“Tell me, who is the giant with gold, curling hair.
He who rides at the head of your band?
Seven feet is his height, with some inches to spare.
And he looks like a king in command…”
And on the diminishing echo, clearly: “Damn you, I’ve told you, forget all that, and go. Good-bye.”
The receiver clashed in the rest, and the door swung before her thrust, she was out, and at the foot of the staircase.
He turned and took the rest of the stairs three at a time, in long leaps. By the time Liri came out on the main landing, he was away along the gallery and out through the great front doors, and bounding down the steps from the terrace towards the dimming slopes that led to the Braide. He ran like a hare, in exuberant leaps, back to the duty Liri had laid on him. The vacant, wandering hand was still languid and easy on the thrusting current. Meurice found himself a dry place to stand, and waited; it was certain he wouldn’t have long to wait.
“I wish I hadn’t done it now,” said Felicity, as many another has said before her with as little effect, and many another will certainly say in the future. “If I’d known…” She stopped there, jutted a dubious lip at what it had been in her mind to say, and rejected it ruthlessly. Whatever she lacked, she was beginning to discover in herself a rare and ferocious honesty. “I should, though,” she said, “the way I felt, even if I’d known how it would turn out.”
“None of us knows that yet,” George reminded her crisply. He had placed a chair considerately for her, so that no too acute light should touch her face, and no too direct glance put her off her stride. Oh, there was stuff in Felicity of which she knew nothing yet, even if she was finding out some things about herself the hard way, and too rapidly.
“No,” she conceded, “but we know the probabilities. I did know them, even then, or I could have if I’d been willing.”
“I doubt,” said George, doing her the justice of showing a like honesty, “if you anticipated that much success.”
She looked up quickly at that, a little startled, and considered it gingerly. The faintest and briefest glint of a smile showed in her eyes, and as feebly withdrew. “You’re not trying to make me think I haven’t done something dreadful, are you?” You, of all people! her tone implied.
“No, I wouldn’t do that. But I am telling you that something like that happens in most lives. Most of us, when it does happen, are lucky enough, clumsy enough, or scared enough to make a mess of our opportunity for malice. You were the unlucky one. You had the perfect explosive put into your hand, and the perfect fuse for it into your mouth. Even then, for some of us, it would have failed to go off. But we shouldn’t have been less guilty. Having something to regret leaves you anything but unique or particular in this world, Felicity, rather confirms you one of the crowd.” He saw her braced to think that out, and resolute to kick the argument to pieces, and saw fit to divert the event. “Look; suppose I ask you my questions first, and then we can talk.”
“All right,” she agreed. “But I’ve told you everything I can think of now.”
“Yes, this is a matter of something you did tell me. You said you left Lucien there by the river, and came away, ‘and latched the gate after me.’ Did you mean that literally? Not just pulled the gate to after you, but latched it?”
She was staring at him now alertly and brightly, momentarily deflected from her own problems. “Yes, latched it. Of course! Why, is that important?”
“It’s a detail. They all help. The latch was still in position then?”
She nodded emphatically. “You couldn’t very well miss it, it’s nearly as long as my arm.” An exaggeration of course, what she was really indicating with a small flourish was her forearm, from elbow to fingertips. “It hasn’t had any rivets, or whatever they are, holding it for a long time, it just hangs there in the slots, you can pull it out if you want to.”
“Yes, I see. And Lucien didn’t think better of it, and come after you? Try to stop you?”
“No,” she said sombrely, “why should he? He didn’t know what I was going to do. He didn’t care about me one way or the other. I suppose there wasn’t really any reason why he should. He never even looked round. He was sitting in the grotto, glad I was gone. I realise now that he must have been at the end of his patience, to do what he did to me.”
“I suspect,” said George, “that his patience was always on the short side.”
“Maybe. I didn’t really know much about him, did I?” she said bleakly. “And neither did he about me.” She looked up earnestly into George’s face, and asked simply: “What am I going to do?”
Outside, the gong for dinner was bawling merrily, but they didn’t notice it, or hear the noisy parade to the hall.
“Live with it,” said George with equal simplicity, “and make the best of it. I can’t absolve you, and you wouldn’t be grateful to me if I tried. I can’t charge you with anything, and there isn’t any penance to be found anywhere, if that’s what you’re looking for. No, you’ll just have to hump the memory along with you and go on carrying it, like the rest of us, and learn to live with yourself and your mistakes. It’s the one way you find out how to avoid more and greater failures.”
“But if I’ve killed him?” she said in a whisper, her eyes frantic but trusting.
“Whatever happens, you won’t have killed him. Not unless you’d been responsible for living their two lives as well as your own, for all the qualities in them and all the things they’d ever done or thought that eventually made it impossible for yesterday to end without a tragedy – only then would you have killed the one and made the other a murderer. Your contribution was bitter enough to you, but only the spark that set off a fire already laid. Don’t claim more than your share, Felicity, you’ll find your fair share quite enough to carry.”
After a brief, deep silence she said in a low voice: “Thank you! At least you haven’t treated me like a child.”
“You’re not a child. Let’s face it, you’re not grown-up yet, either, not quite. But I’ll tell you this, you’re a great deal nearer to being a woman than you were yesterday, when I first met you.”
Her lips tightened in a wry and painful smile that was very close indeed to being adult, and she said something no child could have said. “That doesn’t seem much for Lucien to die for,” said Felicity, and finding her own utterance more horrifying than she had expected, rose abruptly to leave him. “There isn’t anything… useful… I can be doing?”
“Living,” said George, “and perhaps for the moment just living, without any thinking. And don’t think that isn’t useful. For a start you can go in to dinner with the rest of them, and help to tide Follymead over to-night.”
Faintly she said, the child creeping back into her voice and eyes uninvited: “Do I have to? I’m not hungry.”
“You will be. The least useful think you can do is make yourself ill. And you’re needed, don’t forget you’re part of the household, a bigger part than ever before.”
“All right,” she said grimly, and took a step or two towards the door. The weight of the house came down on her appallingly for a moment. She looked back at him in sudden piteous appeal, she didn’t know for what.
“Somehow it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said in a muted wail, “if only I wasn’t so damned dull and plain …”
“Plain!” George echoed incredulously. “Plain!” he repeated in a growl of exasperation. “Child, did you never look at yourself in a mirror? Plain! Come here!” He took her by the shoulders and turned her about, and trotted her sharply across the room to the high mantel and the Venetian mirror above it. It hung so high that at close range only her head came into view, with George’s impatient face above. He cupped a hand under her chin and tilted her face up to the glass. “My dear little idiot, for goodness sake look at yourself. What do you want, in heaven’s name? Do you have to be coloured like a peony to be worth looking at? What if you haven’t got your aunt’s milk-whiteness and roses, and a pile of fair hair? This… this pale-brown, baby-fine stuff you have got was made to go with this face. You find me a more delicately-drawn hair-line than this, or a better-shaped head. And as for your face, I’d like to know who put you off it in the first place. Look at the form of these eye-sockets, look at this line, this curve along your chin and neck. Plain! You haven’t finished growing yet, and the peak’s still to come, but if you can’t see it coming you must be blind, my girl. Don’t you realise you’ve got bones that are going to keep you beautiful until you’re eighty? The prettiest colouring in the world won’t stand by you like these will.”