Their favorite walk home from the golf links led them through a churchyard, and here they often rested in the cool of the afternoon; not in the new part where monument and mound were obtrusively recent, but up the hill from these, where death was so ancient as to be touched with the grace of the antique. Here, in a pleasant gloom of oak shade, cypress and elm, they loitered among the drab stones that headed mounds worn down and overgrown with sweetbrier, wild rose, and matted grass; and here Mrs. Laithe sometimes joined them for the homeward stroll, walking too much, Ewing thought, like one who had risen from the forgotten multitude under foot. Yet, when he spoke of her health she always responded with her gay assurances, and seemed, indeed, to be more concerned about his welfare than her own. He had not been able to talk to her freely. There was so much about Teevan that he felt she would not understand. Besides, he could not speak to her about Teevan.
At the end of the first week he had written to Teevan to say that he must talk with him. The little man had replied from his favorite sea place, naming a day when he would be back in town.
The prospect depressed Ewing anew. It had been easy to lie on his back in a field, nettled by disgust with himself, and frame speeches of self-mastery. But reflection had brought him doubt. The speeches would have to be made, and yet, in a way, he was Teevan's property; Teevan had invested money in him. This added to his depression. And this was why the girl reported him to her sister as a youth joyful in odd moments of forgetting, but sunk in some black despair when he remembered; a young man she could not at all understand. And Mrs. Laithe, puzzling over his trouble, divining that Teevan would somehow be at the bottom of it, determined on a move to aid him, a move that would take her once more to Teevan himself. She had sought him the night after her talk with Sydenham, but the interview had come to nothing. Teevan had been so plausibly solicitous about Ewing's success that she had found herself unready to tax him with a knowledge of Ewing's identity, or with motives inimical to him. His excessive amiability, his air of unsuspecting sincerity, had disarmed her. But this time, she determined, there would be no more fencing. She would attack straightforwardly.
The day they left the girl lightly bade Ewing farewell with talk of meetings in town. He had not told her of a resolve formed the day before when they had ridden to a hill above the village from which they could see veritable mountains in the distance—his own delectable mountains they had seemed, calling to him. Instantly he had determined to go back to his own. Not in defeat, but for fresh courage. He would stay there working as he could, until Teevan was paid. Then the Rookery would know him again, and the men of the Monastery—know him going his own way.
He was meditating gloomily on his retreat as the train bore him back to town with Mrs. Laithe. And she, alive to the distress that showed in his face, forgot everything but him, the one she had helplessly and irrevocably taken for her own, half her entreating child, half her master, terrible and beloved. She watched his face from half-closed eyes, finding it unutterably sad, and, without her being able to withhold it, her mind constantly repeated the image of an embrace, to soothe and sustain him. Incessantly this unsubstantial enfoldment took place in her inner sense, like some wild drama among ocean-bed things, far below an unrippled surface. Over and over the phantom woman beat down his enemies, encircled him from harm, consoled him against her heart, cherished him like the dear walls of a home. And she could not halt this phantom play. Once she divided her arms and raised them a little, as one in a dream faintly acts his vision. Ewing thought she was drawing her chiffon boa about her, and he replaced it on her shoulders.
Floating about this obsession in her mind was the dismayed thought of Teevan. She was fixed on going to him for the truth, and this disturbed her like a coming battle. She was not used to the feeling of antagonism, she, with her gentle woman's life, but she felt an unknown energy welling up in her—the fierceness of the defender. She would have the truth from Teevan.
CHAPTER XXIV
EWING INTERRUPTS
ELEANOR Laithe started from a half sleep. She had begun to dream while still conscious of the library walls, the couch on which she lay, the curtains swelling in and out of the opened windows with a heated breeze of late afternoon, the rattle of a wagon through the street, and the shrilling of boys at a game.
She turned her face from the wall, fixed the pillows more easily under her head, and stared into the room, her eyes narrowing in calculation as she went lucidly back for the hundredth time since she had flung herself there, to check off the details of that half hour with the man who healed—or did not heal.