The Inheritors | Page 5

would cast sudden, piercing glances at him.
I was silent. The birds were singing the sun down. It was very dark
among the branches, and from minute to minute the colours of the
world deepened and grew sombre.
"But--" I said. A feeling of unrest was creeping over me. "But why do
you tell me all this?" I asked. "Do you think I will enlist with you?"
"You will have to in the end," she said, "and I do not wish to waste my
strength. If you had to work unwittingly you would resist and resist and
resist. I should have to waste my power on you. As it is, you will resist
only at first, then you will begin to understand. You will see how we
will bring a man down--a man, you understand, with a great name,
standing for probity and honour. You will see the nets drawing closer
and closer, and you will begin to understand. Then you will cease
resisting, that is all."
I was silent. A June nightingale began to sing, a trifle hoarsely. We
seemed to be waiting for some signal. The things of the night came and
went, rustled through the grass, rustled through the leafage. At last I
could not even see the white gleam of her face....
I stretched out my hand and it touched hers. I seized it without an
instant of hesitation. "How could I resist you?" I said, and heard my
own whisper with a kind of amazement at its emotion. I raised her hand.
It was very cold and she seemed to have no thought of resistance; but
before it touched my lips something like a panic of prudence had
overcome me. I did not know what it would lead to--and I remembered
that I did not even know who she was. From the beginning she had
struck me as sinister and now, in the obscurity, her silence and her
coldness seemed to be a passive threatening of unknown entanglement.

I let her hand fall.
"We must be getting on," I said.
The road was shrouded and overhung by branches. There was a kind of
translucent light, enough to see her face, but I kept my eyes on the
ground. I was vexed. Now that it was past the episode appeared to be a
lost opportunity. We were to part in a moment, and her rare mental
gifts and her unfamiliar, but very vivid, beauty made the idea of parting
intensely disagreeable. She had filled me with a curiosity that she had
done nothing whatever to satisfy, and with a fascination that was very
nearly a fear. We mounted the hill and came out on a stretch of soft
common sward. Then the sound of our footsteps ceased and the world
grew more silent than ever. There were little enclosed fields all round
us. The moon threw a wan light, and gleaming mist hung in the ragged
hedges. Broad, soft roads ran away into space on every side.
"And now ..." I asked, at last, "shall we ever meet again?" My voice
came huskily, as if I had not spoken for years and years.
"Oh, very often," she answered.
"Very often?" I repeated. I hardly knew whether I was pleased or
dismayed. Through the gate-gap in a hedge, I caught a glimmer of a
white house front. It seemed to belong to another world; to another
order of things.
"Ah ... here is Callan's," I said. "This is where I was going...."
"I know," she answered; "we part here."
"To meet again?" I asked.
"Oh ... to meet again; why, yes, to meet again."
CHAPTER TWO
Her figure faded into the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep

water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned.
The episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic,
but decidedly charming, chance travelling companion. The girl was a
riddle, and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing. She, too, would
be a very trivial thing when I had found a solution. It occurred to me
that she wished me to regard her as a symbol, perhaps, of the future--as
a type of those who are to inherit the earth, in fact. She had been
playing the fool with me, in her insolent modernity. She had wished me
to understand that I was old-fashioned; that the frame of mind of which
I and my fellows were the inheritors was over and done with. We were
to be compulsorily retired; to stand aside superannuated. It was obvious
that she was better equipped for the swiftness of life. She had a
something--not only quickness of wit, not only ruthless determination,
but a something quite different and quite indefinably more impressive.
Perhaps it was only the confidence