Chapter II

1

He was interrupted.

One very cold and overcast afternoon towards the end of that January, he was walking up one of the lanes that skirted the parkland of the Kare estate. The lane led gently up the hill for a long and twisting way, and the hill led gently down to the Thames valley. Ivor was walking bareheaded, for his thick dark hair was covering enough on the bitterest day; and his remaining arm was deep in his trouser pocket. He looked a curiously still figure, walking thus: walking swiftly but nowhither, taking thought and air, taking very deep thought: a lonely and defiant man of affairs. How Aunt Percy would have chuckled to see him now!... And then a sudden crash to break his thoughts, a rustling crash of angry leaves and broken boughs, the wintry crash of a raped hedge! Three yards in front, almost on top of him, a horse pirouetted in the little lane; it pawed the air and ground, it made gestures towards equilibrium after its sudden dash through the barrier of Kare Park on to a strolling man. A sleek and quivering picture, drawn with a fine point against a dour background. The horse snorted, it quivered, it eyed the astonished Ivor, and then it pawed the ground with an arrogant air. And a woman laughed.

“Oh, Ivor Marlay!” the woman cried.

Thus Virginia happened--she who had been Virginia Tracy, then Mrs. Sardon, now Lady Tarlyon. But the years that had passed sat as lightly on her as pearls about her throat, her years decorated Virginia; and yet where was the young poet among the many young poets she knew, to take folly by the horns and sing of her complexion, crying that white samite was black beside its sheen?

They grinned at each other, she above and he below. Fairly caught they both were.

“I say, Virginia!” he cried with amazed pleasure.

“That’s me!” she laughed at him. The horse doubtfully came to rest, and it breathed contemptuously into Ivor’s face.

“After all these years, these long years!” she exclaimed wonderingly, staring down at him. Her eyes were clear, blue lights in the gloom. “Did I frighten you, Ivor Marlay?”

“You nearly killed me, that’s all. But I would have died happily, Virginia, saluting you with my pleasure at seeing you again....”

“You see,” he explained, “I had no idea you were so lovely. Someone should have told me....”

“Oh, you’ve changed, Ivor Marlay!” Virginia mocked him deftly. “You are being nice to Virginia. You are not despising Virginia....” That slightly hoarse, breathless voice of hers--so pregnant somehow!

His happy gesture answered her. They were very pleased with each other.

“So I please you now, do I?” Lady Tarlyon gravely asked him.

She was so fair and straight and cleanly drawn; and there was gallantry in her poise and in the way she dared his eyes. Was this the sharp, antagonistic Virginia, this woman ...?

“I simply can’t tell you,” he said, from her stirrup, “how pleased I am to see you, Virginia. And it’s a heartfelt truth dragged out of me by my surprise at seeing you, by my pleasure at being nearly killed by you....”

“That’s all very well, my friend, but it’s up to me to say that kind of thing to you.” She swayed, and waved an intimidating gauntlet across his eyes. “I’ll say them too, but later. People talk about you here and there....”

He was beside her, beneath her. The horse and the lady, a warm picture. She swayed above him in her saddle, she was exquisite. And there was that clearness over her small face, that clear, dry sheen of chill air; and the taut lips, bitten dry by the winter air, hard riding.... The same Virginia, but how different! The same little white face, so white and firm-featured, so proudly set and lightly carried; the same tiny little flesh spot in the furrow of the chin--an inconsiderable little chin it was, you remember?--the same wide blue eyes, so lazy in look, so quick to retort, so light and dark, so kind and mocking, so hard and soft: a soldier’s eyes they were really, but a soldier of fortune. And “Swan and Edgar,” there they were! Ivor laughed to see them, he asked after their unruly health--those twin Virginian curls, tumbling down each cheek in golden-gay cascades from the wide-brimmed, so very rakish, black felt hat! And how it became her in her severe habit, that wide anarchist hat set gallantly about her golden hair!

This sudden meeting of the two former antagonists seemed to bring all the sweetness out of each. It was in their eyes as they smiled at each other in the January gloom of that little lane, with darkening Kare Park on their right, on their left the wintry rolling land of Berkshire, and all about them the pungent smell of sodden earth.

“Do you realise, Ivor, that we’re people of thirty now? Thirty, Ivor!”

“I’m glad enough for you,” he said. She understood. She charmed him by her quick little smile of understanding. He admired her frankly....

“I say, Virginia,” he said eagerly, “we must talk a good deal. I want to hear all about your life since we last spoke together at the Hallidays’ that night. I’ve seen you often in the distance since then, but we’ve somehow never come to grips, it’s just not happened. And whenever I go to the Mont Agel, M. Stutz always tells me that you were there the evening before or that you will not be there for a long time for you are abroad. M. Stutz worships you, Virginia, and quite right he is. But he never tells me anything about you--and now I’ve found you I want an official account of your life, for the rumours about you are so conflicting....” He seemed to plead; and he was really pleading for her to intrude upon his loneliness.

“You haven’t believed the nasty things, have you, Ivor?” she asked him very suddenly. Her eyes were very serious on him. Hard eyes they were, sometimes. Lady Tarlyon knew a lot.

“Oh, stuff!” he smiled at her. “Didn’t we make a pledge, Virginia, the very last time we met? We’ll be friends, we said. Those were our exact words. Well then!”

She pointed a finger dramatically down at him. “That pledge,” she said, “is going to be redeemed. See if it isn’t!”

“I always thought,” he mocked, “that a man and a woman didn’t meet in a lonely place for nothing.”

And then she thought to ask him how he came to be _there_ anyway, in that little lane. He told her of his house by the bridge, and of the Misses Cloister-Smiths, remembering how in the old days Virginia had been amused by the oddities of names. And as she listened, her first gaiety at seeing him seemed somehow to leave her, she grew very quiet and silent, as though a cloud from the bleak sky had sombrely caressed her; and her eyes, so clear and merry but a moment before, wandered about the bleak countryside, beyond his shoulder. Virginia’s eyes were like sentinels, put there to beguile you while Virginia was far away, in some curious unknown place. Only once she swayed to a sudden step of her horse: she was quite immobile, a little sad. He watched her.

Then she told him what he had already guessed, that she and her husband were staying with Rupert Kare for a week or so. No one in the place, she remarked, had said a word about his living round above.

“I doubt if they know,” Ivor said. “I’m living a frightfully private life.”

“So you never go up there, then?” she wondered curiously. “Though I seem to remember your knowing Rupert quite well once upon a time.”

“Oh, yes!” But he might just as well have said, “Oh, no!” for all the real answer he gave. But he knew that Virginia was peculiarly able to understand people’s dislikes and distempers, and that she allowed for them; it used commonly to be her own feeling about a good many people. Yes, she understood.

“But it isn’t so easy for me--to outlaw myself like that,” she told him gravely. “For there I am, you see, still in it. Same men, same women, same places, same baubles. And only dress and dancing changes.... And so I insisted on escaping this afternoon for an hour or so.”

“You are very wise, Ivor,” she suddenly said, “to have left all that as suddenly as you did, so long ago. You annoyed us, but then you wanted to annoy us, and you were wise. And do you know, I’ve always said that you are very wise. Whenever your name is mentioned, whether it’s about a book or a woman, I always say I knew you once and that you are very wise. He knew us all once, I add, but now he is very wise and exclusive. He is indiscriminately exclusive, I say....”

“It’s only that I’m trying to work,” he earnestly explained, looking up at her. And she stared down at him, and under the shadow of her hat her mouth seemed twisted into a queer little smile which puzzled him.

It was darkening; and it was as she was about to leave him that he suddenly asked her:--

“I say, Virginia, do you remember being made to copy out in your first copy-book as a child that marvellous sentence: ‘When gentlefolk meet, compliments are exchanged’? Do you remember, Virginia?”

“That’s us to-day,” he explained.

Her eyes contracted just a little, quizzically. And with her head a little sideways, she examined him. She was curiously detached, this Virginia, yet curiously warm....

“Yes, but that’s not _me_, Ivor. It’s not _my_ nature.” And it was as though she wanted to tell him an ulterior something; but there was no time, it was quickly darkening; the horse stamped eagerly, and she swung away with it. “I’m not like that at all, really, Ivor,” she said swiftly. “It’s you who draw it out of one ... maybe.”

“That’s your particular quality, Ivor,” she cried to him, a woman on a horse, going away. Strangely come, strangely gone! He stared after her through the hedge, a swaying figure through the darkening parkland. A shadow astride a horse ... so fair and gallant! She turned and waved a hand to him, she cried a word, but he didn’t hear it, it was a lost word. A sable wraith she was in the parkland, fading away into the dolorous crypt of winter. She was a symbol for something....

And Ivor thought: “O mystic and sombre Virginia....”

And he wondered if he would see her again. He wondered.... And he didn’t know. He knew nothing about this Virginia--whom he had thought he had judged so well! And as he strode homewards through the chill gloom he mocked the judgments of his early “twenties” a little viciously. “Christ, how they must have loathed me!” he thought.