第4章

I'm--I'm waiting...expecting a letter...(She'll think me a defaulter," he reflected.) "But meanwhile there's plenty of time to find your trunk."He picked up his companion's bundles, and offered her an arm which enabled her to press her slight person more closely under his umbrella; and as, thus linked, they beat their way back to the platform, pulled together and apart like marionettes on the wires of the wind, he continued to wonder where he could have seen her.He had immediately classed her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind of sketchy delicacy in her face, as though she had been brightly but lightly washed in with water-colour, all confirmed the evidence of her high sweet voice and of her quick incessant gestures.She was clearly an American, but with the loose native quality strained through a closer woof of manners: the composite product of an enquiring and adaptable race.All this, however, did not help him to fit a name to her, for just such instances were perpetually pouring through the London Embassy, and the etched and angular American was becoming rarer than the fluid type.

More puzzling than the fact of his being unable to identify her was the persistent sense connecting her with something uncomfortable and distasteful.So pleasant a vision as that gleaming up at him between wet brown hair and wet brown boa should have evoked only associations as pleasing; but each effort to fit her image into his past resulted in the same memories of boredom and a vague discomfort...

II

Don't you remember me now--at Mrs.Murrett's?"She threw the question at Darrow across a table of the quiet coffee-room to which, after a vainly prolonged quest for her trunk, he had suggested taking her for a cup of tea.

In this musty retreat she had removed her dripping hat, hung it on the fender to dry, and stretched herself on tiptoe in front of the round eagle-crowned mirror, above the mantel vases of dyed immortelles, while she ran her fingers comb-wise through her hair.The gesture had acted on Darrow's numb feelings as the glow of the fire acted on his circulation; and when he had asked: "Aren't your feet wet, too?" and, after frank inspection of a stout-shod sole, she had answered cheerfully: "No--luckily I had on my new boots," he began to feel that human intercourse would still be tolerable if it were always as free from formality.

The removal of his companion's hat, besides provoking this reflection, gave him his first full sight of her face; and this was so favourable that the name she now pronounced fell on him with a quite disproportionate shock of dismay.

"Oh, Mrs.Murrett's--was it THERE?"

He remembered her now, of course: remembered her as one of the shadowy sidling presences in the background of that awful house in Chelsea, one of the dumb appendages of the shrieking unescapable Mrs.Murrett, into whose talons he had fallen in the course of his head-long pursuit of Lady Ulrica Crispin.Oh, the taste of stale follies! How insipid it was, yet how it clung!

"I used to pass you on the stairs," she reminded him.

Yes: he had seen her slip by--he recalled it now--as he dashed up to the drawing-room in quest of Lady Ulrica.The thought made him steal a longer look.How could such a face have been merged in the Murrett mob? Its fugitive slanting lines, that lent themselves to all manner of tender tilts and foreshortenings, had the freakish grace of some young head of the Italian comedy.The hair stood up from her forehead in a boyish elf-lock, and its colour matched her auburn eyes flecked with black, and the little brown spot on her cheek, between the ear that was meant to have a rose behind it and the chin that should have rested on a ruff.

When she smiled, the left corner of her mouth went up a little higher than the right; and her smile began in her eyes and ran down to her lips in two lines of light.He had dashed past that to reach Lady Ulrica Crispin!

"But of course you wouldn't remember me," she was saying.

"My name is Viner--Sophy Viner."

Not remember her? But of course he DID! He was genuinely sure of it now."You're Mrs.Murrett's niece," he declared.

She shook her head."No; not even that.Only her reader.""Her reader? Do you mean to say she ever reads?"Miss Viner enjoyed his wonder."Dear, no! But I wrote notes, and made up the visiting-book, and walked the dogs, and saw bores for her."Darrow groaned."That must have been rather bad!""Yes; but nothing like as bad as being her niece.""That I can well believe.I'm glad to hear," he added, "that you put it all in the past tense."She seemed to droop a little at the allusion; then she lifted her chin with a jerk of defiance."Yes.All is at an end between us.We've just parted in tears--but not in silence!""Just parted? Do you mean to say you've been there all this time?""Ever since you used to come there to see Lady Ulrica? Does it seem to you so awfully long ago?"The unexpectedness of the thrust--as well as its doubtful taste--chilled his growing enjoyment of her chatter.He had really been getting to like her--had recovered, under the candid approval of her eye, his usual sense of being a personable young man, with all the privileges pertaining to the state, instead of the anonymous rag of humanity he had felt himself in the crowd on the pier.It annoyed him, at that particular moment, to be reminded that naturalness is not always consonant with taste.

She seemed to guess his thought."You don't like my saying that you came for Lady Ulrica?" she asked, leaning over the table to pour herself a second cup of tea.

He liked her quickness, at any rate."It's better," he laughed, "than your thinking I came for Mrs.Murrett!""Oh, we never thought anybody came for Mrs.Murrett! It was always for something else: the music, or the cook--when there was a good one--or the other people; generally ONEof the other people."

"I see."