It seemed to the happy girl on this unique April afternoon, while the sliding hours, full of the city’s monotonous murmur, sank unnoticed away, and the gardeners planted their pansies and raked lethargically in the scented mould, as though nothing that could ever happen to her afterwards, could outweigh what she felt then, or matter so very greatly in the final reckoning. With every pulse of her young body she uttered her litany of gratitude. “Ite; missa est” her heart cried—“It is enough.”
As they walked home afterwards, hand in hand through the dusk of the friendly park, she made him tell her, detail by detail, every least incident of those first days of their encountering. And Adrian Sorio, catching the spirit of that exquisite entreaty, grew voluble even beyond his wont.
He told her how, in the confusion of his mind, when it was first revealed to him that the devastation he was suffering from did not deny him the sweet sting of “what men call love,” he found it impossible to face with any definite resolution the problem of his doubtful future. He had recognised that in a week or so every penny he possessed would be gone; yet it was impossible—and his new emotion did not, he confessed, alter this in the least—to make any move to secure employment.
A kind of misanthropic timidity, so he explained to her, made the least thought of finding what is popularly known as “work” eminently repellant to him; yet it was obvious that work must be found, unless he wished, simply and quietly, to end the affair by starvation.
This, as things went then, he told her, giving her hand a final pressure as they emerged into the lighted streets, he did not at all urgently want—though in the first days of his return from America he had pondered more than once on the question of an easy and agreeable exit. It was as they settled down side by side,—her hat no longer held languidly in her gloveless hand,—to their long and discreet walk home through the crowded thoroughfares, that she was first startled by hearing the name “Rodmoor” from his lips. How amazing a coincidence! What a miraculous gift of the gods!
Fate was indeed sweeping her away on a full tide.
It seemed like a thing in some old fantastic romance. Could it be possible even before she had time to contemplate her separation from him that she should learn that they were not to separate at all!
Rachel Doorm was indeed a witch—was indeed working things out for her favourite with the power of a sorceress. She kept back her natural cry of delight, “But that is where we are going,” and let him, all unconscious, as it seemed, of the effect of his words, unravel in his own way the thread of his story.
It was about a certain Baltazar Stork she found he was telling her when her startled thoughts, like a flock of disturbed pigeons, alighted once more on the field of his discourse. Baltazar, it appeared, was an old friend of Sorio’s and had written to offer him a sort of indefinite hospitality in his village on the North Sea. The name of this place—had she ever heard of Rodmoor?—had repeated itself very strangely in his mind ever since he first made it out in his friend’s abominable hand.
At that point in their walk, under the glare of a great provision shop, she suddenly became conscious that he was watching her with laughing excitement. “You know!” she cried, “you know!” And it was with difficulty that he persuaded her to let him tell her how he knew, in his own elaborate manner.