Mary Olivier: a Life Part 98

They had finished the run down Reyburn hill. Their pace was slackening on the level.

He said, "That's a jolly bicycle of yours."

"Isn't it? I'm sure you'll like to know I bought it with the wonderful cheque you gave me. I should never have had it without that."

"I'm glad you got something out of that awful time."

"Awful? It was one of the nicest times I've ever had.... Nearly all my nice times have been in that house."

"I know," he said. "My uncle would let you do anything you liked if you were young enough. He ought to have had children of his own. They'd have kept him out of mischief."

"I can't think," she said to the surrounding hills, "why people get into mischief, or why they go and kill themselves. When they can ride bicycles instead."

III.

Mamma was sitting upright and averted, with an air of self-conscious effacement, holding the thin white book before her like a fan.

Every now and then you could see her face swinging round from behind the cover and her eyes looking at Richard Nicholson, above the rims of her gla.s.ses. Uneasy, frightened eyes.

IV.

The big pink roses of the chintzes and the gold bordered bowls of the black mirrors looked at you rememberingly.

There was a sort of brutality about it. To come here and be happy, to come here in order to be happy, when _they_ were gone; when you had hurt them both so horribly.

"I'm sitting in her chair," she thought.

Richard Nicholson sat, in a purely temporary att.i.tude, by the table in the window. Against the window-pane she could see his side face drawn in a brilliant, furred line of light. His moustache twitched under the shadow of his nose. He was smiling to himself as he wrote the letter to Mamma.

There was a brutality about that, too. She wondered if he had seen old Baxter's pinched mouth and sliding eyes when he took the letter. He was watching him as he went out, waiting for the click of the latch.

"It's all right," he said. "They expect you. They think it's work."

He settled himself (in Mr. Sutcliffe's chair).

"It's the best way," he said. "I want to see you and I don't want to frighten your mother. She _is_ afraid of me."

"No. She's afraid of the whole thing. She wishes it hadn't happened.

She's afraid of what'll happen next. I can't make her see that nothing need happen next."

"She's cleverer than you think. She sees that something's got to happen next. I couldn't stand another evening like the last."

"You couldn't," she agreed. "You couldn't possibly."

"We can't exactly go on like--like this, you know."

"Don't let's think about it. Here we are. Now this minute. It's an hour and a half till dinner time. Why, even if I go at nine we've got three hours."

"That's not enough.... You talk as though we could think or not think, as we chose. Even if we left off thinking we should have to go on living.

Your mother knows that."

"I don't think she knows more than we do."

"She knows enough to frighten her. She knows what _I_ want.... I want to marry you, Mary."

(This then was what she had been afraid of. But Mamma wouldn't have thought of it.)

"I didn't think you wanted to do that. Why should you?"

"It's the usual thing, isn't it? When you care enough."

"_Do_ you care enough?"

"More than enough. Don't you? ... It's no use saying you don't. I know you do."

"Can you tell?"

"Yes."

"Do I go about showing it?"

"No; there hasn't been time. You only began yesterday."

"When? _When_?"

"In the hotel. When you stopped talking suddenly. And when I gave you your book. You looked as though you wished I hadn't. As though I'd dragged you away from somewhere where you were happy."

"Yes.... If it only began yesterday we can stop it. Stop it before it gets worse."

"I can't. I've been at it longer than that."

"How long?"

"Oh--I don't know. It might have been that first week. After I'd found out that there was peace when you came into the room; and no peace when you went out. When you're there peace oozes out of you and soaks into me all the time."

"Does it feel like that?"

"Just like that."

"But--if it feels like that now, we should spoil it by marrying."

"Oh no we shouldn't."

"Yes.... If it's peace you want. There won't be _any_ peace.... Besides, you don't know. Do you remember telling me about your uncle?"