He and his father strolled together into the garden an hour later, and found Beatrice reclining in a hammock which had recently been suspended in a convenient spot. She had one hand beneath her head, the other held a large fan, with which she warded off stray flakes of sunlight falling between the leaves.
‘Isn’t this exquisite?’ she cried. ‘Let no one hint to me of stirring before lunch-time. I am going to enjoy absolute laziness.’
‘I thought you would have preferred a gallop over the downs,’ said Mr. Athel.
‘Oh, we’ll have that this afternoon; you may talk of it now, and I shall relish it in anticipation. Or, better still, sit down and tell us old stories about Egypt, and let us forget the age we live in.’
‘What is amiss with the age?’ inquired Mr. Athel, who stood smoking a cigar and was in his wonted state of satisfaction with himself and the universe.
‘Everything is amiss. If you had been with me yesterday in a street I was visiting, not a quarter of a mile from home—But I’m going to forget all that now. How deliciously warm it is here in the shade! I must have a hammock in our garden at Cowes.’
‘When do you go back?’ Mr. Athel asked.
‘In about a fortnight. It has done mother no end of good; don’t you think she looks remarkably well, Mrs. Rossall? I’m afraid she finds it a little dull though.’
When his father had returned to the house, Wilfrid sat en the grass and rested his head against the arm of the low garden chair in which Mrs. Rossall was reclining. The sound of a grass-cutter alone mingled with the light rustling of the trees. It was one of those perfect summer mornings when the sun’s rays, though streaming from a cloudless sky, are tempered by a gentle haze in the upper regions of the air, when the zenith has a tinge of violet and on the horizon broods a reddish mist. From this part of the garden only a glimpse of the house was visible; an upper window with white curtains, cool, peaceful. All else on every side was verdure and bloom.
‘Is it possible,’ Beatrice asked, when there had been silence for a few moments, ‘that I can have met Miss Hood anywhere before to-day? Her face is strangely familiar to me.’
‘She has never been in London before she came to us,’ said Mrs. Rossall.
‘But you have relatives in Dunfield, I think?’ remarked Wilfrid.
‘To be sure,’ said his aunt; ‘she comes from Dunfield, in Yorkshire. Do you think you can have met her there?’
‘Ah, that explains it,’ Beatrice cried eagerly. ‘I knew I had seen her, and I know now where it was. She gave lessons to my uncle’s children. I saw her when I was staying there the last time, three—no, four years ago. I can’t recall her by her name, but her face, oh, I remember it as clearly as possible.’
‘What a memory you have, Beatrice!’ said Mrs. Rossall.
‘I never forget a face that strikes me.’
‘In what way did Miss Hood’s face strike you?’ Wilfrid asked, as if in idle curiosity, and with some of the banter which always marked his tone to Beatrice.
‘You would like some deep, metaphysical reason, but I am not advanced enough for that. I don’t suppose I thought much about her at the time, but the face has stayed in my mind. But how old is she?’
‘Two-and-twenty,’ said Mrs. Rossall, smiling.
‘A year older than myself; my impression was that she was more than that. I think I only saw her once; she was with us at lunch one day. We spoke of her shyness, I remember; she scarcely said a word all the time.’
‘Yes, she is very shy,’ assented Mrs. Rossall.
‘That’s a mistake, I think, aunt,’ said Wilfrid; ‘shyness is quite a different thing from reticence.’
‘Reticent, then,’ conceded the lady, with a smile to Beatrice. ‘At all events, she is very quiet and agreeable and well-bred. It is such a good thing to have a governess who really seems well-bred; it does make it so much easier to treat her with consideration.’
‘Do the children like her?’ Beatrice asked.
‘Very much indeed. And it’s wonderful how she controls them; they are scatter-brained little creatures.’
‘Will she go abroad with you?’
‘Oh, no, I don’t think that necessary.’
Wilfrid presently left the two to their gossip. The conversation naturally turned to him.
‘How is his health?’ Beatrice asked.
‘He seems quite recovered. I don’t think there was ever anything to occasion much alarm, but his father got frightened. I expect we shall bring him back from Switzerland as well as ever he was.’
‘What ever has he done with himself the last two months?’ mused the girl.
‘Well, it has been rather hard to keep him occupied away from books. He has been riding a good deal, and smoking a good deal.’
‘And talking a good deal?’
‘Well, yes, Wilf is fond of talking,’ admitted Mrs. Rossall, ‘but I don’t think he’s anything like as positive as he was. He does now and then admit that other people may have an opinion which is worth entertaining. Celia Dawlish was with us a fortnight ago; she declared him vastly improved.’
‘She told him so?’
‘No, that was in private to me.’
‘But I think Celia and he always got on well together,’ said Beatrice in an idly meditative tone, moving the edge of her fan backwards and forwards a few inches above her face.
A few minutes later, after a silence, she said—
‘Do you know what I am thinking?’
‘What?’ asked Mrs. Rossall, with an air of interest.
‘That if I were to close my eyes and keep quiet I should very soon be fast asleep.’
The other laughed at the unexpected reply.
‘Then why not do so, dear? It’s warm enough; you couldn’t take any harm.’
‘I suppose the walk has tired me.’
‘But if you had no sleep last night? How is it you can’t sleep, I wonder? Is it the same when you are at Cowes?’
‘No, only in London. Something troubles me; I feel that I have neglected duties. I hear voices, as distinct as yours now, reproving me for my idle, frivolous life.’
‘Nonsense! I am sure you are neither idle nor frivolous. Do doze off, if you can, dear; I’ll go and get something to read.’
‘You won’t be angry with me?’ the girl asked, in the tone of an affectionate weary child.
‘I shall if you use ceremony with me.’
Beatrice sighed, folded her hands upon the fan, and closed her lids. When Mrs. Rossall returned from the house with a magazine and a light shawl, the occupant of the hammock was already sound asleep. She threw the shawl with womanly skill and gentleness over the shapely body. When she had resumed her seat, she caught a glimpse of Wilfrid at a little distance; her beckoned summons brought him near.
‘Look,’ she whispered, pointing to the hammock. ‘When did you see a prettier picture?’
The young man gazed with a free smile, the expression of critical appreciativeness. The girl’s beauty stirred in him no mood but that. She slept with complete calm of feature the half-lights that came through the foliage made an exquisite pallor on her face, contrasting with the dark masses of her hair. Her bosom rose and fell in the softest sighing; her pure throat was like marble, and her just parted lips seemed to need a protector from the bees….
While she sleeps, let us learn a little more of her history. Some five-and-twenty years previously, Alfred Redwing was a lecturer on Greek and Latin at a small college in the North of England, making shift to live on a beggarly stipend. Handsome, pleasing, not quite thirty, he was well received in such semblance of society as his town offered, and, in spite of his defects as a suitor, he won for his wife a certain Miss Baxendale, the daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer. She brought him at once a few hundreds a year, and lie pursued his college work in improved spirits. His wife had two brothers; one had early gone to America, the other was thriving as a man of business in the town of Dunfield. With Laurence Baxendale, who dated his very occasional letters from various parts of the United States, the family might be said to have parted for good; before leaving England he had got on ill terms with his father and brother, and it was only a persistent affection for his sister that caused him to give any sign of himself year after year. When this sister had been Mrs. Redwing for about two years, she one day received an intimation from solicitors that Laurence was dead and had left her the whole of a very considerable fortune, the product, mainly, of dealings in lumber. Mr. and Mrs. Redwing in fact found themselves possessed of nearly fourteen thousand a year, proceeding from most orderly investments. This would naturally involve a change in their mode of life. In the first place they paid a visit to America; then they settled in London, where, about the same time, their only child, Beatrice was born. A month after the child’s coming into the world, the father withdrew from it—into a private lunatic asylum. He had not been himself from the day when he heard of the fortune that had come to him; such an access of blessedness was not provided for in the constitution of his mind. Probably few men of his imaginative temperament and hard antecedents could have borne the change without some little unsettling of mental balance; we are framed to endure any amount of ill, but have to take our chance in the improbable event of vast joy befalling us. Poor Redwing conceived a suspicion that his wife desired to murder him; one night as she was following him into their bedroom, he suddenly turned round, caught hold of her with violence, and flung her to the ground, demanding the knife which he protested he had seen gleam in her hand. It was no longer safe to live with him; he was put under restraint, and never again knew freedom. In less than a year he died, a moping maniac.