第66章

Mr. Stone and Thyme, going out, again passed the tall, white young man. He had thrown away the hand-made cigarette, finding that it had not enough saltpetre to make it draw, and was smoking one more suited to the action of his lungs. He directed towards them the same lack-lustre, jeering stare.

Unconscious, seemingly, of where he went, Mr. Stone walked with his eyes fixed on space. His head jerked now and then, as a dried flower will shiver in a draught.

Scared at these movements, Thyme took his arm. The touch of that soft young arm squeezing his own brought speech back to Mr. Stone.

"In those places...." he said, "in those streets! ...I shall not see the flowering of the aloe--I shall not see the living peace! 'As with dogs, each couched over his proper bone, so men were living then!'" Thyme, watching him askance, pressed still closer to his side, as though to try and warm him back to every day.

'Oh!' went her guttered thoughts. 'I do wish grandfather would say something one could understand. I wish he would lose that dreadful stare.'

Mr. Stone spoke in answer to his granddaughter's thoughts.

"I have seen a vision of fraternity. A barren hillside in the sun, and on it a man of stone talking to the wind. I have heard an owl hooting in the daytime; a cuckoo singing in the night.""Grandfather, grandfather!"

To that appeal Mr. Stone responded: "Yes, what is it?"But Thyme, thus challenged, knew not what to say, having spoken out of terror.

"If the poor baby had lived," she stammered out, "it would have grown up.... It's all for the best, isn't it?""Everything is for the best," said Mr. Stone. "'In those days men, possessed by thoughts of individual life, made moan at death, careless of the great truth that the world was one unending song.'"Thyme thought: 'I have never seen him as bad as this!' She drew him on more quickly. With deep relief she saw her father, latchkey in hand, turning into the Old Square.

Stephen, who was still walking with his springy step, though he had come on foot the whole way from the Temple, hailed them with his hat.

It was tall and black, and very shiny, neither quite oval nor positively round, and had a little curly brim. In this and his black coat, cut so as to show the front of him and cover the behind, he looked his best. The costume suited his long, rather narrow face, corrugated by two short parallel lines slanting downwards from his eyes and nostrils on either cheek; suited his neat, thin figure and the close-lipped corners of his mouth. His permanent appointment in the world of Law had ousted from his life (together with all uncertainty of income) the need for putting on a wig and taking his moustache off; but he still preferred to go clean-shaved.

"Where have you two sprung from?" he inquired, admitting them into the hall.

Mr. Stone gave him no answer, but passed into the drawing-room, and sat down on the verge of the first chair he came across, leaning forward with his hands between his knees.

Stephen, after one dry glance at him, turned to his daughter.

"My child," he said softly, "what have you brought the old boy here for? If there happens to be anything of the high mammalian order for dinner, your mother will have a fit."Thyme answered: "Don't chaff, Father!"

Stephen, who was very fond of her, saw that for some reason she was not herself. He examined her with unwonted gravity. Thyme turned away from him. He heard, to his alarm, a little gulping sound.

"My dear!" he said.

Conscious of her sentimental weakness, Thyme made a violent effort.

"I've seen a baby dead," she cried in a quick, hard voice; and, without another word, she ran upstairs.

In Stephen there was a horror of emotion amounting almost to disease.

It would have been difficult to say when he had last shown emotion;perhaps not since Thyme was born, and even then not to anyone except himself, having first locked the door, and then walked up and down, with his teeth almost meeting in the mouthpiece of his favourite pipe. He was unaccustomed, too, to witness this weakness on the part of other people. His looks and speech unconsciously discouraged it, so that if Cecilia had been at all that way inclined, she must long ago have been healed. Fortunately, she never had been, having too much distrust of her own feelings to give way to them completely.

And Thyme, that healthy product of them both, at once younger for her age, and older, than they had ever been, with her incapacity for nonsense, her love for open air and facts--that fresh, rising plant, so elastic and so sane--she had never given them a single moment of uneasiness.

Stephen, close to his hat-rack, felt soreness in his heart. Such blows as Fortune had dealt, and meant to deal him, he had borne, and he could bear, so long as there was nothing in his own manner, or in that of others, to show him they were blows.

Hurriedly depositing his hat, he ran to Cecilia. He still preserved the habit of knocking on her door before he entered, though she had never, so far, answered, "Don't come in!" because she knew his knock.

The custom gave, in fact, the measure of his idealism. What he feared, or what he thought he feared, after nineteen years of unchecked entrance, could never have been ascertained; but there it was, that flower of something formal and precise, of something reticent, within his soul.

This time, for once, he did not knock, and found Cecilia hooking up her tea-gown and looking very sweet. She glanced at him with mild surprise.

"What's this, Cis," he said, "about a baby dead? Thyme's quite upset about it; and your dad's in the drawing-room!"With the quick instinct that was woven into all her gentle treading, Cecilia's thoughts flew--she could not have told why--first to the little model, then to Mrs. Hughs.

"Dead?" she said. "Oh, poor woman!"

"What woman?" Stephen asked.

"It must be Mrs. Hughs."

The thought passed darkly through Stephen's mind: 'Those people again! What now?' He did not express it, being neither brutal nor lacking in good taste.