It was one of those golden evenings that sometimes follows a hot clear day--one of those rare evenings which linger in the memory when summer has slipped away and which come back into the mind like a smile, an endearment or a broad sweet melody, renewing optimism and replenishing faith.The sun had gone, but its warm glow lingered in a sky that was utterly unspotted.The quiet unruffled trees in all the rich green of early maturity stood out against it almost as though they were painted on canvas.The light was so true that distances were brought up to the eye.Far-away sounds came closely to the ear.The murmur from the earth gathered like that of a multitude of voices responding to prayers.
Palgrave drove slowly.The God-given peace and beauty that lay over everything quieted the stress and storm of his mind.Somehow, too, with Joan at his side on the road to the cottage in which he was to play out the second or the last act of the drama of his Great Emotion, life and death caught something of the truth and dignity of that memorable evening--the sounds of life and the distance of death.If he was not to live with Joan he would die with her.There was, to him, in the state of mind into which this absorbing passion had worked him, no alternative.Love, that he had made his lodestar in early youth and sought in vain, had come at last.Marriage, convention, obligations, responsibility, balance and even sanity mattered nothing.They were swept like chaff before this sex-storm.
Ten years of dreams were epitomized in Joan.She was the ideal that he had placed on the secret altar of his soul.She struck, all vibrant with youth, the one poetic note that was hidden in his character behind vanity and sloth, cynicism and the ingrained belief that whatever he desired he must have.And as he drove away from Easthampton and the Hosack house he left behind him Alice and all that she was and meant.She receded from his mind like the white cliffs of a shore to which he never intended to return.He was happier than he had ever been.In his curious exaltation, life, with its tips and downs, its pettiness, its monotony, lay far below him, as the moving panorama of land does to a flying man.His head was clear, his plan definite.He felt years younger--almost boyish.
Laughter came easy--the sort of reasonless laughter that comes to tired men as they start out on a holiday.He saw the strangeness of it all with some wonder and much triumph.The Gilbert Palgrave who had been molded by money and inertia and autocracy was discarded, and the man with Joan at his side was the young Gilbert whom he had caught sight of that night in Paris, when, on his way home under the stars, Joan, with her brown hair and laughing eyes, tip-tilted nose and the spirit of spring in her breath, had come out of his inner consciousness and established herself like a shape in a dream.
His heart turned when he looked at Joan's face.Was its unusual gravity due to the fact that she had come to the end of fooling--that she, too, had sensed the finality or the beginning? He thought so.He believed so.She looked younger than ever, but sweeter, less flippant, less triumphantly irresponsible.She sat, like a child, with her hands in her lap, her mouth soft, an odd wistfulness in her eyes with their long curling lashes.A black straight-brimmed straw hat sat well down on her small head and put a shadow on her face.
The slim roundness of her arms showed through the white silk shirt, and her low collar proved all the beauty of her throat and neck.She looked more than ever unplucked, untouched, like a rosebud.
On the tip of his tongue there were words of adoration, not fastidious and carefully chosen, but simple, elemental words such as a farmhand might blunder out in the deep shadow of a lane, after dark.But he held them back.He would wait until after they had dined together and all round them there were silence and solitude.
He drove still more slowly in order to give the two Japanese servants time to carry out his instructions and remove themselves.
That cottage, which he had bought on the spur of the moment, fitted out with elaborate care and used only twice, for two weeks since, was to justify itself, after all.Who knows? He might have bought it two years before under an inspiration.Even then, months and months before he met Joan or knew of her existence, this very evening might have been mapped out He was a fatalist, and it fell into his creed to think so.
He didn't wonder why Joan was silent or ask himself jealously of what she was thinking.He chose to believe that she had arrived at the end of impishness, had grown weary of Harry Oldershaw and his cubbish ways and had turned to himself naturally and with relief, choosing her moment with the uncanny intuition that is the gift of women.She was only just in time.To-morrow would have found him following the faithful Alice on her forlorn hope--the incurable man.
It was only when they turned into the narrow sandy road that was within a quarter of a mile of the club at Devon that Joan came out of the numbness that had settled upon her and recognized things that were stamped with the marks of an afternoon that was never to be forgotten.Martin--Martin--and it was all her fault.
"But why are you coming this way?" she asked, drawing back into her seat.
"Because my cottage is just here," said Gilbert.
"At Devon?"
"Yes.Why not? I had a fancy for playing hermit from time to time.Isaw the sun set behind the water,--a Byron sunset,--and in the hope of seeing just such another I bought this shack.I did those things once for want of something better.Look at it," he said, and turned the car through a rustic gate, alive with honeysuckle.