The Dark Flower

“I didn’t know you, you know!” he said. “You’ve grown up so awfully.”

“I knew you at once. Your voice is still furry.”

There was another silence, till she said:

“He does pull, rather – doesn’t he, going home?”

“Shall I drive?”

“Yes, please.”

He stood up and took the reins, and she slipped past under them in front of him; her hair smelt exactly like hay, as she was softly bumped against him.

She kept regarding him steadily with very blue eyes, now that she was relieved of driving.

“Cicely was afraid you weren’t coming,” she said suddenly. “What sort of people are those old Stormers?”

He felt himself grow very red, choked something down, and answered:

“It’s only he that’s old. She’s not more than about thirty-five.”

“That IS old.”

He restrained the words: “Of course it’s old to a kid like you!” And, instead, he looked at her. Was she exactly a kid? She seemed quite tall (for a girl) and not very thin, and there was something frank and soft about her face, and as if she wanted you to be nice to her.

“Is she very pretty?”

This time he did not go red, such was the disturbance that question made in him. If he said: “Yes,” it was like letting the world know his adoration; but to say anything less would be horrible, disloyal. So he did say: “Yes,” listening hard to the tone of his own voice.

“I thought she was. Do you like her very much?” Again he struggled with that thing in his throat, and again said: “Yes.”

He wanted to hate this girl, yet somehow could not – she looked so soft and confiding. She was staring before her now, her lips still just parted, so evidently THAT had not been because of Bolero’s pulling; they were pretty all the same, and so was her short, straight little nose, and her chin, and she was awfully fair. His thoughts flew back to that other face – so splendid, so full of life. Suddenly he found himself unable to picture it – for the first time since he had started on his journey it would not come before him.

“Oh! Look!”

Her hand was pulling at his arm. There in the field over the hedge a buzzard hawk was dropping like a stone.

“Oh, Mark! Oh! Oh! It’s got it!”

She was covering her face with both her hands, and the hawk, with a young rabbit in its claws, was sailing up again. It looked so beautiful that he did not somehow feel sorry for the rabbit; but he wanted to stroke and comfort her, and said:

“It’s all right, Sylvia; it really is. The rabbit’s dead already, you know. And it’s quite natural.”

She took her hands away from a face that looked just as if she were going to cry.

“Poor little rabbit! It was such a little one!”

XII

On the afternoon of the day following he sat in the smoking-room with a prayer book in his hand, and a frown on his forehead, reading the Marriage Service. The book had been effectively designed for not spoiling the figure when carried in a pocket. But this did not matter, for even if he could have read the words, he would not have known what they meant, seeing that he was thinking how he could make a certain petition to a certain person sitting just behind at a large bureau with a sliding top, examining artificial flies.

He fixed at last upon this form:

“Gordy!” (Why Gordy no one quite knew now – whether because his name was George, or by way of corruption from Guardian.) “When Cis is gone it’ll be rather awful, won’t it?”

“Not a bit.”

Mr. Heatherley was a man of perhaps sixty-four, if indeed guardians have ages, and like a doctor rather than a squire; his face square and puffy, his eyes always half-closed, and his curly mouth using bluntly a voice of that refined coarseness peculiar to people of old family.

“But it will, you know!”

“Well, supposin’ it is?”

“I only wondered if you’d mind asking Mr. and Mrs. Stormer to come here for a little – they were awfully kind to me out there.”

“Strange man and woman! My dear fellow!”

“Mr. Stormer likes fishing.”

“Does he? And what does she like?”

Very grateful that his back was turned, the boy said:

“I don’t know – anything – she’s awfully nice.”

“Ah! Pretty?”

He answered faintly:

“I don’t know what YOU call pretty, Gordy.”

He felt, rather than saw, his guardian scrutinizing him with those half-closed eyes under their gouty lids.

“All right; do as you like. Have ‘em here and have done with it, by all means.”

Did his heart jump? Not quite; but it felt warm and happy, and he said:

“Thanks awfully, Gordy. It’s most frightfully decent of you,” and turned again to the Marriage Service. He could make out some of it. In places it seemed to him fine, and in other places queer. About obeying, for instance. If you loved anybody, it seemed rotten to expect them to obey you. If you loved them and they loved you, there couldn’t ever be any question of obeying, because you would both do the things always of your own accord. And if they didn’t love you, or you them, then – oh! then it would be simply too disgusting for anything, to go on living with a person you didn’t love or who didn’t love you. But of course SHE didn’t love his tutor. Had she once? Those bright doubting eyes, that studiously satiric mouth came very clearly up before him. You could not love them; and yet – he was really very decent. A feeling as of pity, almost of affection, rose in him for his remote tutor. It was queer to feel so, since the last time they had talked together out there, on the terrace, he had not felt at all like that.

The noise of the bureau top sliding down aroused him; Mr. Heatherley was closing in the remains of the artificial flies. That meant he would be going out to fish. And the moment he heard the door shut, Mark sprang up, slid back the bureau top, and began to write his letter. It was hard work.

“DEAR MRS. STORMER,

“My guardian wishes me to beg you and Mr. Stormer to pay us a visit as soon as you come back from the Tyrol. Please tell Mr. Stormer that only the very best fishermen – like him – can catch our trout; the rest catch our trees. This is me catching our trees (here followed a sketch). My sister is going to be married to-morrow, and it will be disgusting afterwards unless you come. So do come, please. And with my very best greetings,

“I am,

“Your humble servant,