Vestalia paused at the street entrance of the hotel, and looked doubtfully up the hill toward the shifting outline of the strident, crowded Strand.
The prospect repelled her, and she bent her slow steps in the other direction. Crossing the empty, sun-baked roadway of the Embankment, she strolled westward in the partial shade of the young lime-trees, which maintain a temerarious existence along the line of the river’s parapet.
She looked over the stonework to the water from time to time as she walked, and every glance instinctively wandered up-stream toward the stretch of Westminster Bridge, poised delicately in the noonday haze across the body of the sleepy flood. The stately beauty of the opposing piles of buildings which it linked one with the other, and brought together into the loftiest picture the Old World knows, came as she moved toward it to soothe and uplift her spirits. Her lips parted with pleasure at the spectacle, and at the thought that there, in that glorious span between St. Thomas’ and St. Stephen’s, her own romance had been born.
The warm serenity of the scene, the inimitable composure of its vast parts, lying under the sunshine in such majestic calm, seemed to chide the weak flutterings and despondencies to which she had surrendered her bosom. The romance which absorbed her mind, of which, indeed, her whole being had become a portion, had its home there, in the heart of that benignant grandeur. The grace and charm and noble strength of what she gazed upon rebuked her timid want of confidence in Destiny, as it shapes itself on Westminster Bridge. She walked forward with a firmer step, her head up, and her eyes drying themselves by the radiance of their own glance.
And so, being borne along by the powerful spell which this great vista has cast about her, she had no sense of surprise when it caught up also David Mosscrop in its train, and placed him at her side. It was at the corner of the bridge, and a momentary clustering of pedestrians brought to a stand-still by a policeman’s uplifted hand had diverted her thoughts, and then someone touched her on the arm.
She turned and drank in what had happened with tranquil, tenderly self-possessed eyes. She gave no start, as of a mind caught unawares. She was conscious of no wonder, no tremor of disturbance at the unexpected. The luminous regard in which she embraced the newcomer was as unreasoningly ready for him as are the spontaneous raptures of dreamland. No words came to her lips, but it was in the air that she had known he was coming.
“I was just going to hunt a fellow up at his club across there,” said Mosscrop, his coarser masculine sense suggesting an explanation, “and I chanced to look over here, and I made sure it was you, and——”
He stopped short too, and the slower fires kindled in the glance which met hers. They looked into each other’s eyes, in a long moment of silence. He drew her arm in his, while the glamour of this sustained gaze rested still upon them. Then, with a lengthened happy sigh she spoke.
“I want to go again to that dear little place where we breakfasted,” she said softly. “You must let me have my own way. I have money in my purse, now, and you must come and lunch with me. And it must be—oh, it must be there.”
They drove thither, this time in a high-hung, sumptuous, noiseless hansom, which sped with an entranced absence of motion through the busy streets.
“It is like fairyland again,” she whispered, nestling against him in the narrow, deeply-padded enclosure. And he, resting his hand upon hers under the shelter of the closed doors, breathed heavily, and murmured a cadence without words in ecstatic response.
In some ridiculous fraction of time they were at their journey’s end. The impression of having travelled on a magic carpet was in their minds as, almost ruefully, they woke from their day-dream of arrow-flight through space, stepped out, and paid the cabman. They laughed together at the thought, without necessity of mentioning what amused them. Vestalia, before they entered the restaurant, drew her companion a few doors up the street, and halted before the narrow window of the old French bootmaker’s shop. Here they laughed again, he merrily, she with a lingering, mellow aftermath of feeling in her tone.
It was only when they were seated in the little room above and she had drawn off her gloves, and after a joyous insistence upon doing it all herself, had chosen some dishes from the card and sent the waiter off with the order, that their tongues were loosened.
David leaned back in his chair, and beamed broad content. He began to talk in the measured, smooth-flowing tone which she remembered so well. “First of all, dear girl,” he said, “I want to put on the record my boundless delight at finding you once more. I take off my hat to the gods. They have devised in my behalf a boon which swallows up all the imaginable ills of a lifetime. I swear to complain of nothing they do for the rest of my days. They have given you back to me; and if I am dull enough to lose you again, why, I will bow my head submissively to the deserved mishaps of an ass.”
The girl’s blue eyes twinkled with a soft, glad light. “It is a great joy to hear your voice again,” she said, gently. “The echoes of it have kept up a little faint murmur in my ears ever since we parted, as if some spirit was holding a phantom shell close to my head. And now it is as if we hadn’t parted at all, isn’t it?—I mean, for the present.”
“Ah, it matters so little what you mean,” he replied, in affectionate banter. “I erred once, to my profound misfortune, in deferring to your mental processes, and permitting them to translate themselves into actions. Do not think that I shall be so weak again. The key shall never fail to be turned on you hereafter.”
She laughed gaily, and shook her head in playful defiance. “Ah, but suppose——” she began, and then let a glance of merry archness complete her sentence.
“I confess to curiosity,” he said. “I should prize highly your conception of the motives which prompted you to run away from me.”
Her mood sobered perceptibly. “I did it because it was right.”
“As a mainspring of human action, that is inadequate,” he commented. “Almost all painful and embarrassing things are right, but wise people avoid them as much as possible none the less.”
“No, it was right for me to go,” she persisted. “I couldn’t stay and be dependent upon someone else, no matter who that someone else was. Your kindness to me that whole day was more grateful to me than you can think. I was so frightened in that early morning there on the bridge, so desolate and helpless and sick with dread of what was going to become of me, that I didn’t dream of hesitating to take shelter in your—your friendship. It was like going under some hospitable roof while there was a drenching rain outside, and I was very thankful for the refuge. But when it cleared up, I couldn’t go on staying, just because I had been made welcome, now, could I?”
“Since you ask me, I declare with tearful emphasis that you could.”
“No, seriously,” urged Vestalia; “don’t you agree with me that women should be just as self-reliant and independent as men?”
“Me? I agree absolutely. I would have women insist upon the most unflinching independence, all the world over. I feel so keenly on that point, that out of the entire sex I would make only one exception. Very few people would take such an advanced position as that, I imagine. Just fancy how far I go! There are hundreds of millions of women, and I would have them all independent but just one. By a curious accident it happens that you are that one—but you will be fair-minded enough to recognise, I feel convinced, that this is the merest chance.”
She made a droll little mouth at him, and he went on:
“Yes, it is very strange. I cannot pretend to account for it, but you do undoubtedly form an exception to what would otherwise be a universal rule. The thought of other women earning their own living fills me with joy. I am fascinated by it, I assure you. I feel like bursting into song at the barest suggestion of the idea. But this very excess of reverence for the general principle begets a corresponding vehemence of feeling about the one solitary exception. That is in accordance with a natural law. Surely you respect natural laws? Well, the vaguest adumbration of an idea of your doing things for yourself convulses me with rage. The notion that my right to take entire charge of you is disputed seems monstrous and abominable to me. It is a denial of my mission on earth, and I am bound to combat it with all my powers.”
Vestalia smiled. “I see what you mean. You are just an old prehistoric savage like the rest of your sex. Your one idea is to drag a woman off into your cave and keep her there, with a big rock rolled up in front of the door when you’re away.”
“I would not have you disparage the primitive instincts,” urged Mosscrop, with an air of solemnity. “My word for it, we should be an extraordinarily uninteresting lot without them. They are the abiding bone and flesh and muscle of humanity, upon which it pleases each foolish generation in turn to stretch its own thin, trivial pelt of fashionable convention. My desire to seize you, and drag you off to my own cave, and make a life’s business of keeping you there, always beautiful, always happy, always replenishing the well-spring of joy in my existence—you choose that as something typical of the primeval man surviving within me. Let me tell you, sweet little Vestalia, that the human mind would cease tomorrow from its eternal wistful dream of progress if it were not for the hope that advancing civilisation will bring improved facilities for that sort of thing. The world would wilt, and curl up like a sapless leaf, and drop from its solar stem into gaseous space, if that anticipation were taken away. The race keeps itself going only by cherishing the faith that sometime, somewhere in the golden future, this planet will be arranged so that the right woman will always get into the right cave. That is what people mean when they speak of the millennium.”
“That is all very well,” said Vestalia, “but it deals with everything from the man’s point of view. Consider the other side of the case. What do you say to the woman’s disinclination for cave-life—is that not entitled to respect?”
“Possibly,” answered David, reflectively—“if one were able to believe in it.”
The waiter entered at this point with a burdened tray in his arms, and Vestalia took up the wine list. “Which is it that we had—that in the lovely high green bottles, with arms like a vase?” she asked Mosscrop. “We must have the same again.”
“You have told me nothing as yet,” said David, reproachfully, when they were alone again, “of all the thousand things I long to know.”
“It is so hard to tell,” she explained, with hesitation. “That is, there are things that I am supposed not to tell to anybody, at present, at least. And as for what I ought not to tell you—why I have been instructed to avoid you altogether. I was even told not to write you—but I did all the same—just once.”
David took a crumpled envelope from an inner pocket over his heart, held it up for her inspection, and replaced it. But even as he did so sombre shadows began to gather on his face. He laid down his knife and fork, and, biting his lips, looked out of the window.
Vestalia swiftly recalled gruesome associations with that look. She stretched forth her hand, and laid it on his arm. “You mustn’t look out there,” she protested. “It has a bad effect on you. Look me in the face instead—please!”
He shook his head impatiently, and stared with dogged, blinking eyes at the opposite roofs. “You don’t realise what it has all meant to me,” he said at last, his gaze still averted. The quaver in his voice profoundly affected the girl.
“Listen to me—David,” she said, with something of his pathos reflected in her tone. “Turn and look at me. I haven’t the heart for even a moment of misunderstanding today. There isn’t anything on earth I won’t tell you. But you must look at me!”
He slowly obeyed her, and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. “But apparently there are things which it would be merciful not to tell me,” he said, struggling for an instant for composure. Then h............