“You must go? Is that it?” the chill in the air crept into her very soul.
“Not that I must go, but that I must not stay,” parried Bertram, skilfully implying unutterable things. Sooth to say, he was weary of troubadouring.
South ... South ... he on his lonely voyage to the sun; and she remaining to examine fish at the door ... colder drearier days ... Oliver coming back to scold her ... other lovers, two and two and two ... and romance, masked and cloaked, abandoning her for ever?...
“Non ti scordar di me!” he throbbed forth suddenly, in his passionate tenor. “Non ti scordar di me!”
And Aureole replied: “Ask me again, Troubadour, as you asked me once ... and perhaps—perhaps I will come with you.”
After her departure, Bertram still sat on the damp bench beneath the trees, gazing helplessly before him. He found himself pledged, he knew not how, and, ten days hence, he knew not why, to a journey South, he knew not where. He believed he had been guilty of describing, in vivid spirited narrative, some such adventure across the water; because—deuce take it! with the reputation of a troubadour, a traveller, a pedlar of songs, a lover of fair women, a comrade of lords and beggars alike, he could hardly leave acquiescence at a tame: “Yes. Let’s. How jolly,” when she proposed their hazardous plunge together into the unknown. Well, he had still, as result of a successful summer tour, some thirty odd pounds in his pocket, and a store of faithful attachment in his heart. As to their ultimate destiny, when love and the thirty pounds were exhausted,—that was a problem too deep for a mazed troubadour, sitting disconsolately beneath a dripping pine tree. Floating in the vague backwaters of his mind was the supposition that, at worst, he could always take Aureole to Miss Esther Worthing—his sister-in-law—and leave her there. After all, Esther had made Chavvy very welcome. Meanwhile ... Bertram’s inflammable heart had certainly landed him in some awkward situations of late; he didn’t know what women were coming to, when one willy-nilly married you, and another ran away with you! He wondered if it would ever be his lot to meet with a nice modest girl, content with a few kisses and endearments; a girl like his daughter Peter!
—“Lord! I wonder what Peter would say to this mess. When did I promise? What did I ask? I’m hanged if I can remember....”
Stuart came to the conclusion that it was no good plunging into this affair before it had reached its zenith. Just at present there was nothing to get at. It was best as rapidly as possible to hasten the ultimate climax, which he strongly believed would be a romantic elopement, and then, somehow, smash it!
So, in furtherance of these plans, he came to Aureole; and meekly, as though in atonement for his former surliness, placed his sailing-yacht at the disposal of herself and her visitors.