it, feeling her muscles tense against him. “Tessa, why must we? You know the sort of torment this leads us to.”
“Put your hands on my shoulders again, Daniel. Please.”
He did as she asked. She was trembling.
“Now say you love me, Daniel.”
He tried to utter the simple sentence, but he could not. What he felt he could not utter — no, not if his life were to depend upon it.… And at times like these, the tension rising, like a sudden demon out of nothing, would unfurl to their minds and nerves a mortal hell divided between them.
“If only —” began Daniel, but he did not finish the phrase. But both of them knew what he meant: if only, while she was with child, Tessa had been quiet and hadn’t gadded about and played games. Daniel said heavily: “The doctor says there must never be another. It might mean —”
“I’m willing! I don’t care!”
She fingered the lapel of his coat and dropped her eyes. “Daniel. Other people —” She stopped.
“I know, my dear. But it wouldn’t be right. It isn’t right. We’ve talked about that before, over and over again. It wouldn’t be right.”
Presently, they went slowly out of the room together, and a sorely perplexed and abashed boy stood up. His mind was in a turmoil. He did not completely understand what he had heard, but he understood enough to be frightened. Was this what it was like to be grown up? he wondered. He felt obscurely that he was looking for the first time into a fearful world.… He began to jingle some loose cartridges in his coat pocket. He did not want to think of it. “Tomorrow I’ll get up at dawn and set up a target against the escarpment. Two bulls and four inners last time; not bad!”
III
On the way to the garden Dan stopped, as usual, to stare at the portrait of Great-Great-Grandmother Burnet which stood in a panel of the dining room beside that of her husband, General Sir Murdo Burnet. Sir Murdo had a hooked nose, a smoky look, and a face that always reminded Dan of the graven image in Joanna’s coloured Bible. Uncle Charles always called him Sir Tradition Gruff, and he might have been Dan’s own Uncle Murdo.
But it was Sir Rae’s lady that teased the boy’s imagination. She was dressed in flowing Gainsborough silks, as befitted a general’s lady of the eighteenth century, but the artist — perhaps with intentional irony — had left out of the picture the usual picture hat and shepherdess crook; instead, he had painted her with uncovered head, and in her blue-black hair above one ear was thrust a flower — not an English rose but some vivid flower of the south. She was dark and beautiful and strange, and out of her frame she stared not at her descendants, the most British Burnets, but beyond them — at what?
Charles Burnet came into the dining room and followed the boy’s glance. “The mysterious Lady Burnet,” thought Charles. “And worth looking at, too. Fifty devils in her eyes, and in her body the sway of an angel — no peace there.… But let the boy find out all that for himself.”
“Well, Dan, what do you think of your great-grandmother ?”
“She has a strange look in her eyes, hasn’t she?”
“Spells and incantations, my lad. Haven’t they told you about her?”
“Not much.”
“Want to know?”
“Yes. I bet there’s a lot to know.”
“Very discerning of you. I dare say there is, too, and I wish I knew it.… Would you say she was an aristocrat?”
“No-o — I see what you mean. She looks as if she didn’t care a hang for people.”
“Not much for people and less for their things , Dan. Her name was Faa and she belonged to a very special sort of aristocracy, the aristocracy of poverty and freedom.”
“Faa is Mother’s second name.”
“Quite. The Burnets have always been proud of her. She was a gipsy, Dan, a full-blooded Romany rawnie. What d’you think of that?”
Dan stared at his gipsy ancestor.
“It’s a fact. It’s the family skeleton — though we’re secretly proud of it — that her grandfather was hanged for theft in the seventeen-thirties at the Tolbooth in Edinburgh.”
“It must have been strange to be married to a gipsy. I wonder what she was like. Did she have children and was she happy, I wonder?”
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