‘It’s not that I’m afraid about the child. But I’m a cautious man. And I’ve never held omniscience to be part of a physician’s equipment. She has had these chills before?’
‘Frequently, but never so badly.’
‘The nose and throat are affected,’ said the curving doctor. ‘She’s acutely susceptible to cold. Treacherous east winds about. Bad place, England, for a constitution like hers. You should take her to a warm climate: warm and dry.’
With a boyish air of having finished a necessary recital he raised his hat and began picking his way across the wilderness of paddock.
Sheila glanced at her friend’s face. Triumph danced in the eyes of Hypatia.
PART THE FOURTH
Evening of the Same Day
‘SLIP away while you can, and have a look at my Thought Forms,’ Mr. Bunnard had urged the agitated young man; and by politely acquiescing Stephen Redshawe’s son had condemned himself to suffer a two hours’ mystical monologue illustrated by coloured drawings. When they at last emerged from what the old gentleman termed, with accidental aptness, his den, the Egyptian dark had come, not at one stride yet swiftly, to envelop the house at Maadi.
But the darkness of this particular April evening was but a more exquisite light: day seen through a veil of mystery, purged of its glare. Moon shed her unearthly pallor over the piazza with its pattern in ochre and green, and silvered the leaves of the lebbek trees in the garden. The intense dark blue of the sky was numerously divided by the fine mesh of the mosquito netting that clung to the supporting white columns. When Rosemary left the piano and sat down in the deck-chair opposite Redshawe, only the incessant dry rattle of crickets remained to make the stillness musical. She came like cool rain; she seemed to bring with her a dewy grace that dispelled the languor wrought in him by the too-intoxicating syringa; and he reposed gratefully in the unmeasured comfort of her nearness.
Redshawe, dilettante in letters, groped in his mind for a phrase that should symbolize the baffling quality in her: a quality as indefinable as the fragrance of musk-roses. ‘Incarnate stillness’ hovered for his choosing; but the futility of his efforts becoming thereby so patent, he abandoned the search, quite reverently sighing. Stillness, silence, the very spirit of quietude, in her became personal. She had light brown hair and olive skin; she was perhaps twenty-five years old; but her unfathomable dark eyes gazed from an oval face absurdly angelic with the sublime gravity of a child. With Mrs. Bunnard rasping on one side of him and Mr. Bunnard chirping a high-pitched chorus part on the other, Redshawe strained his ears to catch Rosemary’s soft tones. In conversation she palpitated an innocent curiosity. She focussed those twin orbs of mystery upon his religious doubts; and not all the mature intelligence of her arguments could obscure for him the shining of her angel-infancy. That very phrase flashed on him while they talked, an echo from his reading, suggesting another, from the same source, that for a while almost satisfied his longing for an adequate symbol. ‘A white celestial thought.’ Yes: Rosemary herself was a white celestial thought.
‘The fundamental cause of reincarnation,’ said Mrs. Bunnard firmly, ‘is, as you know, the lust for sentient life. Once we have conquered that——’