第50章

The world about him was still amusing and charming; the chatter of his companions, losing itself in the large sea-presence, the plash of the divers and swimmers, the deep blue of the ocean and the silvery white of the cliff, had that striking air of indifference to the fact that his mind had been absent from them which we are apt to find in mundane things on emerging from a nap. The same people were sitting near him on the beach--the same, and yet not quite the same.

He found himself noticing a person whom he had not noticed before--a young lady, who was seated in a low portable chair, some dozen yards off, with her eyes bent upon a book. Her head was in shade; her large parasol made, indeed, an awning for her whole person, which in this way, in the quiet attitude of perusal, seemed to abstract itself from the glare and murmur of the beach.

The clear shadow of her umbrella--it was lined with blue--was deep upon her face; but it was not deep enough to prevent Bernard from recognizing a profile that he knew.

He suddenly sat upright, with an intensely quickened vision.

Was he dreaming still, or had he waked? In a moment he felt that he was acutely awake; he heard her, across the interval, turn the page of her book. For a single instant, as she did so, she looked with level brows at the glittering ocean; then, lowering her eyes, she went on with her reading.

In this barely perceptible movement he saw Angela Vivian; it was wonderful how well he remembered her. She was evidently reading very seriously; she was much interested in her book.

She was alone; Bernard looked about for her mother, but Mrs. Vivian was not in sight. By this time Bernard had become aware that he was agitated; the exquisite rest of a few moments before had passed away. His agitation struck him as unreasonable; in a few minutes he made up his mind that it was absurd.

He had done her an injury--yes; but as she sat there losing herself in a French novel--Bernard could see it was a French novel--he could not make out that she was the worse for it. It had not affected her appearance; Miss Vivian was still a handsome girl.

Bernard hoped she would not look toward him or recognize him; he wished to look at her at his ease; to think it over; to make up his mind. The idea of meeting Angela Vivian again had often come into his thoughts; I may, indeed, say that it was a tolerably familiar presence there; but the fact, nevertheless, now presented itself with all the violence of an accident for which he was totally unprepared. He had often asked himself what he should say to her, how he should carry himself, and how he should probably find the young lady; but, with whatever ingenuity he might at the moment have answered these questions, his intelligence at present felt decidedly overtaxed.

She was a very pretty girl to whom he had done a wrong; this was the final attitude into which, with a good deal of preliminary shifting and wavering, she had settled in his recollection.

The wrong was a right, doubtless, from certain points of view; but from the girl's own it could only seem an injury to which its having been inflicted by a clever young man with whom she had been on agreeable terms, necessarily added a touch of baseness.

In every disadvantage that a woman suffers at the hands of a man, there is inevitably, in what concerns the man, an element of cowardice.

When I say "inevitably," I mean that this is what the woman sees in it.

This is what Bernard believed that Angela Vivian saw in the fact that by giving his friend a bad account of her he had prevented her making an opulent marriage. At first he had said to himself that, whether he had held his tongue or spoken, she had already lost her chance; but with time, somehow, this reflection had lost its weight in the scale.

It conveyed little re-assurance to his irritated conscience--it had become imponderable and impertinent. At the moment of which I speak it entirely failed to present itself, even for form's sake; and as he sat looking at this superior creature who came back to him out of an episode of his past, he thought of her simply as an unprotected woman toward whom he had been indelicate.

It is not an agreeable thing for a delicate man like Bernard Longueville to have to accommodate himself to such an accident, but this is nevertheless what it seemed needful that he should do.

If she bore him a grudge he must think it natural; if she had vowed him a hatred he must allow her the comfort of it. He had done the only thing possible, but that made it no better for her.

He had wronged her. The circumstances mattered nothing, and as he could not make it up to her, the only reasonable thing was to keep out of her way. He had stepped into her path now, and the proper thing was to step out of it. If it could give her no pleasure to see him again, it could certainly do him no good to see her.

He had seen her by this time pretty well--as far as mere seeing went, and as yet, apparently, he was none the worse for that; but his hope that he should himself escape unperceived had now become acute.

It is singular that this hope should not have led him instantly to turn his back and move away; but the explanation of his imprudent delay is simply that he wished to see a little more of Miss Vivian. He was unable to bring himself to the point.

Those clever things that he might have said to her quite faded away.

The only good taste was to take himself off, and spare her the trouble of inventing civilities that she could not feel.

And yet he continued to sit there from moment to moment, arrested, detained, fascinated, by the accident of her not looking round--of her having let him watch her so long. She turned another page, and another, and her reading absorbed her still. He was so near her that he could have touched her dress with the point of his umbrella.

At last she raised her eyes and rested them a while on the blue horizon, straight in front of her, but as yet without turning them aside. This, however, augmented the danger of her doing so, and Bernard, with a good deal of an effort, rose to his feet.