Rest Harrow | Page 7

to her."_
He got up and left the Park. It was ten o'clock of an April morning.
Crocuses--her flowers--were blowing sideways under a south-west
wind. Blue sky, white clouds, shining on the just and the unjust,
covered her in Yorkshire and him, her grim knight, in Mayfair. He
stalked, gaunt and haggard-eyed, down the hill, threading his way

through the growing traffic of the day, and faced his business with the
lady in the case.
Mrs. Germain was serious when he entered her sitting-room. She was
in a loose morning gown of lace and pink ribbon. Pink was her colour.
Her dark eyes looked heavy. She should have been adorable, and she
was--but not to him just now. He stood before her, looked at her where
she sat with her eyes cast down at her hands in her lap. She had let
them rest upon him for the moment of his entry, but had not greeted
him.
Now, as he stood watching her, she had no greeting.
"Good morning, Mary," he said presently, and she murmured a reply.
He saw at once that she was prepared for him, and began in the middle.
"A friend of mine," he said, "is alone and unhappy. I heard of it
yesterday from Chevenix. I must go and see her. I shan't be away long,
and shall then be at your disposition."
Her strength lay in her silence. She sat perfectly still, looking at her
white hands. Her heavy eyelids, weighted with all the knowledge she
had, seemed beyond her power of lifting. He was driven to speak again,
and, against his will, to defend himself.
"I am in a hatefully false position. I ought to have told you long ago all
about it. It seemed impossible at the time, and so from time to time, to
open the shut book. I closed it deliberately, and from the time of doing
it until this moment I have never spoken of it even to myself. Chevenix,
who knew her well, broke it open unawares yesterday, and now we
must read in it, you and I."
He stopped, took breath, and began again. "I don't see how you can
forgive me, or how I can, so to speak, look myself in the face again. I
have played the knave so long with you that it is perhaps the greatest
knavery I can commit to be honest at last. But I am going to do it, Mary.
I want to tell you the whole story. You have told me yours."
Her eyes flickered at that, but she said nothing. Passive as she sat,
heavy in judgment, she was yet keenly interested. All her wits were at
work, commenting, comparing, judging, and weighing every word that
he said.
He told her a strange, incoherent story of poet's love. This mysterious,
shrouded Sanchia figured in it as the goddess of a shrine--omnipresent,
a felt influence, yet never a woman. He spoke her name with a drop of

the voice; every act of hers, as he related it, was coloured by sanction to
seem the dealing of a divine person with creeping mankind. To Mrs.
Germain it was all preposterous; if she had owned the humorous sense
it would have been tragically absurd. For what did it amount to, pray,
but this, that Jack Senhouse had been in love with a girl who had loved
somebody else, had married her choice, and was now repenting it? Jack,
then, in a pique, had trifled with her, Mary Germain, and made love to
her. Now he found that this Sanchia was to be seen he was for jumping
back. Was he to jump, or not to jump? Did it lie with her? Jack seemed
to think that it did.
If it did, what did she want? As to one thing she had long been clear.
Jack Senhouse was a good lover, but would be an impossible mate. She
had found his gypsy tent and hedgerow practice in the highest degree
romantic. With gypsy practice he had the wheedling gypsy ways. An
adventure of hers in the North, for instance--when, panic-struck, she
had fled to him by a midnight train, had sought him through the dales
and over limestone mountains through a day and night, and cried
herself to sleep, and been found by him in the dewy dawn and soothed
by his masterful cool sense-- wasn't this romantic? It had drawn her to
him as she had never before been drawn to a man. She felt that here at
last was a man indeed to be trusted. For she had been there with him,
and not a living soul within miles, entirely at his discretion, and he had
not so much as kissed her fingers. No, not even that, though he had
wanted to.