“Exactly . . . and prolong my stay here. . .” said Bertram, and his eyes were very full of kindness and gratitude as they met eyes that were also very full.
(“What a sweet, kind, good woman she was! And what a cruel wrench it would be to go away and perhaps never see her again. . . .”)
He went for his drive with Mrs. Stayne-Brooker in a car put at her disposal, for the purpose, by the Civil Surgeon; and found he was still very weak and that it was nevertheless good to be alive.
At tea he met Miss Stayne-Brooker, and, for a moment, his breath was taken away by her beauty and her extraordinary likeness to her mother.
He thought of an opened rose and an opening rose-bud (exactly alike save for the “open” and “opening” difference), on the same stalk. . . . It was wonderful how alike they were, and how young Mrs. Stayne-Brooker looked—away from her daughter. . . . The drive-and-tea programme was repeated almost daily, with variations, such as a stroll round the golf-course, as the patient grew stronger. . . . And daily Bertram saw the very beautiful and fascinating Miss Stayne-Brooker and daily grew more and more grateful to Mrs. Stayne-Brooker. He was grateful to her for so many things—for her nursing, her hospitality, her generous giving of her time; her kindness in the matter of lending him books (the books she liked best, prose works and others); her kind interest in him and his career, ambitions, tastes, views, hopes and fears; for her being the woman she was and for brightening his life as she had, not to mention saving it; and, above all, he was grateful to her for having such a daughter. . . . He told her that he admired Miss Stayne-Brooker exceedingly, and she did not tell him that Miss Stayne-Brooker did not admire him to the same extent. . . . She was a little sorry that her daughter did not seem as enthusiastic about him as she herself was, for we love those whom we admire to be admired. But she realised that a chit of a girl, fresh from a Cheltenham school, was not to be expected to appreciate a man like this one, a scholar, an artist to his finger-tips, a poet, a musician, a man who had read everything and could talk interestingly of anything—a man whose mind was a sweet and pleasant storehouse—a kind man, a gentleman, a man who, thank God, needed one, and yet to whom one’s ideas were of as much interest as one’s face and form. Of course, the average “Cheerioh” subaltern, whose talk was of dances and racing and sport, would, very naturally, be of more interest to a callow girl than this man whose mind (to Mrs. Stayne-Brooker) a kingdom was, and who had devoted to the study of music, art, literature, science, and the drama, the time that the other man had given to the pursuit of various hard and soft balls, inoffensive quadrupeds, and less inoffensive bipeds.
Thus Mrs. Stayne-Brooker, addressing, in imagination, a foolishly unappreciative Eva Stayne-Brooker.
* * * * *
As she and her daughter sat at dinner on the verandah which looked down on to Vasco da Gama Street, one evening, a month later, her Swahili house-boy brought Mrs. Stayne-Brooker a message. . . . A shenzi was without, and he had a chit which he would give into no hands save those of Mrs. Stayne-Brooker herself.
It was the escaped Murad ibn Mustapha, in disguise.
On hearing his news, she did what she had believed people only did in books. She fell down in a faint and lay as one dead.