“You mean, when summer is over, you will go to your South?”
(South, where all Troubadours live!)
And he, unheeding that Thatch Lane lay on the London and North-Western Railway, gave careless acquiescence. “I never stop long in any one place. We are birds of passage, Lady Auburn-hair, and when summer is over we will sing our songs in other lands.”
We? Our?—so what had been to her a thrilling pastime, he, deluded Troubadour, had actually meant? He had been building dreams of continuing their golden idyll in other lands? Aureole replied, in curiously vibrant tones:
“Once—I struck you—for suggesting—less than that.”
Bertram, still humming, could not remember what was the direful suggestion he had just inadvertently let fall; but supposing it to have been for a caress, as were usually his demands, he merely stated with a mirthless laugh—not caring to risk again the sting of Aureole’s little fingers:
“Then I must continue to exist without,—somehow,” added in a lower tone of pain.
Aureole had since three years been striving to teach Oliver this language, which came so naturally to the man beside her. To “work up a scene” with her husband had held as much—or as little—intoxication, as going to a ball, in a blouse and skirt, at eleven o’clock of a November morning. Aureole had an insatiable greed for ‘powerful’ scenes; she took dalliance seriously, inasmuch as she always saw herself as a coquette with a heart of stone, scratching at hearts of flesh to see how they bled. “I’m a beast!” she that night adjured her image in the looking-glass—since without a looking-glass impassioned monologues sound never very convincing. “Oh, I am a beast. I don’t care a damn for him, and he thinks I do care; he thinks I’m—coming.” During the month of September, the vision of her Troubadour, a lonely swallow to the South, became almost too poignant to be born.
Summer was dropping her days as faintly and imperceptibly as the first faintly yellowing leaves from the trees. A sense of depression, of the closing-down of the year, drifted over the Farme. Some of the visitors were leaving; as entities they did not matter; but as a symbol of evanescence, their departure affected Aureole with profound melancholy. The Troubadour Quartette sang no more of an evening in the Pavilion Gardens. Bertram rented a room in the town, and lingered on; but at any moment, she felt, the call of the South might peal too clearly for him; and then, with or without her, he too would depart.
With or without her.