"I'm sorry too, I didn't mean it. Only, I wish you would tell me-what do you see? what do you feel?-that compels you so?"
"I can't… it goes, like a dream, when you wake in the night and you're sure you'll never forget, and then in the morning it's gone… all you can remember is that you meant to remember, and can't."
Cordelia suspected that he was withholding something, but from there they progressed to the grassy bank beside the stream, where they lay down and embraced as she had hoped, and where, a little later, he asked her to marry him, and the drowned man was quite forgotten.
On a stifling, overcast evening towards the end of summer, Cordelia was once again watching from her old place in the upstairs window, waiting for Harry to appear at the turning of the lane. A scrawled note in yesterdays post had told her he would be arriving late on Friday, some time between five and seven-thirty, depending on when he could get away from the office.
The day had been exceedingly hot, the sun too fierce to venture out in; it had been a relief, at first, when the clouds came over. But still the heat pressed down like a blanket. The air was heavy with the perfume of the climbing roses on the porch below, mingled with that of a dozen different flowers, scents of foliage and bark and leaf-mould, warm stone and woodwork and paint still soft from the heat of the sun. She turned once more to look at the clock on the mantelpiece. Eight minutes past six.
For the first few weeks of their engagement, Harry had seemed perfectly content. A long spell of fine weather had enabled them to spend a great deal of time out of doors, including several paradisal hours on the riverbank. But even then, the intervening days had passed very slowly indeed. With Beatrice in town all week, Cordelia was effectively tied to Ashbourn, partly for reasons of economy, and partly because Aunt Una, after visiting a London heart specialist, had been ordered to avoid exertion, and rest for several hours every day. And since the house had no telephone, and Harry was, as he cheerfully conceded, hopeless at letters, she would usually have heard nothing from him since the last farewell.
He was also constitutionally incapable of catching a specified train, being always liable to slip into the Museum, or a saleroom, "just for five minutes" and emerge an hour and a half later. And then at Hurst Green he might be drawn into conversation with the stationmaster, or someone he met in the village street, and lose track of yet more time before he came into view of the house, waving as enthusiastically as ever. So she had got into the habit of settling herself with a book in the upstairs window at the earliest possible time, though she seldom did much reading. Her imagination was too active, her emotions too keen; and all too often, especially once the expected hour had come and gone, morbid anxieties would begin to flit about her mind. The train has been delayed. He has accepted another invitation and forgotten to tell me. He has simply forgotten. He no longer loves me. He has met someone else. There has been an accident The train has crashed. He is injured… he is dead. I shall never see him again… all in the most vivid detail. It was like waving away midges at twilight: as fast as you drove one off, another would dart in and stab, on and on interminably, until they were banished by the familiar wave and greeting from the lane below.
For those few perfect weeks, that first embrace had seemed to her the purest essence of joy: she would twine herself around him, only wishing she could hold him close enough to annihilate all distinction between them. Until-she could not say exactly when; the more she brooded upon where the first shadow had fallen, the further back it seemed to stretch-she had become aware that his passion no longer matched her own. She had tried persuading herself that he was merely embarrassed by excessive displays of ardour in public, but even since she had learned to be more restrained, he was likely to say "Here, steady on, old thing", and glance nervously up at the windows. And then he had begun to say such things in private. Her conviction that she must be perfectly, blissfully happy had carried her along, as if she had set out for a walk on a cloudless day, too absorbed to notice the fine, tell-tale streaks of vapour overhead, the gradual weakening of the light, until quite suddenly she had looked up, and shivered, and realised that she had been cold for a long time.
She shivered in fact, though there was nothing chill about the present evening. The house was completely silent. Aunt Una would be lying down in her room; Uncle Theodore was no doubt reading in his study; Beatrice had not yet returned from town. Her lessons at Miss Harringay's were normally over by two o'clock each Friday, and she was supposed to come straight home. But perhaps Harry had got in touch, and suggested she travel down with him, though this had never happened before. At Uncle Theodore's insistence, Beatrice had always taken the first train up each Monday morning, rather than returning with Harry on the Sunday night. Theodore had told Beatrice, when she. began at Miss Harringay's, that he wanted her to impose as little as possible upon her friends in Bayswater; but Cordelia suspected that he had understood how she would have felt to see Beatrice and Harry setting off together, and was grateful to him. She had not realised until too late just how much she was giving up for Beatrice's sake. The four happy years she had spent at Ashbourn since leaving school now seemed to have vanished in a sort of contented sleep; she too wanted to be out preparing to earn her living, as she meant to do when they were married; and in London she could have seen Harry every day.
Beatrice, to do her justice, had not once suggested that Harry should escort her. Her manner towards him had grown still more constrained, but that was capable of more than one interpretation. Cordelia had not been able to stop herself asking Harry, every so often, whether he had seen anything of Beatrice in town; he always assured her he had not; but on the other hand, he had never asked whether she thought he ought to, which suggested he knew better than to ask. And once she had begun to doubt the strength of his feeling, her anxieties had multiplied and swarmed. Until, after tossing and turning for hours on the previous Saturday night, she decided to go down to the kitchen and make herself some cocoa (and perhaps, if she felt bold enough, look in at Harry while he slept). As she approached the room in which they had stored the remainder of Henry St Clair's belongings, she saw light shining from beneath the door.
Unlike the studio, which had its own special lock, this door opened to the same key as all the other rooms in the corridor. Had somebody left the light on? But why? She had not entered the room for many weeks; not since they had put away "The Drowned Man" and turned the key on it. She listened, holding her breath. No sound came from within, but it seemed to her that there was a very faint, rhythmic pulsation in the pool of light around her feet. Which would be worse: to look and see, or lie awake with her imagination running wild? She took hold of the handle and softly opened the door.
Harry-still fully dressed, though it was two in the morning-stood facing her over the lectern, swaying slowly back and forth. She had last seen it in the far corner, draped in a cloth. Now it stood in the centre of the floor, directly beneath the light. If he had glanced up, their eyes would have met, but his entire attention remained fixed upon the lectern. She could see the glitter of his shadowed eyes, and it seemed to her that he was very faintly smiling. She waited, willing him to look at her, until the suspense became unbearable.
"Dearest?"
The rhythm of his breathing faltered like that of a sleeper on the verge of waking, but his concentration did not waver. How long had he been creeping in here at night? Dust was already thick upon the floor, and on the furniture, and yet the lectern, what she could see of it, looked spotless.
She took another step into the room, her hand still on the doorknob. But the hem of her dressing-gown caught on an empty frame and brought it clattering to the floor.