She clasped her hands behind her head. Her eyelids
fell, and through her slight figure there ran a throb
of yearning—of tender yet despairing passion.
“If I could only mend things there, I might
be some use. I don’t want him to marry
me—but just—just—”
Then her hands fell. She shook her head angrily.
“You humbug!—you humbug! For
whom are you posing now?”
Falloden had just finished a solitary luncheon in
the little dining-room of the Boar’s Hill cottage.
There was a garden door in the room, and lighting
a cigarette, he passed out through it to the terrace
outside. A landscape lay before him, which has
often been compared to that of the Val d’Arno
seen from Fiesole, and has indeed some common points
with that incomparable mingling of man’s best
with the best of mountain and river. It was the
last week of October, and the autumn was still warm
and windless, as though there were no shrieking November
to come. Oxford, the beautiful city, with its
domes and spires, lay in the hollow beneath the spectator,
wreathed in thin mists of sunlit amethyst. Behind
that ridge in the middle distance ran the river and
the Nuneham woods; beyond rose the long blue line
of the Chilterns. In front of the cottage the
ground sank through copse and field to the river level,
the hedge lines all held by sentinel trees, to which
the advancing autumn had given that significance the
indiscriminate summer green denies. The gravely
rounded elms with their golden caps, the scarlet of
the beeches, the pale lemon-yellow of the nearly naked
limes, the splendid blacks of yew and fir—they
were all there, mingled in the autumn cup of misty
sunshine like melting jewels. And among them,
the enchanted city shone, fair and insubstantial,
from the depth below; as it were, the spiritual word
and voice of all the scene.
Falloden paced up and down the terrace, smoking and
thinking. That was Otto’s open window.
But Radowitz had not yet appeared that morning, and
the ex-scout, who acted butler and valet to the two
men, had brought word that he would come down in the
afternoon, but was not to be disturbed till then.
“What lunacy made me do it?” thought Falloden,
standing still at the end of the terrace which fronted
the view.
He and Radowitz had been nearly three weeks together.
Had he been of the slightest service or consolation
to Radowitz during that time? He doubted it.
That incalculable impulse which had made him propose
himself as Otto’s companion for the winter still
persisted indeed. He was haunted still by a sense
of being “under command”—directed—by
a force which could not be repelled. Ill at ease,
unhappy, as he was, and conscious of being quite ineffective,
whether as nurse or companion, unless Radowitz proposed
to “throw up,” he knew that he himself
should hold on; though why, he could scarcely have
explained.
