At half past twelve Captain Grey had not yet returned, and Mrs. Royce declared that the ham omelet would be ruined if not eaten at once; so Lexy went down to the dining room and ate her lunch alone.
The rain was still falling steadily, and the little room was dim, chilly, and, to Lexy, unbearably close. She wasn’t particularly hungry, either, after such a hearty breakfast and no exercise. She felt restless and uneasy. When Mrs. Royce went out into the kitchen to fetch the dessert, she jumped up from the table, crossed the room, and opened the window.
The wild rain blew against her face, and it felt good to her. She drew in a long breath of the fresh, damp air, and sighed with relief.
“I’m going to go out this afternoon,” she said to herself, “if it rains pitchforks! I can’t—”
Just then she caught sight of Captain Grey coming down the road. Her first impulse was to call out a cheerful salutation, but after a second glance she felt no inclination for that. He was tramping along doggedly through the rain, his hands in his pockets, his collar turned up. He was as straight and soldierly as ever, but his face was pale, with such a queer look on it!
“Oh, dear!” thought Lexy. “Something’s gone wrong! Oh, the poor soul! And he set off so happy this morning.”
She went into the hall and opened the front door for him. Filled with a motherly solicitude, she wanted to help him off with his overcoat, but he abruptly declined that.
“Am I late?” he asked. “I thought one o’clock, you know—I’m sorry.”
“Mercy, that doesn’t matter!” said Lexy. “Aren’t you going to change your shoes? You ought to. Well, then, you’d better come in and eat your lunch this minute.”
“You’re no end kind, to bother like that!” he said earnestly. “I do appreciate it!”
“Who wouldn’t be?” thought Lexy, glancing at him. “You poor soul, you look as if you’d seen a ghost!”
He took his place at the table, and Lexy sat down opposite him, her chin in her hands, anxiously waiting for him to begin to tell her what had happened.
“Beastly day, isn’t it?” he said, with an obvious effort to speak cheerfully.
“Awful!” agreed Lexy.
“And yet, you know,” he went on, “I rather like a walk on a day like this. The country about here is pretty, don’t you think?”
Lexy glanced around, to make sure that Mrs. Royce had closed the door behind her.
“Captain Grey!” she said, leaning across the table. “Tell me, did you see her?”
He did not meet Lexy’s eyes. He was looking down at his plate with that curious dazed expression in his face.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I saw her.”
Lexy was hurt and disappointed by his manner. Evidently he didn’t want to tell her anything, didn’t want to talk at all. Very well—the only thing for her to do was to maintain a dignified silence. She did so for almost ten minutes, but then nature got the upper hand.
“Well?” she demanded. “Was everything all right?”
“All right?” he repeated. “Oh, rather! Oh, yes, thanks—absolutely all right.”
This was too much for Lexy.
“That’s good,” she said frigidly. “I’m going upstairs now, to write some letters.”
Her tone aroused him. He sprang to his feet, very contrite.
“No! Look here!” he said. “Please don’t run away! I—I want to talk to you, but it’s a bit hard. You can’t imagine what it’s like to see one of your own people, you know—after such a long time.”
Lexy sat down again.
“Was she as you expected her to be?” she asked.
“I don’t quite know what I expected,” he said. “Only—”
He paused for a long time, and Lexy waited patiently, for she felt very sorry for Captain Grey. At first sight she had imagined him to be haughty, stiff, and aloof. She knew now that he was a very sensitive man. He was terribly moved, and he wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t.
She tried to help him.
“Dr. Quelton came to see me this morning,” she observed.
“Yes—he said he would. Very decent sort of chap, don’t you think?”
“Do you mean you liked him?” asked Lexy.
Captain Grey was a little startled by this Yankee notion of liking a person at first sight.
“Well, you see,” he said, “I’ve only met him once; but he seems to me a very decent sort of chap. He’s clever, you know, and—and so on, and my sister seems very happy with him.”
“Happy?”
“Yes. I’ve been an ass, imagining all sorts of silly rot. She’s not very strong, I’m afraid, but she’s happy, and—well, you know, their life out there is lonely, of course, but there’s something about it, rather—rather charming, you know. I’d like you to see it for yourself. I was speaking about you to Muriel. She wants to know you, and I think you’d like her. Would you come out there to tea with me this afternoon?”
“Yes!” cried Lexy, with a vehemence that surprised him.
There was nothing in the world she wanted more at that moment than to see Captain Grey’s sister and to visit Dr. Quelton’s house. She didn’t exactly know why, and she didn’t care, but she wanted to.
Her trunk had not yet arrived. Indeed, she had only sent to Mrs. Enderby’s for it that morning, but she was able to make herself presentable with what she had in her bag, and excitement gave her an added charm. She was in high spirits, gay and sparkling, so pretty and so lively that Captain Grey was quite dazzled.
He had engaged the one and only taxi.
After they were settled in it, and on their way along the muddy road, he said:
“I say, Miss Moran, are there many American girls like you?”
“No!” replied Lexy calmly. “I’m unique.”
“I can believe that!” he said. “I’ve never seen any one like you. I was telling Muriel how much I hope that you and she will hit it off. It would be a wonderful thing for her to have a friend like you in this place.”
Something in his tone made Lexy turn serious. He was speaking as if she was simply a nice girl he had happened to meet, as if she had nothing to do but go out to tea and make agreeable friendships.
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I certainly haven’t accomplished much so far.”
He was silent, and to Lexy his silence was very eloquent.
“I came here for a definite purpose,” she told him. “I haven’t forgotten that, and I’m not likely to forget it.”
“I know,” said he, “but—”
“But,” interrupted Lexy, “I know very well what you’re thinking—that it’s a wild-goose chase, and that I’m a young idiot. Isn’t that it?”
“I don’t mean that,” he protested; “only—don’t you see?”
“I don’t!” Lexy grimly denied. “You’ve thought over the talk we had last night, and you’ve decided that it was all nonsense.”
“No, Miss Moran—not nonsense; but we were both a bit tired then, and perhaps a bit overwrought.”
“All right!” said Lexy. “Don’t go on! No—please drop it. I’ve talked too much, anyhow. From now on I’m not going to talk to any one about my little job. I’m going to go ahead in my own way, alone.”
“You can’t,” said Captain Grey firmly. “I’m here, you know.”
This did not appease Lexy, and she remained curt and silent all the rest of the way. For a couple of miles the taxi went on along a broad, smooth highway; then it turned off down a rough lane, bordered by dark woodland, and entirely deserted. The rain drummed loud on the leather top of the cab, the wind came sighing through the gaunt pines and the slender, shivering birches; but when there was a lull, she heard another sound, a sound familiar to her from childhood and yet always strange, always heart-stirring—the dim, unceasing thunder of the sea.
“Is the doctor’s house near the shore?” she inquired.
“Yes—just on the beach.”
“Oh, I’m so glad!” cried Lexy. “Our old house, where I was born, was on the shore, and on days like this I used to love to go out and walk with father. I love the sea so!”
Captain Grey gave her an odd look, which she didn’t understand. Perhaps that was just as well, for her words and her voice had troubled the young man to an unreasonable degree. He wished he could say something to comfort her. He wished he could offer her the sea as a gift, for instance; and that would have been a mistake, because Lexy did not like to be pathetic.
Just at that moment, however, the taxi turned into a driveway, and there was the house—the Tower. Lexy was disappointed. The name had called up in her mind the picture of a gloomy edifice of gray stone, more or less medieval, and altogether somber and forbidding; and this was nothing in the world but a rather shabby old house, badly in need of paint, and forlorn enough in the rain, but very ordinary and very ugly. Even the tower, which had given the place its romantic name, was only a wooden cupola with a lightning rod on top of it.
“Can you get a good view of the sea from the windows?” Lexy demanded.
“Well, not from the library, where I was,” he answered; “but perhaps—”
“Captain Grey, I want to get out! I want to run down on the beach for one instant!”
“In this rain?” he protested. “You can’t!”
“I’m not made of sugar,” said Lexy scornfully, “I’ve got to run down there just for an instant, before I go in.”
“But, I say, your nice little hat, you know!”
Lexy pulled off the nice little hat and laid it on his knee. Then she rapped on the window, the driver stopped, and Lexy opened the door.
“No! Look here! Please, Miss Moran!” cried Captain Grey. “Very well, then, if you will go, I’ll go with you!”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Lexy. “I feel as if I’d like to go alone just for one look. You know how it is, sometimes. I haven’t had even a smell of the sea for so long; and it reminds me—”
She looked at him with a shadowy little smile, and he did understand.
“All right!” he said. “Then slip on my coat.”
She did so, to oblige him, and off she went, half running, down the lane, in the direction of the sound of the surf. Captain Grey looked after her—such an absurd little figure in that aquascutum of his that almost touched the ground! He watched her till she was out of sight; then he sat down in the cab and lit a cigarette.
He thought about her, but Lexy had forgotten him. She found herself on a desolate stretch of wet sand, with the gray sea tossing under a gray sky. She smelled the hearty, salt smell, she remembered old things, sad and sweet. Tears came into her eyes, and she felt them on her cheeks, warm, salt as the sea. If only she could go running home, back to the house where her mother used to wait for her! If only she could find her father’s big, firm hand clasping her own!
“I mustn’t be like this,” she said to herself. “Daddy would feel ashamed of me.”
In a cavernous pocket of the captain’s overcoat she found a handkerchief. She dried her eyes with it, and turned back. The Tower faced the lane, and the left side of it fronted the beach, rising stark and high from the sands. She looked up at it. On the first floor a sun parlor had been built out, and through the windows she could see a woman sitting there in a deck chair.
“I suppose that’s Muriel,” she thought, with a reawakening of her lively interest.
She came a little nearer. The woman was wearing a negligee and a coquettish little silk cap. Her back was turned toward Lexy. She lay there motionless, as if she were asleep.
Lexy drew closer. The woman turned, straightened up in the chair, and rose. A shiver ran along Lexy’s spine. She stopped and stared and stared.
The woman had raised her thin arms above her head, stretching. Then, for a moment, she stood in an odd and lovely pose, with her hands clasped behind her head. Oh, surely no one else ever stood like that! That figure, that attitude—it couldn’t be any one else!
“Caroline!” cried Lexy. “Caroline!”
The woman did not hear. She was moving toward the long windows of the room, and her every step, every line of her figure, was familiar and unmistakable to Lexy.
“Caroline!” she cried, running forward across the wet sand. “Wait! Wait for me, Caroline!”
A hand seized her arm. With a gasp, she looked into the pale, heavy face of Dr. Quelton. He was smiling.
“Miss Moran!” he said. “This is an unexpected pleasure—”
Lexy jerked her arm away, and looked up at the windows of the sun parlor. The woman had gone.
“I saw Caroline!” she said. “In there!”
“Caroline?” he repeated. “I’m afraid, I’m very much afraid, Miss Moran, that you’ve made a mistake.”
Their eyes met. In that instant, Lexy knew. He was still smiling with an expression of bland amusement at this extraordinary little figure in the huge coat; but he was her enemy, and she knew it.
“Suppose we go on?” he suggested. “I believe it’s raining.”
They turned and walked side by side around the house to the front door, where Captain Grey stood waiting.
“I say!” he exclaimed anxiously. “Your hair—your shoes—you’ll take a chill, Miss Moran!”
“I feel anxious about Miss Moran myself,” said Dr. Quelton. “I’m afraid she’s a very imprudent young lady.”
But Lexy said nothing.