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"I wouldn't bring you, Mary, if I didn't feel sure." If she had not felt sure she wouldn't have put on the grey kid gloves, the mantle and the bonnet with the white marabou feather. You don't dress like that to go shopping in Durlingham. "You mean," Mary said, "that we shall see him." Her heart beat calmly, stilled by the sheer incredibility of the adventure. "Of course we shall see him. Mrs.
She filled the days between with reading and walking and parish work. There had been changes in Garthdale. Mr. Grierson had got married in one of his bursts of enthusiasm and had gone away. His place had been taken by Mr. Macey, the strenuous son of a Durlingham grocer. Mr. Macey had got into the Church by sheer strenuousness and had married, strenuously, a sharp and sallow wife.
He was not going to get drunk any more, because he knew that if he did Alice Cartaret wouldn't marry him. Greatorex would have made a happy saint. But he was a most lugubrious sinner. The train from Durlingham rolled slowly into Reyburn station. Gwenda Cartaret leaned from the window of a third class carriage and looked up and down the platform.
She had sat like that since the train began to pull, ready to get out the instant it stopped at Durlingham. "I feel sure it's going to be all right," she said. The white marabou feather nodded. Her gentle mauve and sallow face was growing old, with soft curdlings and puckerings of the skin; but she still carried her head high, nodding at you with her air of gaiety, of ineffable intrigue.
"Uncle Victor will have got to Durlingham," she said. An hour ago she had said, "Uncle Victor will have got to York." Their minds clung to Uncle Victor as they had clung, four days ago, to Dan, because of his unconsciousness. Uncle Victor had put his arm on her shoulder. He was leaning rather heavily.
Posters on the platform at Durlingham announced in red letters that Professor Lee Ramsden, M.A., F.R.S.L., would lecture in the Town Hall at 8 P.M. She heard Miss Kendal saying, "If it had been at three instead of eight we could have gone." She had a supreme sense of something about to happen. Heavenly the long, steep-curved glass roof of the station, the iron arches and girders, the fanlights.
They gazed at her as they had already glanced, surreptitiously and kindly, on the platform at Durlingham. Now they seemed to be saying to themselves that they were sure it must be she. Gwenda walked quickly away from them and disappeared through the booking-office into the station yard. And then Rowcliffe, who had apparently been hiding in the general waiting-room, came out on to the platform.
Black hair and eyebrows grew bushily from his dull-white Frewin skin. He would be an engineer. Mr. Belk's brother had taken him into his works at Durlingham. He wasn't seventeen, yet he knew how to make engines. He had a strong, lumbering body. His heart would go on thump-thumping with regular strokes, like a stupid piston, not like Roddy's heart, excited, quivering, hurrying, suddenly checking.
Still, I can't help feeling something will.... When you're famous, Mary, I shall think of how we went into Durlingham together." "Whatever comes of it I shall think of you." The marabou feather quivered slightly. "How long have we known each other?" "Seventeen years." "Is it so long?... I shall never forget the first day you came with your mother.
She would stay there with the Sutcliffes, for weeks and weeks, in the pink and white house on the terrace. Perhaps they would go on into Italy. Mr. Sutcliffe was going to send to Cook's for the tickets to-morrow. Expensive, well-fitting clothes had come from Durlingham, so that nothing could prevent it happening. Mr. Sutcliffe was paying for her ticket. Uncle Victor had paid for the clothes.
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