Part 128

He kissed her, just to show what possessed him.

The question of finance was settled by his going into it again and finding out her awful average and making her an allowance large enough to cover it. And at the end of another two months she came to him in triumph.

"Look there," she said. "I've saved a halfpenny. It isn't much, but it shows that I can save when I give my mind to it."

He said he would hang it on his watch-chain and cherish it for ever.

As before, he kissed her. He loved her, as men love a disastrous thing, desperately, because of her divine folly.

In all these things her genius had no part. It was as if they had agreed to ignore it. But people were beginning to talk now of the Event of nineteen-five, the appearance of Hambleby's successor, said to be greater than Hambleby.

She was conscious then of a misgiving, almost a dread. Still, it hardly concerned her. This book was the work of some one unfamiliar, unrecognizable, forgotten by the happy woman that she was. So immense was the separation between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick.

She was aware of the imminence of her loss without deploring it. She spoke of it to Brodrick.

They were sitting together, one night in June, under the lime-tree on the lawn, only half visible to each other in the falling darkness.

"Would you mind very much," she said, "if I never wrote anything again?"

He turned to her. "What makes you think you can't write? (He too had a misgiving.) You've plenty of time. You've all day, in fact."

"Yes, all day long."

"It's not as if I bothered you--I say, they don't bother you, do they?"

She understood him as referring to the frequent, the very frequent incursions of his family.

"You mustn't let them. You must harden your heart."

"It isn't they. It isn't anybody."

"What is it then?"

"Only that everything's different. I'm different."

He regarded her for a long time. She was different. It was part of her queerness, this capacity she had for being different. He could see nothing now but her wild fawn look, the softness and the flush of life. It was his miracle on her.

He remained silent, brooding over it. In the stillness she could hear his deep breathing; she could just discern his face, heavy but tender.

"It doesn't mean that you're not well, Jinny?" He remembered that once or twice since he had known her it had meant that.

She smiled. "Oh no, not that."

"It doesn't make you unhappy?"

"No, not if--if it wasn't for that you cared."

"You know it wasn't."

She knew. She had always known it.

They sat silent a long time. Round and about them Brodrick's garden slept, enchanted in darkness. Phantasmal, blanched by the dark, his flowers dreamed on the lawn. An immense tenderness filled her for Brodrick and all things that were his.

At last they rose and went hand in hand, slowly, through the garden towards the house.