Eustace and Hilda (103 page)

“I've been selfish,” she said. “I was so glad of the opportunity to talk to you about Dick, that I didn't ask you how Hilda was.”

Eustace told her. The effort not to make it sound too bad made it sound worse.

“So she hasn't been able to tell you anything?” Anne said.

“No. But she's going out with me this afternoon,” he added, brightening. “That's a great step forward. I'm glad it's such a lovely day.”

The wind that had been raging since the middle of the month had at last died down, and the clouds were at rest in a heaven of tender, gauzy blue. Automatically they turned and began to walk to the house, which lay below them, its windows fiery from the sun, its walls a deeper red.

“I'm glad you came,” Anne said. “We didn't like the idea of your being so close and not seeing you. If you hadn't come by! I'm afraid we're all too easily resigned to the shape things fall into. Certainly I am. It isn't always as immovable as it seems.”

“No, indeed,” said Eustace, at whose bidding volcanoes had burst into flame and lava flowed. “But I don't think I want to influence the course of events any more.”

“Not even for Hilda?”

“Well I had thought of something.” But he shrank from saying what it was, even to himself. Daunted by his thoughts he did not notice the two figures coming towards them across the grass. Anne waved to them and said, “Mama and Papa will want you to stay to tea.”

Eustace's heart began to beat fast.

“I mustn't do that, thank you. Another day, if I might.”

He could see that Sir John did not recognise him, but Lady Staveley, in her thick purple tweeds, walked quickly towards him and held out her hand.

“This is a nice surprise. John, here is Mr. Cherrington.”

Making inarticulate noises of welcome, Sir John came up to Eustace. “Very glad to see you again,” he said. There was a pause, into which Anne flung herself.

“Mr. Cherrington is here for some time,” she said. “He's promised to come over another day. I'm afraid I interrupted his bicycle ride, and dragged him in.”

“Oh no, I was most glad to come,” protested Eustace.

“Haven't you asked him to stay to tea?” said Sir John indignantly.

“Strange as it may seem to you, Papa, I have, but he's got to get back.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Lady Staveley quickly. “But we're always here, we never go away, you know, and any day you can spare the time to come and see two dull old people——”

“You're forgetting Anne,” said Sir John. “We may be old and dull, if you say so, but she isn't.”

“Darling Anne, she knows I don't forget her,” said Lady Staveley, recovering herself. “She is our sheet anchor. But sometimes I feel as though we were back again in the war, when she was away, nursing, and we were by ourselves.”

“We weren't here then,” said Sir John. “And the house was a hospital. I don't know how you get such fancies.”

“Nor do I; but all I mean is that Mr. Cherrington will be very welcome.”

“Of course he will be; but he won't want to come unless you can find something for him to do.” From under Sir John's wiry eyebrows his blue eyes shot a keen glance at Eustace. “May I ask you a personal question?” he said surprisingly.

“No, Papa, I think you'd better not.”

“Of course you can,” said Eustace.

“Did you have that moustache when you were here before?”

“I've asked him that, Papa, and he didn't,” said Anne, before Eustace had time to answer.

“I thought not. I knew there was something different. Makes him look like someone we used to know—who was it, Edie? Fellow in the Grenadiers.”

“I think you must mean Captain Bruce-Popham,” said Lady Staveley.

“That's the man. Friend of Dick's, good fellow, a trifle slap-dash. He was a bit bigger than you are, but the resemblance is most striking.”

They all looked at Eustace, and he felt ridiculously pleased.

“Now you mention it, I do see a likeness,” said Lady Staveley.

They crossed the courtyard, which seemed to smile a many-windowed smile at Eustace, and passed into the gateway which had so often resounded to the tread of armed men.

“Hullo, a bicycle,” said Sir John. Leaning against the blackened wall, Eustace's cherished roadster looked like a trademan's.

“Yes,” he said lamely, “it's mine.”

“Do you mean to say you came on a bicycle?”

“Well, what is there surprising in that, Papa?”

“Nothing whatever, only one doesn't often see them. Let me have a look. Hm. A Super-Achilles. One of the best makes. You've got a treasure there. Last you a lifetime.”

Again Eustace felt absurdly pleased.

“May I go back through the park?” he asked.

“You may go anywhere you like, my dear fellow. The whole place is open to you.”

The janitor came out of his room, and, having ceremoniously delivered the bicycle into Eustace's hands, saluted and retired.

“Mind you come back,” said Sir John.

“Yes, remember we're always here,” said Lady Staveley.

He said good-bye to them in the archway, but Anne walked with him across the bridge over the moat.

“I shall write to-night,” she said, “and tell him we've seen you.”

Possessed by a strange feeling of elation, an intensification of the happiness that had visited him at intervals throughout the day, Eustace rode on into the sunshine. The shallow valley with its ancient stunted trees, hoary and out at elbows, seemed to belong to him now that he was alone with it, and Sir John had said he could go anywhere he liked. Only a few hours ago the park had been forbidden ground to his imagination; now it welcomed him into the past—the past which had given him so many wishes to play with. What matter if they had come to nothing? Here he had the sense of their fulfilment, unvexed by reminders of the bath-chair at Cambo, and the burning sand of the Arabian desert.

As he went on, his memories became more distinct. Somewhere, not far from here, he had stood with his father, Miss Cherrington and Hilda, to watch the manœuvres. The Yeomanry were encamped in the park; a few men in shirt-sleeves were loitering among the tents, performing mysterious duties, and lining the hillsides, figures in smart blue uniforms stood or crouched or ran. Umpires galloped about with white bands on their arms. From a nearby crest, almost hidden in a thicket, a machine-gun stuttered lethally, and another answered from the far side of the valley. Hilda wanted to climb up and see the gun in action, but Eustace was frightened, and much relieved when his father told her to stay where she was. He had imagined an invisible line, beyond which it was unsafe to go, and his heart came up in his mouth if any of the spectators strayed across it. Gradually his father persuaded him that this was a mock-battle, only in fun, as things could be only in fun in those days before the war; and Eustace, gaining confidence, had imagined that all battles might be mock battles, and the soldiers would for ever put off their fierceness with their pipe-clay when the cease-fire sounded and they gathered round the cook-house (which his father, who had been a Volunteer, pointed out to him) for their tea.

And somewhere not far from here must be the place where he and Nancy broke away from the road and got lost in the undergrowth, that looked impenetrable still, from which Dick had rescued them. But Eustace could not entertain the thought of Nancy: she asked him a question he could not answer, and fled hurtfully from his dream. The smart stayed with him; his thoughts fluttered with a broken wing, and when he came to the Downs, the precipitous sides had flattened to tame slopes, on which ugly, muddy streaks had been scored by the toboggans.

But only Nancy was proof against the hour's transmuting touch. His other memories willingly submitted to the change; the orange water of the iron spring delighted him as of old with its promise of vast untapped therapeutic properties in the earth; the roofless, gabled church which the sky poured into, made him feel as if a lid had been taken off his own mind. He passed by it slowly, his eye dwelling with pleasure on all its broken but enduring surfaces.

And now he was out on the main road, in the suburbs of Anchorstone, between the tree-girt Convalescent Home and the rose-red pillar of the water-tower. This silken dalliance with his thoughts must stop, for Hilda, chained to her rock, awaited him at Cambo.

Yet what if the experiment failed, if the shock missed fire, if Hilda returned from her ride the same as she went out? If the day that had opened so triumphantly closed in defeat?

You cannot hesitate long on a bicycle: Eustace described a wobbly semicircle and fell off. Need he go back just yet? As originally planned, his ride was to have been much longer, and included an ascent of Frontisham Hill, on the crest of which he now stood. The ascent of that hill, hitherto always taken on foot, at a slow pace and with occasional halts, was to be the sign of his complete physical recovery, his utter independence of the brandy flask.

‘No, Dr. Speedwell,' he heard himself saying, ‘there's nothing the matter with me at all. I'm as sound as a bell, as fit as a fiddle, as right as a trivet. You can put your stethoscope away, old chap. Why, yesterday I cycled up Frontisham Hill.' ‘Frontisham Hill? My dear boy, you must be a Hercules.' ‘Well, not quite that, Dr. Speedwell, but pretty good for a C
₃
man.'

Reluctantly Eustace rang down the curtain on this intoxicating scene, and took out his watch, one of his Venetian watches, for Miss Fothergill's was too precious to take bicycling. It had stopped. How annoying; if only he had brought a supplementary time-piece he would know exactly how he stood. Those obsolete customs had their uses after all. If he had not been so busy talking to the Staveleys he would have noticed the time by the blue-and-gold clock in the courtyard. But the sun was still high in the heavens and he needn't really worry. Hilda couldn't scold him, Minney wouldn't, and anyhow, scolding had no terrors for a Eustace who reminded Sir John Staveley of Captain Bruce-Popham.

Five minutes' glorious coasting would take him to Frontisham, where the church had a clock. Better know how late he was, even if the knowledge made him later, so Eustace reasoned, even if it delayed the shock he was to administer to Hilda. He had given Dick a shock, perhaps he could give her one, too. He would be able to think out the details on the way down, and on the way up fortify his moral constitution with a demonstration of his physical prowess.

Slap-dash as any Guards officer, he scorned to use his brakes. After the second turn, where the road disappears beneath one's feet, he became one with his own speed. At his approach the villagers scattered like hens, for Eustace's pre-war bicycling technique did not spare the bell. So in a glorious flurry of sound and speed he breasted the steep rise to the church, and flung himself from his bicycle like the deus ex machina that he was, and propped it under the lych-gate. His progress round the church—for the gate was at the east end—seemed intolerably slow. Below him to the left, in the garden of the Swan Hotel, a family party, including some children, were having tea. He remembered having tea there, too. They were staring at something above his head. He knew what they were looking at, although he could not see it, and he walked down the steep pathway among the tombstones to get a view.

Yes, there it was, the famous window, flickering upwards, its stone flames gilded by the sunshine, its dark glass sparkling with a hundred points of light. Slowly the spectacle began to re-create in Eustace the mood of so many years ago: his being kindled and divided into tongues of fire that seared the walls of sense with a sweet agony; but while the experience was still in its infancy, still hot and fluid in his mind, while the peace of petrifaction was still as far away as the soldier's home is from the battlefield, the clock in the tower struck five, and time had robbed him of eternity.

No question now of not pedalling up the hill, for unless he made haste, Hilda might miss her ride, and who knew whether, having been let down once, she would ever bring herself to face the daylight.

H
IS BICYCLE
stabled, Eustace slipped softly into the house by the back door. Late as he was, he could not possibly let Hilda see him like this, steaming and sweating and not quite able to get his breath. But not only with exertion, with triumph; for he had scaled the hill, he had proved himself. Many times he had been on the point of giving up. He had been reduced to subterfuges: to husbanding his strength from one telegraph pole to the next; to tacking this way and that across the road; finally, to counting by tens the revolutions of his pedals. But he had done it, and in the doing the incapacities of a lifetime seemed to have slipped from him.

Still breathing hard, he tiptoed through the hall, stretched out his hand for the letter on the hat-rack, and stole up to his room. No sound at Hilda's door: the house seemed empty.

Washing was the crown of athletic effort, but how heavily the bath-towel pressed upon his shoulders, and how long it took him to get dry. The new vest would soon be as sticky as the old.

A moment's halt while he read the letter. It had a Venetian postmark, but the handwriting was strange to him.

And then a name he could not read.

Eustace did not hear the knock, or the sound of the door opening, but there was Minney, her hair untidy, and her kind face looking as reproachful as it ever could.