So we sat there, on the still, blue brink of twilight, till the moon rose red as a molten helmet, and cooled to a silver bowl as she sailed higher, dripping light. But tell me this: Would I think of such similes if I weren't like a man who has eaten hasheesh and filled his brain with a fantastic tumult--a magical vision of romance, such as his heart never knew in its youth, never can know except in visions, now that youth has passed? There's joy as well as pain in the vision, though, I can tell you, as there must be in any mirage. And it was in a mirage of moonlight and mystery that we took up our journey again, after that second picnic, swooping bird-like, from hill to valley, on our way to the Knoll Park Hotel.
It's an historic place, by the way, with an interesting past--once it was a country house belonging to an eccentric gentleman--and at present it is extremely ornamental among its lawns and Lebanon cedars.
As for Sidmouth the town, you have but to enter it to feel that you are walking in a quaint old coloured lithograph--one of the eighteenth-century sort, you know, that the artist invariably dedicated, with extravagant humility, to a marquis, if he didn't know a duke!
There's no architecture whatever. As far as that is concerned, children might have built the original village of Sidmouth as they sat playing on the beach; but the queer cottages, with their low brows of mouse-coloured thatch, protruding amid absurd battlements, have a fantastic charm. They are most engaging, with their rustic-framed bow-windows, like surprised-looking eyes in spectacles; their green veranda-eyebrows, and their smiling, yellow-stucco faces, with low foreheads. The house where Queen Victoria stopped as a little girl is a great show place, of course, and is like a toy flung down against a cushiony hillside, a battlemented doll's house, forgotten by the child who let it fall, while big trees grew up and tried to hide it.
Two cliffs has Sidmouth, and an innocent esplanade, and--that is about all, except the toy town itself. But it's a place to stay in. A happy man would never tire of it, I think. An unhappy one might prefer Brighton--or Monte Carlo. I am neither one nor the other. So I prefer a motor-car. We are on the wing again to-morrow.
I must now go to our sitting-room, which looks over the sea, and play a rubber of bridge with Mrs. Senter, Emily, and Burden. Ellaline doesn't play.
Hope I haven't bored you with my Burden, and other complaints.
Yours ever,
Pen.
_Later, August 2nd, Night_
I have opened my letter again, to tell you what came of that rubber of bridge.
I've lost--all the glamour. The reaction after the hasheesh has set in.
We didn't play long. Just that one rubber, and before we finished Ellaline had taken her copy of "Lorna Doone" upstairs to her own room, without interrupting our game for a good-night. She didn't think we saw her go; but there were two of us who did. Burden was one of the two. I don't need to tell you who the other fool was.
Mrs. Senter and I were partners, as we generally are, if there's any bridge going in the evening. She's devoted to the game, and it's always she who proposes it. I would generally prefer to fag up our route for next day with guide-books and road-maps. But hosts, like beggars, can't be "choosers."
Well, to-night Emily and Burden had all the cards, and Burden wanted a second rubber, but his aunt doesn't like losing her money to her nephew, even though we play for childishly low stakes. She said she "knew that Mrs. Norton was tired," and Emily didn't deny the soft impeachment, as she plays bridge in the same way she would do district visiting during an epidemic of measles--because it is her duty.
Dick had the latest French imitation of Sherlock Holmes to read, and a box of Egyptian cigarettes to smoke (mine), which he evidently thinks too young for me. Emily had some embroidery, which I seem to remember that she began when I was a boy, and kept religiously to do in hotels. (But what is there that my good sister does, which she does not do religiously?) Mrs. Senter had nothing to amuse or occupy her--except your humble servant--consequently she suggested a stroll in the garden before bedtime.
She was almost beautiful in the moonlight, quite ethereal-looking, and her hair a nimbus for that small white face of hers; just as small, just as white, and just as smooth as when those big eyes used to look up into our eyes under an Indian moon. And she is always agreeable, always witty, or at least "smart." Still, I must confess that I was ungallantly absent-minded until something she said waked me up from a brown study.
"He really _is_ a nice boy," she was saying, "and after all, it's a tribute to your distinguished qualities that he should be afraid to speak to you."
I guessed at once that she must have been talking of her nephew.
"What is he afraid to say to me?" I enquired.
"Afraid to ask you for Miss Lethbridge," she explained.
I think just about that time an ugly black eyelid shut down over the moon. Anyhow, the world darkened for me.
"Isn't it rather old-fashioned, in these rapid days, for a young man to ask a guardian's permission to make love to his ward?" said I, savage as a chained dog.
She laughed. "Oh, he hasn't waited for that to make love, I'm afraid," she returned. "But he's afraid she won't accept him without your consent."
"He seems to be afraid of several things," I growled. "Afraid to speak to me--afraid to speak to her."
"He is young, and love has made him modest," Mrs. Senter excused her favourite. "He knows he isn't a _grand parti_. But if they care for each other?"
"I have seen no reason to believe that she cares for him," said I, thinking myself (more or less) safe in the recollection of Ellaline's words at Winchester. I told you about them, I think.
"Ah, well," said Mrs. Senter, "she cares enough, anyhow, to have entered into a pact of some sort with the poor boy--a kind of understanding that, if _you_ approve, she may at least _think_ of being engaged to him in the future."
"You are sure she has done that?" I asked, staggered by this statement, which I was far from expecting.
"Quite sure, unless love (in the form of Dick) is deaf as well as blind. He certainly flatters himself that they are on these terms."
"Since when?" I persisted. (By the by, I wonder if the inquisitors ever hit on the ingenious plan of making prisoners torture themselves? Nothing hurts worse than self-torture.)
"Only since Lulworth Cove, or you would have heard of it before. You know when we came back from our walk, and saw them sitting on the beach together, I said what a pretty picture they made?"
Naturally, I remembered extremely well.
"That was when they had their great scene. Dick begged me, as an old friend of yours, to say a word when I found the chance. And I confess, I've _made_ the chance to-night. I do hope you won't think me impertinent and interfering? I'm fond of Dick. He's about all I have to be fond of in the world. And besides--just because I've never been happy myself, I want others to be, while they're young, not to waste time."
I muttered something, I hardly know what, and she went on to talk to me of her past, for the first time. Said she had married when little more than a child, and had made the mistake of marrying a man she thought she could manage to live happily with, instead of one she couldn't manage to live happily without. That was all; but it had made _all_ the difference--and if Miss Lethbridge had given her first love to Dick----
I nearly said, "Hang first love!" but I held my tongue, fortunately, for of course she meant well, and was only doing her best for her nephew. But how anyone could love that fellow passes my understanding! Why, it seems to me the creature's parents could hardly have loved him, unless he had had something of the monstrous hypnotism, as well as the selfishness, of a young cuckoo in its stolen nest. Yet the same hypnotism may influence birds outside the nest, I suppose. That's the only way to account for an infatuation on the part of Ellaline.
"If you are angry, Dick and I must go away," Mrs. Senter went on. "But he couldn't help falling in love, and to me they seem made for each other."
I had to answer that of course I wasn't angry, but I thought any talk of love premature, to say the least.
"You won't actually refuse your consent, then?" asked she.
"Much good my refusing would do, if the girl really cares!" said I. "I shan't disinherit her, whatever she does."
Mrs. Senter laughed at that. "Why, even if you did," said she, "it wouldn't matter greatly to them, because Dick has something of his own, and she is an heiress, isn't she?"
Then--I don't know whether I was wrong or not--but I swear I made the answer I did without any mean or selfish motives--if I can read my own soul. If Burden were a fortune-hunter, I wanted to save her from him, that's all. I told Mrs. Senter that Ellaline had very little money of her own. "I shall look after her, of course," I said. "But the amount of the _dot_ I may give will be determined by circumstances."