The day had been close and sultry, and the bedroom still felt hot after the hours of scorching sunlight on the tiles. Eve drew the curtains back, and opened the casement to its widest, for the upper windows were still fitted with the old lead-lights. The sill was deep, nearly a foot and a half broad, and Eve half lay and half leant upon it while the night air streamed in.
And what a night! All jet and silver; for the moon was up over the fir woods, just as on the night when her mother died. The stillness was the stillness of a dawn where no birds sing. The nightingale had long been mute, and the nightjar preferred the oak woods in the clayland valleys. Eve’s ears could not snatch a single sound out of that vast motionless landscape, with its black woods and mysterious horizons.
The silence made her feel lonely, eerily lonely, like a sensitive child lost in a wood. She remembered how she had started awake at night sometimes, terrified by this horror of loneliness, and crying out “Mother, mother!” It was absurd that the grown woman should feel like the child, and yet she found herself hungering for that little placid figure with its boring commonplaces and amiable soft face. What a prig she had been! She had let that spirit of superiority grow in her, forgetting that the hands that were always knitting those foolish woollen superfluities had held and comforted her as a child. Now, in the white heat of an emotional ordeal, she missed the nearness of that commonplace affection. What a mistake it was to be too clever; for when the heart ached, one’s cleverness stood by like a dreary pedagogue, helpless and dumb.
The stillness! She wished those dim stars would send down astral rain, and patter on this roof of silence. The sound of dripping water would be welcome. Yes, and those Latimer fountains, were they still murmuring under the cypresses, or did not the spirit of sage economy turn off the water-cocks and shut down the sluices? Life! It, too, was so often a shutting down of sluices. The deep waters had to be tamed, dammed back, kept from pouring forth as they desired. Modern conventional life was like a canal with its system of locks. There were no rapids, no freshets, no impetuous cataracts. You went up, steadily, respectably, lock by lock; you came down steadily, and perhaps just as respectably. In between was the gliding monotony of the long stretches between artificial banks, with either a religious tow-rope or a puffing philosopher to draw you.
She suffered on account of the stillness and this atmosphere of isolation, and yet the nearness of some very human incident was as a stabbing pain compared to a dull ache. Leaning there over the window-sill, with the moonlight glimmering on the lozenged glass in the lattices, she knew that she was looking towards Fernhill and all that it represented. Lynette, the child; the great gardens, that wide, free spacious, colour-filled life; Canterton’s comradeship, and even more than that. The whole future quivered on one sensitive thread. A breeze could shake it away as a wind shakes a dewdrop from the web of a spider.
She told herself that Canterton must have realised by now the impossible nature of the position he was asking her to assume. If he only would go back to the yesterday of a month ago, and let that happy, workaday life return! But then, would she herself be content with that? She had sipped the wine of Tristan and Isoult, and the magic of it was in her blood.
Her thoughts had come to this point, when something startled her. She had heard the latch of the gate click. There was a man’s figure standing in the shade of a holly that grew close to the fence.
Eve was not conscious of any fear, only of an intense curiosity—a desire to know whether she was on the brink of some half foreseen crisis. It might be a tramp, it might be the man who came courting her girl Anne; but Anne had gone to bed with a headache an hour before Eve had come to her own room.
In spite of these other possibilities, she felt prophetically convinced that it was Canterton. She did not move away from the window, knowing that the man, whoever he was, must have seen the outline of her head and shoulders against the light within. Her heart was beating faster. She could feel it as she leant with her bosom pressing upon the window-sill.
She knew Canterton the moment he moved out into the moonlight, and, crossing the grass, came and stood under her window. He was bareheaded, and his face, as he looked up at her, gave her an impression of pallid and passionate obstinacy.