I

IN the shadow of a huge mulberry-tree, upon whose finger-like branches already the very light green leaves were beginning to form a veil, Katya Lascarides was sitting in a deck-chair. The expression upon her face was one of serenity and of resigned contentment. She was looking at the farmhouse; she was knitting a silk necktie, a strip of vivid green that fell across her light grey skirt. With a little quizzical and jolly expression, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of cream-coloured overalls, Kitty Langham looked sideways for approval at her aunt. She had just succeeded in driving a black cat out of the garden.

They lived down there in a deep silence, Katya never speaking and eliciting no word from the child. But already the child had made concessions to the extent of clearing her throat or emitting a little “Hem!” when she desired to attract her aunt’s attention; but her constant occupation was found in the obstinate gambols of a pet lamb—a “sock,” as the farm-people called it—which inhabited the farm-house, bleated before the door, or was accustomed by butting to send the garden-gate flying back upon its hinges.

This creature, about one-third the size of a mature ram, was filled with obstinacies apparently incomprehensible; it was endowed with great strength and a considerable weight. With one push of its head it would send the child rolling several feet along the grass; it would upset chairs in the dining-room; it bleated clamorously for milk at all meals when Kitty had her milk and water.

Against its obstinacies Kitty’s was valiant but absolutely useless. With her arms round its neck—a little struggling thing with dark eyes and black hair, in her little white woollen sweater—she would attempt to impede the lamb’s progress across a garden-bed. But the clinching of her white teeth availed nothing at all. She would be dragged across the moist earth, and left upon her back like a little St. Lawrence amongst the flames of the yellow crocuses. And at these struggles Katya Lascarides presided with absolute deafness and with inflexible indifference; indeed, after their first meeting, when Ellida Langham had brought the child with her nurse to the gloomy, if tranquil, London hotel, where Katya had taken from Mrs. Van Husum a parting which lasted three days, and ended in Mrs. Van Husum’s dissolving into a flood of tears—at the end of that meeting Ellida had softly reproached Katya for the little notice she had taken of what was, after all, the nicest child in London.

But cool, calm, tall, and dressed in a grey that exactly matched her eyes, Katya “took charge.” And, during the process, whilst she said, “I shall want this and that,” or “The place must be on a hill; it must face south-west; it must be seven miles from the sea; it must be a farm, with plenty of live-stock but no children,” Ellida watched her, silent, bewildered, and admiring. It seemed so improbable that she should have a sister so professional, so practical, so determined. Yet there it was.

And then they descended, Katya and Kitty alone, into the intense silence of the farm that was found. It was on a hill; it faced south-west; it was seven miles from the sea, and the farmer’s wife, because she was childless, surrounded herself with little animals whose mothers had died.

And there the child played, never hearing a word, in deep silence with the wordless beasts. This had lasted three weeks.

The gate was behind Katya’s back as she smiled at the rolling hills below the garden. She smiled because the night before she believed she had overheard Kitty talking to the lamb; she smiled because she was exhausted and quivering and lonely. She knitted the green necktie, her eyes upon the April landscape, where bursts of sunlight travelled across these veil-like films of new leaves that covered tenderly the innumerable hedgerows.

And suddenly she leaned forward; the long fingers holding the knitting-needles ceased all motion. She had heard a footstep—and she knew every footstep of the farm....

He was leaning over the back of her chair; she saw, against the blue when she opened her eyes, his clear, dark skin, his clear, dark contemplative eyes. Her arms slowly raised themselves; her lips muttered unintelligible words which were broken into by the cool of his cheek as she drew him down to her. She rose to her feet and recoiled, and again, with her arms stretched straight before her, as if she were blind and felt her way, her head thrown back and her eyes closed, an Oriental with a face of chiselled alabaster. And with her eyes still closed, her lips against his ear as if she were asleep, she whispered:

“Oh, take me! Take me! Now! For good....”

But these words that came from her without will or control ceased, and she had none to say of her own volition. There fell upon them the silent nirvana of passion.

And suddenly, vibrant, shrill, and interrupted by sobs and the grinding of minute teeth, there rose up in the child’s voice the words:

“Nobody must be loved but me. Nobody must be loved but me.”

They felt minute hands near their knees; they were parted by a little child, who panted and breathed through her nostrils. They looked at each other with eyes into which, very slowly, there came comprehension. And then, over the little thing’s head, Katya repeated:

“Nobody must be loved but me. Nobody must be loved but me.” And with a quick colour upon her cheeks and the wetness of tears in her eyes, “Oh, poor child!” she said.

For in the words the child had given to her she recognized the torture of her own passion.

That night quite late Katya descended the stairs upon tiptoe. She spoke in a very low voice:

“The little thing’s been talking, talking,” she said, “the quaintest little thoughts. I’ve seen it coming for days now. Sometimes I’ve seen her lips moving. She’s the most precise enunciation in the world.”

“I wired Ellida this afternoon,” Robert Grimshaw said.

“Then Ellida will be down here by the last train?” Katya answered, and he commented: “We’ve only got an hour.”

“But little Kitty,” she was beginning.

“No, no,” he interrupted. “Nobody must be talked about but us. Nobody must be talked about but us. I’m as glad as you or Ellida or Paul could possibly be about Kitty, but now that I have got you alone at last you’re bound to face the music.”

“But little Kitty?” Katya said. She said it, however, only for form’s sake, for Robert Grimshaw’s gentle face was set in a soft inflexibility, and his low tones she knew would hold her to the mark. She had to face the music. In the half-darkness his large eyes perused her face, dark, mournful and tender. The low, long farmhouse room with its cheap varnished furniture was softened by the obscure light from the fire over which he had been standing for a very long hour.

“Is it the same terms, then?” he asked slowly, and she answered:

“Exactly the same.”

He looked down at the fire, resting his hand on the chimney-piece. At last she said: “We might modify it a little;” and he moved his face, his eyes searching the obscurity in which she stood, only one of her hands catching the glow from the fire.

“I cannot modify anything,” he said. “There must be a marriage, by what recognized rite you like, but—that.”

Her voice remained as level as his, expressing none of the longing, the wistfulness, that were in her whole being.

“Nobody knew about mother,” she said. “Nobody seems to have got to know now.”

“And you mean,” he said, “that now you consent to letting nobody know it about you?”

“You did succeed,” she evaded him, “in concealing it about mother. It was splendid of you! At the time I thought it wasn’t possible. I don’t know how you managed it. I suppose nobody knows about it but you and me and Ellida and Pauline.”

“You mean,” he pursued relentlessly, “you mean that now you consent to letting nobody know it about you? Of course, besides us, my solicitor knows—of your mother.”

“At the first shock,” she said, “I thought that the whole world must know, and so I was determined that the whole world should know that I hadn’t deserted her memory....” She paused for a wistful moment, whilst inflexibly he reflected over the coals. “Have you,” she said, “the slightest inkling of why she did it?”

He shook his head slowly; he sighed.

“Of course I couldn’t take you even on those terms—that nobody knew,” he said, with his eyes still averted. Then he turned upon her, swarthy, his face illumined with a red glow. The slow mournfulness of their speeches, the warmth, the shadow, kept him silent for a long time. “No,” he said at last, “there isn’t a trace of a fact to be found. I’m as much in the dark as I was on that day when we parted. I’m not as stunned, but I’m just as mystified.”

“Ah!” she said, “but what did you feel—then?”

“Did you ever realize,” he asked, “how the shock came to me? You remember old Partington, with the grey beard? He asked me to call on them. He sat on the opposite side of his table. He handed me the copy of some notes your father had made for their instructions as to his will. It was quite short. It ran: ‘You are to consider that my wife and I were never married. I desire you to frame a will so phrased that my entire estate, real and personal, should devolve upon my two daughters, Ellida and Katharine, without revealing the fact that they are illegitimate. This should not be difficult, since their mother’s name, which they are legally entitled to bear, was the same as my own, she having been my cousin.’” Grimshaw broke off his low monologue to gaze again at her, when he once more returned his eyes to the coals. “You understand,” he said, “what that meant to me. It was handed to me without a word; and after a long time Partington said: f You understand that you are your uncle’s heir-at-law—nothing more.”

Katya whispered: “Poor old Toto!”

“You know how I honoured your father and mother,” he said. “They were all the parents I ever knew. Well, you know all about that.... And then I had to break the news to you.... Good God!”

He drew his hands down his face.

“Poor old Toto!” Katya said slowly again. “I remember.”

“And you won’t make any amends?” he asked.

“I’ll give you myself,” she said softly.

He answered: “No! no!” and then, wearily, “It’s no good.”

“Well, I did speak like a beast to you,” she said. “But think what a shock it was to me—mother not dead a month, and father not four days, and so suddenly—all that. I’ll tell you how I felt. I felt a loathing for all men. I felt a recoiling from you—a recoiling, a shudder.”

“Oh, I know,” he said, and suddenly he began to plead: “Haven’t you injured me enough? Haven’t I suffered enough? And why?—why? For a mad whim. Isn’t it a mad whim? Or what? I can understand you felt a recoil. But ...”

“Oh, I don’t feel it now,” she said; “you know.”

“Ah yes,” he answered; “but I didn’t know till to-day, till just now when you raised your arms. And all these years you haven’t let me know.”

“How did you know?” she asked. “How did you know that I felt it? But, of course, you understand me even when I don’t speak.”

“It’s heaven,” he said, “to know that you’ve grown out of it. It has been hell to bear the thought....”

“Oh, my dear! ...” she said.

“Such loneliness,” he said. “Do you know,” he continued suddenly, “I came back from Athens? I’m supposed to be a strong-minded man—I suppose I am a strong-minded man—but I turned back the moment I reached Greece because I couldn’t bear—I could not bear the thought that you might still shudder at my touch. Now I know you don’t, and ...”

“Ellida will be here soon,” Katya said. “Can’t you hear her train coming down the valley ... there...? And I want to tell you what I’ve found out about mother. I’ve found it out, I’ve made it out, remembering what she said from day to day. I’ll tell you what it was—it was trustfulness. I remember it now. It was the mainspring of her life. I think I know how the very idea came into her mind. I’ve got it down to little details. I’ve been inquiring even about the Orthodox priests there were in England at the time. There wasn’t a single one! One had just died suddenly, and there did not come a successor for six months. And mother was there. And when she was a young thing, mother, I know, had a supreme contempt—a bitter contempt—for all English ideas. She got over it. When we children were born she became the gentlest being. You know, that was what she always was to me—she was a being, not a woman. When she came into the room she spread soothing around her. I might be in paroxysms of temper, but it died out when she opened the door. It’s so strong upon me that I hardly remember what she looked like. I can’t remember her any more than I can conceive of the looks of a saint. A saint!—well, she was that. She had been hot-tempered, she had been contemptuous. She became what you remember after we were born. You may say she got religion.”

Katya, her eyes full of light, paused; she began again with less of exultation.

“I dare say,” she said, “she began to live with father without the rites of the Church because there was no Church she acknowledged to administer them; but later, she didn’t want them remember how she always told us, ‘Trust each other, trust each other; then you will become perfectly to be trusted.’ And again, she would never let us make promises one to another. Don’t you remember? She always said to us: ‘Say that you will do a thing. Never promise—never. Your word must be your bond.’ You remember?”

Grimshaw slowly nodded his head. “I remember.”

“So that I am certain,” she said, “that that was why she never married father. I think she regarded marriage—the formality, the vows—as a desecration. Don’t you see, she wanted to be my father’s chattel, and to trust him absolutely—to trust, to trust! Isn’t that the perfect relationship?”

Grimshaw said: “Yes, I dare say that is the explanation. But ...”

“But it makes no difference to you?” she pleaded. In the distance she heard the faint grind of wheels.

“No,” he said, “not even if no one else knew it. I’m very tired; I’m very lonely. I want you so; I want you with all my heart. But not that—not that.”

“Not ever?” she said.

“No,” he answered; “I’ll play with my cards on the table. If I grow very tired—very, very tired—if I cannot hold out any longer, well, I may consent—to your living with me as your mother lived with your father. But”—and he stood up briskly—“I’ll tell you this: you’ve strengthened me—you’ve strengthened me in my motive. If you had shuddered at me as you did on that day years ago, I think I should have given in by now. But you didn’t any longer. You’ve come to me; you raised your arms to me. Don’t you see how it has strengthened me? I’m not alone any more; I’m not the motherless boy that I was.... Yes, it’s heaven.”

Her hands fell by her side. The sound of wheels filled the room, and ceased.

“If I’d repulsed you, you’d have given in?” she said.

The door fell violently back, and from the black and radiant figure of Ellida came the triumphant cry: “Kitty’s spoken! Kitty’s spoken! You’ve not deceived me!”