第51章 Chapter XI(2)

Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was drawing her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.

"You might have known." He seized her in his arms; again and again and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.

"Well," sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, "that's the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me." He looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.

There was a long silence.

"It's the most perfect thing in the world," Susan stated, very gently and with great conviction. It was no longer merely a proposal of marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.

In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.

"And what will Mr. Perrott say?" she asked at the end of it.

"Dear old fellow," said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over, was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment.

"We must be very nice to him, Susan."

He told her how hard Perrott's life had been, and how absurdly devoted he was to Arthur himself. He went on to tell her about his mother, a widow lady, of strong character. In return Susan sketched the portraits of her own family--Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she loved better than any one else, "except you, Arthur. . . . Arthur," she continued, "what was it that you first liked me for?"

"It was a buckle you wore one night at sea," said Arthur, after due consideration. "I remember noticing--it's an absurd thing to notice!--that you didn't take peas, because I don't either."

From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very fond of the same thing. They would live in London, perhaps have a cottage in the country near Susan's family, for they would find it strange without her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with, now flew to the various changes that her engagement would make-- how delightful it would be to join the ranks of the married women-- no longer to hang on to groups of girls much younger than herself-- to escape the long solitude of an old maid's life. Now and then her amazing good fortune overcame her, and she turned to Arthur with an exclamation of love.

They lay in each other's arms and had no notion that they were observed.

Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them.

"Here's shade," began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead.

They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened.

The man then sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious.

Nor could you tell from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word.

Hewet felt uncomfortably shy.

"I don't like that," said Rachel after a moment.

"I can remember not liking it either," said Hewet. "I can remember--" but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice, "Well, we may take it for granted that they're engaged. D'you think he'll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?"

But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.

"Love's an odd thing, isn't it, making one's heart beat."

"It's so enormously important, you see," Hewet replied.

"Their lives are now changed for ever."

"And it makes one sorry for them too," Rachel continued, as though she were tracing the course of her feelings. "I don't know either of them, but I could almost burst into tears. That's silly, isn't it?"

"Just because they're in love," said Hewet. "Yes," he added after a moment's consideration, "there's something horribly pathetic about it, I agree."

And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded to sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force, though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of the sight, remained with them.

As a day upon which any emotion has been repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different, merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.

"A great encampment of tents they might be," said Hewet, looking in front of him at the mountains. "Isn't it like a water-colour too-- you know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper--

I've been wondering what they looked like."

His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and reminded Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail.

She sat beside him looking at the mountains too. When it became painful to look any longer, the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond their natural limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to scrutinise this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where she was endowed with the supreme power.

She bent a blade of grass, and set an insect on the utmost tassel of it, and wondered if the insect realised his strange adventure, and thought how strange it was that she should have bent that tassel rather than any other of the million tassels.

"You've never told me you name," said Hewet suddenly.

"Miss Somebody Vinrace. . . . I like to know people's Christian names."

"Rachel," she replied.

"Rachel," he repeated. "I have an aunt called Rachel, who put the life of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious fanatic-- the result of the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire, never seeing a soul. Have you any aunts?"

"I live with them," said Rachel.

"And I wonder what they're doing now?" Hewet enquired.