She had gone crookedly down the passage before I had opportunity to remention the tea. In a moment she came back, threw open my door and flung something on the bed.
“There,” she said crossly, “put it on! No need to dress as if you was ninety.”
And there on my pillow I saw as she hastened away the great pink tea rose that had blossomed only that day from the rose plant in her own window where she had tended it for months.
Pelleas was in the library across the hall from the drawing-room where those two dear little people were. I opened the library door softly and went in and stood close beside his chair before he turned. Pelleas is not in the least deaf, as we both know; he is simply no longer distracted by small, unnecessary noises.
He looked up smiling and then sprang to his feet and suddenly caught my hands and held me at arm’s length and bade me turn about slowly, slowly so that he might see. One would think that I had never worn my old grosgrain and my Mechlin. I told him so, though I can never conceal delight. And we talked a little about the first night that I had worn it—O, so many years before, and about many things in which the very sunshine of the room had no part because these things were so much more luminous.
At last when the clock struck five we crossed the hall to the drawing-room door. At the foot of the stairs Pelleas stopped for a moment.
“Do you remember, Etarre,” he said, “the night that I ‘spoke’ to your father, and you waited in the drawing-room, half dead with alarm, as you made me believe?”
“Ah, yes,” I cried, “and how my father used to say that you won his heart by your very beginning. ‘I can’t talk about it, sir,’ you said, ‘but you see, sir, you can; and will you?’”
We laughed together as we are never tired of laughing tenderly over that, and I remembered tenderly too the old blue and white drawing-room with the spindle-legged chairs and the stiff curtains where I had waited breathlessly that night in my flowered delaine dress, while Pelleas “spoke” to father. I was trembling when he came back, I recall, and he took me in his arms and kissed away my fear. And some way the thought of the girl in the flowered delaine dress who was I and of the eager, buoyant young lad who was Pelleas must have shone in the faces of us both when we entered our drawing-room now, reverently, as if to meet our long-gone selves.
He was a fine, handsome fellow,—Eric Chartres, this young lover of Lisa’s, and their sweet confusions and dignities were enchanting. Pelleas and I sat on the red sofa and beamed at them, and the little fire tossed and leaped on the hearth, and the shadows gathered in the corners and fell upon us; and on Lisa and her lover the firelight rested.