The telephone rang and she pulled herself to her feet at last. It was Mildred ringing up from Seton Blaise to say that she and Felix would be bringing Miranda tomorrow morning. Miranda.
Chapter Twenty-nine
MIRANDA was back at Grayhallock and Penn was in torment. He had been, at the idea of her staying on at Seton Blaise, very cast down at first: but in fact her absence had been for him a time of welcome respite wherein he could spend the day dreaming of her without those sharp and painful disturbances of his private image which the actual presence of his darling so often occasioned. He had also enjoyed looking forward to her return. But the return itself had had a terrible quality.
It was as if the house feared Miranda. The darkness, the coldness, the dampness of the still rainy weather seemed to gain, from her return, an extra shadow. The house groaned and huddled. Miranda herself was in an evident state of extreme depression and was very short with anyone who came near her. Ann was jumpy and nervous and more than usually awkward with her daughter, though she was also at times merry in a way which unnerved Penn more than her accustomed soberness. One morning he heard what he had never heard before, Ann singing: and this sound, echoing through the darkened arches of the brooding and prophetic house, made Penn shiver with a sense of ills to come.
He was now tossing on his bed. He had already got up several times, and looked across at the light which was still burning in Miranda's bedroom in the opposite tower. It was not in fact very late. After Miranda retired Penn had gone to bed in a mood of mingled boredom and desperation, and had been trying to cheer himself up by reading Such is Life. But even Tom Collins could not speak to his condition. For the time the myth of his past seemed dead, the great image of the new free man in the appallingly ancient land. They were far off now, the drooping myalls and the lordly kurrajongs and the crimson quondongs and the spotted leopard trees.
The huge coloured country might have been a dream; and Penn apprehended with alarm a sort of failure within him for the first time of his sense of nationality. It was no use, in the crisis which faced him, being even, an Australian.
He could not get comfortable. His body ached through and through with desire, producing a sort of perpetual tiredness which was half pleasurable and half painful. He got up again and went to the window. The light was still on in Miranda's room. He put on his dressing-gown and began to wander about his own room. He looked gloomily at the wrecked bed, and at his few books on the white shelf. On the table in a blue vase were roses Ann had brought up that morning. Beside them lay the Swedish knife which Humphrey had given him. He snapped it open and tried the blade. Humphrey was kind to him. He was the only person who had really wanted to be told about Australia. And now he had asked Penn to London again and Penn had again said no. It was a good knife: but of course it was nothing like the German dagger.
Penn opened the drawer and took out the dagger. He drew it silkily out of its sheath and balanced it in his hand. It made him feel dangerous. He was very sorry to think that he would have to part with it. He had put off telling Miranda about it; and in any case, since the occasion in the churchyard when he had nearly given it to her he had had other matters on his mind. He went to the window again and gazed at her light, scratching the palm of his left hand gently with the point of the dagger.
Penn felt sorry at the thought of losing it, but he also felt pleased to be able to delight Miranda and to make, for her, some evident little sacrifice. He did not want to waste the scene of returning the dagger, and he began to wonder, when shall I give it to her? He opened his window a little wider. The night was very dark but warmer and there was a flowery smell, the smell of thousands of roses. The idea came up when out of the darkness, I shall give it to her now.
Why not? His heart accelerated and he turned back from the window blushing with excitement. He had never entered Miranda's room. She had never asked him up there, and indeed the whole of the other tower had a perilous taboo quality. He was exceedingly frightened by the idea which he had just received. Could he mount the other tower? The notion that he might thereby frighten Miranda made him even more frightened himself. But it was also fearfully attractive; and the next moment he had a vision of himself running up the stairs and seizing Miranda in his arms.
Things are getting out of hand, Penn said to himself. I'd better get back into bed. But he didn't, and stood there tense and frowning. Where had he, with Miranda, really gone? He felt convinced that she needed him and that she really liked him far more than she pretended to. Why otherwise did she so often, even though to tease him, seek his company? He was convinced too, though this more irrationally, that the leap from the tree had been aimed at impressing him. When he thought of his failure there he groaned aloud. If only he had got there first, and, preferably, broken a leg or something in the attempt! He was not managing to cut much of a figure. Perhaps he was being altogether too gentle with her?
He could at least try. Anything was better than the torment of inactivity and helplessness. He would, for once, stretch his limbs. She herself was violent, wild, extreme; he would try to deserve her. He put the unsheathed dagger into one pocket and the sheath in the other and softly opened the door.
He listened. The house was silent except for his own heart beats.
He wondered if Ann was in bed. He did not want to meet her on the way. He began to descend the stairs barefoot in the dim light from his open door. He reached the gallery. Here it was dark, but it was as if he saw and he glided along it confidently until he reached the foot of the opposite spiral. Here he hesitated.
He did not want to pass the door of Randall' s room, which seemed to him, far more than the room his grandmother had been dying in, inhabited by death. Perhaps it was very foolish to disturb Miranda now, perhaps she would simply hate him for it? Could he indeed prevent himself, finding her there warm, reclining, undressed, from crushing her like a nut? An image of her suddenly accessible, defenceless, near, rose before him and he nearly fell on his knees on the stairs. Then his yearning body decided the issue and he ran on up to her door.
Breathless he knocked. There was a silence and then her voice. He entered.
Miranda was lying opposite to him tucked up in her divan bed. She was propped on pillows and had been reading. She looked toward him now, raising a pale startled face. Her hair was tousled and the collar of her striped pyjamas stood on end about her neck.
As soon as Penn found himself in Miranda's presence his violence was blunted and his purposes dimmed. Her small imperious being confronted him and he felt confusion. He said hastily, 'Hello, Miranda, I hope you don't mind my butting in. I saw your light was still on and I thought I'd just come and say hello.
Miranda had recovered herself at once. She adjusted the pillows, sitting up a bit more, and buttoned up the neck of her pyjamas. She gave him a fastidious look which made him feel like Caliban. 'This is a bit unusual, isn't it? The remark had a little conventional grown-up sound. He took in her room a little. It was a replica of his own, but a deluxe replica. Here, after his monochrome, all was coloured. All was vivid, figured, flowered, spotted, striped. He had an impression of a clutter of small things, making of the room a little treasure trove, a miniature queen's boudoir. There were a lot of little square rugs end to end, several bowls of roses, and a shelled arched built-in bookcase, dotted with objects, «two shelves of which were occupied by dolls sitting in jumbled rows with their feet protruding. Their wide blue eyes stared out censoriously. Rich furry curtains were half drawn to reveal upon the long windowsill a row of round glass paper-weights. A single lamp cast an ivory light upon the white sheets and upon Miranda's multi-coloured head.