Prisoners | Page 4

Michael had not
been alone in his suffering. She also had felt the parting with equal
poignancy.
They met again a few days later by chance in an old cloistered, deserted
garden. How often she had walked in that garden as she was doing now
with English friends! His presence gave the place its true significance.
They met as those who have between them the bond of a common
sorrow.
"And what have you been doing all these four years?" she asked him,
as they wandered somewhat apart.
"I have been working."
"You never came to say good-bye before you went to that place in
Germany to study."

"I was told I had better not come."
"I suppose grandmamma told you that."
"She did, most kindly and wisely."
A pause.
She was leaning in the still May sunshine against an old grey tomb of
carved stone. Two angels with spread wings upheld the defaced
inscription. Above it, over it, round it, like desire impotently defying
death, a flood of red roses clambered and clung. Were they trying to
wake some votary who slept below? A great twisted sentinel cypress
kept its own dark counsel. Against its shadow Fay's figure in her white
gossamer gown showed more ethereal and exquisite even than in
memory. She seemed at one with this wonderful, passionate southern
spring, which trembled between rapture and anguish. The red roses and
the white irises were everywhere. Even the unkept grass in which her
light feet were set was wild with white daisies.
"Do you remember our last walk on the down that day in spring?" she
said suddenly.
She had forgotten it until last night.
"I remember it."
"It was May then. It is May again now."
He did not answer. The roses left off calling to the dead, and suddenly
enfolded the two young grave creatures leaning against the tomb, in a
gust of hot perfume.
"Do you remember," Fay's voice was tremulous, "how you gave me a
bit of pink may?"
"I remember."
"I was looking at it yesterday. It is not very pink now."

It was true. In all shallow meanings, and when she had not had time to
get her mind into a tangle, Fay was perfectly truthful. She had
yesterday been turning over the contents of a little cedar box in which
she kept her childish possessions, and she had found in an envelope a
brown unsightly ghost of what had once been a may-blossom on a
Hampshire down. She had remembered the vivid sunshine, the
wheeling seagull, the soft south wind blowing in from the sea. Michael
had kissed her under the thin dappled shade of the flowering tree, and
she had kissed him back.
Michael's eyes turned for a long moment to the yellow weather-stained
arches of the cloister, and then he looked full at Fay with a certain
peculiar detached glance which had first made her endeavour to attract
him. There is a look in a man's face which women like Fay cannot
endure, because it means independence of them.
"I thought," he said, with the grave simplicity which apparently was
unchangeable in him whatever else might change, "that it was only I
who remembered. It has always been a comfort to me that any
unhappiness which my want of forethought, my--my culpable
selfishness may have caused, was borne by myself alone."
"I was unhappy too," she said, speaking as simply as he. She looked up
at him suddenly as she said it. There was a wet glint in her deep violet
eyes. She believed absolutely at that moment that she had been as
unhappy as he for four years. There was no suspicion in her mind that
she was not genuine. Only the sincere ever doubt their sincerity. Fay
never doubted hers. She felt what she said, and the sweet eyes turned
on Michael had the transparent fixity of a child's.
They walked unsteadily back to the others and spoke no more to each
other that day. Conscience pricked Fay that night.
"Leave him alone," it said. "You have both suffered. Let the dead past
bury its dead."
Fay's conscience was a wonderfully adaptable one with a tendency to
poetic quotation. It showed considerable tact in adopting her point of

view. Nevertheless from that generally fallacious standpoint it often
gave her quite respectable advice. "Leave him alone," said the
hoodwinked monitor. "You are married and Andrea is easily jealous.
Michael is sensitive, and has been deeply in love with you. Don't stir
him up to fall in love with you again. Leave him alone."
The young British matron waxed indignant. Was she, Fay, the kind of
woman to forget her duty to her husband? Was Michael the kind of
man to make love to a married woman? Such an idea was preposterous,