“I hope you don’t think Martin mercenary,” said Allegra. “There never was a man who set less value on money. It wouldn’t make any difference to him if you had not a penny. And as for me, I have a little income from my mother—more than enough to buy frocks and things—and beyond that I can earn my own living. So you really needn’t trouble yourself about me.”
There was a touching simplicity in her speech, mingled with a slight flavour of audacity, as of an emancipated young woman, which amused her lover, reminding him of a heroine of Murger’s, or Musset’s, a brave little grisette, who was willing to work hard for the ménage à deux, and who wanted nothing from her lover but love. He looked into the candid face, radiant in the fire-glow, and he told himself that this was just the one woman for whom his heart had kept itself empty, like a temple waiting for its god, in all the years of his manhood. And now the temple doors had opened wide, the gates had been lifted up, and the goddess had marched to her place, triumphant and all-conquering.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck six, and the old eight-day clock in the hall followed like a solemn echo. Captain Hulbert started up. “So late! Why, we have been talking for nearly two hours!” he exclaimed, “and I have a budget of letters to write for the night mail. Good-bye, darling—or I’ll say au revoir, for I’ll walk down again after dinner, and get half an hour’s chat with Disney, if you don’t think it will be too late for me to see him.”
“You know he is always pleased to see you—we are not very early people—and this is Christmas Eve. We were to sit round the fire and tell ghost-stories, don’t you remember?”
“Of course we were. I shall be here soon after nine, and I shall think over all the grizzly legends I ever heard, as I come down the hill.”
He went reluctantly, leaving her standing by the fire, a contemplative figure with downcast eyes. At a little later stage in their engagement no doubt she would have gone with him to the door, or even out to the garden gate, for a lingering parting under the stars—but there was a shyness about them both in this sweet dim beginning of their union, when it was so strange to each to have any claim upon the other.
“How lightly she took the whole business,” Captain Hulbert said to himself as he went up the hill. “Yet her voice trembled now and then—and her hand was deadly cold when first I clasped it. I think she loves me. A year,”—snapping his fingers gaily at the stars—“what is a year? A year of bliss if it be mostly spent with her. Besides, long engagements are apt to dwindle. I have seen such engagements—entered on solemnly like ours to-night—shrink to six months, or less. Why should one linger on the threshold of a new life, if one knows it is going to be completely happy?”
The blissful lover had not been gone five minutes when Isola came creeping into the room, and put her arm round Allegra’s neck and kissed her flushed cheek.
“Why, Isa, where have you been hiding all this evening?”
“I had fallen asleep in my room, just half an hour before tea, and when I awoke it was five o’clock, and Löttchen told me you and Captain Hulbert were in the drawing-room. And as I know you two have always so much to talk about, I thought I wouldn’t disturb you. So I let Löttchen make tea for me in the nursery, and I stayed there to play with baby. And here you are all in the dark.”