The Tower of Oblivion Part 62

"Oh, smell the air! This is a jolly place! Which way is St Briac from here?"

"Over that way."

The dark eyes sent a message. "Well, now tell me what his painting's like. I expect it's as wonderful as his writing was."

"It rather struck me--I don't know much about it--but I fancied it was on somewhat similar lines."

"What sort of lines?"

"The old story--starting anew from the very beginning of everything--nothing to do with anything else, past, present or to come."

"Of course he would be the same.... But now tell me--we've hardly had ten words yet, what with Madge and shopping and your silly illness and one thing and another. You say he's got to twenty?"

"Thereabouts."

"And he hasn't moved since--you know what I mean?"

"That isn't quite clear."

"What isn't there clear about it?"

"He thinks he's moving--he hopes to move--forward again."

She stopped to stare at me. Already the few days' sun had softly browned her natural milky pallor.

"He _what_!" she gasped.... "But that's wilder than all the rest put together!"

"It's what he thinks. There's simply his word for it. He can't explain it. But he's staking everything on it."

"Everything? What?"

"His future course, I suppose, whatever that is. By the way, has Madge said anything to you about him?"

She stared harder than ever. "Madge! Does Madge know him?"

"She doesn't know Derry. But she knows Arnaud. He's been to the house."

"He's been ... Oh-h-h-h!"

You may call me if you will the most dunderheaded fellow who ever meddled in things he did not understand. I deserve it all and more. All the same I must ask you to believe me when I say that it was not until that "Oh-h-h-h!" broke in an interminable contralto whisper from her lips that I saw what I had done. I had resolved that not one word of Jennie Aird's affairs should she learn from me. As much for her own sake as for Jennie's I had determined to spare her that.

And now I had gone and told her that very thing!

For the knowledge of it leaped full-blown out of that long record of her own heart. Jennie was in love; Arnaud had been to Ker Annic; therefore--she knew it, she knew it--Jennie was in love with Derry. How should anybody, seeing him as Julia Oliphant had seen him at his former twenty, not fall in love with him? Young, sunbrowned, beautiful, grave--only to see him, only to have him at the house for tea, was to be in love with him during the whole of the remaining days. Who knew this if Julia Oliphant did not? Jennie thenceforward would love him as she herself had loved him through the unbroken past. And if he thought his turning-point had now come, forward into the future again he and Jennie would go together.

That and nothing else was what I had told her.

"Oh-h-h-h!" she said again. "I _see_!" And yet once more, "Oh-h-h-h! I _see_!"

And, losing my head once, in that very same moment a wilder thing still rose up in my heart to crown it with folly. I forgot that between Julia Oliphant and myself there could never be any question of love. Little difference it made that I now loved her, knew now that I had long loved her. For me she could never care. Yet I forgot that. It seemed to me in that overwrought moment that if Derry really was right, and on the point of living normally forward again, in one way the field of the future could be left to him and to Jennie Aird. Julia and I together could leave it to them. She in my arms (I was distracted enough to think), Jennie in his, would at least cut the knot it pa.s.sed our wits to untie.

In any case Derry would never again look at Julia Oliphant. He never had looked at her. But I looked and found her desirable, as other men had found her desirable. And why should not I too have whatever of good the remaining years could give me?

So, under that convolvulus-starred hedge, with that sweet air in our nostrils and the whispering of the corn in our ears, I asked Julia Oliphant to marry me.

Before coming out she had picked up and put on her head one of Alec's panamas. For the rest she wore a sort of rough creamy c.r.a.pe, with a wide-open collar, elbow-length sleeves, a cord round her waist, grey silk stockings and suede shoes. Little wisps of her dark hair were still damp from her bathe, and her skirt was dusted with particles of mica from the sands. Since uttering that "Oh-h-h-h!" she had not moved.

"I see," she said again. "I see."

"Then, Julia----"

"Oh, I see! I ought to have known the very first moment!"

"Then----"

She turned towards me, but only for an instant. Then she looked away again. "What were you saying?" she asked.

"Very humbly, I asked you to marry me, Julia."

"Queer," she murmured.

"Is it so very queer?"

She gave a tremulous little laugh. "The way everything happens at once, I mean. Get yourself proposed to once and you go on. I shall know quite a lot about it soon.... I say, George----"

"What, Julia?"

"How long ago was that--when he came to the house, I mean?"

"About ten days ago."

"And you there! What nerve! Did he let himself be introduced to you, or what?"

"He came up and shook hands with me. In fact he carried everything off very competently."

"Carried everything off ..." she repeated, looking away over the corn.

"And has he been since then?"

"We had tea with him in his garden one afternoon."

"One afternoon ..." she murmured again. "How does Jennie spend most of her time?"

"I've been laid up in bed."

"Of course," she nodded. Apparently she pa.s.sed it as a good man's answer, as men's answers go.

But my own question she did not appear to dream of answering. Except to compare it with another man's similar question she might not have heard it. Nor had I asked that question only as the solution of an otherwise insoluble problem. Happy I, could I have taken her into my arms there and then. So I waited, my eyes in the shadow of her panama, while she continued to look far away.

Then, "I see," she said yet once more. "Of course I ought to have known in the tent."