Part 115

‘I don’t know--I didn’t ask,’ said Paula sadly. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t care to meet us again.’

‘That’s because you didn’t explain.’

‘Well--why didn’t the old man give me an opportunity?’ exclaimed the niece with suppressed excitement. ‘He would scarcely say anything but yes and no, and gave me no chance at all of introducing the subject. I wanted to explain--I came all the way on purpose--I would have begged George’s pardon on my two knees if there had been any way of beginning; but there was not, and I could not do it!’

Though she slept badly that night, Paula promptly appeared in the public room to breakfast, and that not from motives of vanity; for, while not unconscious of her accession to the unstable throne of queen-beauty in the establishment, she seemed too preoccupied to care for the honour just then, and would readily have changed places with her unhappy predecessor, who lingered on in the background like a candle after sunrise.

Mrs. Goodman was determined to trust no longer to Paula for putting an end to what made her so restless and self-reproachful. Seeing old Mr. Somerset enter to a little side-table behind for lack of room at the crowded centre tables, again without his son, she turned her head and asked point-blank where the young man was.

Mr. Somerset’s face became a shade graver than before. ‘My son is unwell,’ he replied; ‘so unwell that he has been advised to stay indoors and take perfect rest.’

‘I do hope it is nothing serious.’

‘I hope so too. The fact is, he has overdone himself a little. He was not well when he came here; and to make himself worse he must needs go dancing at the Casino with this lady and that--among others with a young American lady who is here with her family, and whom he met in London last year. I advised him against it, but he seemed desperately determined to shake off lethargy by any rash means, and wouldn’t listen to me. Luckily he is not in the hotel, but in a quiet cottage a hundred yards up the hill.’

Paula, who had heard all, did not show or say what she felt at the news: but after breakfast, on meeting the landlady in a passage alone, she asked with some anxiety if there were a really skilful medical man in Etretat; and on being told that there was, and his name, she went back to look for Mr. Somerset; but he had gone.

They heard nothing more of young Somerset all that morning, but towards evening, while Paula sat at her window, looking over the heads of fuchsias upon the promenade beyond, she saw the painter walk by. She immediately went to her aunt and begged her to go out and ask Mr. Somerset if his son had improved.

‘I will send Milly or Clementine,’ said Mrs. Goodman.

‘I wish you would see him yourself.’

‘He has gone on. I shall never find him.’

‘He has only gone round to the front,’ persisted Paula. ‘Do walk that way, auntie, and ask him.’

Thus pressed, Mrs. Goodman acquiesced, and brought back intelligence to Miss Power, who had watched them through the window, that his son did not positively improve, but that his American friends were very kind to him.

Having made use of her aunt, Paula seemed particularly anxious to get rid of her again, and when that lady sat down to write letters, Paula went to her own room, hastily dressed herself without assistance, asked privately the way to the cottage, and went off thitherward unobserved.

At the upper end of the lane she saw a little house answering to the description, whose front garden, window-sills, palings, and doorstep were literally ablaze with nasturtiums in bloom.

She entered this inhabited nosegay, quietly asked for the invalid, and if he were well enough to see Miss Power. The woman of the house soon returned, and she was conducted up a crooked staircase to Somerset’s modest apartments. It appeared that some rooms in this dwelling had been furnished by the landlady of the inn, who hired them of the tenant during the summer season to use as an annexe to the hotel.

Admitted to the outer room she beheld her architect looking as unarchitectural as possible; lying on a small couch which was drawn up to the open casement, whence he had a back view of the window flowers, and enjoyed a green transparency through the undersides of the same nasturtium leaves that presented their faces to the passers without.

When the latch had again clicked into the catch of the closed door Paula went up to the invalid, upon whose pale and interesting face a flush had arisen simultaneously with the announcement of her name. He would have sprung up to receive her, but she pressed him down, and throwing all reserve on one side for the first time in their intercourse, she crouched beside the sofa, whispering with roguish solicitude, her face not too far from his own: ‘How foolish you are, George, to get ill just now when I have been wanting so much to see you again!--I am so sorry to see you like this--what I said to you when we met on the shore was not what I had come to say!’

Somerset took her by the hand. ‘Then what did you come to say, Paula?’ he asked.

‘I wanted to tell you that the mere wanton wandering of a capricious mind was not the cause of my estrangement from you. There has been a great deception practised--the exact nature of it I cannot tell you plainly just at present; it is too painful--but it is all over, and I can assure you of my sorrow at having behaved as I did, and of my sincere friendship now as ever.’

‘There is nothing I shall value so much as that. It will make my work at the castle very pleasant to feel that I can consult you about it without fear of intruding on you against your wishes.’

‘Yes, perhaps it will. But--you do not comprehend me.’

‘You have been an enigma always.’

‘And you have been provoking; but never so provoking as now. I wouldn’t for the world tell you the whole of my fancies as I came hither this evening: but I should think your natural intuition would suggest what they were.’

‘It does, Paula. But there are motives of delicacy which prevent my acting on what is suggested to me.’

‘Delicacy is a gift, and you should thank God for it; but in some cases it is not so precious as we would persuade ourselves.’