So, without his knowledge, Oswald’s fate was decided. As though feeling her thoughts upon him, he turned his head, but at once had to look back at the road.
He was very much the gallant, chivalrous lover, and quick as a woman, almost, to detect her moods. In his deep-blue eyes, which were incapable of deception, could be read an endless tenderness and devotion; though whether he’d ever dare to approach her as a man was open to doubt. It didn’t matter. She always rather shrank from a man, physically, though she’d taught herself to enjoy the embraces of men. What was much more important to her at the moment was the glimpse she’d just caught of that incongruous sort of misgivinga curious hollow look of uncertainty which was a puzzle to her, and a stronger attraction than all his good looks and other qualities put together.
*
The car tilted over a humpback bridge, crossing the stream, flat stepping-stones at the side for people on foot to cross the brown busy water — like crossing into the Middle Ages, it seemed to Rejane — and climbed steeply on between jungles of flowering plants gone back to the wild, convolvulus smothering everything, blowing its trumpets triumphantly everywhere after the wet season, although its leaves were already beginning to droop and wither, touched by the frost.
The house seemed not only at the end of the road but at the end of the world. The engine of the car was switched off and silence descended, into which Rejane stepped out — into this absolute northern silence, timeless, as if everything had stopped, and they’d come, not to the Middle Ages but to a place before time began. If there was a village near it must have been on the other side of the hill, for not a single habitation was visible in the whole huge encirclement of the moors.
In miles, the distance they’d come from The Hope Deferred wasn’t very great; yet everything here seemed oddly different, changed. Besides the new silence and solitude, there was a new coolness. The upland air was sharp, even in sunshine. And that the place had already turned towards winter was evident, not only in the overgrown garden but in the pale sear grass slope above, reaching up, between frequent knots and ridges of granite, to the pale looming mass of stone; and in the faint blue, hardly blue at all, of the sky.
In its silence, particularly, the vast, pale, deserted landscape, with its bare islands of ghostly rock, seemed to her to exhale something hostile to human life, stony and arid, without sound or movement, a lifeless and empty scene. In the almost frightening silence she saw the house as the advance-post of some doomed expedition, recklessly daring the curse of that wintry region, already lying upon it in the shadow of the rocks overhead, balanced in precarious-seeming immensity, threatening to fall and crush it out of existence.
But the interior of the house was less romantic, merely gloomy and dark, with the peculiar petrified gloom of houses that have known better days, where people live in the past. The cold rooms seemed damp, and gave the impression of being arranged as they had been twenty or more years before. The furniture was massive, dark and heavy, the pictures hung darkly and obscurely upon the walls, between military trophies, banners, helmets, sabres; the rust on the steel looked like bloodstains, the dusty, bedraggled plumes on the helmets suggested that the curse had come home to roost.
In this dismal atmosphere the lunch wasn’t very successful, though Rejane was charming as usual. And the old lady did her best, ingenuously, childishly chattering about people and things the visitor had never heard of; until she forgot, and sat staring blankly, out of those queer psychic eyes that seemed to see only ghosts. Then, with a guilty glance at Oswald, she would start up again, scattering her inconsequent sentences into a gulf of incomprehension thousands of miles across.
They were an odd trio of women sitting at lunch, around the correct, handsome young man. The dreamy-eyed mother seemed scarcely present, despite her spasms of conversation. And he was there only for Rejane. His sister, tall, flushed, with an air of suppressed resentment, made frequent trips to the kitchen, hardly saying a word.
The elegant, worldly Rejane sat through the meal in her amused casual fashion, finding it all rather boring, rather an imposition. Why should she, who must never be bored, put up with these absurd people? Oswald should have known better than to bring her here.
She was thankful when the meal was over at last, and they could go, leaving the house with almost indecent haste. Once she was alone in the car with him, her habitual good humour returning, she could smile at the memory of those cold, disastrous rooms.
Although to the man they were simply ‘home’, a background he wouldn’t have dreamed of criticizing on his own account, so familiar he never really looked at them, he had seen that they were not for her. He at once proposed that in future they should meet at the hotel; a far better arrangement from his point of view, its great advantage being that he’d have her to himself, instead of having to share her with his mother and sister. Thank goodness for the fast car, and the freedom it gave him.
3
WHILE Rejane’s interlude progressed to her satisfaction, Oswald found it less satisfactory, in spite of spending whole days alone with her, in the providentially fine weather, exploring the moors. Many of the wild beauty spots were remote, and could be reached only on foot, or by riding the rough-coated, sure-footed ponies that roamed the district, belonging to no one, or to any landowner who took the trouble to claim and train them.
The young cavalryman of course had always ridden himself, and was delighted to find Rejane equally at home on horseback. His naïve optimism took it as a sign that they were meant for each other. With extreme care he chose her a good-looking, dark-brown pony, with long, creamy mane and tail, which they called Coffee. And every morning they would set off with a picnic lunch, riding up to the moors.
The young man was at his best there, confident and at home, as if the whole wild landscape were his demesne, to which he welcomed her as an honoured guest, bestowing its freedom upon her, and making himself responsible for her safety and happiness; always attentive, devoted, surrounding her with his watchfulness, ready to avert any contretemps before it could occur. If her pony stumbled, slipped on the shelving rock-face, or went too near one of the treacherous patches of bog, he was always there, with his unobtrusive helpfulness and constant, undemanding devotion. She marvelled at his capacity for unselfish and loving service; and much more, at his lack of interest in her income.
She found this one of the most puzzling things about him. No one, in her whole life, had allowed her to forget, as he did, how rich she was — her wealth had always been an important factor in her relations with others. She was so used to the sincere respect people had for her money that she could hardly believe in Oswald’s indifference, and, when finally she became convinced, she despised him slightly for being so unmercenary. A little store of contempt was accumulating somewhere in her. Yet she really was almost touched by his insistence on being responsible for such small expenses as they incurred together, which he considered his masculine privilege. It made a pleasant change for her, used as she was to keeping a sharply suspicious eye on her acquaintances, when it came to paying.
But Oswald, in his simplicity, never knew why, after he’d bought her some trifle, she would suddenly give him one of her most ravishing smiles. She had a certain pure, wistful smile, very young, tender and almost virginal, that he could have worshipped. It was, of course, totally misleading.
For him the whole affair was deadly serious, the great romance of his life, for which he’d been waiting and keeping himself, all the more poignant because of the time factor. He wanted to marry her before he rejoined his regiment, and, in the first rapture, actually believed she might consent — she was always so friendly and natural with him; obviously she must like him. But she would never let him propose, implying that marriage was out of the question.