“Is it clear to you now?” I said.
“Quite clear,” she answered.
“Then there is nothing more to be said on the matter?”
“Nothing,” she replied.
Yet there was a kind of nagging at my heart, and a strange mistrust. All spontaneity was gone, the joy and laughter we had shared together when I gave her the jewels.
God damn my godfather if he had said anything to hurt her.
“Put up your veil,” I said.
For a moment she did not move.
Then she glanced up at Wellington’s broad back and the groom beside him on the box.
He whipped the horses to a brisker pace as the twisting avenue turned into the straight.
She lifted her veil, and the eyes that looked into mine were not smiling as I had hoped, or tearful as I had feared, but steady and serene and quite unmoved, the eyes of someone who has been out upon a matter of business and settled it in satisfaction.
For no great reason I felt blank, and in some sense cheated.
I wanted the eyes to be as I remembered them at sunrise.
I had thought, foolishly perhaps, that it was because her eyes were still the same that she had hidden them behind her veil.
Not so, however.
She must have sat facing my godfather thus, across the desk in his study, purposeful and practical and cool, no whit dismayed, while I sat waiting for her, in torment, on the front door step at home.
“I would have been back before now,” she said, “but they pressed me to remain for luncheon, and I could not well refuse.
Had you made a plan?”
She turned her face to watch the passing scene, and I wondered how it was that she could sit there, as if we were two people of casual acquaintance, while it was as much as I could do not to put out my hands to her and hold her.
Since yesterday, everything was changed.
Yet she gave no sign of it.
“I had a plan,” I said, “but it does not matter now.”
“The Kendalls dine tonight in town,” she said, “but will look in upon us afterwards, before returning home.
I fancy I made some progress with Louise.
Her manner was not quite so frozen.”
“I am glad of that,” I said, “I would like you to be friends.”
“In fact,” she went on, “I am coming back again to my original way of thinking.
She would suit you well.”
She laughed, but I did not laugh with her.
It was unkind, I thought, to make a joke of poor Louise.
Heaven only knew, I wished the girl no harm, and that she might find herself a husband.
“I think,” she said, “that your godfather disapproves of me, which he has a perfect right to do, but by the end of luncheon I think we understood one another very well.
The tension eased, and conversation was not difficult.
We made more plans to meet in London.”
“In London?” I asked.
“You don’t still intend to go to London?”
“Why, yes,” she said, “why ever not?”
I said nothing.
Certainly she had a right to go to London if she pleased.
There might be shops she wished to visit, purchases to make, especially now that she had money to command, and yet… surely she could wait awhile, until we could go together?
There were so many things we must discuss, but I was hesitant to do so.
It struck me with full force, suddenly and sharply, what I had not thought of until now.
Ambrose was but nine months dead.
The world would think it wrong for us to marry before midsummer.
Somehow there were problems to the day that had not been at midnight, and I wanted none of them.
“Don’t let’s go home immediately,” I said to her.
“Walk with me in the woods.”
“Very well,” she answered.
We stopped by the keeper’s cottage in the valley, and descending from the carriage let Wellington drive on.
We took one of the paths beside the stream, which twisted upward to the hill above, and here and there were primroses, in clumps, beneath the trees, which she must stoop and pick, returning again to the subject of Louise as she did so, saying the girl had quite an eye for gardens and with instruction would learn more, in time.