Carnival Part 82

Carefully they lifted him, and, warm with sun-dyed sleep, laid him in Jenny's cool bed.

"Light the nightlight, there's a love," said Jenny. "Good night."

"Good night," whispered May, fading like a ghost through the black doorway, leaving the tall room to Jenny and Frank. Tree shadows, conjured by the moon, waved on the walls, but very faintly, for the nightlight burned with steady flame in the opalescent saucer. Jenny settled herself to think what she should say to Maurice next morning.

But soon she forgot all about Maurice, and "I'd rather like to have a little girl," was her last thought before she went dreaming.

Chapter XLVIII: _Carni Vale_

Jenny woke up the next morning in a gray land of mist. A sea-fog had come in to obliterate Trewinnard and even the sparkling month of June, creating a new and impalpable world, a strange undated season. Above the elm trees and the hill-tops the fog floated and swayed in vaporous eddies. Jenny's first impulse was to postpone the meeting on the cliffs, and yet the day somehow suited the enterprise. Shrouded fittingly, she would face whatever ghosts Maurice had power to raise.

"I'm going for a walk," she told May, "by myself. I want to tell Maurice not to hang about here any more because it gets on my nerves."

"I'll look after Frank when you're gone," said May.

"Don't let him eat any more wool off that lamb of his, will you?"

"All right."

"I sha'n't be long. Or I don't expect so."

"If he comes back from Plymouth before you come in, where shall I say you've gone?" May asked.

"Oh, tell him 'Rats!' I can't help his troubles. So long," said Jenny emphatically.

"Say 'ta--ta' nicely to your mother, young Frank," commanded Aunt May.

As Jenny faded into the mist, the boy hammered his farewells upon the window-pane; and for awhile in the colorless air she saw his rosy cheeks burning like lamps, or like the love for him in her own heart. Before she turned up the drive, she waited to listen for the click and tinkle of Granfa's horticulture, but there was no sound of his spade. Farther along she met Thomas.

"Morning! Mrs. Trewh.e.l.la!"

"Morning, young Thomas."

"Going for a walk, are 'ee?"

"On the cliffs," Jenny nodded.

"You be careful how you do walk there. I wouldn't like for 'ee to fall over."

"Don't you worry. I'll take jolly good care I don't do that."

"Well, anybody ought to be careful on they cliffs. Nasty old place that is on a foggy morning." Then as she became in a few steps a wraith, he chanted in farewell courtesy, "Mrs. Trewh.e.l.la!"

Along the farm road Jenny found herself continually turning round to detect in her wake an unseen follower. She had a feeling of pursuit through the s.h.i.+fting vagueness all around, and stopped to listen. There was no footstep: only the drip-drip, drip-drip of the fog from the elm boughs. Before she knew that she had gone so far, the noise of the sea sounded from the grayness ahead, and beyond there was the groan of a siren from some uncertain s.h.i.+p. Again she paused for footsteps, and there was nothing but the drip-drip, drip-drip of the fog in the quickset hedge. On the steep road that ran up towards Crickabella, the fog lifted from her immediate neighborhood, and she could see the washed-out sky and silver sun with vapors curling across the strange luminousness. On either side, thicker by contrast, the mist hung in curtains dreary and impenetrable. Very soon the transparency in which she walked was veiled again, and through an annihilation of shape and color and scent and sound, she pressed forward to the summit.

On the plateau, although the fog was dense enough to mask the edge of the cliff at a distance of fifty yards and to merge in a gray confusion sky and sea beyond, the fresher atmosphere lightened the general effect. She could watch the fog sweeping up and down in diaphanous forms and winged nonent.i.ties. The silence in the hedgeless, treeless country was profound. The sea, oily calm in such weather, gave very seldom a low sob in some cavern beneath the cliff. Far out a solitary gull cried occasionally.

How absurd, thought Jenny suddenly, to expect Maurice on such a day.

What painting was possible in so elusive a landscape, so immaterial a scene? He was not at all likely to be there. She stood for a moment listening, and was violently startled by the sight of some animal richly hued even in such a negation of color. The fox slipped by her with lowered brush and ears laid back, vanis.h.i.+ng presently over the side of the cliff. She had thought for a second that it was Trewh.e.l.la's dog, and her heart beat very quickly in the eerie imagination of herself and his master alone in this grayness. She walked on over the cus.h.i.+ons of heather, p.r.i.c.king her ankles in the low bushes of gorse. Burnet roses were in bloom, lying like sh.e.l.ls on the ground. Ahead of her she saw a lonely flower tremulous in the damp mist. It was a blue columbine, a solitary plant full blown. She thought how beautiful it looked and stooped to pluck it. On second thoughts she decided that it would be a shame not to let it live, this lovely deep-blue flower, nodding faintly.

Jenny stood once more fronting the vapors on each side in turn, and was on the point of going home, when she perceived a shadow upon the mist that with approach acquired the outlines of a man and very soon proved to be Maurice. She noticed how pale he was and anxious, very unlike the old Maurice, even unlike himself of five or six weeks ago.

"You've come at last," he said.

"Yes, I've come to say you mustn't stay here no more. It worries me."

"Jenny," he said, "I knew I'd been a fool before I saw you again last first of May. I've known for four years what a fool and knave I'd been; but, oh, G.o.d, I never knew so clearly till the other day, till I'd hung about these cliffs waiting for you to come."

"Where was the good?" she asked. "It's years too late now."

"When I heard from Castleton where you were, I tried not to come. He told me I should make things worse. He said it would be a crime. And I tried not to all this winter. But you haunted me. I could not rest, and in April the desire to see you became a madness. I had to come."

"I think you acted very silly. It isn't as if you could do anything by coming. I never used to think about you."

"You didn't?" he repeated, agonized.

"Never. Never once," she stabbed. "I'd forgotten you."

"I deserve it."

"Of course you do. You can't mess up a girl's life and then come and say you're sorry the same as if you'd trod on her toe."

They were walking along involuntarily, and through the mist Jenny's words of sense, hardened to adamantine sharpness by suffering, cut clear and cruel and true. She did not like, however, to prosecute the close encounter in such a profusion of s.p.a.ce. She fancied her words were lost in the great fog, and sought for some familiar outline that should point the way to Crickabella. Presently a narrow serpentine path gave her the direction.

"Along here," she said. "I can't talk up here. I feel as if there must be listeners in this fog. I wish it would get bright."

"It's like my life has been without you," said Maurice.

"Shut up," she stabbed again, "and don't talk silly. Your life's been quite all right till you took a sudden fancy to see me again."

"Walk carefully," said Maurice humbly. "We're very near the cliff's edge."

Land and air met in a wreathed obscurity.

"Down here," said Jenny.

They scrambled down into Crickabella, slipping on the pulpy leaves of withered bluebells, stumbling over clumps of fern and drenching themselves in the foxgloves, whose woolly leaves held the dripping fog.

"This is where I often used to sit," said Jenny. "Only it's too wet in the gra.s.s now. There's a rock here that's fairly dry, though it does look rather like a gravestone sticking up out of the ground."

They were now about half-way down the escarpment from the top of which the rampart of black cliff, sheer on either side of the path, ran up for twenty feet, so far as could be judged in the deceptive atmosphere.

Jenny leaned against the stone outcrop and faced Maurice.

"Jenny," he began, "when I didn't turn up at Waterloo that first of May, I must have been mad. I don't want to make excuses, but I must have been mad."