an inner Paradise now. The tropically scented warmth—the tiers on tiers of bloom above bloom—the softened swing of music—the splash of the fountain on water and leaves. Their plane had lifted itself too. They could hear the splashing water and sometimes feel it in the corner seat of marble he took her to. A crystal drop fell on her hand when she sat down. The blue of his eyes was vaguely troubled and he spoke as if he were not certain of himself.
“I was wakened up in what seemed to me the middle of the night,” he said, as if indeed the thing had happened only the day before. “My mother was obliged to go back suddenly to Scotland. I was only a little chap, but it nearly finished me. Parents and guardians don’t understand how gigantic such a thing can be. I had promised you—we had promised each other—hadn’t we?”