“I have outstayed all the rest,” Lindsay said, with his hat and stick in his hand, in Alicia Livingstone's drawing-room, “because I want particularly to talk to you. They have left me precious little time,” he added, glancing at his watch.
She had wondered when he came, early in the formal Sunday noon hour for men's calls, since he had more casual privileges; and wondered more when he sat on with composure, as one who is master of the situation, while Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries came and went. There was a mist in her brain as she talked to the Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries—it did not in the least obscure what she found to say—and in the midst of it the formless idea that he must wish to attach a special importance to his visit. This took shape and line when they were alone, and he spoke of out-sitting the others. It impelled her to walk to the window and open it. “You might stay to lunch,” she said, addressing a pair of crows in altercation on the verandah.
“There is nearly half an hour before lunch,” he said. “Can I convince you in that time, I wonder, that I'm not an absolute fool?”
Alicia turned and came back to her sofa. She may have had a prevision of the need of support. “I hardly think,” she said, drawing the long breath with which we try to subdue a tempest within, “that it would take so long.” She looked with careful criticism at the violets in his buttonhole.
“I've had a supreme experience,” he said, “very strange and very lovely. I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it,” he added quickly, watching her face; “so don't, for Heaven's sake, touch it roughly.”
She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation. “Why should you suppose I would touch it roughly?” There was that in her voice which cried out that she would rather not touch it at all; but Lindsay, on the brink of his confidence, could not suppose it, did not hear it. He knew her so well.
“A great many people will,” he said. “I can't bear the thought of their fingers. That is one reason that brings me to you.”
She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked straight at him. It nerved her to be brought into his equation, even in the form which should finally be eliminated. She contrived a smile.
“I believe you know already,” Lindsay cried.
“I have heard something. Don't be alarmed—not from people, from Miss Howe.”
“Wonderful woman! I haven't told her.”
“Is that always necessary? She has intuitions. In this case,” Alicia went on, with immense courage, “I didn't believe them.”
“Why?” he asked enjoyingly. Anything to handle his delight—he would even submit it to analysis.
She hesitated—her business was in great waters, the next instant might engulf her. “It's so curiously unlike you,” she faltered. “If she had been a duchess—a very exquisite person, or somebody very clever—remember I haven't seen her.”
“You haven't, so I must forgive you invidious comparisons.” Lindsay visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated hardness.
Alicia raised her eyebrows.
“What do you expect one to imagine?” she asked, with quietness.
“A miracle,” he said sombrely.
“Ah, that's difficult!”
There was silence for a moment between them, then she added perversely—
“And, you know, faith is not what it was.”
Duff sat biting his lips. Her dryness irritated him. He was accustomed to find in her fields of delicately blooming enthusiasms, and running watercourses where his satisfactions were ever reflected. Suddenly she seemed to emerge to her own consciousness, upon a summit from which she could look down upon the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he stood.
“Don't make a mistake,” she said. “Don't.” She thrust her hand for a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew it, gathering herself together to meet what he might say.
What he did say was simple, and easy to hear. “That's what everybody will tell me; but I thought you might understand.” He tapped the toe of his boot with his stick as if he counted the strokes. She looked down and counted them too.
“Then you won't help me to marry her?” he said, definitely, at last.
“What could I do?” She twisted her sapphire ring. “Ask somebody else.”
“Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid colours of the lost.”
The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she looked too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.
“No,” she said. “It must be somebody else. Don't ask me. I should become involved—I might do harm.” She had surmounted her emotion; she was able to look at the matter with surprising clearness and decision. “I should do harm,” she repeated.
“You don't count with her effect on you.”
“You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man.”
“But won't you take anything—about her—from me? You know I'm really not a fool—not even very impressionable?”
“Oh no!” she said impatiently. “No—of course not.”
“Pray why?”
“There are other things to reckon with.” She looked coldly beyond him out of the window. “A man's intelligence when he is in love—how far can one count on it?”
There was nothing but silence for that, or perhaps the murmured, “Oh, I don't agree,” with which Lindsay met it. He rode down her logic with a simple appeal. “Then after all,” he said, “you're not my friend.”
It goaded her into something like an impertinence. “After you have married her,” she said, “you'll see.”
“You will be hers then,” he declared.
“I will be yours.” Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested on a brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.
“And I thought you broad in these views,” Lindsay said, glancing at her curiously. Her opportunity for defence was curtailed by a heavy step in the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon Major Livingstone, looking warm. He, whose other name was the soul of hospitality, made a profound and feeling remonstrance against Lindsay's going before tiffin, though Alicia, doing something to a bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear it. Not that her added protest would have detained Lindsay, who took his perturbation away with him as quickly as might be. Alicia saw the cloud upon him as he shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling to reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all effulgence on the other side of the door.
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