Without my being aware of it, too, he played a kind of chess with me, seizing each answer in turn for hook on which to hang another question. What had I to conceal? Of my short history, though not of myself, I told him freely; yet asked him few questions in return. Nor at that time did I even consider how strange a chance had brought two such human beings as he and I to this place of meeting. Yet, after all, whales are but little creatures by comparison with the ocean in which they roam, and glow-worm will keep tryst with glow-worm in forests black as night.
Through all he said was woven a thread of secrecy. So low and monotonous was his voice (not lifting itself much, but only increasing in resonance when any thought angered or darkened his mind); so few were his gestures that he might have been talking in his sleep. Not once that long morning did he laugh, not even when I mischievously proffered him my parasol (as he sat a few paces away) to screen him from the March sun! Solemnly he shared Mrs Bowater's biscuits with me, scattering the crumbs to a robin that hopped up between us, as if he had been invited to our breakfast.
His head hung so low between his heavy shoulders that it reminded me of a flower stooping for want of water. Not that there was anything limp or fragile or gentle in his looks. He was, far rather, clumsy and ugly in appearance, yet with a grace in his look like that of an old, haggled thorn-tree when the wind moves its branches. And anyhow, he was come to be my friend—out of the unknown. And when I looked around at the serene wild loveliness of the garden, it seemed to be no less happy a place because it was no longer quite a solitude.
"You read," he said, glancing reflectively, but none too complimentarily, at my book.
"It isn't wise to think too much." I replied solemnly, shutting Miss Austen up. "Besides, as I haven't the opportunity of seeing many people in the flesh, you know, the next best thing is to meet them in books—specially in this kind of book. If only I were Jane Austen; my gracious, I would enjoy myself! Her people are just the same as people are now—inside. I doubt if leopards really want to change their spots. But of course"—I added, since he did not seem inclined to express any opinion—"I read other kinds of books as well. That's the best of being a dunce—there's so much to learn! Just lately I have been learning to tie knots."
I laughed, and discovered that I was blushing.
He raised his eyes slowly to my face, then looked so long and earnestly at my hands, that I was forced to hide them away under my bag. Long before I had noticed that his own hands were rather large and powerful for his size. Fanny's face I had loved to watch for its fairness and beauty—it would have been as lovely if she had not been within. To watch Mrs Bowater's was like spelling out bits of a peculiar language. I often found out what she was feeling or thinking by imitating her expression, and then translating it, after she was gone. This young man's kept me engrossed because of the self that brooded in it—its dark melancholy, too; and because even then, perhaps, I may have remotely and vaguely realized that flesh and spirit could not be long of one company. He himself was, as it were, a foreigner to me, and I felt I must make the best and most of him before he went off again.
Perhaps memory reads into this experience more than in those green salad days I actually found there. But of this at least I am certain—that the morning sped on unheeded in his company, and I was even unconscious of how cold I was until he suddenly glanced anxiously into my face and told me so. So now we wandered off together towards the great house—which hitherto I had left unapproached. We climbed the green-stained scaling steps from terrace to terrace, tufted with wallflower and snapdragon amongst the weeds, cushioned with bright moss, fretted with lichen. Standing there, side by side with him, looking up—our two figures alone, on the wide flowerless weed-grown terrace—hale, sour weeds some of them, shoulder-high—I scrutinized the dark, shut windows.
What was the secret that had kept it so long vacant, I inquired. Mrs Bowater had never given me any coherent answer to this question. My words dropped into the silence, like a pebble into a vast, black pool of water.
"There was a tale about," he replied indifferently, and yet, as I fancied, not so indifferently as he intended, "that many years ago a woman"—he pronounced the word almost as if it had reference to a different species from ourselves—"that a woman had hanged herself in one of its upper rooms."