He owned, quite apart from the large house in Hamilton Terrace where his official family life was spent, a set of bachelor chambers off Jermyn Street, and here Kathleen and he often passed their evenings. The furniture of these rooms was amusing to her critical faculty: perfect unobtrusive taste of an English gentleman; every article expensive with the careless air of costing next to nothing; yet here and there, where Napier's secret preferences had willy-nilly broken through his layer of acquired good form, were spurts of gaudy colour: a bead-embroidered cushion ... scarlet and gold piano-cover he had draped with much pride and festooned with a large tinsel rose ... a couple of gold-framed pictures of very pink-and-white nudes with plenty of hair ... things that cost next to nothing with a shrieking air of being expensive.
But Kathleen loved just those awful pictures and the tinsel rose, with the same tenderness she had once poured on to Gareth's smaller failings—before these failings had become her daily companions.
And it was good to lie on the couch with her head on the satin cushion—his cushion—while he sang to her ... jumble of opera, and crooning lullaby, and those husky bitter-sweet melodies that never sound quite human, but rather as the plaint of love itself, or wail of exile....
Then he would stop singing, and laugh, and soothe her with his kisses ... cuddle her as if she were a silly child, and pet her ... who had ever before shown the temerity to pet Kathleen? And how she worshipped him for it ... worshipped his feline caresses.
On a certain Sunday of mid-October, Napier took her for a day's motoring in the country lanes of Surrey. He was in excellent humour, in anticipation of a trip to Spain, where he was entered for the great International Automobile Race to be held within a fortnight. Napier had little doubt but that he would come out victor in the contest; and Kathleen, noting his marvellous handling of the car, adjustment so swift and delicate as to be well-nigh instinctive to every emergency of road and traffic, Kathleen shared his confidence, and exulted in the man who was master of his job. For the time being, in the exhilaration of their rush out of London into a world that was bright and ruddy and clear-edged, nature's last abundant fling of colour and warmth before the closing-in, she succeeded in forgetting his impending departure. They lunched sumptuously at Dorking, and then leapt on again, eating up the curl of the road with incredible speed.... Napier's golden eyes were fixed straight ahead of him—his mouth smiled—and he hummed a tune that throbbed with a queer barbaric dissonance....
"What is it?" asked Kathleen, fascinated.
"Moorish. I picked it up when I was touring in Spain. Did I ever tell you, Kathleen, that I'd been a chauffeur for five months?"
And he related, with infinite zest at recollection, how some people had wished to hire from him a car and chauffeur for an exhaustive trip through Spain, during his first struggling years in the motor business; all the men in his service already booked, he yet had not dared to refuse so advantageous an offer, and had boldly undertaken the job himself, with all its attendant duties of guide and bottle-washer—"And Lordy! how that country twisted itself round the very core of my heart!"
So thus was explained his sudden thrilling inflection when, during their first conversation at Ilfracombe, he had spoken of Granada, and the hill called The Last Sigh of the Moor.... "I'd like to stand with you just there, and look down on the Alhambra...."
Why not, then? Why not? Throughout the rest of the afternoon she was strung to vibrant expectation of his: "Come with me, Kathleen!"...