CHAPTER XXIX
Mrs. Hayward decided that she would walk home.
For what reason?—for no reason at all, so far as she was aware; only, apparently without knowing it, to help out the decisions of fate. There was a stream of other people going home, some of them walking too, as it was so lovely an evening. The air was the softest balm of summer, cool, the sun going down, soft shadows stealing over the sky, the river still lit with magical reflections—those reflections which are nothing, such stuff as dreams are made of, and yet more beautiful than anything in earth or heaven. The rose tints were in the atmosphere as well as the sky. When you turned a corner, the resistance of the soft air meeting you was as a caress—like the kiss with which one loving creature meets another as they pass upon their happy way. It was no longer spring indeed, but matured and full-blown summer, ready any morning, by a touch of north wind or early frost, to become autumn in a moment, but making the very best of her last radiant evening. The well-dressed crowd streamed out of the gates of Sir Samuel’s great house on the hill, and then separated, flowing in little rills of white and bright dresses, of pleasant voices and talk, upon their several ways. Till then, of course, they had all kept together. Afterwards the little accidents, the natural effect of unequal steps and different pace, so arranged it that the older pair dragged behind, having still some good-byes to make, and that the other two, who had fallen together without any intention, went on before.
Joyce was always shy, but she had never been embarrassed by the presence of Norman Bellendean. She had been able even to laugh with him when the gloom of her arrival in this new sphere, and of her severance from the old, was heaviest upon her. She had the reassuring consciousness that he knew all about her, and could not be in any way deceived. No need of fictions to account for her, nor apologies for her ignorance, were necessary with him. And she gave him from the first that most flattering proof of preference by being at her ease with him, when she was so with no one else. But there was something in the air to-night which suggested embarrassment—something too familiar, over-sweet. Mrs. Hayward and the Colonel did not feel this. They said to each other that it was a lovely evening, and then they talked of their own concerns. Joyce was not like them—the rose-tinted vapours on the sky had got into her very soul.
‘Was there ever such a sunset?’ said Norman Bellendean. ‘And yet, Miss Joyce, you and I remember something better still,—the long, long lingering of the warm days——’
‘In summer,’ she said, with a little catching of her breath, ‘when you never could tell whether there was any night at all.’
‘And when the night was better than the day, if better could be, and morning and evening ran into each other.’
‘And it was all like paradise,’ said Joyce, chiming in. Their voices were full of emotion, though they were speaking only of such unexciting things as the atmosphere and the twilight—two safe subjects surely, if any subjects could be safe.
‘It is not like that,’ Joyce added, with a little reluctance; ‘but still the river when the last flash of the sun is upon it, and all the clouds hanging like roses upon the sky, and the water glimmering like a glass, and making everything double like the swan——’
Norman was one of the unread. He did not know what swan it was that floated ‘double, swan and shadow,’ for ever and ever, since that day the poet saw it: but he understood the scene and the little failure of breath in the enthusiasm of her description with which Joyce spoke.