CHAPTER XIV
SHE was waiting for him at the little South Coast station, where decorum had to cloak the rapture of their meeting. But they sat close together, hand in hand, in the hackney motor-car that took them home. This gave him an intermediary breathing space for explanation; and the explanation was easier than he had feared. Really, his journey had been almost for nothing and had afforded little interest. The agent whom he was to interview having been summoned back to Russia the day before he arrived, he had merely delivered his dispatches to the British authorities and taken the next boat to England. It was just a history of two dull sea voyages. Nothing more was to be said about it, save that he would go on no more fool’s errands for a haphazard government.
“Besides, it’s too dreadful to be away from you.”
“It has been awful for me, too,” said Olivia. “I never imagined what real loneliness could feel like. All the time I thought of the poor solitary little dab the Bryce children showed us the other day in the biscuit-tin of water. Oh, I was the most forsaken little dab.”
He swore that she should never be lonely again; and, by the time they reached their house by the sea, he had half-exultingly dismissed his fictitious mission from his mind. All the apprehensions of the narrow Northern kitchen melted in the joy of her. All danger had vanished like a naughty black cloud sped to nothing by the sun. The mythical past had to remain; but henceforward his life would be as clear to her as her own exquisite life to him.
In their wind-swept home they gave themselves up to deferred raptures, kissing and laughing after the foolish way of lovers. To grace his return she had filled the rooms with flowers—roses and sweet peas—which she bought extravagantly in the neighbouring seaside town. The scent of them mingled delicately with the salt of the sea. To her joy he was quick to praise them. She had wondered whether they would be noticed by one so divinely careless of material things. He even found delight in the meal which Myra served soon after their arrival—he so indifferent to quality of food.
“Everything is you,” said he; “scent and taste and sight. You inform the universe and give it meaning.”
Her eyes grew moist as she swiftly laid her hand on his.
“Am I really all that to you?” She laughed with a little catch in her throat. “How can I live up to it?”
He raised her hand to his lips. “If only you went on existing like a flower, your beauty and fragrance would be all in all to me. But you are a flower with a bewildering soul. So you merely have to be as you are.”