Gilbert laughed boyishly.Her enthusiasm delighted him.To make the long low living room with its big brick chimney and open fireplace absolutely right had dispelled his boredom--little as he had intended to use it.The whole thing was carried out on the lines of the main room in an English shooting box.The walls were matchboarded and stained an oak color, and the floor was polished and covered with skins.Old pewter plates and mugs, and queer ugly delightful bits of pottery were everywhere--on shelves, on the wide mantelpiece, and hanging from the beams.Colored sporting prints covered the walls, among stuffed fish and heads of deer with royal antlers and beady eyes with a fixed stare.The furniture was Jacobean--the chairs with ladder backs and cane seats; a wide dresser, lined with colored plates; a long narrow table with rails and bulging legs.Two old oak church pews were set on each side of the fireplace filled with cushions covered with a merry chintz.
There were flowers everywhere in big bowls--red rambler roses, primula, sweet williams, Shasta daisies, and scarlet poppies.All the windows were open, and there was nothing damp or musty in the smell of the room.On the contrary, the companionable aroma of tobacco smoke hung in the air mixed with the sweet faint scent of flowers.The place seemed "lived-in"--as well it might.The two Japs had played gentlemen there for some weeks.The table was laid for two, and appetizing dishes of cold food, salad and fruit were spread out on the dresser and sideboard, with iced champagne and claret cup.
"The outside of the cottage didn't suggest all this comfort," said Joan.
"Comfort's the easiest thing in the world when you can pay for it.
There's one bedroom half the size of this and two small ones.Abathroom and kitchen beyond.There's water, of course, and electric light, and there's a telephone.I loathe the telephone, the destroyer of aloofness, the missionary that breaks into privacy." He switched on the lights in several old lanterns as he spoke.The day had almost disappeared.
He went over to her and stood smiling.
"Well, isn't this better than a road-house reeking of food and flies and made hideous by a Jazz band?""Much better," she said.
The delightful silence was broken by the crickets.
"Martin--Martin," she thought," and it was all my fault."A sort of tremble ran over Gilbert as he looked at her.Agony and joy clashed in his heart.He had suffered, gone sleepless, worn himself out by hard, grim exercise in order, who knew how many times, to master his almost unendurable passion.He had killed long nights, the very thought of which made him shudder, by reading books of which he never took in a word.He had stood up in the dark, unmanned, and cursed himself and her and life.He had denounced her to himself and once to her as a flapper, a fool-girl, an empty-minded frivolous thing encased in a body as beautiful as spring.He had thrown himself on his knees and wept like a young boy who had been hurt to the very quick by a great injustice.He had faced himself up, and with the sort of fear that comes to men in moments of physical danger, recognized madness in his eyes.But not until that instant, as she stood before him unguarded in his lonely cottage, so slight and sweet and unexpectedly gentle, her eyes as limpid as the water of a brook, her lips soft and kind and unkissed, her whole young body radiating virginity, did he really know how amazingly and frighteningly he loved her.But once again he held back a rush of adoring words and a desire to touch and hold and claim.The time had not come yet.Let her warm to him.Let him live down the ugliness of the mood that she had recently put him into, do away with the impression he must have given her of jealousy and petulance and scorn.Let her get used to him as a man who had it in him to be as natural and impersonal, and even as cubbish, as some of the boys she knew.Later, when night had laid its magic on the earth, he would make his last bid for her kisses--or take her with him across the horizon.
"How do you like that?" he asked, and pointed to a charmingly grotesque piece of old Staffordshire pottery which made St.George a stunted churchwar den with the legs of a child, his horse the kind of animal that would be used in a green grocer's cart and the dragon a cross between a leopard and a half-bred bulldog.
"Very amusing," she said, going over to it.
And the instant her back was turned, he opened a drawer in a sideboard and satisfied himself that the thing which might have to put them into Eternity together lay there, loaded.