“This air is like a warm bath. I must not keep you long, anyhow.”
“Oh, I haven’t got a thing to do,” she precipitately assured him. “Come, we’ll walk up and down the path,–hadn’t we better?–so as not to be standing still. Go ahead, now; tell me all about yourself. How do you feel? Have you got entirely rid of your cough? And the stitch in your side?”
He would only speak to answer, she soon found; the moment she stopped talking silence fell. Had he nothing to say to her, then? Or did he find it difficult somehow to talk? She was so determined to make the atmosphere cozy, friendly, happy–make the atmosphere as it had used to be between them–so determined, that she jabbered on like a magpie, like a mill, about this, that, and the other, sprinkling in little jokes in her own manner, and little stories in her own taste, accompanied by her rich–on this occasion slightly nervous gurgle.
“Aurora dear,” he said at last, with an effect of mournful patience as much as of protest, “what makes you? I am here to beg your forgiveness, and you put me off with what Mrs. Moriarty said to Mrs. O’Flynn. Do you call it kind?”
A knot tied itself in Aurora’s throat, which she could not loosen so as to go on. If she had tried to speak she would have betrayed the fact that those simple words had, like a pump, fetched the tears up from her heart into her throat. He had his chance now to do all the talking.
“Couldn’t we sit down somewhere for a minute? Should you mind?” His gesture vaguely designated the 340green inclosure, where the stone table stood, pale among the dark laurels.
But when they were seated, he only pressed his hands into his eye-sockets and kept them there.
“I am ridiculous!” he muttered and shook himself straight. After an ineffectual, suffocated attempt to begin, “I am ridiculous!” he said again, and without further concession to weakness started in: “I ought to have written you, Aurora. But I had seemed to be so unfortunate in writing I did not dare to try it again. Heaven knows what I wrote. I don’t; but it must have been a prodigy of caddishness to offend you so deeply. It doesn’t do much good to say I am sorry.”
“Your letter was all right,” broke in Aurora. “I only didn’t understand at first. Afterwards I did. I tell you, that letter was all right.”
“It was written in a mood–a perplexity, a despair, you have no means of understanding, dear Aurora. When your answer showed me what I had done, I could have cut my throat, but I could not have come to tell you I was not the monster of ingratitude I appeared to be. Not that a man can’t get out of bed, if there is reason enough, and take himself somehow where he wants to be, but because of a sick man’s unreasonable nerves, which can start him raving and make him a thing to laugh at. I had the common sense, thank Heaven! to see that I must wait. Then, as the days passed, it all quieted down. Vincent was with me, a tranquilizing neighborhood.