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Immortal Moment

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<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2> AT eight o'clock Mrs. Tailleur was not to be found in her room, or in any other part of the hotel. By nine Lucy was out on the Cliff-side looking for her. He was not able to account for the instinct that told him she would be there. The rain had ceased earlier in the evening. Now it was falling again in torrents. He could see that the path was pitted with small, sharp footprints. They turned and returned, obliterating each other. At the end of the path, in the white chamber under the brow of the Cliff, he made out first a queer, irregular, trailing black mass, then the peak of a hood against the wall, and the long train of a woman's gown upon the floor, and then, between the loops of the hood, the edge of Mrs. Tailleur's white face, dim, but discernible. She sat[113] sideways, leaning against the wall, in the slack, childlike attitude of exhausted misery. He came close. She did not stir at the sound of his feet trampling the slush. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open; she breathed, like a child, the half-suffocated breath that comes after long crying. He stood looking at her, tongue-tied with pity. Every now and then her throat shook like a child's with guileless hiccoughing sobs. He stooped over her and called her name. "Mrs. Tailleur." She turned from him and sank sidelong into the corner, hiding her face. The long wings of her cloak parted and hung back from her cowering body. Her thin garments, beaten smooth by the rain, clung like one tissue to the long slope above her knees. Lucy laid his hand gently on her gown. She was drenched to the skin. It struck through, cold and shuddering, to his touch. She pushed his hand away and sat up. "I think," she said, "you'd better go away."[114] "Do you want me to go?" "I don't want you to see me like this. I'm—I'm not pretty to look at." "That doesn't matter in the very least. Besides, I can hardly see you in this light." He drew her cloak about her and fastened it. He could feel, from the nearness of her flushed mouth, the heat and the taste of grief. She flung her head back to the wall away from him. Her hood slipped, and he put his arm behind her shoulders and raised it, and drew it gently forward to shelter her head from the rough wall. His hand was wet with the rain from her loose hair. "How long have you been walking about in the rain before you came here?" She tried to speak, and with the effort her sobs broke out in violence. It struck him again, and with another pang of pity, how like a child she was in the completeness of her abandonment! He sat down beside her, leaning forward, his face hidden[115] in his hands. He felt that to hide his own face was somehow to screen her. Her sobbing went on, and her hand, stretched toward him unawares, clutched at the top of the wooden seat. "Would you like me to go away and come back again?" he said presently. "No!" she cried. And at her own cry a terrible convulsion shook her. He could feel her whole body strain and stiffen with the effort to control it. Then she was calm. "I beg your pardon," she said. "I told you, didn't I, that you'd better go away?" "Do you suppose that I'm going to leave you here? Just when I've found you?" "Miss Keating's left me. Did you know?" "Yes, I heard. Is it—is it a great trouble to you?" "Yes." She shook again. "Surely," he began, and hesitated, and grew bold. "Surely it needn't be? She wasn't, was she, such a particularly amiable person?"[116] "She couldn't help it. She was so unhappy." His voice softened. "You were very fond of her?" "Yes. How did you know she'd gone?" It was too dark in there for him to see the fear in her eyes as she turned them to him. "Oh," he said, "we heard she'd left. I suppose she had to go." "Yes," said Mrs. Tailleur, "she had to go." "Well, I shouldn't distress myself any more about it. Tell me, have you been walking about in the rain ever since she left?" "I—I think so." "And my little sister was looking for you everywhere. She wanted you to dine with us. We thought you would, perhaps, as you were free." "That was very good of you." "We couldn't find you anywhere in the hotel. Then I came out here."[117] "What made you come?" "I came to look for you." "To look for me?" "Yes. You don't mind, do you?" "How did you know I should be here?" "I didn't. It was the last place I tried. Do you know it's past nine o'clock? You must come in now." "I—can't." "Oh yes," he said, "you can. You're coming back with me." He talked as he would to a frightened child, to one of his own children. "I'm afraid to go back." "Why?" "Because of Bunny. She told me people were saying dreadful things about me. That's why she left. She couldn't bear it." Lucy ground his teeth. "She couldn't bear it? That shows what she was, doesn't it? But you—you don't mind what people say?" "No," she said, "I don't mind." "Well——"[118] "Yes!" she cried passionately. "I do mind. I've always minded. It's just the one thing I can't get over." "It's the one thing," said Lucy, "we have to learn to get over. When you've lived to be as old as I am, you'll see how very little it matters what people say of us. Especially when we know what other people think." "Other people?" "Friends," he said, "the people who really care." "Ah, if we only could know what they think. That's the most horrible thing of all—what they think." "Is that why you don't want to go back?" Lucy's voice was unsteady and very low. "Yes," she whispered. There was a brief silence. "But if you go back with me," he said, "it will be all right, won't it?" The look in her eyes almost reached him through the darkness, it was so intense.[119] "No," she said out loud, "it won't. It will be all wrong." "I don't agree with you. Anyhow, I'm going to take you back. Come." "No," she said, "not yet. Mayn't we stay here a little longer?" "No, we mayn't. You've got your death of cold as it is." "I'm not cold, now. I'm warm. Feel my hands." She held them out to him. He did not touch them. But he put his arm round her and raised her to her feet. And they went back together along the narrow Cliff-path. It was dangerous in the perishing light. He took her hands in his now, and led her sidelong. When her feet slipped in the slimy chalk, he held her up with his arm. At the little gate she turned to him. "I was kind to Bunny," she said, "I was really." "I am sure," he said gently, "you are kind to everybody."[120] "That's something, isn't it?" "I'm not sure that it isn't everything." They went up the side of the garden, along the shrubbery, by a path that led to the main entrance of the hotel. A great ring of white light lay on the wet ground before the porch, thrown from the electric lamps within. Mrs. Tailleur stepped back into the darkness by the shrubbery. "Look here," she said, "I'm going in by myself. You are going round another way. You have not seen me. You don't know where I am. You don't know anything about me." "I know," said Lucy, "you are coming in with me." She drew farther back. "I'm not thinking of myself," she said, "I'm thinking of you." She was no longer like a child. Her voice had suddenly grown older. "Are you?" he said. "Then you'll do what I ask you." He held her with his[121] arm and drew her, resisting and unresisting, close to him. "Ah," she cried, "what are you going to do with me?" "I am going," he said, "to take you to my sister." And he went with her, up the steps and into the lighted vestibule, past the hall-porter and the clerk in his bureau and the manager's wife in hers, straight into the lounge, before the Colonel and his wife, and he led her to Jane where she sat in her place beside the hearth. "It isn't half such a bad night as it looks," said he in a clear voice. "Is it, Mrs. Tailleur?"[122] <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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