“Please don’t let us discuss it now,” she said, and moved before him out of the room.
CHAPTER IV
THE evening had worn to an end—a really terrible evening for Rose, though both she and Cecily had talked and laughed with apparent ease. Cecily followed her cousin into her bedroom, lighted the candles, rearranged the curtains, was solicitous for her comfort, and, with a flow of light talk, kept her at a distance.
“Good-night, dear,” she said at last, kissing her hastily. “You must be dreadfully tired. Don’t be frightened if you hear a footstep on the stair in the small hours. Robert doesn’t generally come up till then. He writes so late.”
Mrs. Summers’ eyes questioned her mutely, but Cecily’s did not waver.
“Jane will bring your tea when you ring in the morning. Good-night. Sleep well.” She went out smiling, and as the door closed upon her Rose moved mechanically to the nearest chair and sat down. She felt dazed and stupid. Emotions had succeeded one another so rapidly in the past eight hours that the state of mind of which she was most acutely conscious was bewilderment. Through this confused sense, however, self-reproach pierced sharply. How like one of life’s practical jokes it was, to bring her thousands of miles over-sea to tell her best friend what any spiteful acquaintance in the village might have placed within her knowledge. Mrs. Summers looked round the pretty, peaceful room with a sense of oppression. Over the windows, the rose-patterned chintz curtains hung primly. She got up and pushed them aside, and then blew out the candles. A lovely night had succeeded the lovely day, and the garden was magical with moonlight. Sweet scents rose from it. Pools of shadow lay on the silvered grass. Deep and mysterious the great trees stood massed against the luminous sky.
Rose leaned against the window-frame, and let the silence and the peace quiet her thoughts, while she tried to realize the stranger she had found in the place of the old impulsive Cecily. It was the self-control that chilled and baffled her, even while she admired its exercise. Mentally she reviewed the evening, and found Cecily’s demeanor excellent. Her manner towards her husband had been perfectly friendly. A stranger seeing them together, she reflected, would have thought them on very good terms, though Robert might have been pronounced rather absent-minded and preoccupied. At the remembrance of Kingslake, Rose’s face darkened.
“She needn’t have taken so much trouble,” was her bitter reflection. “He wouldn’t have noticed even if she’d been disagreeable. His mind was elsewhere.”
To Rose, whose recollection of Robert was as a lover, so devoted that the only clear idea she had retained about his personality was that he loved Cecily,—to Rose, his present obvious indifference seemed a thing almost incredible. It brought to her, as nothing else since her home-coming had brought to her, the realization that five years is long—that the heart of life may be cut out with its passing.
Mrs. Summers felt her eyes dim with sudden tears. She was hurt at her friend’s reticence. The Cecily she knew had vanished, and with her, it seemed, she had taken all youth, all keenness, all desire. In that moment of disappointment, Rose had a horrible premonition of age.