"But, dearly beloved, I have your blessing on this new departure, haven't I?" she asked. "After all, it's you, just simply you, that sends me back to an honest life and to my profession. So I should like to have your blessing—that, and your prayers."
"Can you doubt that you have them," Iglesias answered, and his voice, too, shook, somewhat, "now and always, dearest of friends?"
For a little minute Poppy sat looking full at him, he looking full at her. Then, with a sort of rush, she rose to her feet.
"Come along, this won't do," she said. "Sentiment strictly prohibited. It's not wholesome for you after the nasty turn you had on Barnes Common—and it's not particularly wholesome for me either, though for quite other reasons. Moreover, it's fiendishly hot in here. So see, dear man, you're not going just yet. I telephoned to the Bell Inn stables for a private hansom to be on hand about ten thirty for you. Meanwhile, you're to take it easy and rest. It is but five steps upstairs, and that won't tire you. Come up into the cool and have your coffee on the balcony."
And so it came about that Dominic Iglesias followed Poppy St. John upstairs—she moving rapidly, in a way defiantly—followed her into a bedchamber, where a subtle sweetness of orris-root met him; and a fantastic brightness of gaslight and moonlight, coming in through open windows, chequered the handsome dark-polished brass-inlaid furniture, the green silk coverlet and hangings, the dimly patterned ceiling and walls. Without hesitation or apology, Poppy walked straight through this apartment, and passed out on to the white-planked and white-railed balcony.
The dome of the sky was immense and had become perfectly clear, the great clouds having boiled up during the afternoon only to sink away and vanish at sunset, as is their wont in seasons of drought. North and east the glare of London pulsed along the horizon; and above it the stars were faint, since the radiant first-quarter moon rode high, drenching roadway and palings, the stretch of the polo-ground, the shrubberies and grove of giant elms, with white light blotted and barred, here and there, by black shadow. The air was still, but less oppressive, the cruelty of sun-heat having gone out of it and only a suavity remaining. The facade of the terrace of smirking, self-conscious, much-be-flowered and be-balconied little houses had taken on a certain worth of picturesqueness, suggestive of the bazaar of some far-away Oriental city rather than of a vulgar London suburb, the summer night even here producing an exquisiteness of effect and making itself very sensibly felt. Poppy silently motioned her guest to the further of the two cane deck-chairs set in the recess, arranged a cushion at his back, drew up a little mother-of-pearl inlaid table beside him, poured coffee into two cups. Then she moved across to the rail of the balcony, and stood there, her head thrown back, her hands clasped behind her, facing the moonlight, which covered her slender rounded figure from head to foot as with a pale transparent veil of infinite tenuity. Iglesias could see the rise and fall of her bosom, the flutter of her eyelids, the involuntary movement of her lips as she pressed them together, restraining, as might be divined, words to which she judged it wiser to deny utterance.
And this hardly repressed excitement in Poppy's bearing and aspect, along with the peculiar scene and circumstances in which he found himself, worked profoundly upon Dominic Iglesias. In passing through that scented, half-discovered, fantastically lighted bedchamber and stepping out into the magic of the night, he had stepped out, in imagination, into regions dreamed of in earlier years—when reading poetry or hearing music,—but never fairly entered, still less enjoyed, since all the duties and obligations of his daily life militated against and even forbade such enjoyment. The weariness of his work in the City, the petty annoyances he suffered at Cedar Lodge, the haunting disgust of de Courcy Smyth's presence, fell away from him, becoming for the time as though they were not. He never had been, nor was he now, in any degree self-indulgent or a sentimentalist. The appeal of the present somewhat enchanted hour was to the intellect and the spirit, rather than sensuous, still less sensual. Nevertheless, an almost passionate desire of earthly beauty took him—of the beauty of things seen, of things plastic, beauty of the human form; beauty of far-distant lands and the varied pageant of their aspect and history; of great rivers flowing seaward; of tombs by the wayside; of the glorious terror of the desert's naked face; of languorous fountain-cooled gardens, close hid in the burning heart of ancient cities; beauty of sound, beauty of words and phrases, above all, of the eternal beauty of youth and the illimitable expectation and hope of it.
And it was out of all this, out of the mirage of these vast elusive prospects and apprehensions, that he answered Poppy St. John, as with serious eyes yet smiling lips she turned, and coming across the white floor sat down beside him, saying:
"How goes it, Dominic? Are you rested?"
"Yes," he answered, "I am rested. And more than that, I am alive and awake, strangely awake and full of vision—thanks to you."