“All my life.”
So, for a time, they faced each other, and something in Chivers made Yule at last speak. “Then I won’t give you up!”
“Indeed, sir, I hope you won’t give up anything.”
The Captain took up his hat. “It remains to be seen.” He looked over the place again; his eyes wandered to the open door. “Is that the garden?”
“It was!”—and the old man’s sigh was like the creak of the wheel of time. “Shall I show you how it used to be?”
“It’s just as it is, alas, that I happen to require it!” Captain Yule reached the door and stood looking beyond. “Don’t come,” he then said; “I want to think.” With which he walked out.
Chivers, left alone, appeared to wonder at it, and his wonder, like that of most old people, lay near his lips. “What does he want, poor dear, to think about?” This speculation, however, was immediately checked by a high, clear voice that preceded the appearance on the stairs, before she had reached the middlemost landing, of the wonderful figure of a lady, a lady who, with the almost trumpeted cheer of her peremptory but friendly call—“Housekeeper, Butler, old Family Servant!”—fairly waked the sleeping echoes. Chivers gazed up at her in quick remembrance, half dismayed, half dazzled, of a duty neglected. She appeared now; she shone at him out of the upper dusk; reaching the middle, she had begun to descend, with beautiful laughter and rustling garments; and though she was alone she gave him the sense of coming in a crowd and with music. “Oh, I should have told him of her!”
III
She was indeed an apparition, a presence requiring announcement and explanation just in the degree in which it seemed to show itself in a relation quite of its own to all social preliminaries. It evidently either assumed them to be already over or wished to forestall them altogether; what was clear at any rate was that it allowed them scant existence. She was young, tall, radiant, lovely, and dressed in a manner determined at once, obviously, by the fact and by the humour of her journey—it might have proclaimed her so a pilgrim or so set her up as a priestess. Most journeys, for this lady, at all events, were clearly a brush of Paris. “Did you think I had got snapped down in an old box like that poor girl—what’s her name? the one who was poking round too—in the celebrated poem? You dear, delightful man, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you, mum——?”