“I don’t know,” she said; “but O, smell!”
But though I held the flowers to my face I, who can even detect the nameless fragrance of old lace, could divine in them no slightest perfume. I held them toward Pelleas, dozing in a deep chair, and when he had lifted them to his face he too shook his head.
“It is strange,” he said; “I would say that they have no odour.”
“They’ve such a beautiful smell,” said the child, sighing, and took back her flowers with that which immediately struck Pelleas and me as a kind of pathetic resignation. It was as if she were wonted to having others fail to share her discoveries and as if she had approached us with the shy hope that we might understand. But we had failed her!
“Won’t you sit down here with us?” said I, dimly conscious of this and wistful to make amends. It is a very commonplace tragedy to fail to meet other minds—their fancies, their humour, their speculation—but I am loath to add to tragedy and I always do my best to understand.
We tried her attention that day with all that we knew of fairy stories and vague lore. She listened with the closest regard to what we offered but she was neither impressed nor, one would have said, greatly diverted by our most ingenious inventions. Yet she was by no means without response—we were manifestly speaking her language, but a language about which Pelleas and I had a curious impression that she knew more than we knew. It was as if she were listening to things which she already understood in the hope that we might let fall something novel about them. This we felt that we signally failed to do. Yet there was after all a certain rapport and the child evidently felt at ease with us.
“Come and see us to-morrow morning,” we begged when she left us. For having early ascertained that there was not a single pair of lovers in the house, possible or estranged, we cast about for other magic. In the matter of lack o’ love in that boarding house we felt as did poor Pepys when he saw not a handsome face in the Sabbath congregation: “It seems,” he complained, “as if a curse were fallen upon the parish.” Verily, a country house without even one pair of lovers is an anomaly ill to be supported. But this child was a gracious little substitute and we waited eagerly to see if she would return to us.
Not only did she return but she brought us food for many a day’s wonder. Next morning she came round the house in the sunshine and she was looking down as if she were leading some one by the hand. She lifted her eyes to us from the bottom step.
“I’ve brought my little sister to see you,” she said.
Then she came up the steps slowly as if she were helping uncertain feet to mount.