“He seemed to be shy of them,” laughed
Mrs. Winnie. “He said it had a tendency
to lead one into dangerous fields. But oh!
I forgot—I asked my swami also, and it
didn’t startle him. They are used to ghosts;
they believe that souls keep coming back to earth,
you know. I think if it was his ghost, I wouldn’t
mind seeing it—for he has such beautiful
eyes. He gave me a book of Hindu legends—and
there was such a sweet story about a young princess
who loved in vain, and died of grief; and her soul
went into a tigress; and she came in the night-time
where her lover lay sleeping by the firelight, and
she carried him off into the ghost-world. It
was a most creepy thing—I sat out here
and read it, and I could imagine the terrible tigress
lurking in the shadows, with its stripes shining in
the firelight, and its green eyes gleaming. You
know that poem—we used to read it in school—’Tiger,
tiger, burning bright!’”
It was not very easy for Montague to imagine a tigress
in Mrs. Winnie’s conservatory; unless, indeed,
one were willing to take the proposition in a metaphorical
sense. There are wild creatures which sleep in
the heart of man, and which growl now and then, and
stir their tawny limbs, and cause one to start and
turn cold. Mrs. Winnie wore a dress of filmy
softness, trimmed with red flowers which paled beside
her own intenser colouring. She had a perfume
of her own, with a strange exotic fragrance which
touched the chorus of memory as only an odour can.
She leaned towards him, speaking eagerly, with her
soft white arms lying upon the basin’s rim.
So much loveliness could not be gazed at without pain;
and a faint trembling passed through Montague, like
a breeze across a pool. Perhaps it touched Mrs.
Winnie also, for she fell suddenly silent, and her
gaze wandered off into the darkness. For a minute
or two there was stillness, save for the pulse of
the fountain, and the heaving of her bosom keeping
time with it.
And then in the morning Oliver inquired, “Where
were you, last night?” And when his brother
answered, “At Mrs. Winnie’s,” he
smiled and said, “Oh!” Then he added,
gravely, “Cultivate Mrs. Winnie—you
can’t do better at present.”
CHAPTER XI
Montague accepted his friend’s invitation to
share her pew at St. Cecilia’s, and next Sunday
morning he and Alice went, and found Mrs. Winnie with
her cousin. Poor Charlie had evidently been scrubbed
and shined, both physically and morally, and got ready
to appeal for “one more chance.”
While he shook hands with Alice, he was gazing at
her with dumb and pleading eyes; he seemed to be profoundly
grateful that she did not refuse to enter the pew
with him.
