Constantia hurriedly searched in her bag and brought out a letter. ‘No, no, Ernest,’ she said in agitation. ‘He says from the temple to the fountain.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Did you promise him to do it?’
‘Yes, did you?’
‘Well, I suppose I did. But my instructions were the other way round. He means us to meet in the middle, then.’
‘Yes. What time is it, Ernest? We mustn’t be late.’
‘Three minutes to four. Just let me get my stick.’
‘Stick, you won’t want a stick. What do you want a stick for?’
‘To beat you with,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘Be quick, then.’
I hurried out, shutting the door behind me and turning the key in the lock. Suddenly feeling tired I sat down on a chair on the landing.
In the hall below me the grandfather clock struck four.
Oh, the ecstasy of that moment! It seemed to me that my whole life was being fulfilled in it. I heard Constantia’s voice calling ‘Ernest! Ernest!’ But I could not move, I could not even think, for the waves of delight that were surging through me. I heard the rattle of the door-handle; I could see it stealthily turning, backwards and forwards, in a cramped semi-circle. Soon she began to beat upon the door. ‘Her little fists will soon get tired of that,’ I thought. ‘And she can’t get out through the window: there’s a drop of twenty feet into the garden.’
As distinctly as if there had been no door between us I saw her face clenched in misery and fury. Ah, but this was real! This was no sentimental saunter down a garden-path! Presently the hammering ceased and another sound began. Constantia was crying: she did not do it prettily: she did not know she had a listener: she coughed her tears out. That, too, ministered to my ecstasy; I was the king of pain. I sat on, savouring it till all sounds ceased, except the ticking of the clock below.
How long my drowse lasted I cannot tell, but it was broken by the crack of a shot. It seemed to be inside me, it hurt me so much. I jumped up as if it was I who had been hit. I pressed the key against the lock too hard: it turned unwillingly, but at last I was in the room.
She was sitting bent forward with her face in her hands, blood was trickling from her broken knuckles, and for a moment I believed that she was dead. But she raised her face and looked at me unrecognizingly. ‘Ernest?’ she said, as if it was a question. ‘Ernest?’
‘I’m sorry, Constantia,’ I said. ‘Something delayed me. Shall we go into the garden now?’
She rose without a word and followed me downstairs, and we went out through the french windows in Christopher’s room.
‘Here we divide,’ I said. ‘You go to the temple and I’ll go to the fountain, and we’ll meet in the middle, Constantia.’ She obeyed me like a child.
I looked at the flowers as Christopher wished me to. I did not look at anything else, though when I raised my eyes I could see Constantia, very small and far away, coming towards me. The afternoon sunshine lay thick on all these thousands of blooms. Not a single one seemed to be in shadow: all were displayed for us to look at, as Christopher had wished them to be. Constantia and I were representing the public, the great public, in fact the world, to whom Christopher had felt this strange obligation to make known the beauty he had helped to create. And now I was not only willing but eager to fall in with his plan. Methodically I zig-zagged from one side of the grass path to the other, from the rhododendrons to the azaleas, from the Boucher-like luxuriance of the one to the Chinese delicacy and tenuousness of the other. I went on the flowerbeds; I lifted the brown labels, trying to decipher rain-smudged names; I stooped to the earth, yes, from time to time I knelt, to read the inscriptions on the leaden markers. Nothing that he would have wished me to see escaped me; the smallest effect was as clear to me as the largest; I found no faults—no dissonance, even, between the prevailing pink of the rhododendrons and the prevailing orange of the azaleas, which had hitherto always offended my eye when these flowers were juxtaposed. Yes, I thought, he has brought it off, he has established a harmony; the flowers all sing together an anthem to his glory.
I was approaching the middle of the Long Walk and my journey’s end when I heard Constantia scream. Instantly the garden was in ruins, its spell broken.
I did not see her at first. Like me, she had been going to and fro among the flower-beds, and it was there, under the shadow of a towering rhododendron that I found her, bending over Christopher. Something or someone—perhaps Christopher, perhaps Constantia in the shock of her discovery, had shaken the bush, for the body was covered with rose-pink petals, and his forehead, his damaged forehead, was adrift with them. Even the revolver in his hand had petals on it, softening its steely gleam. But for that, and for something in his attitude that suggested he was defying Nature, not obeying her, one might have supposed that he had fallen asleep under his own flowers.
In his pocket we afterwards found a letter. It was addressed to both of us and dated Sunday 4.30. ‘I had meant to join you at the garden-party,’ it said, ‘but now I feel it’s best I shouldn’t. Only half an hour, but long enough to be convinced that I have messed things up. And yet I can’t quite understand it, for I felt so differently at four o’clock. Was it too much to ask, that you should keep your promise to me, or too little? All my life I have been asking myself this question, in one form or another, and perhaps this is the only answer. Bless you, my children, be happy.—Christopher.’
‘But don’t you see,’ I said to Constantia, ‘it all proves what I said? He couldn’t come to terms with life, he didn’t know how to live, and so he had to die?’
‘You may be right,’ she answered listlessly. ‘But I shall never forgive myself for failing him—or you.’
I argued with her—I even got angry with her—but she would not see reason, and after the inquest we never met again.
HILDA’S LETTER
It may take time to get over an obsession, even after the roots have been pulled out. Eustace was satisfied that ‘going away’ did not mean that he was going to die; but at moments the fiery chariot still cast its glare across his mind, and he was thankful to shield himself behind the prosaic fact that going away meant nothing worse than going to school. In other circumstances the thought of going to school would have alarmed him; but as an alternative to death it was almost welcome.
Unconsciously he tried to inoculate himself against the future by aping the demeanour of the schoolboys he saw about the streets or playing on the beach at Anchorstone. He whistled, put his hands in his pockets, swayed as he walked, and assumed the serious but detached air of someone who owes fealty to a masculine corporation beyond the ken of his womenfolk: a secret society demanding tribal peculiarities of speech and manner. As to the thoughts and habits of mind which should inspire these outward gestures, he found them in school stories; and if they were sometimes rather lurid they were much less distressing than the fiery chariot.
His family was puzzled by his almost eager acceptance of the trials in store. His aunt explained it as yet another instance of Eustace’s indifference to home-ties, and an inevitable consequence of the money he had inherited from Miss Fothergill. She had to remind herself to be fair to him whenever she thought of this undeserved success. But to his father the very fact that it was undeserved made Eustace something of a hero. His son was a dark horse who had romped home, and the sight of Eustace often gave him a pleasurable tingling, an impulse to laugh and make merry, such as may greet the evening paper when it brings news of a win. A lad of such mettle would naturally want to go to school.