The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [159]
The tall Englishman strode away round the corner of the palace with these provisions, and along the great terrace towards a solitary figure sitting forlornly at the top of one of the flights of steps that drop in noble succession down to the expanses of artificial water that seem to stretch away into the heart of France.
“I couldn’t find anywhere to get tea,” he said as soon as he was within speaking distance; “I couldn’t find anything but an old woman selling oranges, and I got you some of those, and she made me get some cakes as well—I don’t know if they’re fit to eat.”
Mr. Lambert spoke with a very unusual timorousness, as he placed his sticky purchases in Francie’s lap, and sat down on the step beside her.
“Oh, thank you awfully, Roddy, I’m sure they’re lovely,” she answered, looking at her husband with a smile that was less spontaneous than it used to be, and looking away again immediately.
There was something ineffably wearying to her in the adoring, proprietary gaze that she found so unfailingly fixed upon her whenever she turned her eyes towards him; it seemed to isolate her from other people and set her upon a ridiculous pedestal, with one foolish worshipper declaiming his devotion with the fervour and fatuity of those who for two hours shouted the praises of Diana of the Ephesians. The supernatural mist that blurs the irksome and the ludicrous till it seems like a glory was not before her eyes; every outline was clear to her, with the painful distinctness of a caricature.
“I don’t think you could eat the oranges here,” he said, “they’d be down on us for throwing the skins about. Are you too tired to come on down into the gardens where they wouldn’t spot us?” He laid his hand on hers, “You are tired. What fools we were to go walking round all those infernal rooms! Why didn’t you say you’d had enough of it?”
Francie was aching with fatigue from walking slowly over leagues of polished floor, with her head thrown back in perpetual perfunctory admiration of gilded ceilings and battle pictures, but she got up at once, as much to escape from the heavy warmth of his hand as from the mental languor that made discussion an effort. They went together down the steps, too much jaded by uncomprehended sight-seeing to take heed of the supreme expression of art in nature that stretched out before them in mirrors of Triton and dolphin-guarded water, and ordered masses of woodland, and walked slowly along a terrace till they came to another flight of steps that fell suddenly from the stately splendours of the terraces down to the simplicities of a path leading into a grove of trees.
The path wound temptingly on into the wood, with primroses and celandine growing cool and fresh in the young grass on either side of it; the shady greenness was like the music of stringed instruments after the brazen heroics of a military band. They loitered along, and Francie slipped her hand into Lambert’s arm, feeling, unconsciously, a little more in sympathy with him, and more at ease with life. She had never pretended either to him or to herself that she was in love with him; her engagement had been the inevitable result of poverty, and aimlessness, and bitterness of soul, but her instinctive leniency towards any man who liked her, joined with her old friendliness for Mr. Lambert, made it as easy a way out of her difficulties as any she could have chosen. There was something flattering in the knowledge of her power over a man whom she had been accustomed to look up to, and something, too, that appealed incessantly to her good nature; besides which there is to nearly every human being some comfort in being the first object of another creature’s life. She was almost fond of him as she walked beside him,