To induce clearer consciousness she instinctively parted the mosquito curtains, slipped her feet down over the side of the bed; and, a little crouched together and fumbly—baby-fashion—being still under the comfortable empire of sleep, crossed the room and set back the inward opening casements of the south window. Thereupon the outdoor freshness, fluttering her hair and the lace and nain-sook of her nightdress, brought her, on the instant, into full possession of her wandering wits. She remembered the nature of that charmingly pleasant something; yet paused, before yielding it attention, held captive by the spectacle of returning day.
It was early. The disc of the sun still below the horizon. But shafts of light, striking up from it, patterned the underside of a vast dapple of fleecy cloud—heliotrope upon the back-cloth of blue ether—with fringes and bosses of scarlet flame. Against this, occupying the foreground, the pine trees, which sheltered the terrace, showed up a deep greenish purple bordering upon black.
Leaning out over the polished wooden bar—which topped the ironwork of the window-guard—Damaris sought and gained sight of the sea. This, darker even than the tufted foliation of the pines—since still untouched by sunlight—spread dense and compact as molten metal, with here and there a sheen, like that of the raven's wing, upon its corrugated surface. To Damaris it appeared curiously forbidding. Seeing it thus she felt, indeed, to have taken Nature unawares, surprised her without disguise; so that for once she displayed her veritable face—a face not yet made up and camouflaged to conceal the fact of its in-dwelling terror from puny and defenceless man.
With that the girl's thoughts flew, in longing and solicitude, to Faircloth, whose business so perpetually brought him into contact with Nature thus naked and untamed.—By now, and over as sinister a sea—since westward the dawn would barely yet have broke—the Forest Queen must be steaming along the Andalusian coast, making for Gibraltar and the Straits upon her homeward voyage. And by some psychic alchemy, an influence more potent and tangible than that of ordinary thought, her apprehension fled out, annihilating distance, bridging intervening space. For, just as certainly as Damaris' fair body leaned from the open window, so certainly did her fair soul or—to try a closer and more scientific definition—her living consciousness, stand in the captain's cabin of the ocean-bound tramp, making Darcy Faircloth turn smiling in his sleep, he having vision and glad sense of her—which stayed by him, tempering his humour to a peculiar serenity throughout the ensuing day.
That their correspondence was no fictitious one, a freak of disordered nerves or imagination, but sane and actual, both brother and sister could convincingly have affirmed. And this although time—as time is usually figured—had neither lot nor part in it. Such projections of personality are best comparable, in this respect, to the dreams which seize us in the very act of waking—vivid, coherent and complete, yet ended by the selfsame sound or touch by which they are evoked.
In Damaris' case, before the scarlet, dyeing the cloud dapple, warmed to rose, or the dense metallic sea caught reflections of the sunrise, broadening incandescence, her errant consciousness was again cognizant of, subjected to, her immediate surroundings. She was aware, moreover, that the morning sharpness began to take a too unwarrantable liberty with her thinly clad person for comfort. She hastily locked the casements together; and then waited, somewhat dazed by the breathless pace of her strange and tender excursion, looking about her in happy amazement.
And, so doing, her eyes lighted upon a certain oblong parcel lying on her dressing-table. There was the charmingly pleasant something which awaited her attention! A present, and the most costly, the most enchanting one (save possibly the green jade elephant of her childish adoration) she had ever received!
She picked up, not only the precious parcel, but a hand-mirror lying near it; and, thus armed, bestowed herself, once more, in her still warm bed.
The last forty-eight hours had been fertile in experiences and in events, among which the arrival of this gift could by no means be accounted the least exciting.—Hordle had brought the packet here to her, last night, about an hour after she and her father—standing under the portico—waved reluctant farewells to Colonel Carteret, as the hotel omnibus bore him and his baggage away to the station to catch the mail train through to Paris. This parting, when it actually came about, proved more distressing than she had by any means prefigured. She had no notion beforehand what a really dreadful business she would find it, after these months of close association, to say good-bye to the man with the blue eyes.
"We shall miss you at every turn, dear, dear Colonel Sahib," she almost tearfully assured him. "How we are going ever to live without you I don't know."