She followed wondering. She knew not why she had promoted this
discussion. She felt that she had been very unbalanced all the day.
They went back to the house almost silently and through the green
drawing-room window again and up the broad stairs with Sir William
Hamilton's huge decorative painting of an Ardayre group of his time,
filling one vast wall at the turn.
And so they reached the cedar parlour, and found coffee waiting and
cigarettes.
There was a growing tension between them and each guessed that the other
was not calm. Amaryllis began showing him the view from the windows
across the park, and then the old fireplace and panelling of the room.
"We sit here generally when we are alone," she said. "I like it the best
of all the rooms in the house."
"It is a fitting frame for you."
They lit cigarettes.
Denzil had many things he longed to say to her of the place, and the
thoughts it called up in him--but he checked himself. The thing was to
get through with it all quickly and to be gone. They went into the
picture gallery then, and began from the end, and when they came to the
Elizabethan Denzil they paused for a little while. The painted likeness
was extraordinary to the living splendid namesake who gazed up at the old
panel with such interested eyes.
And Amaryllis was thinking:
"If only John had that something in him which these two have in their
eyes, how happy we could be."
And Denzil was thinking:
"I hope the child will reproduce the type." He felt it would be some kind
of satisfaction to himself if she should have a son which should be his
own image.
"It is so strange," she remarked, "that you should be exactly like this
Denzil, and yet resemble John who does not remind me of him at all,
except in the general family look which every one of them share. This one
might have been painted from you."
He looked down at her suddenly and he was unable to control the
passionate emotion in his eyes. He was thinking that yes, certainly, the
child must be like him--and then what message would it convey to her?
Amaryllis was disturbed, she longed to ask him what it was which she
felt, and why there seemed some illusive remembrance always haunting her.
She grew confused, and they passed on to another frame which contained
the Lady Amaryllis who had had the sonnets written to her nut brown
locks. She was a dainty creature in her stiff farthingale, but bore no
likeness to the present mistress of Ardayre.
Denzil examined her for some seconds, and then he said reflectively:
"She is a Sweetheart--but she is not you!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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