The Cuckoo in Spring by Cadell Elizabeth

Author:Cadell, Elizabeth [Cadell, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: The Friendly Air Publishing
Published: 2016-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

IN Julian’s room there were now two pictures—the Green Girl and the Blue Girl. He looked at them and felt that they represented two steps in his journey towards Alexandra, and the feeling strengthened his hopes; he was nearer to her; all he needed was patience....

He was less moody, but he was no more resigned; sometimes he had a feeling that she was lost for ever. In his optimistic moods he felt that somewhere, soon, she would leave a clue; in his worst moment, he felt that she had already left one—perhaps more than one—and he had failed to find it.

His memories of her, he found, were sharpening as the days of separation lengthened. Her image was far away, but it was clear and unblurred; he recalled every trick of movement, every shade of expression. He could hear her voice clearly; again and again he went over the conversations they had had and remembered her blue, lovely, laughing eyes. Even if he never saw her again he had, he knew, a remembrance of her that would stay with him all his life. She had laughed at him; she was perhaps laughing at him now, but he was certain that her laughter would be kind, and that one day she would make up to him for the weeks, the months of companionship of which she was depriving them both.

At night when the house was quiet, when the baby’s yells for his dinner had been succeeded by the silence of repletion, when Drusilla had had her late bath and banged the bathroom door for the last time; when Mr. Hurst’s slow, steady footsteps had gone the round of the house and ended in his bedroom, when sleep descended upon all, Julian found that Alexandra’s image became clearest. He remembered things she had said, things they had done....

“Julian, how fast can you run? I used to be good at racing boys twice my size. Ready, steady... go!”

He had won by lengths, and he had waited for her and had swept her, breathless, into his arms. Alexandra...

“Julian, I think I’ll make an awfully good wife, but I’m not sure what sort of husband you’re going to be. Does your mother spoil you?”

“Good Lord, no! And never did.”

“Then what made you so everything-I-want-I-get?”

“If there’s no harm in my having it, why not have it, whatever it is?”

“I was thinking of that character you haven’t got.”

His attention to business was now sufficient to absolve him from the reproaches of his aunt. She knew—as all the family knew in some vague way—that the two Clauvals in his room were the keys to the mystery; Rowena had once or twice, with what she felt to be deep and prepared cunning, remarked on the features of the girl in the picture, but what she learned—that Julian had never seen the original—served only to add to the puzzle. Nor was she helped by a chance remark made by Julian one day at the studio—a remark which caused her to look up from the ledger in which she was writing and fix upon him a look of blank astonishment.

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