Sinister Street, Compton Mackenzie [classic books for 10 year olds .TXT] 📗

they, when they revisit places they’ve known in younger days? When he was here, I must have been about fifteen. Funny, severe, narrow-minded old father!”

Michael waited rather anxiously. She had never yet spoken of her life before she met his father, and he had never brought himself to ask her.

“Funny old man! He was at Cambridge⁠—Trinity College, I think it was called.”

Then she was silent for a while, and Michael knew that she was linking her father and his father in past events; but still she did not voice her thoughts, and whatever joys or miseries of that bygone time were being recalled were still wrapped up in her reserve: nor did Michael feel justified in trying to persuade her to unloose them, even here in this majestic enclosure that would have engulfed them all as soon as they were free.

“You’re not cold?” he tenderly demanded.

Surely upon his arm she had shivered.

“No, but I think we’ll go back to the ballroom,” she sighed.

Michael felt awed when their feet grated again in movement over the gravel. Behind them in the quadrangle there were ghosts, and the noise of walking here seemed sacrilegious upon this moonless and heavy summer night. Presently, however, two couples came laughing into the lamplight at the corner. The sense of decorous creeds outraged by his mother’s behavior of long ago vanished in the relief that present youth gave with its laughing company and fashionable frocks. Beside such heedlessness it were vain to conjure too remorsefully the past. After all, Peckwater was a place in which young men should crack whips and shout to one another across window-boxes; here there should be no tombs. Michael and his mother went on their way to the hall, and soon the music of the waltzing filled magically the lamplit entries of the great college, luring them to come back with light hearts, so importunate was the gaiety.

Michael rather reproached himself afterward for not trying to take advantage of his mother’s inclination to yield him a more extensive confidence. He was sure Stella would not have allowed the opportunity to slip by so in a craven embarrassment; or was it rather a fine sensitiveness, an imaginative desire to let the whole of that history lie buried in whatever poor shroud romance could lend it? As he was thinking of Stella, herself came toward him over the shining floor of the ballroom emptied for the interval between two dances. How delicately flushed she was and how her gray eyes were lustered with joy of the evening, or perhaps with fortunate tidings. Michael was struck by the direct way in which she was coming toward him without bothering through self-consciousness to seem to find him unexpectedly.

“Come for a walk with me in the moonlight,” she said, taking his arm.

“There’s no moon yet, but I’ll take you for a walk.”

The clock was striking two, as they reached Tom quad, and the decrescent moon to contradict him was already above the roofs. They strolled over to the fountain and stood there captured by loveliness, silent themselves and listening to the talk and laughter of shimmering figures that reached them subdued and intermittent from the flagged terraces in the distance.

“I suppose,” said Stella suddenly, “you’re very fond of Alan?”

“Rather, of course I am.”

“So am I.”

Then she blushed, and her cheeks were very crimson in the moonlight. Michael had never seen her blush like this, had never been aware before of her maidenhood that now flooded his consciousness like a bouquet of roses. Hitherto she had always been for Michael a figure untouched by human weakness. Even when last summer he had seen her break down disconsolate, he had been less shocked by her grief than by its incongruity in her. This blush gave to him his only sister as a woman.

“The trouble with Alan is that he thinks he can’t marry me because I have money, whereas he will be dependent on what he earns. That’s rubbish, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” he agreed warmly. “I’ll tell him so, if you like.”

“I don’t think he’d pay much attention,” she said. “But you know, poor old Prescott left me a lot of land.”

Michael nodded.

“Well, it’s got to be managed, hasn’t it?”

“Of course,” said Michael. “You’ll want a land agent.”

“Why not Alan?” she asked. “I don’t want to marry somebody in the Home Civil Service. I want him to be with me all day. Wouldn’t you?”

“You’ve not told mother?” Michael suggested cautiously.

“Not yet. I shall be twenty-one almost at once, you know.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

He was determined that in Stella’s behavior there should be no reflection, however pale, of what long ago had come into the life of an undergraduate going down from Christ Church. He wished for Stella and Alan to have all the benisons of the world. “You’ve no right to assume that mother will object,” he told her.

But Stella did not begin to speak, as she was used, of her determination to have her own way in spite of everybody. She was a softer Stella tonight; and that alone showed to Michael how right he had been to wish with all his heart that she would fall in love with Alan.

“There he is!” she cried, clapping her hands.

Michael looked up, and saw him coming across the great moonlit space, tall and fair and flushed as he should be coming like this to claim Stella. Michael punched Alan to express his pleasure, and then he quickly left them standing by the fountain close together.

XVII The Last Day

At sunrise when the stones of Oxford were the color of lavender, a photograph was taken of those who had been dancing at the Christ Church ball; after which, their gaiety recorded, the revelers went home. Michael was relieved when Alan offered to drive his mother and Stella back to the Randolph. He was not wishing for company that morning, but rather to walk slowly down to college alone. He waited, therefore, to see the dancers