“I wish you’d tell some of your adventures.”
“I might, some time.”
Yet he continually put it off. Partly, of course, because it was always easier to do so; Mrs. Consett’s chatter was a strong current that could be swum against, but it was far less trouble to relax and let it carry one along. And partly, too, because he felt a curious reluctance to break the tranquillity of those simple days, and what tranquillity or simplicity could remain after he had told his entire story?
He had, in fact, few chances of talking to the girl alone, and he could not, he felt, tell her the final secret—her own identity—at any other time.
One night, after dinner, someone brought a gramophone into the tiled hall and put on dance records. The girl asked him if he danced and he replied, smiling: “I’m afraid I don’t—I never learned, and I’m too old now.” She said: “I’ll teach you, then,” and as other couples were by that time moving from their seats, he replied, with sudden decision: “Will you? All right.” He found it easy; she was a good pilot, and he himself had a sure sense of rhythm. “As if you were too old to learn,” she whispered, reproachfully, as they drifted in amidst the lamp-lit shadows. “I don’t think you’re really too old for anything.”
“Although I’m nearly three times your own age?”
“That doesn’t matter. You don’t feel old, do you? And if anyone saw you when you were making a fire for a picnic, they’d think you were only a boy.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I was watching you this afternoon. You were enjoying it, weren’t you?”
“Absolutely, I admit.”
“So was I. I don’t think I’ve ever got to know anybody so quickly as I have you. It seems rather an awful thing to say, but sometimes—sometimes I wish mother wasn’t quite so—so everywhere—and always; she’s a dear, but she does chatter terribly, doesn’t she?”
“Just as well, perhaps, because I’m not much of a talker myself.”
“Neither am I, yet I’d rather like to give ourselves a chance. By the way, were you once a rubber planter out in the Malay States?”
“Sumatra, it was. But how did you know?”
“Oh, mother seems to have been finding out all about you. She happened to see an article in the London Times, and thought it must be you, from the name and initials. Then someone else told her—some people staying here, but I think they’ve gone now—that you’d been a planter out there and had made heaps of money.”
“It depends how much you mean by heaps.”
She laughed. “Personally, I’m not very curious, but mother seems to think you’re a millionaire travelling incognito, or something of that sort.”
He laughed also. “You can contradict the rumour,” he assured leer.
They went on dancing. They danced, in fact, with hardly a pause until nearly midnight, and when they finally rejoined Mrs. Consett he said, with eyes and cheeks glowing: “Your daughter is a most charming teacher. I hope we haven’t been allowing the lesson to last too long?”
“Oh, not at all—not at all.” Indeed, she seemed quite pleased.
He was tired that night when he went to bed, but it was the sort of tiredness to be expected after a day on the mountains and an evening of fox- trots. Curiously, in a way, he felt much better since he had begun the more strenuous life of Roone’s; it seemed to tire him far less to scramble up a mountain in search of fuel for a picnic-fire than to take leisurely strolls along city pavements.
The girl and he had more time together during the second week; there were occasions when Mrs. Consett professed fatigue and said she would write letters in the lounge while they, if they cared, took a walk. Roone’s was growing emptier; the eight months’ season of slack business was approaching and the first gales of autumn had already laid bare the trees in the woods. As an offset to the general exodus of visitors, a light cruiser came to anchor in Carrigole Bay for a few days’ visit. Most of the officers and men carne ashore to Roone’s; bluejackets swarmed into the public bar, while the hall and the long verandah terraces were filled with shouting and laughing naval officers. Every night they kept up their merriment to a late hour, and most of the day a group of them hung about the counter in the hall, chatting and joking with the Roones.
One morning Fothergill and the girl made the ascent of the Baragh, a steep, cone-shaped peak that rose a thousand feet at the back of the hotel. An hour of scrambling through heather brought them to the summit, whence could be seen the roofs of Carrigole and the long bay stretching westward into the sunlit sea.
NOW, he felt, as he sat on a rough stone with the sweep of sea and mountain all around him and the girl seated on another stone somewhat below,—now was just his chance. He could talk without interruption; he could begin at the beginning and tell all that was to be told.
Yet he didn’t even begin to tell. Another thought carne to him—that in all the world she was probably the only person he would ever meet who had ever known Daly—the sole surviving contact with all in his own life that had mattered most. And that dark passion of his, subdued for years, spilled over now in a little tender flood of affection for the girl.
Suddenly she said: “Do you remember I told you I sometimes had dreams that might have something to do with the time before I left Russia?”
He nodded.
“I had a dream of that sort last night. Too queer to be remembered, really, but the queerest part was that you were mixed up in it somehow.”
“I was?”
“Yes. We seemed to be going somewhere all the time—just one place after another—and at night we slept out in the open and used hot stones for water-bottles.” She laughed. “Isn’t it curious the way everything gets mixed up in dreams?”
The chance to tell her was again full on him, yet once again he forbore. He was still wrestling with memories of those old and epic days. He said, abruptly: “Are you happy in America? What do you do there? Tell me the kind of life you have.”
She looked amused. “I rather thought mother had told you everything you ever wanted to hear about our home life. As a matter of fact, we really do have a good time and get on splendidly together. We play a little bridge and tennis (though we’re both very bad), and we just have money enough to travel now and again and go to theatres and have friends to stay with us. I shall have to earn my own living, of course, for which I’m rather glad—I think it’s a mistake to do nothing but idle about and wait to be married by somebody.”
“Don’t you wish you’d been born rich, or high up in the world—a princess, say?”
“I wouldn’t mind if I’d been born rich, though I don’t suppose it would have made me any happier. And as for being a princess, when I feel romantic I sometimes try to kid myself that I am one—after all, nobody knows who I really am, do they?”
“I suppose not.”
“Though I daresay I wouldn’t really like it if I were. It must be very tiresome having to be important all the time. It would stop me from doing things like this, wouldn’t it?”
“Like this?”
“Yes. Scrambling up a mountain with you.”
He laughed—a sudden almost boyish laugh that startled the mountain silences. “Yes, you’re right. You’re happier as you are, no doubt.”
“I know I am. Oh, it has been such fun, travelling all over Europe ever since nearly a year ago, and the strange thing is, it all somehow seems to have been leading up to this. I mean this—here—now—just this.” She looked at him quickly and then stared far across the distance to the furthest horizon. “I like these mountains ever so much better than the Swiss ones, don’t you? I suppose it’s heresy to say so, but the Alps rather remind me of wedding-cake.”