Yes, Jenny Blair could see them now, a dark and a white shape blended together by the swinging light from the Chinese lanterns. When the children flitted nearer, the dark and the white shape appeared to break up and melt apart, as the shadows of the elm boughs broke up and melted apart in a sudden breeze. There was a sigh, a laugh, a gay protest, and a voice asked a trifle sharply, "What are you doing up so late, children?" That was Mr. Birdsong. Only Mr. Birdsong could speak in an impatient tone with an edge of roughness that was charming.
"They sent us to find you," Jenny Blair answered gravely. "Mrs. Birdsong has had a spell, and she says she must go home."
"A spell? Eva?" His tone was all roughened now, the roughness of anxiety, not of annoyance. As he passed under the Chinese lanterns, Jenny Blair saw that his face was flushed and slightly moist, with the puffiness beneath the eyes she had observed regretfully that afternoon in Canal Street. There was the same look of having run too far and too fast, though apparently he had been sitting in one spot, fanned by the river breeze, for nearly an hour. His voice, too, when he spoke again, had that panting sound, like a rapid heartbeat, which had worried her in Memoria's parlour. "Well, run ahead. I'm coming. I'm coming as quick as I can."
While he started back to the porch, Delia Barron slipped from the shadows and clung to his side; but she might have been an apparition for all the notice he took of her. Through the illuminated garden, threading his way in and out of the box-maze, he rushed on, without a glance at the loveliness or a thought of the fragrance. Only when they reached the porch and he was about to enter the house, he appeared to remember the girl at his side. Good-night, Delia," he said, and there was a resentful, almost an angry note, in his voice, "Forgive me for letting you go in alone." Then following the children up the stairs, he exclaimed in nervous desperation, "Run on, run on, show me where they have taken her!"
When Bena pointed to the closed door, he flung it open and rushed to the couch on which his wife was lying with her hair still loose on her shoulders and a tragic yet triumphant look in her face. Curious but embarrassed, the children shrank back to the bed, and caught up the half-folded sashes from the coverlet. After all, as they tried to make plain by their behaviour, the nursery belonged to them by rights, and even if they were in the way, they could scarcely be dismissed as intruders. To their astonishment, however, no one, not even Bena's mother, who let so little escape her, appeared, for the first few minutes at least, to be aware of their presence. For Mrs. Peyton was absorbed in ministering to her friend, in supporting her, in smoothing away the tragic yet triumphant expression:
"It was a sudden faintness," she said. "I am always uneasy about her heart when she has these attacks."
"A sudden faintness," Mr. Birdsong repeated, as he swept down, with his anxious tenderness, his exuberant vitality, and seized his wife in his arms. "Eva, why didn't you tell me? If I'd known you were not well, I should never have let you come."
"Will you take me home? George, I must go home as soon as I can. Mary is sending us in."
"That's nice of her. Has the carriage come round?" Mr. Birdsong glanced over his shoulder. "Jenny Blair, will you look out of the window?"
Yes, the victoria was there. Jenny Blair hurried to the window, glanced down on the drive before the door, and came back again. Then, watching the look in Mrs. Birdsong's face, the child was seized by the feeling of moral nakedness that came to her whenever the veil slipped away from life and even grown-up people stopped pretending. Like a tingling flush, this sensation swept over her, and she knew that she was scorched with shame, not for herself, but for Mrs. Birdsong. More than anything in the world, she hated to see her elders begin to crumble on the surface and let glimpses through of feelings that ought never to be exposed, not even in the direst extremity.
"If you'll let me put her to bed. It has all been too much for her," Mrs. Peyton urged mildly.
"Thank you, Cousin Mary, but she'd better go home. Come, Eva, I'll take you." There was something so alive, so helpless, so suffering, in his voice that Jenny Blair trembled with fear lest his wife should resist him. But, no, she did not resist him. She gave herself to his arms as if she were yielding up more than her body. "Yes, take me home," she said. "Take me home." That was all, but the words were ringed round with a flame, with the burning sweetness, the pure radiance, which flickered for a heartbeat, and then shone steadily in her eyes, in her smile, in her flushed and transfigured face.
"Shall I carry you? Are you able to walk?" How he loved her, Jenny Blair thought, with a twinge of jealousy, though she adored Mrs. Birdsong.
"Oh, I'm able to walk. I'll be all right again as soon as we are at home." Rising from the couch, Mrs. Birdsong tucked up her hair in a careless knot, and reached out her arms for the filmy wrap Bena had brought from the guest room. "Isn't my hair a sight?" she asked, almost gaily. "Hadn't I better throw a scarf over my head?"
"No, your curls are lovely." Mrs. Peyton touched the bright head here and there. "Be careful with her, George. She is still feeling faint."
"Oh, I'll be careful!" Slipping his arm about his wife, he led her out of the room and down the wide circular staircase. Though she clung to his arm, rhythm flowed again in her step, and when she paused for an instant to glance back, her loveliness pierced Jenny Blair's heart.
"Go straight to bed, children," Mrs. Peyton commanded, "and remember, if any one asks you about Mrs. Birdsong, that she had a sudden faintness and was obliged to leave early."
"A sudden faintness," the children repeated, while they ran to the window, where, a few minutes afterwards, they were rewarded by the sight of the victoria turning out of the drive, with the moonlight and the deeper yellow of the Chinese lanterns blending over the lustrous folds of primrose-coloured satin. "I don't believe it was a sudden faintness," Bena muttered, with one of the darts of wisdom that lent her pert childish features the look of malicious age.
"It was, it was," Jenny Blair returned defiantly. "It was a sudden faintness. Your mother said so."
"She just said that for us."
"No, she didn't."
"Yes, she did. Besides, it happened in my home, so I ought to know more about it than you do." That was Bena's way, no matter where you were or what you were pretending.
Slipping out of her clothes and into her nightgown, Jenny Blair rushed back to the window for a last glimpse of the glowing lawn, the pale sky, and the thin mist that fluttered like a dropped scarf over the river. "It was a sudden faintness," she repeated firmly; for even at her tender age she had not failed to perceive that you may believe almost anything if you say it over often enough.
Then, without cause, without warning, while she stood there in her cambric nightgown, with the river breeze blowing in a sharp spray over her skin, she was visited by one of those swift flashes of ecstasy. Wordless, vast, encompassing, this extraordinary joy broke over her like an invisible shower. Without and within, she felt the rain of delight sprinkling her body and soul, trickling over her bare flesh, seeping down through her skin into the secret depths of her heart. "The world is so lovely," she cried, dancing round and round on her bare feet. "I'm alive, alive, alive, and I'm Jenny Blair Archbald!"
PART TWO
THE DEEP PAST
CHAPTER 1
"Yes, it is true," said old General Archbald, for he had passed his eighty-third birthday, and had found that phrases, like events, often repeat themselves, "you can't mend things by thinking."