“Oh dear, no! You must ask my brother for all those things.”
“You ought to have a collection of legends and traditions. You ought to have loves and murders and mysteries by the roomful. I shall be ashamed of you if you haven’t.”
“Oh Mr. Searle! We’ve always been a very well-behaved family,” she quite seriously pleaded. “Nothing out of the way has ever happened, I think.”
“Nothing out of the way? Oh that won’t do! We’ve managed better than that in America. Why I myself!”—and he looked at her ruefully enough, but enjoying too his idea that he might embody the social scandal or point to the darkest drama of the Searles. “Suppose I should turn out a better Searle than you—better than you nursed here in romance and extravagance? Come, don’t disappoint me. You’ve some history among you all, you’ve some poetry, you’ve some accumulation of legend. I’ve been famished all my days for these things. Don’t you understand? Ah you can’t understand! Tell me,” he rambled on, “something tremendous. When I think of what must have happened here; of the lovers who must have strolled on this terrace and wandered under the beeches, of all the figures and passions and purposes that must have haunted these walls! When I think of the births and deaths, the joys and sufferings, the young hopes and the old regrets, the rich experience of life—!” He faltered a moment with the increase of his agitation. His humour of dismay at a threat of the commonplace in the history he felt about him had turned to a deeper reaction. I began to fear however that he was really losing his head. He went on with a wilder play. “To see it all called up there before me, if the Devil alone could do it I’d make a bargain with the Devil! Ah Miss Searle,” he cried, “I’m a most unhappy man!”
“Oh dear, oh dear!” she almost wailed while I turned half away.
“Look at that window, that dear little window!” I turned back to see him point to a small protruding oriel, above us, relieved against the purple brickwork, framed in chiselled stone and curtained with ivy.
“It’s my little room,” she said.
“Of course it’s a woman’s room. Think of all the dear faces—all of them so mild and yet so proud—that have looked out of that lattice, and of all the old-time women’s lives whose principal view of the world has been this quiet park! Every one of them was a cousin of mine. And you, dear lady, you’re one of them yet.” With which he marched toward her and took her large white hand. She surrendered it, blushing to her eyes and pressing her other hand to her breast. “You’re a woman of the past. You’re nobly simple. It has been a romance to see you. It doesn’t matter what I say to you. You didn’t know me yesterday, you’ll not know me to-morrow. Let me to-day do a mad sweet thing. Let me imagine in you the spirit of all the dead women who have trod the terrace-flags that lie here like sepulchral tablets in the pavement of a church. Let me say I delight in you!”—he raised her hand to his lips. She gently withdrew it and for a moment averted her face. Meeting her eyes the next instant I saw the tears had come. The Sleeping Beauty was awake.
There followed an embarrassed pause. An issue was suddenly presented by the appearance of the butler bearing a letter. “A telegram, Miss,” he announced.
“Oh what shall I do?” cried Miss Searle. “I can’t open a telegram. Cousin, help me.”