A World of Love Read Free

he cleared out. He walked out one morning without a word to anyone, to be heard of some time afterwards in Australia. The 1914 War saw him, one heard, at a battle-front with the
    Australian army. Some years after that war, when Montefort was closed and the lands let out, Fred was reported about the country: Antonia tried to contact him but found him, again, gone.
    His next return had been a matter of fate. Antonia, camping alone in Montefort, staring out of a window at the June twilight, saw him sauntering down the rise from the obelisk as though he had never been an hour away. She hastened out, shouting: Fred came back indoors with her and they drank together. No, this time—he informed her—he had no plans; he in fact would not be half sorry if someone said to him he was back for good. He had quite a mind to stay in the country if he could see his way to it, but he doubted that. She, on her side, was at a crisis of worry about the place—the fecklessness or ill-will of the grazing tenants, the decay getting a hold on the shut-up house. With a rush, on the strength of a brain-flash, she brought out the proposition about Montefort. He put down his glass and turned his head away slowly, as though offended: forbiddingly, he advised her to think it over. Would he think it over? Well, he supposed he might. He had then shoved past her out of the darkening dining-room. That night, as Antonia lay tense, excited, yet another comet shot through her brain: she could hardly wait to put up the idea to Fred. When next they met, in the yard next morning, she point-blank asked—had he got a wife? Fred’s eye for a moment just flitted over her—no, he told her, after deliberation. That was fine, she exulted: all could now be straightforward. For, let her tell him, a woman went with the land. Take one, take both: in fact, it was both or neither.
    ‘Would it be you?’ he not unreasonably asked.
    On learning it was to be Lilia, whose legend he surprisingly did recall, he said he saw no harm in taking a look. Lilia, summoned by telegram, unknowingly brought herself over from England on approval. She arrived flaccid after the all-night journey, debilitated by sea-sickness, quite her worst—she had not been sleeping; morbid blue virginal circles were round her eyes; her talk was exclusively of fatigues and worries. Fred came in as far as doorways, where he lingered taking oblique notice: after thirty-six hours he was able to intimate that as far as he went, the thing was on. Would Antonia speak to the lady on his behalf?
    Lilia, on being told she was asked in marriage, incontrovertibly answered that Fred was common. ‘You would not even ask me to  think of this,’ she added, ‘if it was not that you’re sick of the sight of me. So this is what it has come to! Have you forgotten how once I was good enough for Guy? It would have been better, I now see, if I had thrown myself off that ship on the way over. I all but did, let me tell you. When that telegram came, I knew you had something up your sleeve.’
    ‘To me, you know, Fred’s an attractive man.’
    ‘Then why don’t you have him?’
    ‘Because I don’t want him,’ flashed out Antonia thoughtlessly.
    I see. So you put him up to this?’
    ‘But don’t you want a home?—my heavens! Don’t you ever want children? They’d be as pretty as posters: you wait and see!’
    ‘After all these years, you think of that.’
    ‘The occasion didn’t arise till now.’
    ‘You think so? Thank you,’ Lilia coldly returned. ‘How many other offers do you imagine I might not have always had, if I had chosen to lift a finger, instead of staying faithful to Guy’s memory? That, of course, you never would understand.’
    That brought a clashing silence, a contemptuously brutal stare from Antonia under which Lilia folded up—she sobbed and began to pluck at her handkerchief. ‘Home where?’ she asked, with an air of shame. ‘What sort of home could he ever give me?’ She glanced