‘That’s to be Keith’s privilege! I’m for the other boat.’ But neither his smile nor the light pressure of her arm could atone for the refusal.
‘Pointed and purposeless,’ she denounced it mentally; but within a very few moments his purpose was revealed.
‘Down stream a bit first, Keith,’ he called out, as he pushed off his own boat and sprang lightly in. ‘I want to run up to the village. Miss Alison and her friend might like to join us.’
So they rowed down stream at his command: and for Lady Forsyth the pleasure of the outing was gone; the peace and beauty of the evening spoilt by fierce resentment against these intrusive strangers who had no authorised position in the scheme of things. And her natural vexation was intensified by concern for Sheila: though whether the girl took Mark’s sudden and strange defection seriously it was impossible to tell. She wore that smiling, friendly graciousness of hers like a bright veil, that seemed to baffle attempts at intimacy, while it enhanced her charm. Even with Lady Forsyth, who loved her as a daughter, she had her reserves, notably on matters nearest her heart.
‘After all, she knows the real Mark almost as well as I do,’ Mark’s mother reflected by way of consolation. ‘And she’s wiser than I am, in many ways, though she is nearly thirty years younger. I’m probably racing on miles too fast. He’s barely known the girl a fortnight. He couldn’t be so crazy⸺All the same, he’s no business to—it’s distracting!’ she concluded, her irritation flaming up again at sight of the two figures that were now approaching the shore, escorted by Mark.
Miss Alison, the taller one, had unquestionably height and grace to recommend her. Mark, who stood six feet in his socks, could barely give her a couple of inches; and the languid deliberation of her movements had, on Lady Forsyth, the same maddening effect as a drawl in speech. Her own brain and body were too quick, in the original sense of the word, not to make her a trifle intolerant towards the ‘half-alive’; and, rightly or wrongly, Miss Alison was apt to produce that impression even on her admirers, though no doubt they expressed it differently.
Personal prejudice apart, Lady Forsyth preferred the girl’s companion, Miss O’Neill, in spite of her wrong-headed zeal for the Suffrage and Home Rule. Had Bel Alison been out in search of a foil, she could have discovered none better than this big-hearted, fanatical woman of five-and-thirty, shortish and squarely built, with an upward nose, an ugly, humorous mouth, and a quantity of rough brown hair in a chronic state of untidiness. Lady Forsyth gathered that she was an active philanthropist, and that the incongruous pair shared a flat somewhere in Earl’s Court. To outward seeming they had certainly nothing beyond the same address in common.
If Bel’s movements were over-deliberate, Miss O’Neill’s were apt to be sudden; and she strode into the boat with the decision of one given to putting her foot down to some purpose.
‘Steady on! You evidently don’t do things by halves!’ Sir Mark remonstrated, laughing, and consigning her to a cushion in the bows. Bel had already usurped Maurice’s seat astern, and Mark rowed stroke—this time without need of invitation. Then they turned about and moved slowly up the loch, dabbling their oars in the sunset fires and shivering the purple shadows of the hills.
And if for Helen Forsyth the pleasure of the evening was over, for Mark it had but just begun. And she knew it. Therein lay the sting. Though ‘the boy’ was now very much a man, she could honestly have said, two weeks ago, that nothing beyond minor differences and mutual flashes of temper had marred the deep essential unity of their relation—a unity the more inestimably precious since he was now all she had left of her nearest and dearest on earth. Husband, daughter and younger son had all passed on before her into the Silence, and of her own people one brother alone remained. At the moment he was Governor of New Zealand, and seemed disposed to stay on there indefinitely when his term of office expired. The Empire, he wrote, was a saner, sweeter, more spacious place of abode than twentieth-century England, which seemed temporarily given over to the cheap-jack, the specialist, and the party politician. And she—while loving every foot of her husband’s country and her own—understood too well the frequent disappointment of those who came, on rare and hardly earned leave, from the ends of the earth and failed to find, in picture-palaces and music-halls, in the jargon of Futurists and demagogues, the England of their dreams.