Miss Tresilyan rose instantly to greet the intruder (yes, that’s the right word) with her usual calm courtesy. Very few words had been exchanged for the last hour, but she was perfectly aware—what woman is not?—of the influence she had exercised over her listener. That consciousness had made her strangely happy. So, she certainly could have survived the chaplain’s absence. Royston Keene rose too, quite slowly. There are compounds, you know, that always remain soft and ductile in a certain temperature, but harden into stone at the first contact with the outer air. It was just so with him. Even as he moved, all gentle feelings were struck dead in his heart, and he stood up a harder man than ever, with no kinder emotion left than bitter anger at the interruption. He could not always 28 command his eyes, he knew; and, if he had not passed his hand quickly over his face just then, their expression might have thrilled through the new-comer disagreeably.
“Cecil, dearest,” Mrs. Danvers said, with rather an awkward assumption of being perfectly at her ease, “Mr. Fullarton was good enough to say he would come and read to us this evening, and explain some passages. I don’t know why I forgot to tell you. I meant to do so, but—” Her look finished the sentence. Royston, like the others, guessed what she meant, and you may guess how he thanked her.
Cecil colored with vexation. She was so anxious to prevent Mrs. Danvers from feeling dependent that she allowed her to take all sorts of liberties, and the amiable woman was not disposed to let the privilege fall into disuse. On the present occasion there was such an absurd incongruity of time and place that she might possibly have tried to evade the “exposition,” but she happened just then to meet Keene’s eye. The sarcasm there was not so carefully veiled as it usually was in her presence. Never yet was born Tresilyan who blenched from a challenge; so she answered at once to express “her sense of Mr. Fullarton’s kindness, and her regret that he had not come earlier in the evening.” If Royston had known how bitterly she despised herself for disingenuousness he would have been amply avenged.
Even while she was speaking he closed the piano very slowly and softly. It did not take him long to put on his impenetrable face, for when he turned round there was not a trace of anger left; the scarce suppressed taunt in Cecil’s last words moved him apparently no more than Mrs. Danvers’s glance of triumph.
“I owe you a thousand apologies,” he said, “for staying such an unwarrantable time, and quite as many thanks for the pleasantest two hours I have spent in Dorade. Don’t think I would detain you one moment from Mr. Fullarton and your devotional exercises. You know—no, you don’t know—the verse in the ballad:
‘Amundeville may be lord by day,
But the monk is lord by night;
Nor wine nor wassail would stir a vassal
To question that friar’s right.’”
He went away then without another word beyond the ordinary adieu. Royston had a way of repeating poetry peculiar to himself—rather monotonous, perhaps, but effective from the depth and volume of his voice. You gained in rhythm what you lost in rhyme. The sound seemed to linger in their ears after he had closed the door.