He looked at her, as a lover can;
She looked at him, as one who awakes.
The Statue and the Bust.
There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.—Proverbs.
In his salad days, a long time ago, Denis had fallen in love with the daughter of a respectable suburban fishmonger, after tumbling out of the sky on the roof of her house. The young lady's parents were rich but honest; the young lady herself—well, she had an extremely pretty face, which occupied Denis to the exclusion of a blue and yellow sports coat and a large string of pearls. His love dream lasted six weeks; then he fell out of his aeroplane again and broke his handsome nose, or was supposed to have done so, and Miss Tyrrell broke the engagement. "I c-couldn't bear you with a broken nose!" she wept. Whatever Denis broke, it was not his heart. When he looked back on the episode, it was with devout and wondering thankfulness; but he preferred not to look back on it at all.
This was his sole experience of the tender passion. In his single-minded and laborious life there had been no room for more; even Nina Tyrrell had been sandwiched between two flying accidents. Denis was at bottom a simple soul. He had three main interests—his religion, his aeroplanes, his friends; and they were all bound up together by a child-like faith. He believed in others because his own heart was pure. It was this bloom of innocence which Gardiner loved in his friend, and which both he and Lettice were tender to protect; and it was this which made his feeling for Dorothea at once so beautiful, and so vulnerable.
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He took the revelation very simply, very seriously, with reverence and awe; among other primitive virtues, Denis had a fine stock of awe. Love was to him a sacrament, a gift direct from heaven; he carried it in his heart like a jewel almost too precious for human hands to touch, and gave humble thanks to God. A good old-fashioned churchman, Denis had been accustomed to "say his prayers" night and morning, walking in a decent English soul-silence the rest of the day; but this new gratitude transcended all rules and overflowed in ceaseless praise. Nobody, he was certain, had ever felt like this before. He was happy—happier than it had ever entered his head to imagine, in sunshine which turned all the gray of life to gold.
All that day he could settle to nothing, but mooned about the house, getting in the way of Miss Simpson, who had planned to turn out his room. Next day, in town, he looked at Wandesforde the married man with new curiosity. He did not in the least want to unbosom himself; but he would have liked to extract confidences from somebody who had been through it all before. Wandesforde, however, was not given to making confidences, and if ever he had been driven into speech his partner was the last man he would have chosen to receive his outpourings. He put down Denis's unusual silence to his liver, and genially advised him to take more exercise—that venerable joke, which always seems so good to the maker and so poor to the recipient!
That night Denis lay awake, building castles in the air. Dorothea had told him all her sad little story as far as her marriage, one squally day when they were sheltering in the hangar; he set up in his heart a shrine of protective love and reverence and worshiped her there, his little lady of the sorrows—Dorothea, with a heart full of black hate! Yet Denis was not blind. He saw one side of her clearly enough, and was ready to own with tender indulgence that she had plenty of endearing imperfections, of small gray faults; but of the other side, the dark half of the moon, she had shown him nothing, and how was he to divine it? With him, indeed, she was what he believed her: true to her true self,[Pg 123] since but for her starved girlhood Dorothea would never have learned to hate. He scarcely dared hope she loved him yet, though he had a shy confidence that he would win her in the end; but he meant to ask her at once, that very day when she came for her lesson. He was up and out at six o'clock, among pearly mists, and saw the sun rise in rose and gold over meadows spread with the thin silver of the frost. Then he came in to breakfast, took up his letters, and met his first check. There was a note from Miss Byrd to say they could not come.
She wrote for Dorothea, whose hand was troubling her again; perhaps she had strained it yesterday; at any rate, she thought best not to use it at present. But would Mr. Merion-Smith come to tea with them to-morrow after church instead? She hoped this would be convenient and that they might have the pleasure of his company, and she was his very sincerely, Mary Anne Byrd. Denis's face, which had darkened, cleared again; after all, it was not such a bad thing. Better say what he had to say in a drawing-room than shout it through the hum of a propeller.
He went to afternoon church, and listened to the Evangelical vicar's sermon on Christian evidences, which he seemed to rest mainly on the fact that there have been martyrs for the faith (a proposition over which Denis knit his brows, though he could not imagine that the congregation then present was liable to have its faith upset by faulty logic); and when the choir of little girls recited the General Thanksgiving, he recited it with them, in great seriousness and devotion. Coming out into the sunny white road, with the ink-blue sea on one hand, the grayish cliff grass on the other, he walked down to Dorothea's bungalow—the one bungalow of Bredon, which he already knew sufficiently well, having lived there for several years himself. The car was at the door; he paused to look over it before he rang the bell.
Miss Byrd received him in the drawing-room, and for the first half-hour entertained him alone; a tall, slim woman with a complexion of wrinkled ivory, gentle and dignified and intelligent. As a teacher she had been subject to storms[Pg 124] of nervous anger, for which she was not too proud to apologize, even to a pupil; it was an incident of this sort which had stamped her indelibly in Dorothea's affections. Always a little shy of Denis, to-day she seemed in a state of nervous tremor; her hands were shaking as she arranged and rearranged the cozy, and wondered for the tenth time what could be keeping Dot. Denis, who had one manner for the mighty and another for the humble and meek, set himself to soothe her alarms. He was just succeeding when the door unclosed and the truant swept in.
"Am I very frightfully late?" she inquired unconcernedly. "So sorry; having only one hand makes you awkward, you know. Do you mind doing this for me, Birdie?"
She stood bending her graceful head while Miss Byrd settled the rose point of her collar. She was wearing a velvet dress, very rich, very sumptuous, cut open at the throat and bordered with sable fur. Round her neck went a gold chain, rough links nearly an inch across, hanging to her knees and looking barbarously heavy. She sank into a chair, and there was the gleam of a golden shoe, a Cinderella slipper with jeweled straps crossing on the arch of a silken instep. What a transformation! But the greater change was in her manner.
"Have you been to church?" she asked. "How pious of you! I haven't; but then I'm not pious, you know. I went for a joy-ride instead. My hand? Oh yes, thanks, I managed all right. I generally do manage to do what I want to," she added, spreading out a slender hand with the diamonds upon it which Lettice had admired long ago. She looked up at Denis throu............