The band was playing a rich, thick, drawling melody, full of the purple
night and the warm air. The lovers round the bandstand seemed to sway to
it and draw closer to each other. Joanna looked down into her lap, for
her eyes were full of tears. She regretted passionately the days that
were past--those light loves which had not been able to live in the
shadow of Martin's memory. Oh, why had he taught her to love and then
made it impossible for her ever to love again?--till it was too late,
till she was a middle-aged woman to whom no man came.... It was not
likely that anyone would want her now--her light lovers all lived now in
substantial wedlock, the well-to-do farmers who had proposed to her in
the respectful way of business had now taken to themselves other wives.
The young men looked to women of their own age, to Ellen's pale, soft
beauty ... once again she envied Ellen her loves, good and evil, and
shame was in her heart. Then she lifted her eyes and saw Martin coming
towards her.
Sec.13
In the darkness, lit only now by the lamp-dazzled moonlight, and in the
mist of her own tears, the man before her was exactly like Martin, in
build, gait, colouring and expression. Her moment of recognition stood
out clear, quite distinct from the realization of impossibility which
afterwards engulfed it. She unclasped her hands and half rose in her
seat--the next minute she fell back. "Reckon I'm crazy," she thought to
herself.
Then she was startled to realize that the man had sat down beside her.
Her heart beat quickly. Though she no longer confused him with Martin,
the image of Martin persisted in her mind ... how wonderfully like him
he was ... the very way he walked....
"I saw you give me the glad eye ..." not the way he talked, certainly.
There was a terrible silence.
"Are you going to pretend you didn't?"
Joanna turned on him the tear-filled eyes he had considered glad. She
blinked the tears out recklessly on to her cheek, and opened her mouth
to reduce him to the level of the creeping things upon the earth.... But
the mouth remained open and speechless. She could not look him in the
face and still feel angry. Though now she would no longer have taken him
for Martin, the resemblance still seemed to her startling. He had the
same rich eyes--with an added trifle of impudence under the same
veiling, womanish lashes, the same black sweep of hair from a rather
low forehead, the same graceful setting of the head, though he had not
Martin's breadth of shoulder or deceiving air of strength.
Her hesitation gave him his opportunity.
"You aren't going to scold me, are you? I couldn't help it."
His unlovely, Cockney voice had in it a stroking quality. It stirred
something in the depths of Joanna's heart. Once again she tried to speak
and could not.
"It's such a lovely night--just the sort of night you feel lonely,
unless you've got someone very nice with you."
This was terribly true.
"And you did give me the glad eye, you know."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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