"Aura!" he said almost incredulously, "and you sounded--so--so glad."
"I thought--I thought you were Ted," she explained with a little sob.
"I've been expecting him so long, you see."
"Ted!" he echoed, "you have been expecting him? I don't understand."
"No," she replied hurriedly in a low voice. "Of course, I forgot you couldn't." There was a faint pause, then she collected herself.
"We--we were married----" This time the pause remained unbroken until coolly, almost sarcastically, the question came.
"You were married! May I ask--when?"
The darkness of those drawn down blinds was in a way a godsend to them both. It hid all expression, and it seemed to Ned Blackborough in his incredulous dismay as if he were speaking to a disembodied spirit; was he also, by some chance, a disembodied spirit?
"I--I don't remember," came her voice, all strained and curiously weary. "Oh, yes; of course I do. It was on the 14th of February." She was just beginning to remember dates, and to recollect that this must be the 1st of March. Everything seemed to have been blotted out by her grandfather's sudden death two days before, and the impossibility of getting any answer to her telegram from Ted, Ted on whom she had learnt to rely.
Ned laughed suddenly. "St. Valentine's Day," he echoed. "So I sent you my valentine as a wedding present. If I had only known, I mightn't have taken so much--trouble--to send it off. I expect I was pretty near death when you were getting married, young lady, and I compliment you on the quickness----"
"But we were engaged, quite a long time before," she said in idle protest, for something in her seemed hammering at her head, beating into it the knowledge that she had been mean.
Once more he laughed. "May I ask how long?"
"On--on New Year's Day." He could scarcely hear what she said.
"On New Year's Day," he echoed incredulously, "impossible!" Then the conviction that, if this were so, Ted Cruttenden had--well! almost lied to him came to rouse his anger to the uttermost, and he strode towards her shadow. "But this is foolishness," he exclaimed, "You know you love me--you know you do----"
"Hush!" she cried, interrupting his swift rise in tone, "Remember, please, that my grandfather lies dead upstairs."
"Dead!" he said stupidly after a pause, "Dead! I--I didn't know. I--I am very sorry." The conventional words of sympathy came slowly as he stood, feeling baulked indescribably, done out, as it were, of his just claim to anger.
"Are there any more terrors to tell?" he asked at last recklessly. "Do you happen to be dead yourself, or has the 'coo' been killed? I beg your pardon--you won't understand the allusion----" he added hastily, "but I must be excused; there are limits! So, I see; you took me for Ted--for your husband, save the mark! Why isn't he here?--where he ought to be?"
The sudden blame, following her own thought so closely, took Aura all unprepared. The dull grievance which had been hers all those long hours of vain waiting became suddenly acute. She dissolved into young self-pitying tears.
"I don't know," she murmured, strangling her sobs, "and I don't in the least know what to do."
For an instant Ned Blackborough felt inclined to arraign high heaven for thus robbing him of righteous wrath.
But he was a gentleman, his heart was soft, so there was nothing for it save to accept the situation with the best grace he could. And the grace came, to his surprise, with such exceeding ease, despite his ill-usage, that he had to drive himself not towards patience, but to impatience, as he listened to Aura's tale of ignorance and loneliness.
A man with money behind him, or rather money with a man behind it, can do all things save avoid vulgarity, ensure happiness, or escape death.
By the evening, therefore, Ned Blackborough was able to give Aura a most sympathetic and affectionate telegram from her husband.
"We ran him to earth in Vienna, where he had gone on business," said Ned, refraining, why he scarcely knew, from saying also that Ted had been found in a Biergarten, and that he had left strict orders that telegrams were not to be forwarded. "I got him through Hirsch, but he again was unfortunately in Paris; they have some big scoop on hand.
But it is all right now, and he should be home to-morrow. As for the rest, you need not bother. It is all settled, and I will tell Martha what to expect. So I will say good-bye."
She could not stifle down the quick appeal, "Must you go?"
"Of course, I must go," he replied roughly, "I ought never to have come, and I am sorry I did, even though I have helped you. Good-bye."
She watched him put on his greatcoat without another word, almost angry with herself for feeling so inexpressibly mean. She would have liked to tell him that she had been unable to wait, that even if she had waited her answer would have been the same; but she felt that all this must come afterwards when he had had time.
And then suddenly he turned to her again.
"I'll leave this here, I think," he said, putting a flat parcel he had taken out from his pocket on the piano, "you might while an hour or so by looking at them. It--it isn't all cussedness, Mrs. Cruttenden; I should like you to see them. I should like you to know _something_ of it, once! Good-bye; throw them into the fire when you have done with them. I shall not want them again."
When he had gone she went over to the piano, and taking the packet crouched down with it beside the fading fire-light, which she stirred into a blaze. To other eyes the room might have looked inexpressibly dreary, large, bare, empty, even the very sofa, imported into it for the old man's invalid use, taken away for him when the stairs became too much for his strength. But Aura was accustomed to the bareness; it had been part of her life always.
They were sketches evidently, and on the fold of white paper, which was their last covering, Ned had written one word.
"Avilion."
She sat looking at them all, these plans and sketches of the island in the southern sea, that was to have been that Island of the Blessed, of which a glimpse only can be seen by mortals, when at sunset time the golden sea fades into the golden sky, and far away--is it land or is it cloud?--a purple shadow, tipped with rosy light into distant peaks, fades with the sky into the grey of night.
How beautiful they were! And in every one of them, in front, even of the foreground, looking out, as the painter himself must have looked out, over the blue ripples, down into the pellucid cave depths where strange fish showed in flashes of colour, towards the leafy contours of the ilex woods, along the flower-decked lawns, or through the fluted columns of marble pavilions, stood the filmy diaphanous figure of a woman, white, immobile, mist-like with averted face.
But she knew who it was, and a lump rose in her throat as she recognised it as his dream of her.
She was not worth it! No! Behind his dream of her stood a reality that had nothing to do with her. He was seeking, and she was seeking something that had nothing to do with manhood or womanhood.
The fire blazed up fiercely, fitfully, as one by one in obedience to his request, those dreamful figures caught, flared up for a space, and then died down into little trembling sparks.
Behind them all lay Darkness and Peace. So to her as she sat holding the Dream of a Man's Love in her hands, came for the first time a glimpse of the sightlessness and soundlessness, and touchlessness, which lie beyond all earthly things.
Ned meanwhile was giving his orders to Martha in the kitchen. She was taking them, as usual, with many subservient bobs, but with a certain waveringness of voice, and an unsteadiness of eye which augured ill for her calm of mind.
"I'll do my best, your lordship," she said finally with an odd little sniff, half tears, half anger. "But what with folks going away as shud 'ave stayed, an' them as might a-gone away an' welcome stoppin' on, an' both together comin' back an' staying away, I'm like a o-ven with the door bein' open constant--not fit to bake a penny-piece."
Ned looked at her, for a wonder, distastefully.
"Do you mean," he said, "that you didn't expect to see me again?"
Martha grew red, then white. "So sure as my name's Martha Higgins,"
she began tearfully, "If I'd expected your lordship wasn't playin' the back-step----"
He interrupted her calmly. "I'm sorry to say it, Martha, but I think you are a fool," he said calmly, and left her collapsed in a chair crying silently, not so much for herself as for him; since she had seen the tragedy of his face.
Adam Bate, coming in ten minutes later, found her so, and being diffident of his power to console, crept away again to administer comfort to a newly calved cow who was lowing for her young one.
"Coo-up, Coo-ep, m'dear," he said, wisping its back with a handful of straw, "th' shallt 'ave it for sure when th' bags full, so set th'
mind to the makin' o' milk. See! there's a bit o' mangle fur 'ee, but mind 'ee 'to whom much is given of them shall much be requir-ed,' as passon says. So--'pail-full, cauf-full.' Think o' that an' dinnot squander God's strength on booin'."
He felt inclined to read some such moral lesson to Martha when he returned to find her in no better case, the fire dwindling and no sign of tea; but, as has been said, he felt diffident. So he contented himself with laying the tea, poking up the fire and putting on the kettle, accompanying these unwonted actions with the hissing noise which grooms use, apparently as an encouragement to their own ardour.
Perhaps this aided him to courage; perhaps the presence of death in the house taking him back to fundamentals roused in him a revolt of vitality, a desire to secure safety in equilibrium; anyhow, after a time, he sat himself down in a kitchen chair, and scrooped it by excruciating half-inches towards Martha's, until they almost touched.
"Martha, woman!" he said tentatively, "If this sort o' thing's goin'
on--If you 'urns goin' to be taken, this no supper, no tea way, as you 'urn bin doin' o' late--why there ain't nothin' for it but ter marry me, as doan't forgit them things."
Martha shook her head forlornly. "It--it'll have to come to that in the end, I sippose," she sobbed.