“Li Choo! Li Choo!” she gasped, reprovingly, for it was as though the Ark of the Covenant had been burgled. But Li Choo, clucking, slip-slopped out of the room and down the stairs as happy as an Oriental soul could be. What was in the far recesses of that soul, where these two young people were concerned, must remain unrevealed; but Li Choo and the halfbreed woman in their own language—which was almost without words—clucked and grunted their understanding.
Left alone again, Louise found herself seated with only the table between herself and Orlando, pouring him tea and offering him white frosted cake like that dispensed at weddings; while Orlando chuckled his thanks and thought what a wonderful thing it was that a bullet in a man’s side could bring the unexpected to pass and the heart’s desire of a man within the touch of his fingers.
Their conversation was like that of two children. She talked of her bird Richard, which she had sent to him every morning that it might sing to him; of her black cat Nigger, which sat on his lap for many an hour of the day; of the dog Jumbo, which said its prayers for him to get well, for a piece of sugar-that was a trick Louise had taught it long ago. Orlando talked of his horses and of his mother—who, he declared, was the most unselfish person on the whole continent; how she only thought of him, and spent her money for him, and gave to him, never thinking of herself at all.
“She has the youngest heart of anyone in the world,” said Orlando.
Louise did not even smile at that. No one with a heart that was not infantile could dress and talk as Orlando’s mother dressed and talked; and so Louise said softly: “I am sure her heart is a thousand years younger than mine—or younger than mine was.” And then she blushed, and Orlando blushed, for he understood what was in her mind—that until they two had met, she was, as the Young Doctor said, a victim to senile decay.
That was the nearest they had come as yet to saying anything which, being translated, as it were, through several languages, could mean love-making. Their love-making had only been by an inflection of the voice, by a soft abstraction, by a tuning of their spirits to each other. They were indeed like two children; and yet Li Choo was right when, in his dark soul, he conceived them to be lovers, and thought they would do what lovers do—hold hands and kiss and whisper, with never an end to a sentence, never a beginning.
It was not that these things were impossible to them. It was not that their beating pulses, and the throbbing in them, was not the ancient passion which has overturned an empire, or made a little spot of earth as dear as Heaven above. It was that these were forbidden things, and Louise and Orlando accepted that they were forbidden.
How long would this position last? What would the future bring? This was only the fluttering approach of two natures, from everlasting distances. The girl had been roused out of sleep; from her understanding the curtains had been flung back so that she might see. How long would it last, this simple, unsoiled story of two lives?
Orlando reached out his hand to put his cup back upon the tray. As her own hand was extended to take it, her fingers touched his. Then her face flushed, and a warm cloud seemed to bedim her eyes. There flashed into her mind the deep, overwhelming fact that for three long years a rough, heavy hand had held her captive by day, by night, in a pitiless ownership. She got to her feet suddenly; her breath came quickly, and she turned towards the door as though she meant to go.
At that instant Li Choo slid softly into the room, caught up the tray, poised it on his three fingers over his head and said: “Old Mazaline, he come. Be queeck!”