Part 68

She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her with an expression between suspicion and impatience.

For some moments nobody moved. Then Cothope remarked that perhaps he’d better get her water.

As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I scarcely know how from this incident, with its instant contacts and swift emotions, and that was that I must make love to and possess Beatrice. I see no particular reason why that thought should have come to me in that moment, but it did. I do not believe that before then I had thought of our relations in such terms at all. Suddenly, as I remember it, the factor of passion came. She crouched there, and I stood over her, and neither of us said a word. But it was just as though something had been shouted from the sky.

Cothope had gone twenty paces perhaps when she uncovered her face. “I shan’t want any water,” she said. “Call him back.”

After that the spirit of our relations changed. The old ease had gone. She came to me less frequently, and when she came she would have some one with her, usually old Carnaby, and he would do the bulk of the talking. All through September she was away. When we were alone together there was a curious constraint. We became clouds of inexpressible feeling towards one another; we could think of nothing that was not too momentous for words.

Then came the smash of Lord Roberts α, and I found myself with a bandaged face in a bedroom in the Bedley Corner dower-house with Beatrice presiding over an inefficient nurse, Lady Osprey very pink and shocked in the background, and my aunt jealously intervening.

My injuries were much more showy than serious, and I could have been taken to Lady Grove next day, but Beatrice would not permit that, and kept me at Bedley Corner three clear days. In the afternoon of the second day she became extremely solicitous for the proper aeration of the nurse, packed her off for an hour in a brisk rain, and sat by me alone.

I asked her to marry me.

All the whole I must admit it was not a situation that lent itself to eloquence. I lay on my back and talked through bandages, and with some little difficulty, for my tongue and mouth had swollen. But I was feverish and in pain, and the emotional suspense I had been in so long with regard to her became now an unendurable impatience.

“Comfortable?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Shall I read to you?”

“No. I want to talk.”

“You can’t. I’d better talk to you.”

“No,” I said, “I want to talk to you.”

She came and stood by my bedside and looked me in the eyes. “I don’t—I don’t want you to talk to me,” she said. “I thought you couldn’t talk.”

“I get few chances—of you.”

“You’d better not talk. Don’t talk now. Let me chatter instead. You ought not to talk.”

“It isn’t much,” I said.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I’m not going to be disfigured,” I said. “Only a scar.”

“Oh!” she said, as if she had expected something quite different. “Did you think you’d become a sort of gargoyle?”

“L’Homme qui Rit!—I didn’t know. But that’s all right. Jolly flowers those are!”

“Michaelmas daisies,” she said. “I’m glad you’r not disfigured, and those are perennial sunflowers. Do you know no flowers at all? When I saw you on the ground I certainly thought you were dead. You ought to have been, by all the rules of the game.”

She said some other things, but I was thinking of my next move.

“Are we social equals?” I said abruptly.

She stared at me. “Queer question,” she said.

“But are we?”