“No, no. I know. I always know. Longer ago than you would believe you used to work for me. We are in the same whirl-pool, you and I. Our atoms must always be whirled together again. You can’t escape me, Beatrice Veronica.”
“Do you think I want to?” she asked.
But in daily life she clung to her secret like grim death. She would not have been burdened with V. Lydiat’s laurels for the world. The dishonesty of it! And yet one could never explain. Hopeless! Who would believe? And apart from that, she had a kind of growing certainty that V. Lydiat would enter upon his own one day. Not that she remembered him as any more than a vague dream influence; she did not, but yet the realization of a Presence was growing, and she herself developing daily.
There is not much space here to tell the wondrous sights she saw with V. Lydiat, and holding by his hand. That would be a book in itself—and a beautiful one. And though she could only remember them in drifts like a waft of far-off music on a breeze, it was incomparable food for the sub-conscious self, and strengthened every latent faculty of memory and experience. Beatrice Veronica promised to be a very remarkable woman if some day the inner and outer faculties should unite.
But what was to be the solvent? That, this story can only indicate faintly for the end is not yet.
She went out a little less into her small world of daily life—not shunning it certainly, but her inner life was so crowded, so blissful that the outer seemed insipid enough. Why figure at teas and bridge parties, and struggle with the boredom of mah jong when the veranda was waiting with the green way before it that led to the silence of the sea, and the lover beyond? For it had come to that—the lover. All joy summed up in that word, joy unmeasurable as the oceans of sunlight—a perfect union. She walked as one carefully bearing a brimmed cup,—not a drop, not a drop must spill,—so she carried herself a little stiffly as it might seem to the outer world which could not guess the reason.
People liked her—but she moved on her own orbit, and it only intersected theirs at certain well-defined points. Her soft abstracted air won but eluded;—it put an atmosphere of strangeness about her, of thoughts she could not share with anyone.
“She must have rather a lonely life of it!” they said. But she never had.
One day came a letter from Sidney Verrier, now Sidney Mourilyan, from her husband’s coffee plantation in the Shevaroy Hills in southern India. She wrote from the settlement of Yercaud— “Not a town,” she wrote, “but dear little scattered houses in the trees. We have even a club, think of it!—after the wilds where you and I have been!—and there are pleasant people, and Tony expects to do well with coffee here. I wish half the day that you could come. You would like it, B. V.— You would like it! And you would like my boy—two years old now, and a sheer delight. Not to mention my garden. The growth here! The heliotropes are almost trees. The jasmines have giant stars. The house is stormed with flowers—almost too sweet. Couldn’t you come? Don’t you hear the east calling? At all events you hear me calling, for I want you. And you must be having very idle lazy days, for I remember I never could imagine what you would find to do if you stopped travelling. Your whole soul was in that. It’s a cold country you’re in—frigid pines, and stark mountains and icy seas. Do come out into the sunshine again.”
She laid down the letter there and looked at the beloved pines almost glittering in the sunshine as it slid off their smooth needles. And idle?—her life, her wonderful secret life! Little indeed did Sidney know if she could write like that. She took up the letter again, smiling.