A few minutes later Jane found herself once more in Grace Ironwood’s room. Miss Ironwood and the Dennistons all sat facing her so that she felt as if she were the candidate in a viva voce examination. And when Ivy Maggs brought in the tea she did not go away again, but sat down as if she also were one of the examiners.
“Now!” said Camilla, her eyes and nostrils widened with a sort of fresh mental hunger-it was too concentrated to be called excitement.
Jane glanced round the room.
“You need not mind Ivy, young lady,” said Miss Ironwood. “She is one of our company.”
There was a pause. “We have your letter of the 10th,” continued Miss Ironwood, “describing your dream of the man with the pointed beard sitting making notes in your bedroom. Perhaps I ought to tell you that he wasn’t really there: at least, the Director does not think it possible. But he was really studying you. He was getting information about you from some other source which, unfortunately, was not visible to you in the dream.”
“Will you tell us, if you don’t mind,” said Mr. Denniston, “what you were telling me as we came along.”
Jane told them about the dream of the corpse (if it was a corpse) in the dark place and how she had met the bearded man that morning in Market Street: and at once she was aware of having created intense interest.
“Fancy!” said Ivy Maggs. “So we were right about Bragdon Wood!” said Camilla. “It is really Belbury,” said her husband. “But in that case, where does Alcasan come in?”
“Excuse me,” said Miss Ironwood in her level voice, and the others became instantly silent. “We must not discuss the matter here. Mrs. Studdock has not yet joined us.”
“Am I to be told nothing?” asked Jane.
“Young lady,” said Miss Ironwood, “you must excuse me. It would not be wise at the moment indeed, we are not at liberty to do so. Will you allow me to ask you two more questions?”
“If you like,” said Jane, a little sulkily but only a very little. The presence of Camilla and Camilla’s husband somehow put her on her best behaviour.
Miss Ironwood had opened a drawer and for a few moments there was silence while she hunted in it. Then she handed a photograph across to Jane and asked,
“Do you recognise that person?”
“Yes,” said Jane in a low voice, “that is the man I dreamed of and the man I saw this morning in Edgestow.”
It was a good photograph and beneath it was the name Augustus Frost, with a few other details which Jane did not at the moment take in.
“In the second place,” continued Miss Ironwood holding out her hand for Jane to return the photograph, “are you prepared to see the Director . . . now?”
“Well-yes, if you like.”
“In that case, Arthur,” said Miss Ironwood to Denniston, “you had better go and tell him what we have just heard and find out if he is well enough to meet Mrs. Studdock.”
Denniston at once rose.
“In the meantime,” said Miss Ironwood, “I would like a word with Mrs. Studdock alone.” At this the others rose also and preceded Denniston out of the room. A very large cat which Jane had not noticed before jumped up and occupied the chair which Ivy Maggs had just vacated.
“I have very little doubt,” said Miss Ironwood, “that the Director will see you.”
Jane said nothing.
“And at that interview,” continued the other, “you will, I presume, be called upon to make a final decision.”
Jane gave a little cough which had no other purpose than to dispel a certain air of unwelcome solemnity which seemed to have settled on the room as soon as she and Miss Ironwood were left alone.
“There are also certain things,” said Miss Ironwood, “which you ought to know about the Director before you see him. He will appear to you, Mrs. Studdock, to be a very young man: younger than yourself. You will please understand that this is not the case. He is nearer fifty than forty. He is a man of very great experience, who has travelled where no other human being ever travelled before and mixed in societies of which you and I have no conception.”
“That is very interesting,” said Jane, though displaying no interest.
“And thirdly,” said Miss Ironwood, “I must ask you to remember that he is often in great pain. Whatever decision you come to, I trust you will not say or do anything that may put an unnecessary strain upon him.”
“If Mr. Fisher-King is not well enough to see visitors . . . ,” said Jane vaguely.
“You must excuse me,” said Miss Ironwood, “for impressing these points upon you. I am a doctor, and I am the only doctor in our company. I am therefore responsible for protecting him as far as I can. If you will now come with me I will show you to the Blue Room.”
She rose and held the door open for Jane. They passed out into the plain, narrow passage and thence up shallow steps into a large entrance hall whence a fine Georgian staircase led to the upper floors. The house, larger than Jane had at first supposed, was warm and very silent, and after so many days spent in fog the autumn sunlight, falling on soft carpets and on walls, seemed to her bright and golden. On the first floor, but raised above it by six steps, they found a little square place with white pillars where Camilla, quiet and alert, sat waiting for them. There was a door behind her.
“He will see her,” she said to Miss Ironwood getting up.
“Is he in much pain this morning?”
“It is not continuous. It is one of his good days.”
As Miss Ironwood raised her hand to knock on the door, Jane thought to herself, “Be careful. Don’t get let in for anything. All these long passages and low voices will make a fool of you if you don’t look out. You’ll become another of this man’s female adorers.” Next moment she found herself going in. It was light-it seemed all windows. And it was warm-a fire blazed on the hearth. And blue was the prevailing colour. Before her eyes had taken it in she was annoyed, and in a way ashamed, to see that Miss Ironwood was curtseying. “I won’t “contended in Jane’s mind with “I can’t. “: for it had been true in her dream, she couldn’t.
“This is the young lady, sir,” said Miss Ironwood.
Jane looked; and instantly her world was unmade.
On a sofa before her, with one foot bandaged as if he had a wound, lay what appeared to be a boy, twenty years old. On one of the long window-sills a tame jackdaw was walking up and down. The light of the fire with its weak reflection, and the light of the sun with its stronger reflection, contended on the ceiling. But all the light in the room seemed to run towards the gold hair and the gold beard of the wounded man.
Of course he was not a boy-how could she have thought so? The fresh skin on his forehead and cheeks and, above all, on his hands, had suggested the idea. But no boy could have so full a beard. And no boy could be so strong. She had expected to see an invalid. Now, it was manifest that the grip of those hands would be inescapable, and imagination suggested that those arms and shoulders could support the whole house. Miss Ironwood at her side struck her as a little old woman, shrivelled and pale-a thing you could have blown away.
The sofa was placed on a kind of dais divided from the rest of the room by a step. She had an impression of massed hangings of blue-later, she saw that it was only a screen-behind the man, so that the effect was that of a throne room. She would have called it silly if, instead of seeing it, she had been told of it by another. Through the window she saw no trees nor hills nor shapes of other houses: only the level floor of mist, as if this man and she were perched in a blue tower overlooking the world.
Pain came and went in his face: sudden jabs of sickening and burning pain. But as lightening goes through the darkness and the darkness closes up again and shows no trace, so the tranquillity of his countenance swallowed up each shock of torture. How could she have thought him young? Or old either? It came over her, with a sensation of quick fear, that this face was of no age at all. She had, or so she had believed, disliked bearded faces except for old men with white hair. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood-and the imagined Solomon too. Solomon . . . for the first time in many years the bright solar blend of king and lover and magician which hangs about that name stole back upon her mind. For the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all its linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power. At that moment, as her eyes first rested on his face, Jane forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Grace Ironwood, and her more obscure grudge against Mark, and her childhood and her father’s house. It was, of course, only for a flash. Next moment she was once more the ordinary social Jane, flushed and confused to find that she had been staring rudely (at least she hoped that rudeness would be the main impression produced) at a total stranger. But her world was unmade; she knew that. Anything might happen now.