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The stimulus of the fragrant night-stock had been excluded. Miss Tattersall pretended not to yawn. We all pretended that we did not feel a craving to yawn. The chatter rose and fell spasmodically in short devitalised bursts of polite effort. I looked round for Brenda, but could not see her anywhere. "Won't you come back into the drawing-room?" Mrs. Jervaise was saying to the Sturtons.
He did not follow the neat set paths that cut the garden squarely, but thrust across the beds and through the wet, tall, scented herbs, through the night-stock and the nicotine and the clusters of phantom white mallow flowers and through the thickets of southernwood and lavender, and knee-deep across a wide space of mignonette.
He stood there a moment, posed for us, searching the ladder of our gallery; and the spirit of the night-stock drifted past him and lightly touched us all as it fled up the stairs. Then he came across the Hall, and addressing his sister, asked, in a voice that overstressed the effect of being casual, "I say, Olive, you don't happen to know where Brenda is, do you?"
See, not a light is left! And all its blinds are drawn and its eyes shut. One window is open, my little window, Stephen! but that is in the shadow where that creeper makes everything black. "Along here a little further is night-stock. Now Now! Sniff, Stephen! Sniff! The scent of it! It lies like a bank of scented air.... And Stephen, there!
I was aware of the wide open door, of the darkness beyond, and of the timid visiting of the brilliant, chattering crowd by the fragrance of scented night-stock a delicate, wayward incursion that drifted past me like the spirit of some sweet, shabby fairy. What possible bell could be appropriate to that air?
As I quietly shut the door behind me, a delicious whiff of night-stock drifted by me, as if it had waited there for all those long hours seeking entrance to the stale, dry air of the Hall. And it must have been, I think, that scent of night-stock which gave me the sense of a completed episode, or first act, as I stood alone, at last, on the gravel sweep before the Hall.
I felt that Hughes had been scored off; but I instantly forgot such small triumphs in the delight of being able to get out into the night. Out there was romance and the smell of night-stock, all kinds of wonderment and adventure. I was so eager to be in the midst of it that I never paused to consider the queerness of the expedition.
Look!... A star a star without a sound, falling out of the blue! It's gone!" There was her dear face close to mine, soft under the soft moonlight, and the breath of her sweet speech mingled with the scent of the night-stock.... That was indeed the most beautiful night of my life, a night of moonlight and cool fragrance and adventurous excitement.
I was trying to listen to a little piece that was unfolding in my mind, a piece that began with the coming of the spirit of the night-stock into this material atmosphere of heated, excited men and women.
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