City and town life -- Fiction; Foundlings -- Fiction
"I must say Alex done that last minute right, the way he done
everything, light and glossy. When Robin come down, I was up in the
little seat behind the doctor's cart, and Alex stood beside and helped
her. A servant, he said, would come on after us in the automobile with a
hamper, and would wait at the Cadozas' gate until she was ready to come
back. Somehow, it hadn't entered anybody's head, least of all, I guess,
Alex's own, that he should come, too. He see us off with his manners on
him like a thick, thick veil, and he even managed to give to himself a
real dignity so that Robin said her good-by with a kind of wistfulness,
as if she wanted to be reassured. And I liked her the better for that.
For, after all, she _was_ going--there was no getting back of that. And
when a woman is doing the right thing against somebody's will, I'm not
the one to mind if she hangs little bells on herself instead of going
off with no tinkle to leave herself be reminded of, pleasant.
"We swung out onto the open road, with Chris sitting still between the
two of them, and me on the little seat behind. The sunset was flowing
over the village and glittering in unfamiliar fires on the windows. The
time was as still as still, in that hour 'long towards night when the
day seems to have found its harbour it has been looking for and to have
slipped into it, with shut sails--so still that Robin spoke of it with
surprise. I forget just what she said. She was one of them women that
can say a thing so harmonious with a certain minute that you never wish
she'd kept still. I believe if she spoke to me when I was hearing music
or feeling lifted up all by myself, I wouldn't mind it. What she'd say
would be sure to fit what was being. They ain't many folks in anybody's
life like that. I believe she could talk to me any time, sole unless
it's when I first wake up in the morning; then any talking always seems
like somebody stumbling in, busy, among my sleeping brains.
"For a minute Insley didn't say anything. I was almost sure he was
thinking how unbelievable it was that he should be there, alone with
her, where an hour ago not even one of his forbidden dreams could have
found him.
"'Beautifully still,' he answered, 'as if all the things had stopped
being, except some great thing.'
"'I wonder,' she says, absent, 'what great thing.' And all the time she
seemed sort of relaxed, and resting in the sense--though never in the
consciousness--that the need to talk and to be talked to, to suggest and
to question, had found some sort of quiet, levelling process with which
she was moving along, assentin'.
"Insley stooped down, better to shield her dress from the mud there was.
I see him look down at her uncovered hands laying on the robe, and then,
with a kind of surprise, up at her face; and I knew how surprising her
being near him seemed.
"'That would be one thing for you,' he answered, 'and another for me.'
"'No,' she says, 'I think it's the same thing for us both.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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