IT was the middle of January. Felicia stood at the salon window and looked out at the snow falling, falling in the deserted street. She was oppressed by the dead silence of things. There was not even a cheerful fire to crackle in the room, which was heated by the cold white porcelain stove in the corner. All the ladies had retired to their rooms, for their usual afternoon siesta, and there was not a sound in the house. She caught sight of a cab passing down the street, but it moved with a deathlike noiselessness over the snow. She half wished the driver would crack his whip, although she hated the maniacal pastime, dear to Genevese cabmen, as much as Schopenhauer himself. But he passed on, a benumbed, silent spectre, huddled up on his box.
Nothing but stillness, dreariness, and desolation. The house seemed empty, the street empty, the world empty.
Raine Chetwynd had come and gone. For a brief season his hearty voice and cheery face had gladdened the little pension. He had come with his robustness of moral fibre, his culture, his broad knowledge of the world, and his vigorous manhood, and the pulse of the community seemed to beat stronger for it. In spite of the old man's warning, they had all expected to see in the young “professor” a pale image of his father, minus the softening charm of age. But, instead, they had been presented with a type of blond, Anglo-Saxon comeliness—tall, deep-chested, fresh-coloured, with an open, attractive face, blue-eyed and fair-moustached, which, at first sight, seemed to belong to a thousand men who rowed and cricketed, and lived honest, unparticularized lives, but on closer examination showed itself to be that of a man who could combine thought and action, the scholar and the athlete, the man of intellectual breath and refinement, and the cheery, practical man of the world. He was a man, in the specific feminine sense. He had brought into the pension the influence that Mrs. Stapleton had insisted on, with such passionate bitterness, as being needful in a woman's life. Each of the women had brightened under it, exhibiting instinctively the softer side of her nature. Mme. Popea had kept hidden from view the shapeless wrapper, adorned with cheap soiled lace, in which, much to Frau Schultz's annoyance, she would now and then appear at déjeuner, and had tidied and curled her hair betimes, instead of leaving it till the late afternoon. In Frau Schultz a dignified urbanity had taken the place of peevish egotism. Little Miss Bunter had perked up like a frozen sparrow warmed into life, and had chirruped merrily to her canaries. The only friction that his presence had caused, had arisen between Mme. Boccard and Frâulein Klinkhardt, who had broadly hinted a request to be placed next to him at table. A pretty quarrel had resulted from Mme. Boccard's refusal; after which Frâulein Klinkhardt went to bed for a day, and Mme. Boccard called her softly, under her breath, a German crane, which appeared to afford her much relief.
It had been pleasant and comfortable to see a man again in the salon. It had broken the sense of isolation they carried with them, like lead in their hearts, all through the winter. Then, too, he had been a man whom one and all could honestly respect. He had been open-hearted, frank with them all, showing, in a younger, fresher way, the charm of courtesy that distinguished his father. But naturally he had brought himself nearer to them, had not seemed placed in such remote moral and intellectual spheres.
Besides, there had been a few festivities. Old Mr. Chetwynd had given, in honour of his son's visit, a Christmas dinner, which had won him the heart of Frau Schultz. Frâulein Klinkhardt and herself had lavished more than their usual futile enthusiasm on a Christmas tree, which, owing to Raine, had something better than its customarysuccès d'estime. He had taken them to the theatre, made up skating parties at Villeneuve, at the other side of the lake. Some friends of his at Lausanne had given a large dance, to which he had managed to escort Felicia and Katherine, under his father's protection. A couple of undergraduates of his own college were there; they came a few days afterwards to Geneva to see him; and that was another merry evening at the pension.
Katherine Stapleton had brightened, too, under the gaiety, and her eyes had lost for the time the touch of weariness that saddened her face in her gentler moods, and her laugh had rung true and fresh. There were many evident points of contact between herself and him, much that was complementary in each to the other.
One day he had said to her laughingly,—
“I have come round to the opinion—-which I had not at first—that you are the most incomprehensibly feminine thing I know.”
“And I,” she had replied, “to the after-opinion that you are the most comprehensibly masculine one.”
“Is that why we get on so well together?”
“That is what I had meant to convey,” she had answered with a light laugh.
The rest of which conversation lingered long after his departure in Katherine's memory.
Now he had gone, and life at the pension resumed its dreary, monotonous round. Raine Chetwynd would have been surprised had he known the change wrought by his departure.
Felicia obviously shared in the general depression, and, like Katherine, had memories of bright hours in which the sun seemed to shine exclusively for her own individual benefit. She thought of them wretchedly, as she stood by the window watching the flakes fall through the grey air.
A voice behind her caused her to start, though the words seemed to come out of some far distance. It was old Mr. Chetwynd. He had been somewhat ailing the last day or two, unable to go out. In a fit of restlessness, he had wandered down to the salon.
“Lost in the snow?” he asked, coming to her side.
“Yes,” she replied, with a half sigh. “I think so. Quite. I was beginning to doubt whether I should find my way safe home again, and to grow almost tearful.”
“You have no business with low spirits, my dear,” he replied, with a smile. “You should leave that to old people. Their hearts get lost in the snow sometimes, and when they feel them gradually getting stone-cold and frozen, then they may be excused for despairing.”
“What is to prevent it from being the same with young hearts?”
“The warm blood of their youth.”
“That may keep them warm, but it doesn't prevent their being lost,” said Felicia, argumentatively.
“Well, what does it signify if you do go out of your way a little, when your legs are strong and your blood circulates vigorously?” he said cheerfully.
“But the young heartcanget lost,” said Felicia.
“I won't chop logic with you, young lady. I am trying to teach you that youth is a glorious thing and ought to be its own happiness. I suppose it is attempting to teach the unlearnable. Ah me! How beautiful it would be to be three and thirty again!”
“Three and thirty! Why, that is quite old!”
He looked at her with a touch of sadness and amusement, his head on one side.
“I suppose it is for you. I was forgetting. To me it is youth, the full prime of a man's life, when the world is at his feet. Later on he begins to feel it is on his shoulders. But at thirty-three—I was thinking of Raine. That is his age.”
“Have you heard from Mr. Chetwynd?” asked Felicia, after a longish pause.
“Oh, yes. He never keeps me long without news of him. There are only the two of us.”
“You seem very fond of one another,” said Felicia.
“I am proud of my son, my dear, and he is foolish enough to be proud of his poor old daddy.”
His voice had grown suddenly very soft, and he spoke with the simplicity of old age.
His eyes looked out into the distance, their brightness veiled with a strange tenderness. Felicia was touched, felt strongly drawn to him. She lost sense of the scholar of profound learning in that of the old man leaning on his son's strong arm. And the son's manhood grew in her eyes as the father's waned.
“It is not many men,” he continued musingly, “that would have given up a Christmas vacation and come all this way just to see an old, broken-down fellow like me.”
Felicia stared out of the window, but she no longer saw the snow.
“You must miss him dreadfully.”
“I always do. We are much together in Oxford. He always gives me at least a few minutes of his day.”
“How good of him. It must be beautiful for you.”
“A great happiness—yes, a great happiness!”
He too was looking out of the window, by Felicia's side, his hands behind his back, and likewise saw nothing. A spell of wistfulness was over them both—bound them unconsciously together.
“A tender-hearted fellow,” said the old man. “Wonderfully sympathetic.”
“He seems to understand everyone so.”
“Yes; that is Raine's way—he gets behind externals. I have missed him sadly since he left.”
“Yes,” said Felicia, softly.
“And I have been wishing for him all day.”
“So have I!” said Felicia, under the spell.
Her tone suddenly awakened the old man. His eyes flashed into intelligence as a darkened theatre can leap into light. The girl met them, recoiled a step at their brilliance, and shrank as if a search-light had laid bare her soul.
She had scarcely known what she had been saying. A quivering second. Was there time to recover? She struggled desperately. If the tears had not come, she would have won. But they rose in a flood, and she turned away her head sharply, burning with shame.
The old man laid his thin hand on her shoulder, and bent round to look into her face.
“My dear little girl—my poor child!” he said gently, patting her shoulder.
For all her shrinking, she felt the tenderness of the touch. To have withdrawn from it would have been to repulse. But it added to her wretchedness. She could not speak, only cry, with the helpless consciousness that every second's silence and every tear were issues whence oozed more and more of her secret.
“Does Raine know?” whispered the old man.
Then she turned quickly, her brown eyes glistening, and found speech.
“He know? Know what? Oh, you must never tell him—never, never, never! He would think—and I couldn't bear him to, although he will never see me again. And, please, Mr. Chetwynd, don't think I have told you anything—I haven't. Of course, I only miss him—as every one does.”
Felicia moved softly towards the door, longing for retreat. The old man followed at her side.
“Forgive me, my dear,” he said, with a shadow of a smile round his lips. “I have been indiscreet, and leapt to wrong conclusions. Raine is so bright that we all miss him—equally.”
She glanced at him. The smile found a watery reflection in her eyes. In another moment she was on the stairs, fleeing to the comfort of her own room.
The old man, left to himself, kicked open the door of the stove, drew up a chair, and spread his hands out before the glow.
“Louis Chetwynd,” he said to himself, “you are no better than an old fool.”
The subject was never touched upon again, but it seemed always afterwards to be in their thoughts when together. At first Felicia was shy—felt the blood rise to her cheeks whenever the old man's bright eyes were fixed upon her. But her involuntary admission had stirred a great tenderness in his heart. Somehow he had always thought sadly of the possibility of Raine marrying, although he had urged him to it many times. Up to now he had been the first—or thought he had, which comes to the same thing—in Raine's affections, and he could not yield that first place without a pang. And it would be to a woman not good enough for Raine; that was certain. If he could only choose for him the paragon that was his equal, then the surrender would be less hard. But Raine would choose for himself. It was a way even the most loving of sons had—one of the perversities of the scheme of things. Now, Felicia's confession and his own feelings towards her supplied him with a happy solution to this vexed question. Why should not Raine marry Felicia?
He used to argue it out with himself when his intellectual conscience told him he ought to be criticizing Calvin's condemnation of Servetus, and pulverizing the learned Beza. But he soothed it by reflecting that he was pursuing a philosophical method of inquiry. He put it syllogistically. Girls do not fall in love with a man until he has given them good reason. Felicia was in love with Raine. Therefore he had given her good reason. Again, an honourable man does not give a girl such reasons unless he loves her.
Raine was an honourable man. Therefore he loved her. Which was extremely satisfactory; and had it not been for the uneasy suspicion of a fallacy in his first major, he would have written off to Raine there and then. In spite of the fallacy, however, he wove his old man's web of romance, saw Felicia married to Raine, and surrendered his first place with great gladness. For he would be second in the hearts of two, which common arithmetic shows to be equal to first in the heart of one. And when he had definitely settled all this in his mind, he revoked the judgment he had previously passed upon himself, and felt distinctly gratified at his own tact and shrewdness. So the liking that he had conceived for Felicia developed into a tenderer sentiment, of whose existence she gradually became aware, though naturally she remained in ignorance of its cause.
She fought fierce battles with herself during the next few weeks. If she were ever going to see him again, there would have been a fearful joy, a strange mingling of shame and dizzying hope to keep her heart excited. But as he had gone for ever out of her path, her common sense coming to the aid of her ashamedness strove to crush her futile fancies. They took a great deal of killing, however, especially as she found the friendship between Raine's father and herself growing daily stronger. She longed for the day of her release to come, when she could join her uncle and aunt in Bermuda.
Will you come for a walk this beautiful morning, Miss Graves?” asked Frau Schultz.
Felicia had intended to pursue her study of scientific dressmaking under Mrs. Stapleton's tuition, but she acceded graciously enough. She had considered it her duty to like Frau Schultz; yet Frau Schultz remained her pet aversion. Although she still winced under Mme. Popea's innuendoes and Fraulein Klinkhardt's pretty free theories of life, yet she managed to find something likeable in each. But Frau Schultz's red, weather-beaten face, coarse habits and spiteful tongue, jarred upon her. She smiled pleasantly, however, when she came down in her fur-trimmed jacket, hat and muff, and met Frau Schultz on the landing outside the salon.
“It will do you good. You sit too much in the house,” said Frau Schultz magisterially.
It seemed a lovely day when the sunshine was looked at from the windows of a warm room, but outside, thebisewas blowing, and caught the face like a million razor-edges. Felicia put up her muff with a little cry, as soon as they emerged into the open air. “Oh! this dreadfulbise!”
“Ach! It is nothing,” said the other, who prided herself on her pachydermaty. “You English girls would sacrifice everything to your complexions. If your skin cracks you can put on some cold cream. But you will have had your exercise.”
Frau Schultz wore an imitation sealskin jacket, a new crape hat with broad strings tied under her chin, and thick grey woollen gloves. Felicia wondered, with not unpardonable vindictiveness, how many cracks would do her appreciable damage.
“I don't care a little bit about my complexion,” she replied stoutly, resolved, for the honour of her countrywomen, to face a blizzard, if called upon. “I have felt worse east winds than this in England.”
“Ah, your England! It is a wonderful place,” said Frau Schultz.
They walked along by the end of the Jardin Anglais, crossed the bridge and proceeded by the Quai du Mont Blanc in the direction of the Kursaal. Frau Schultz was evidently in an atrabiliar mood. Felicia began to be rather grateful to thebise, which does not favour conversation. But she had not reckoned with Frau Schultz's voice. As soon as it had found the right pitch, by means of desultory remarks, it triumphed over mere wind, and shrieked continuously.
“I asked you to come out because I wanted to talk to you.”
“Perhaps she prefers talking in a hurricane,” thought Felicia in comic desperation. But all she said was,—
“Oh?”
“Yes. You are so young and inexperienced that I have thought it my duty to advise you. Mme. Boccard is too busy. I am a mother. I brought up my Lottchen excellently, and she married last year. I am clearly the only one in the pension who knows what is suitable for a young girl and what isn't.”
Felicia looked at her in some astonishment from under the wind depressed hat brim.
“I am sure I am getting on very well.”
“Ah, you think so. But you are wrong. You cannot touch pitch without stinking.” Frau Schultz's English was apt to fail her now and then.
“Really, I don't understand at all, Frau Schultz.”
“I will make myself quite plain. You have become too great a friend with Mrs. Stapleton. She is the pitch.”
Felicia stopped short, her eyes watering with wind and indignation.
“If you say such things of my friends, Frau Schultz, I shall go home again.”
“I did not hear,” said Frau Schultz coming closer.
Felicia repeated her observation, with an irritated little patting of her foot.
“Ach!” cried the other impatiently, “I come to talk with you out of motherly kindness, for your own good, and you get angry. It is not polite either, as I am so much older than you. I repeat that Mrs. Stapleton is a bad woman. If you do not like to walk with me, I will walk with myself. But I have done my duty. Are you going to stand, Miss Graves, or will you proceed?”
Felicia, in spite of her indignant resentment of Frau Schultz's tone, hesitated for a moment. She had seen too many sordid squabbles in the pension, in consequence of which women would not speak to each other for a week, and asked each other vicariously to pass the salt, not to feel a wholesome horror at the prospect of finding herself involved in one. Hitherto she had escaped. So she checked her outburst of wrath.
“I shall be happy to go on, Frau Schultz, if you will drop the subject,” she said.
“Ach, so!” replied Frau Schultz, enigmatically, and they continued their walk. But after this, conversation was not cordial. At the Kursaal they turned and retraced their steps.
On the Quai du Mont Blanc, where the steamers lay at their moorings, Frau Schultz stopped and looked at the view. Things were vivid in their spring freshness, and stood out clear in the wind-swept air. The larches in Rousseau's Island had put on their green, and so had the clustering limes in the Jardin Anglais, at the other end of the bridge. Above the white, tree-hidden shops and cafés on the Grand Quai, the old town rose sharply defined, around the grim cathedral. Straight in front was the ever sea-blue lake, its fringe of trees on the other side, just hiding the villas at the foot of the hills; and away in the intense distance behind them rose the crest of Mont Blanc, shimmering like frosted silver against the blue sky.
At the sight of the latter, Frau Schultz drew a long, rapt breath.
“Wunderschon!”
She would not trust herself to speak English. She looked at Felicia for responsive enthusiasm. But Felicia was angry, and she could not help feeling a little resentment against Mont Blanc, for affording Frau Schultz pleasurable sensations. But she replied politely that it was very pretty.
“How few of you English have any soul!” said Frau Schultz, as they went on again.
“I think it is that we are not sentimental,” said Felicia.
“I never could quite understand what that 'sentimental' is, that you are all so afraid of.”
“It is making the same fuss about little emotions as one only could about big ones.”
“So you think I am sentimental because I admire the glorious nature?”
“I did not say so, Frau Schultz.”
“Ah, but you thought so. It is the way you all have. Nothing is good but what you put your seal to.”
It was decidedly not a pleasant walk. Frau Schultz took up the parable of the narrow-minded Englishman, and expounded it through thebise. Felicia longed for home. To try to turn the conversation into a calmer channel, she took advantage of a lull, and inquired after Frau Schultz's daughter. The ingenious device succeeded.
Lottchen's early history lasted until they reached their own street. Felicia did not know whether to hate Lottchen for being such a paragon, or to pity her for being so parented. At last she made a rash remark.
“I don't think you gave Frâulein Schultz much chance of doing anything wrong.”
“I was her mother,” replied Frau Schultz with dignity, “and in Germany young girls obey their mothers and respect the mothers of other young girls. If I had spoken to a German girl as I did to you this morning, she would have been grateful.”
“I am very sorry, Frau Schultz, but I don't like to hear my friends spoken ill of.”
“I wanted to save you from those friends. I say again, Mrs. Stapleton is not the person I should let my innocent daughter associate with.”
Felicia fired up. They were within a few yards of the entrance to the pension. “You know nothing whatever against Mrs. Stapleton. I think it very unkind of you.”
“So!Ask her where her husband is.”
“She is a widow.”
Frau Schultz looked at her and broke into derisive laughter. It jarred through the girl as if she had trodden upon an electric eel. She left Frau Schultz at the foot of the staircase, and ran up by herself, tingling with anger and disgust.
Six months ago she would scarcely have divined Frau Schultz's insinuations. Now she did. Her mental range had widened considerably since she had lived in the pension. A less refined nature might have been to some extent coarsened by the experience, but her knowledge only brought her keener repugnance. She was no longer puzzled or frightened, but disgusted—sometimes revolted. It seemed as if she could never get free from the taint. Even Katherine, whose society, since they had grown more intimate, she had sought more and more, and to whom she had gone for comfort and pure breath, when the air had been close with lax talk or unsavoury recrimination—even Katherine was now declared by this vulgar, domineering woman to be infected by what, in the girl's eyes, was the same leprosy. She did not believe it. In other matters Felicia had seen Frau Schultz convicted as a liar. But the imputation seemed like a foul hand laid upon their friendship.
It was a relief when she went into Katherine's room and saw the welcome on the quiet, delicate face that looked up from the needlework. Katherine's room, too, always cheered her. Like Katherine herself, it was different from the others. Mme. Popea's, for instance, struck one with a pervading sense of soiled dressing-gowns; Miss Bunter's was all primness, looking as if made to match the stiff wires of her canary cages. But this sunny little retreat, with all its bedroom suggestions curtained off, and cosy with piano and comfortable easy chairs and rugs, was essentially a lady's room that had assimilated some of the charm of its owner. By the time the gong went fordéjeuner, Felicia was cheered and comforted, and she entered the dining-room, her arm around Katherine's waist, darting a rebellious glance at Frau Schultz.
The days went on uneventfully. The only incident was the return of old Mr. Chetwynd from a month's holiday in Italy, when the whole pension united to do him honour and welcome him. On the day of his arrival Felicia laid a pair of slippers she had worked for him in his room, which delighted the old man so much that he came down to the salon in the evening to offer them for general admiration. But otherwise there was no departure, no arrival all the spring. Every one sighed for the summer and fresh faces. They looked forward with the longing that chrysalises must have for butterflydom. Felicia joined in the general anticipation. She had not forgotten Raine, though he gradually grew to be but a wistful memory. But she felt convinced, with the fervid conviction of twenty, that she could never love any man again.
The whole course of her thoughts was altered on one morning in May. The hour fordejeunerhad been put earlier than usual, for some domestic reason, and the English post arrived during the meal. Mr. Chetwynd glanced over his envelopes, selected one, and courteously asked Katherine and Felicia permission to open it. His eyes sparkled as he read.
“I have had pleasant news,” he said radiantly, laying down the letter and addressing Mme. Boccard at the other end of the table. “My son is coming here for the first part of the Long Vacation.”
There was a general chorus of satisfaction. Tongues were set on the wag. Mme. Popea and Frau Schultz conversed with simultaneous unmodulation. Mme. Boccard explained volubly to Mr. Chetwynd the pleasure he would derive from his son's visit. But all was a distant buzz in Felicia's ears. The announcement was like an electric shock, vivifying the fading love into instant life. Her heart gave a great leap, and things swam before her eyes, causing her to close them for a second. She opened them to a revelation—Katherine's face, which was as white as paper, and Katherine's eyes fixed upon her with an almost terrified intelligence. The exchanged glance told each the other's secret. But all was so sudden that only they two knew.
Katherine recovered her composure instantly, and the reaction brought the blood back into her cheeks. She said with a smile to the old man,—“It will be charming to see Mr. Chetwynd again.”
Felicia envied her. She could not have trusted her voice whatever had been at stake.
When they rose from the table, the old man motioned to Felicia to come with him on to the balcony, which ran continuously past the dining-room and salon windows.
“Is it not good news?”
She hung her head, and faltered out,—
“Yes.”
“Will you still be glad to see Raine again?”
“You know—how can I tell you?”
“My dear child,” he said, laying his hand on hers, as it rested on the iron balustrade, “do you know what I hope Raine is coming for?”
Felicia shook her head.
“Oh, I dare not think it—we must not speak of it. I don't think I shall be able to meet him.”
“Can I help you?” asked the old man, tenderly. “You can tell an old man things without shame that you cannot tell a young one. I have grown very fond of you, my child. To part with you would be a great wrench. And that this other should be has become one of the dearest wishes of my life.”
“Ah! you are good—dear, and good, and kind,” replied the girl; “but—”
“Well, perhaps you can explain a little enigma in Raine's letter!”
She looked up at him quickly. For the first time, her cheek flushed with a ray of hope.
“Can you explain this?” he asked, taking the letter from his pocket, and placing it so that they both could read as they leant over the balcony.
He pointed to a sentence.
“I am coming on my own account as well as yours. This, so that you should not be conceited, and think you are the only magnet in Geneva that draws
Your loving
“Raine.”
“There!” he said, hastily withdrawing it. “Perhaps I ought not to have shown it to you. But Raine never talks idly; and I have ventured to believe that Miss Felicia Graves is the magnet in question. Goodbye, my dear. I think I have committed enough indiscretion for one day.”
She gave his hand a little caressing squeeze, and, when he had gone, remained a long time on the balcony, deep in troubled thoughts. Who was the magnet—she or Katherine?
She strove not to think of it, to busy herself with whatever interests she could find to hand. With this end in view, she took out for a long walk little Miss Bunter, who had been in low spirits for some days. She strove to cheer her. But Miss Bunter folded her drapery of depression all the more closely around her, and poured into Felicia's ears the history of her engagement with the man in Burmah.
“Our marriage has just been put off for another year,” she said. “I thought I had come to the end of my waiting. But he can't afford it yet; and you have no idea how expensive living is there.”
“Oh! I shouldn't have thought so,” said Felicia.
“My dear!” said Miss Bunter, straightening her thin shoulders reproachfully, “Mr. Dotterel says so, and he has been living there fifteen years.”
“It is strange that you have remained so fond of one another all this long time.”
“Do you think so? Oh, no!” replied Miss Bunter, with a convinced shake of her head. “When one loves really, it lasts for ever. But,” she added, sighing, “it has been a long engagement.”
So Felicia parted with Miss Bunter rather more depressed than before. She had thought to get outside the range of such things, but she had been brought only the closer within it.
She could not sleep that night. Many things troubled her, causing her cheek to burn in the darkness—the sudden rekindling within her of feelings against which her young maiden pride had ever revolted; the shame at having revealed them for the second time; the hope suggested by Raine's letter, to which it seemed a joy and a humiliation to cling; the discovery of Katherine's love.
She buried her face in her pillow, trying to hide from herself her self-abasement. So does it happen to many women, when their sudden investiture of womanhood comes to them, with its thoughts and sorrows, and, unaware, they still regard it with the eyes of a young girl.
Then you won't join us?” said the Junior Dean.
“I can't say definitely,” replied Raine Chetwynd, rubbing his meerschaum bowl on his coat-sleeve.
“You had better,” urged the other. “We can make our arrangements fit into yours, if you'll give us timely notice. Put aside a fortnight in July or August, and we will keep all the plums for then. You see we must have dates beforehand, on account of the guides.”
“Quite so,” Raine assented; “and it's very good of you, Rogers. But somehow I shouldn't care to tie myself down. I am not certain how long I may be likely to stay in Switzerland; and I have half promised the Professor to take him away somewhere, if he has had enough of Geneva. No; you fellows make your own arrangements without reference to me. Tell me your dates, and I'll very probably happen upon you and take my chance of what's going.”
The Junior Dean did not press the matter. Chetwynd was not a man to be governed by caprice, and doubtless had excellent reasons for not wishing to make a specific engagement. But Raine thought it necessary to apologize. He got up, and walked to the open window.
“Don't think me a disagreeable beast.”
The Junior Dean, laughed, and came and leant on the sill by his side.
“No one could be disagreeable on a day like this.”
The window gave upon the College Gardens. The lawn was flooded with sunlight, save for the splashes of shade under the two flowering chestnut-trees. The fresh voices of some girls up for Commemoration rose through the quiet afternoon air; the faint tinkle of a piano was heard from some rooms in the grey pile on the left that stood cool in shadow.
The two men stood side by side for a long time without speaking, Raine leaning on his elbow, blowing great puffs of smoke that curled lazily outwards in the stillness, and the Junior Dean with his hands behind his back.
“We ought to be accounted happy,” said the latter, meditatively. “This life of ours—”
“Yes, it approaches Euthanasia sometimes,” replied Raine, allusively—“or it would, if one gave way to it.”
“I can't see that,” rejoined the other. “A life of scholarly ease is not death—the charm of it lies in its perfect mingling of cloistered seclusion with the idyllic. Here, for instance”—with a wave of a delicate hand—“is Arden without its discomforts.”
“I am afraid I am not so 'deep-contemplative' as you,” said Raine, with a smile, “and the idyllic always strikes me as a bit flimsy. I never could lie under a tree and pretend to read Theocritus. I'd sooner read Rabelais over a fire.”
“I think you're ungrateful, Chetwynd. Where, out of Oxford—Cambridge, perhaps—could you get a scene like this? And not the scene alone, but the subtle spirit of it? It seems always to me thought-haunted. We have grown so used to it that we do not appreciate sufficiently the perfect conditions around us for the development of all that is spiritual in us—apart from 'the windy ways of men.'”
“The 'windy ways of men' are very much better for us, if you ask me,” replied Raine. “I mean 'men' really and not technically,” he added, with a smile and a thought of undergraduate vanity.
“Ah, but with this as a haven of refuge—the grey walls, the cool cloisters, the peaceful charm of rooms like these looking out on to these beautiful, untroubled gardens.”
“I don't know,” said Raine. “Loving Oxford as I do, I sometimes breathe more freely out of it. There is too much intellectualmise en scènein all this. If you get it on your mind that you are expected to live up to it, you are rapidly qualifying yourself for the newest undergraduate culture-society, at a college that shall be nameless. Many a man is ruined by it.”
“But, my dear Chetwynd,” said the Junior Dean, “there is a difference between loving 'to walk the studious cloysters pale' and intellectual priggishness.”
“Doubtless. But it isn't everyone who can walk honestly. The danger lies in finding another fellow doing the same. Then the two of you join together and say how beautiful it is, and you call in a third to share the sensation, and you proceed to admire yourselves as being vastly superior meditative persons. Then finally, according to modern instinct, you throw it into a Pale Cloyster Company, Limited, which is Anathema.”
“Switzerland will do you good, Chetwynd,” remarked the Junior Dean quickly. “Particularly as your mind is so disorganized as to misinterpret Milton.”
Raine laughed, stretched himself lazily after the manner of big men, and lounged back on the window-sill, his hands in his pockets.
“I don't care. I'd misinterpret anybody—even you. I've had enough of Oxford for a time. You see I have had a long spell since January. There were Entrance Scholarships and a lot of bursarial work for Evans to be done that kept me up nearly all the Easter vacation. I suppose you are right. I want a change.”
“The mountain air would be better for you than a stuffy town.”
“Oh, good gracious!” laughed Raine, swelling out his deep chest, “I am healthy enough. You don't presume to say I am pale with overwork!”
“No,” said the Junior Dean, mentally contrasting his own spare form with his colleague's muscular development. “You have a constitution like an ox. But you would get better air into your lungs and better rest in your mind.”
“Well, perhaps you are right,” said Raine. “Anyhow, if Geneva gets too hot for me, I can come to you and sit on the top of the Jungfrau with some snow on my head and get cool.”
The Junior Dean, in spite of his sentiment, was a man of the world, and he scented a metaphor in Raine's speech. He glanced at him keenly through hispince-nez. Whereupon Raine burst out laughing and took him by the arm.
“Look here, are you going to put in an appearance at the St. John's garden-party?”
“Yes.”
“Well, time is getting on. Let us go.”
And on their way thither down the Broad, they discussed the Masonic Ball, the results of the Schools, the prospects of the cricket match, and kindred subjects, such as are dear to the hearts of dons in summer time.
The first person that Raine met at the Garden Party was his cousin, Mrs. Monteith. She skilfully disposed of a couple of pretty nieces she was chaperoning to some passing undergraduates, and walked up and down the lawn by his side.
She was a small, pretty, keen-faced woman, some two or three years his senior. Once upon a time she had fostered a conviction that Raine and herself had been born for one another, and had sought to share his soul's secrets. As long as she depended upon his initiative, all went well; but one day, having forced open a scrupulously locked apartment, she recoiled in pained surprise. Whereupon she decided that she had mistaken the intentions of the Creator, and forthwith married Dr. Monteith, whose soul's secrets were as neatly docketed and catalogued as the slips of his unfinished Homeric Lexicon. But she always claimed a vested interest in Raine's welfare, which he, in a laughing, contented way, was pleased to allow.
“So you're off to Switzerland,” she said. “What are you going to do there, besides seeing Uncle Louis?”
“Rest,” he replied. “Live in a pension and rest.”
“You'll find it dismally uninteresting. How long are you going to stay there?”
“Possibly most of the Long.”
Mrs. Monteith opened her eyes and stopped twirling her parasol.
“My dear Raine! In Geneva?”
“My dear Nora, I really don't see anything in that to create such surprise. I've just had Rogers expressing himself on the subject. Why shouldn't I live in Geneva? What objection have you?”
“If you talk to me in that vehement way you will make people fancy you are declaring a hopeless passion for me.”
“Let them,” said Raine, “they won't be greater fools than I am.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Oh, don't be alarmed. I am not going to declare myself. I wonder whether you would laugh at me, if I told you something.”
“It would depend whether it were funny or not.”
“That would be a matter of opinion,” he replied with a smile.
“Well, first let me know in what capacity I am to listen to it.”
“As guide, philosopher, and friend,” he said. “Let us get out of the way of these people. There are the Kennets bearing down upon us.”
They found a garden seat in a secluded corner under a tree, and sat down. Mrs. Monteith laid her gloved fingers on his arm.
“Don't tell me it's about a woman, please.”
“How did you know it's about a woman?”
“My dear boy, you wouldn't drag me to this sequestered wilderness if it were about a man! Of course it's a woman. You have it written all over your face. Well?”
“If you are not sympathetic I shan't tell you.”
“Oh, Raine!”
She moved a little nearer to him, and settled her skirts. When a woman settles her skirts by a man's side it impresses him with a sense of confidential relations.
“Nora,” he said, “when a man doesn't know whether he is in love or not, what is the best thing he can do?”
“The best thing is to make up his mind that he isn't. The next best is to find out.”
“Then I am going to do the next best thing. I am going to Geneva to find out.”
“And how long have you been like this?”
“Since January.”
“Why didn't you tell me before?”
“Because I did not relish telling it to myself. Now I have acknowledged it, I have been pulling the petals off the marguerite, in a kind of inverse way, for months, and the pastime has palled. The dear old man thinks I am going solely for his sake, and I feel rather a humbug. But of course—well—”
“Most of us are.”
“What?”
“Humbugs,” replied the lady sweetly. “Come, honour bright. Don't you know whether you are in love or not?”
“No.”
“Would you like to be?”
“I don't quite know. That's the irritating part about it.”
“Oh, I see! Then it's a question of the lady's desirability. Oh, Raine, I know these pensions. I hope it isn't a Polish countess with two poodles and a past. Tell me, what is she like?”
“Well, to tell you the truth,” he replied, with a strange conjuncture of a humorous twinkle in his eyes and a deprecatory smile, “it is impossible to say.”
“Why?”
“Because she isn't one, but two.”
“Two what?”
“Two individuals.”
“And you don't know which one to fall in love with?”
Raine nodded, lounging with arms extended along the back of the seat.
Mrs. Monteith looked at him in silence for a few moments, and then broke into rippling laughter.
“This is delicious.3098like the warrior in Anacreon!”
“Don't quote, Nora,” said Raine. “It is one of your bad habits. You are trying enough with your list of first lines of Horace; but you know nothing at all about Anacreon.”
“I do!” she cried, wheeling round to face him. “Joshua was correcting the proofs of his edition during our honeymoon. I used to make him translate them—it was a way of getting him to make love to me. There! Now I'll repeat it:3099
“Oh, my dear Raine, it is too delicious! You, of all people in the world!”
“Then your verdict is that I am supremely ridiculous?”
“I am afraid I must say it strikes me in that light.”
“Thanks,” said Raine serenely. “That was what I was trying to get at. I have been jesting a little, but there is a substratum of truth in my confession. You confirm me in my own opinion—I am supremely ridiculous. I like to make certain of things. It is so futile to have this complicated state of mind—I hate it.”
“Do you?” said Mrs. Monteith. “How different from a woman; there is nothing she enjoys more.”
After Raine had taken her back to her charges, he remained to exchange a few civilities with the St. John's people and their wives, and then strolled back to his own college. He mounted his staircase, with a smile on his lips, recalling his conversation with his cousin. How far had he been in earnest? He could scarcely tell. Certainly both Katherine and Felicia had attracted him during his Christmas visit. He had been thrown into more intimate contact with them than he usually was with women. Perhaps that was the reason that they stood out distinct against the half-known feminine group whom he was accustomed to meet at the crowded afternoon receptions to which Oxford society is addicted. Perhaps, too, the fact of his going from Oxford, where men are a glut in the market, to the Pension Boccard, where they are at an extravagant premium, had something to do with it. Some unsuspected index in his robust organization was sensitive to the sudden leap in values. Whatever was the reason, he retained a vivid impression of the two personalities, and, as he had written to his father—in the same half-jesting strain as he had talked with his cousin—he found himself bound to admit that filial duty was not the only magnet that attracted him to Geneva. As for his disinclination to bind himself to a definite mountaineering engagement with Rogers and his party, he was glad of these nebulous fancies as affording him a conscientious reason. The Junior Dean was an excellent fellow and an Alpine enthusiast, but he was apt to be academic, even on the top of the Jungfrau.
These considerations were running lightly through his mind as he sat down to his desk to finish off some tutorial work before dinner, in the little inner room which he made his sanctuary, whither undergraduates only penetrated for strictly business purposes. The outer keeping-room was furnished with taste and comfort for the general eye, but here Raine kept such things as were nearly connected with his own life. As he wrote, he idly took up an ivory paper-knife in his left hand, and pressed it against his cheek.
He paused to think, looked mechanically at the paper-knife, and then lost himself in a day-dream. For the bit of ivory had taken him back many years—to the days when he had just entered on his manhood.
He started, threw down his pen, and leant back in his chair, a shadow of earnestness over his face.
“That was the boy,” he said, half aloud. “What would it be for the man? If this foolishness is serious—as the other—”
And, after a few seconds, he clapped both hands down on the leather arms of his chair.
“Itisboth equally—it must be—I'll swear that it is! And so there's nothing in it.”
He pushed aside his unfinished schedule, and took a sheet of note-paper from the stationery-case.
“My dear Nora,” he wrote, “I have been thinking you may have misunderstood my rubbish this afternoon. So don't think I propose anything so idiotic as a search for a wife. Remember there are two, and there is safety in numbers. If you will go over to Geneva and make a third attraction, you may be absolutely unconcerned as to the safety of
“Your affectionate cousin,
“Raine Chetwynd.”
When he had tossed the letter into the tray for the next post, he felt relieved, and went on with his work.
But the next morning he received a note by hand from Mrs. Monteith, which he tore up wrathfully into little pieces and threw into the waste-paper basket.
It ran:—
“My dear Raine,—Men are the funniest creatures! I laughed over your letter till I cried.
“Your affectionate cousin,
“Nora Monteith.”
Which shows how a woman can know your mind from a sample, when you yourself are in doubt with the whole piece before you.