They stood trembling before him, white in the face, like petitioners. But he, weary and thinking of his papers, was seized with a stubborn unwillingness, though he was seldom able to refuse his wife anything.
“No, Léonie,” he said, firmly. “And you must never promise things of which you’re not certain.”
He turned away, went round the screen and sat down to his work.
They looked at each other, the mother and the step-son. Slowly, aimlessly, they moved away, to the front-verandah, where a moist, dripping darkness drifted between the stately pillars. They saw a white form coming through the swamped garden. They started, for they were now afraid of everything, thinking at the sight of every figure of the chastisement that would overtake them like some strange thing, if they remained in the paternal house which they had covered with shame. But, when they looked more closely, they saw that it was Doddie. She had come home; she said, trembling, that she had been at Eva Eldersma’s. Actually she had been walking with Addie de Luce; and they had sheltered from the rain in the compound. She was very pale, she was trembling; but Léonie and Theo did not notice it in the dark verandah, even as she herself did not see that her step-mother and Theo were pale. She was trembling like that because in the garden—Addie had brought her to the gate—stones had been thrown at her. It must have been some impudent Javanese, who hated her father and his house and his household; but, in the dark verandah, where she saw her step-mother and her brother sitting side by side in silence, as though in despair, she suddenly felt, she did not know why, that it was not an impudent Javanese....
She sat down by them, silently. They looked out at the damp, dark garden, over which the spacious night was hovering as on the wings of a gigantic bat. And, in the mute melancholy which drifted like a grey twilight between the tall white pillars, all three of them—Doddie singly, but the step-mother and step-son together—felt frightened to death and crushed by the strange thing that was about to befall them....
Chapter Twenty-Six
And, despite their anxiety, the two sought each other all the oftener, feeling themselves now bound by indissoluble bonds. In the afternoon he would steal to her room; and, despite their anxiety, they lost themselves in wild embraces and then remained close together.
“It must be nonsense, Léonie,” he whispered.
“Yes, but then what is it?” she murmured in return. “After all, I heard the moaning and heard the stone whizz through the air.”