Part 95

It was then that Mr. Gunning waked himself, violently; starting and staring, his pale eyes round with terror; for his sunstroke had made him dream dreams.

Laura gave an inarticulate murmur of compassion. She knelt by him, and held his hands in hers and stroked them.

"What is it, Papa dear, have you had a little dream? Poor darling," she said, "he has such horrid ones."

Mr. Gunning looked about him, still alarmed, still surrounded as in his dream, by appalling presences. He was a little man, with a weak, handsome face, worn and dragged by emotion.

"What's all this? What's all this?" he reiterated, until out of the throng of presences he distinguished dimly a woman's form. He smiled at it. He was almost wide awake now.

"Is it Rose?" he said.

"No, Papa. It's Nina."

Mr. Gunning became dejected. If it had been Rose she would have sat beside him and talked to him a little while.

He was perfectly wide awake now; he had seen Prothero; and the sight of Prothero revived in him his one idea. His idea was that every man who saw Laura would want to pick the little thing up and carry her away from him. He was haunted by the fear of losing Laura. He had lost everything he had and had forgotten it; but a faint memory of disaster persisted in his idea.

"What are you going to do with my little girl?" he said. "You're not going to take her away? I won't have that. I won't have that."

"Isn't he funny?" said Laura, unabashed. And from where she knelt, there on the verge of her terror, she looked up at the young man and laughed. She laughed lest Prothero should feel uncomfortable.

Nina had risen for departure, and with a slow, reluctant movement of his long body, Prothero rose too. Nina could have sworn that almost he bowed his head over Laura's hand.

"May I come and see you again some day?" he said. And she said she would be very glad.

That was all.

Outside in the little dull street he turned to Nina.

"It wasn't fair, Nina; you didn't tell me I was going to have my heart wrung."

"How could I know," she said fiercely, "what would wring your heart?"

He looked away lest he should seem to see what was in her.

But she knew he saw.

XXV

Three weeks passed. Prothero had been four times to see Miss Gunning. He had been once because she said he might come again; once because of a book he had promised to lend her; once because he happened to be passing; and once for no reason whatsoever. It was then borne in on him that what he required was a pretext. Calling late one evening he caught Miss Gunning in the incredible double act of flinging off a paragraph for the papers while she talked to Mr. Gunning.

His pretext, heaven-sent, unmistakable, stared him in the face. He could not write paragraphs for the papers (they wouldn't take his paragraphs), but he could talk to Mr. Gunning. It was not so difficult as he would have at first supposed. He had already learnt the trick of it. You took a chair. You made a statement. Any statement would do. You had only to say to Mr. Gunning, "Isn't that so?" and he would bow and assure you, with a solemn courtesy, that it was, and sit up waiting patiently for you to do it again; and you went on talking to Miss Gunning until he showed signs of restlessness. When you had done this several times running he would sink back in his chair appeased. But Prothero had discovered that if you concentrated your attention on Mr. Gunning, if you exposed him to a steady stream of statements, he invariably went to sleep; and while he slept Laura wrote.

And while Laura wrote, Owen could keep on looking at her as much as he liked.

From where he sat his half-closed eyes could take in rather more than a side view of Laura. He could see her head as it bent and turned over her work, showing, now the two low waves of its dark hair, now the flat coils at the back that took the beautiful curve of Laura's head. From time to time she would look up at him and smile, and he would smile back again under his eyelids with a faint quiver of his moustache.

And Laura said to herself, "He is rather ugly, but I like him."

It was not odd that she should like him; but what struck her as amazing was the peace that in his presence settled on Papa. Once he had got over the first shock of his appearance, it soothed Mr. Gunning to see Prothero sitting there, smoking, his long legs stretched out, his head thrown back, his eyes half closed. It established him in the illusion of continued opulence, for Mr. Gunning was not aware of the things that had happened to him four years ago. But there had been lapses and vanishings, unaccountable disturbances of the illusion. In the days of opulence people had come to see him; now they only came to see Laura. They were always the same people, Miss Holland and Miss Lempriere and Mr. Tanqueray. They did no positive violence to the illusion; in their way they ministered to it. They took their place among the company of brilliant and indifferent strangers whom he had once entertained with cold ceremony and a high and distant courtesy. They stayed for a short time by his chair, they drifted from it into remote corners of the room, they existed only for each other and for Laura. Thus one half of his dream remained incomprehensible to Mr. Gunning. He did not really know these people.

But he knew Mr. Prothero, who took a chair beside him and stayed an hour and smoked a pipe with him. He had known him intimately and for a long time. His figure filled the dark and empty places in the illusion, and made it warm, tangible and complete. And because the vanished smokers, the comrades of the days of opulence, had paid hardly any attention to Laura, therefore Mr. Gunning's mind ceased to connect Prothero with his formidable idea.

Laura, who had once laughed at it, was growing curiously sensitive to the idea. She waited for it in dreadful pauses of the conversation; she sat shivering with the expectation of its coming. Sooner or later it would come, and when it did come Papa would ask Mr. Prothero his intentions, and Mr. Prothero, having of course no intentions, would go away and never have anything to do with them again.