Part 3

She dressed carefully for dinner in a black dress that her father

liked, and that made her look serious and responsible. Dinner was quite

uneventful. Her father read a draft prospectus warily, and her aunt

dropped fragments of her projects for managing while the cook had a

holiday. After dinner Ann Veronica went into the drawing-room with Miss

Stanley, and her father went up to his den for his pipe and pensive

petrography. Later in the evening she heard him whistling, poor man!

She felt very restless and excited. She refused coffee, though she knew

that anyhow she was doomed to a sleepless night. She took up one of her

father’s novels and put it down again, fretted up to her own room for

some work, sat on her bed and meditated upon the room that she was now

really abandoning forever, and returned at length with a stocking to

darn. Her aunt was making herself cuffs out of little slips of insertion

under the newly lit lamp.

Ann Veronica sat down in the other arm-chair and darned badly for a

minute or so. Then she looked at her aunt, and traced with a curious eye

the careful arrangement of her hair, her sharp nose, the little drooping

lines of mouth and chin and cheek.

Her thought spoke aloud. “Were you ever in love, aunt?” she asked.

Her aunt glanced up startled, and then sat very still, with hands that

had ceased to work. “What makes you ask such a question, Vee?” she said.

“I wondered.”

Her aunt answered in a low voice: “I was engaged to him, dear, for seven

years, and then he died.”

Ann Veronica made a sympathetic little murmur.

“He was in holy orders, and we were to have been married when he got a

living. He was a Wiltshire Edmondshaw, a very old family.”

She sat very still.

Ann Veronica hesitated with a question that had leaped up in her mind,

and that she felt was cruel. “Are you sorry you waited, aunt?” she said.

Her aunt was a long time before she answered. “His stipend forbade it,”

she said, and seemed to fall into a train of thought. “It would have

been rash and unwise,” she said at the end of a meditation. “What he had

was altogether insufficient.”

Ann Veronica looked at the mildly pensive gray eyes and the comfortable,

rather refined face with a penetrating curiosity. Presently her aunt

sighed deeply and looked at the clock. “Time for my Patience,” she said.

She got up, put the neat cuffs she had made into her work-basket,

and went to the bureau for the little cards in the morocco case. Ann

Veronica jumped up to get her the card-table. “I haven’t seen the new

Patience, dear,” she said. “May I sit beside you?”

“It’s a very difficult one,” said her aunt. “Perhaps you will help me

shuffle?”

Ann Veronica did, and also assisted nimbly with the arrangements of the

rows of eight with which the struggle began. Then she sat watching the

play, sometimes offering a helpful suggestion, sometimes letting her

attention wander to the smoothly shining arms she had folded across her

knees just below the edge of the table. She was feeling extraordinarily

well that night, so that the sense of her body was a deep delight, a

realization of a gentle warmth and strength and elastic firmness. Then

she glanced at the cards again, over which her aunt’s many-ringed hand

played, and then at the rather weak, rather plump face that surveyed its

operations.

It came to Ann Veronica that life was wonderful beyond measure. It

seemed incredible that she and her aunt were, indeed, creatures of the

same blood, only by a birth or so different beings, and part of that

same broad interlacing stream of human life that has invented the fauns

and nymphs, Astarte, Aphrodite, Freya, and all the twining beauty of

the gods. The love-songs of all the ages were singing in her blood, the

scent of night stock from the garden filled the air, and the moths that

beat upon the closed frames of the window next the lamp set her mind

dreaming of kisses in the dusk. Yet her aunt, with a ringed hand

flitting to her lips and a puzzled, worried look in her eyes, deaf

to all this riot of warmth and flitting desire, was playing

Patience--playing Patience, as if Dionysius and her curate had died

together. A faint buzz above the ceiling witnessed that petrography,

too, was active. Gray and tranquil world! Amazing, passionless world! A

world in which days without meaning, days in which “we don’t want things

to happen” followed days without meaning--until the last thing happened,

the ultimate, unavoidable, coarse, “disagreeable.” It was her last

evening in that wrappered life against which she had rebelled. Warm

reality was now so near her she could hear it beating in her ears. Away

in London even now Capes was packing and preparing; Capes, the magic man

whose touch turned one to trembling fire. What was he doing? What was he

thinking? It was less than a day now, less than twenty hours. Seventeen

hours, sixteen hours. She glanced at the soft-ticking clock with the

exposed brass pendulum upon the white marble mantel, and made a rapid

calculation. To be exact, it was just sixteen hours and twenty minutes.

The slow stars circled on to the moment of their meeting. The softly

glittering summer stars! She saw them shining over mountains of snow,

over valleys of haze and warm darkness.... There would be no moon.

“I believe after all it’s coming out!” said Miss Stanley. “The aces made

it easy.”

Ann Veronica started from her reverie, sat up in her chair, became

attentive. “Look, dear,” she said presently, “you can put the ten on the

Jack.”

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH

IN THE MOUNTAINS