There was not any necessity to pronounce that name Calliani spoke it on the rush to his friend.
Lord Ormont and Weyburn advanced the steps to the meeting. Neither of them flinched in eye or limb.
At a corridor window of the dwelling-house a lady stood. Her colour was the last of a summer day over western seas; her thought: ‘It has come!’ Her mind was in her sight; her other powers were frozen.
The two men conversed. There was no gesture.
This is one of the lightning moments of life for the woman, at the meeting of the two men between whom her person has been in dispute, may still be; her soul being with one. And that one, dearer than the blood of her body, imperilled by her.
She could ask why she exists, if a question were in her grasp. She would ask for the meaning of the gift of beauty to the woman, making her desireable to those two men, making her a cause of strife, a thing of doom. An incessant clamour dinned about her: ‘It has come!’
The two men walked conversing into the school-house. She was unconscious of the seeing of a third, though she saw and at the back of her mind believed she knew a friend in him. The two disappeared. She was insensible stone, except for the bell-clang: ‘It has come’; until they were in view again, still conversing: and the first of her thought to stir from petrifaction was: ‘Life holds no secret.’
She tried, in shame of the inanimate creature she had become, to force herself to think: and had, for a chastising result, a series of geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive of the situation, not communicably. The most vivid and persistent was a triangle. Interpret who may. The one beheld the two pass from view again, still conversing.
They are on the gravel; they bow; they separate. He of the grey head poised high has gone.
Her arm was pressed by a hand. Weyburn longed to enfold her, and she desired it, and her soul praised him for refraining. Both had that delicacy.
‘You have seen, my darling,’ Weyburn said. ‘It has come, and we take our chance. He spoke not one word, beyond the affairs of the school. He has a grandnephew in want of a school: visited the dormitories, refectory, and sheds: tasted the well-water, addressed me as Mr. Matthew. He had it from Giulio. Came to look at the school of Giulio’s “friend Matthew,”:—you hear him. Giulio little imagines!—Well, dear love, we stand with a squad in front, and wait the word. It mayn’t be spoken. We have counted long before that something like it was bound to happen. And you are brave. Ruin’s an empty word for us two.’
‘Yes, dear, it is: we will pay what is asked of us,’ Aminta said. ‘It will be heavy, if the school… and I love our boys. I am fit to be the school-housekeeper; for nothing else.’
‘I will go to the boys’ parents. At the worst, we can march into new territory. Emile will stick to us. Adolf, too. The fresh flock will come.’
Aminta cried in the voice of tears: ‘I love the old so!’
‘The likelihood is, we shall hear nothing further.’
‘You had to bear the shock, Matthew.’
‘Whatever I bore, and you saw, you shared.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Mais, n’oublions pas que c’est aujourd’hui jour francais; si, madame, vous avez assez d’appetit pour diner avec nous?
‘Je suis, comme toujours, aux ordres de Monsieur.’ She was among the bravest of women. She had a full ounce of lead in her breast when she sat with the boys at their midday meal, showing them her familiar pleasant face.
Shortly after the hour of the evening meal, a messenger from Bern delivered a letter addressed to the Headmaster. Weyburn and Aminta were strolling to the playground, thinking in common, as they usually did. They read the letter together. These were the lines:
‘Lord Ormont desires to repeat his sense of obligation to Mr. Matthew for the inspection of the school under his charge, and will be thankful to Mr. Calliani, if that gentleman will do him the favour to call at his hotel at Bern to-morrow, at as early an hour as is convenient to him, for the purpose of making arrangements, agreeable to the Head-master’s rules, for receiving his grandnephew Robert Benlew as a pupil at the school.’
The two raised eyes on one another, pained in their deep joy by the religion of the restraint upon their hearts, to keep down the passion to embrace.
‘I thank heaven we know him to be one of the true noble men,’ said Aminta, now breathing, and thanking Lord Ormont for the free breath she drew.
Weyburn spoke of an idea he had gathered from the earl’s manner. But he had not imagined the proud lord’s great-heartedness would go so far as to trust him with the guardianship of the boy. That moved, and that humbled him, though it was far from humiliating.
Six months later, the brief communication arrived from Lady Charlotte
‘She is a widow.
‘Unlikely you will hear from me again. Death is always next door, you said once. I look on the back of life.
‘Tell Bobby, capital for him to write he has no longing for home holidays. If any one can make a man of him, you will. That I know.
‘CHARLOTTE EGLETT.’