Miranda of the Balcony Part 22

Thus Miss Holt and Wilbraham crossed the patio and entered the pa.s.sage to the outer door. Charnock followed a few steps behind them; and just after Miss Holt with her companion had entered the pa.s.sage, while he yet stood in the patio, he heard a door slam behind him.

He turned, and walked round the tiny group of tamarisks in the centre of the patio. It was not the door into the garden which had slammed, because that now stood wide open, whereas he remembered he had closed it behind him; and the only other door in that side of the house was the door of Miranda's parlour. He had left Miranda in the garden; it was plainly she who had slammed the door, and had slammed it upon herself.

Charnock was alone in the empty patio. It was very quiet; the suns.h.i.+ne was a steady golden glow upon the tiled floor, upon the tiled walls; above in the square of blue there was no scarf of cloud. He stood in the quiet empty patio, and the touch of her fingers tingled again upon his breast. Again he saw her drop the flowers she had culled for Wilbraham down the cliff. Amongst his doubts and perplexities those two recollections shone. They were accurate, indisputable. Her feverish vivacity, her coquetries, her friendliness to Wilbraham, her silence towards himself, the basket of flowers for Gibraltar--these things were puzzles. But twice that afternoon she had been true to herself, and each time she had betrayed the reality of her trouble and the reality of her need.

It was very still in the patio. A bee droned amongst the tamarisks. It seemed to Charnock that, after much sojourning in outlandish corners of the earth, he who had foreseen his life as a struggle with the brutality of inanimate things was, after all, here in the still noonday, within these four walls, to undergo the crisis of his destiny. He gently turned the handle of the door and entered the room.

CHAPTER XIV

MIRANDA PROFESSES REGRET FOR A PRACTICAL JOKE

He closed the door behind him. Miranda had neither seen nor heard him enter. She sat opposite to the door, on the other side of the round oak table, her arms stretched out upon the table, her face buried in her arms. She was not weeping, and Charnock might have believed from the abandonment of her att.i.tude that she lay in a swoon, but for one movement that she made. Her outstretched hands were clasped together and her fingers perpetually worked, twisting and intertwisting. There was no sound whatever in the room beyond the ticking of a clock, and Charnock leaned against the door and found the silence horrible. He would have preferred it to have been broken if only by the sound of her tears. All his doubts, all his accusations, were swept clean out of his brain by the sight of her distress, and, tortured himself, he stood witness of her torture. He advanced to the table, and leaning over it took the woman's clasped hands into his.

"Miranda!" he whispered, and again, "Miranda!" and there was just the same tenderness in his voice, as when he had first p.r.o.nounced the name in the balcony over St. James's Park.

Miranda did not lift her head, but her hands answered the clasp of his. She did not in truth know at that moment who was speaking to her.

She was only sensible of the sympathy of his touch and the great comfort of his voice.

Charnock bent lower towards her.

"I love you," he said, "you--Miranda."

Then she raised her face and stared at him with uncomprehending eyes.

"I love you," he repeated.

She looked down towards her hands which he still held and suddenly she s.h.i.+vered.

"I love you," he said a third time.

And she understood. She wrenched her hands away, she stretched out her arms, she thrust him away from her, in her violence she struck him.

"No, it's not true," she cried, "it's not true!" and so fell to pleading volubly. "Say that it's not true, now, at once. Say there's no truth in your words. Say that pity prompted them and only pity,"

and her voice rose again in a great horror. Horror glittered too in her eyes. "Say that you spoke more than you meant to speak!"

"I can say that," he answered. "When I came into this room I had no thought of speaking--as I did. But I saw you--I watched your hands,"

and he caught his breath, "and they plucked the truth out from me. For what I said is true."

"No!" she cried.

"Very true," he repeated quietly.

Her protesting arms fell limply to her sides. She nodded her head, submitted to his words, acknowledged their justice.

"Yes," she said, "yes. I knew this afternoon. You told me in the garden, and though I would not know, still I could not but know."

Then she rose from her chair and walked to the window. Charnock did not speak. He hung upon her answer, and yet dreaded to hear it, so that when her lips moved, he would have had them still, and when they ceased to move, he was conscious of a great relief. After a long while she spoke, very slowly and without turning to face him, words which he did not understand.

"Love," she said, in a wondering murmur, "is it so easily got? And by such poor means? Surely, then it's a slight thing itself, of no account, surely not durable," and at once her calmness forsook her; she was caught up in a whirl of pa.s.sion. She raised a quivering face, and cried aloud in despair: "It's the friend I wanted; I want no lover!"

"But you have both," returned Charnock. With a hand upon the table he leaned over it towards her. "You have both."

"Ah!" exclaimed Miranda. With extraordinary swiftness she swung round and copied his movement. She leaned her hand upon the table, and bent forward to him. "But to win the one I have had to create the other. To possess the friend I have had to make the lover," and she suddenly threw herself back and stood erect. "Well, then," and she spoke with a thrill in her voice, as though she had this instant become aware of a new and a true conviction, "I must use neither--I will use neither--I want neither."

She faced Charnock resolute, and in her own fancy inflexible to any appeal. Only he made no appeal; he drew his hand across his forehead and looked at her with an expression of simple worry and bewilderment.

"My ways have lain amongst men, and men, and men," he said regretfully. "I wish I understood more about women."

The simplicity of his manner and words touched her as no protestations would have done, and broke down her self-control.

"My dear, my dear!" she cried, with a laugh which had more of tears in it than amus.e.m.e.nt, "I am not so sure that we understand so very much about ourselves;" and she dropped again into the chair and covered her face with her hands. But she heard Charnock move round the table towards her, and she dared not risk the touch of his hand, or so much as the brus.h.i.+ng of his coat against her dress. She drew her hands from her face, held out her arms straight in front of her like bars, and shrank back in the chair behind the protection of those bars.

"I do not want you," she said deliberately, with a quiet harshness.

"That, at all events, I understand and know. Go! Go away! I do not want you!" and the words, spoken this time without violence or haste, struck Charnock like a blow.

He stood dazed. He shook his head, as though it sang from the blow.

Miranda drew in a breath. "Go!" she repeated.

"You do not want me?" he asked, and somehow, whether it was owing to his tone or his look, Miranda understood from the few words of his question how much he had built upon the belief that she needed him; and consequently the reply she made now cost her more than all the rest to make. "I do not," she managed to say firmly, and dared not hazard another syllable.

Charnock felt in his breast-pocket, took out an envelope, and from the envelope a glove. "Yet this was sent to me." He laid the glove upon the table. "It was sent by you." Miranda took it up. "It contradicts your words."

Miranda turned the glove over, and stretched it out upon her knees.

"Does it?" she asked, with a slow smile, "does it contradict my words?"

"You sent it to me?"

"No doubt."

"You summoned me by sending it."

"Surely."

"For some purpose, then?"

"Ah, but for what purpose?" said she, leaning forwards in her chair.

The cold smile was still upon her face, and seemed to Charnock unfriendly as even her violence had not been. It had some cruelty too, and perhaps, too, some cunning.

"For what purpose? You should know. It is for you to say," he answered in a dull, tired voice. He had built more upon this unneeded service than he himself had been aware.

"I will tell you," continued Miranda. "You have talked to my companion Miss Holt?"

"Yes."