It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a
painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking
at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not
what. The earth gave forth a fainting warmth, stealing up through the
chilly garment in which winter had wrapped her. It was her long caress
of invitation, to draw men down to lie within her arms, to roll their
bodies on her, and put their lips to her breast.
On just such a day as this Soames had got from Irene the promise he had
asked her for so often. Seated on the fallen trunk of a tree, he had
promised for the twentieth time that if their marriage were not a
success, she should be as free as if she had never married him!
"Do you swear it?" she had said. A few days back she had reminded him
of that oath. He had answered: "Nonsense! I couldn't have sworn any such
thing!" By some awkward fatality he remembered it now. What queer things
men would swear for the sake of women! He would have sworn it at any
time to gain her! He would swear it now, if thereby he could touch
her--but nobody could touch her, she was cold-hearted!
And memories crowded on him with the fresh, sweet savour of the spring
wind-memories of his courtship.
In the spring of the year 1881 he was visiting his old school-fellow
and client, George Liversedge, of Branksome, who, with the view of
developing his pine-woods in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth, had
placed the formation of the company necessary to the scheme in Soames's
hands. Mrs. Liversedge, with a sense of the fitness of things, had given
a musical tea in his honour. Later in the course of this function, which
Soames, no musician, had regarded as an unmitigated bore, his eye had
been caught by the face of a girl dressed in mourning, standing by
herself. The lines of her tall, as yet rather thin figure, showed
through the wispy, clinging stuff of her black dress, her black-gloved
hands were crossed in front of her, her lips slightly parted, and her
large, dark eyes wandered from face to face. Her hair, done low on
her neck, seemed to gleam above her black collar like coils of shining
metal. And as Soames stood looking at her, the sensation that most men
have felt at one time or another went stealing through him--a peculiar
satisfaction of the senses, a peculiar certainty, which novelists and
old ladies call love at first sight. Still stealthily watching her, he
at once made his way to his hostess, and stood doggedly waiting for the
music to cease.