VI

VI

Themidday post had come while Miss Page and the doctor talked in the garden.

As she passed through the hall after the motor-car had disappeared, Anne found her letters lying upon the table.

She turned them over, and lighted with satisfaction upon one with a foreign postmark.

Her correspondence with François Fontenelle—a correspondence of fifteen years’ duration—had never ceased to be a pleasure to her.

She picked up his letter, and went through the inner hall into the garden, to the seat under the beech tree.

Several things on the first page made her laugh. François was evidently in a gay mood when he wrote. He had more work with portraits than he could get through. He described his sitters with the light raillery he managed so well, presenting them to his reader with a felicity of phrase, a touch as skilful and clever as she well knew the portraits themselves must possess.

It was better to be François Fontenelle’s friend than his enemy, Miss Page reflected, and smiled to remember the rash women who now crowded to his studio, anxious to be painted by the popular if distinguished artist.

She guessed how many of them winced in secret at the result, and marvelled that fashion, as well as religion, should exact its willing martyrs.

“I hear,” he said towards the end of the letter, “that I’m likely to renew my acquaintance with your little friend, Mrs. Dakin. By a strange chance, the wife of a friend of mine, Louis Didier, knew her as a school-girl—went to school with her, I think; and she has been asked to visit them. Louis Didier is a good fellow—an architect. No. You never met him. I have known him myself only two or three years. He belongs to the younger generation. C’est un bon garçon, though his work is mediocre enough. I don’t like his wife. I suspect her of being what you in England call a cat, though to me she is amiable enough. I may possibly have struck terror into her feline heart. When you are in Rome I want you to go again to the Farnesina Palace, and look at the Correggio. You know the one I mean?” The letter ended with talk about pictures.

Anne read it to the last word, and thensat with it still unfolded in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the drooping branches of the beech under which she sat.

Its leaves were already yellow, and it rose like a fountain of gold towards the quiet September sky. All round the eaves of the house the swallows were skimming and crying, in the unrest of an imminent parting, and the hazy sunshine wrapped the garden in a dream of peace.

Anne too, sat dreaming. Ever since the visit of her friend, earlier in the summer, her thoughts had developed a tendency to wander back over the years before their meeting.

To-day it was of her first five years at Fairholme Court that she was thinking.

She remembered driving up to the house that was now her home.

She remembered walking through the hall into the drawing-room, distressfully conscious, even through her shyness, of the desecrated stateliness of a dwelling meant for beauty.

True, she would not in those days have known with what to replace the gaudy Axminster carpet in the hall, nor the arsenic green curtains at the drawing-room windows. But little as she had seen, little as she then knew of material loveliness, the right instinct she possessed for form and colour wasoutraged at every turn by the indications at once trivial and ponderous of Mid-Victorian taste.

As she entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Burbage rose from the sofa on which she had been lying, a woollen rug of rainbow hues thrown across her feet.

She was a little old woman with grey, corkscrew curls hanging in bunches over her ears, keen eyes, and a mouth which combined shrewdness and suspicion.

She looked Anne up and down with a penetrating glance.

“I didn’t think you would have grown so tall,” she remarked. “You were a little creature when I last saw you. Ring for tea, my dear, and then I dare say you would like to go to your room. Parker will show you. Make yourself at home, and amuse yourself in your own way, if you can find anything to do in this dull place. I don’t want you to think you need trouble about running after me, unless I ask for you. I hate fuss. There will be time enough for that when I get worse.”

The words struck the keynote of the future relationship between the two women.

Even at that time Anne’s benefactress was a semi-invalid who did not rise till noon, and usually spent the rest of the day on the sofa,knitting interminably. Her illness, not at first severe, made any but the slightest attention unnecessary. She was a woman a little eccentric, often difficult in temper, but never exacting in trifles.

Her great abhorrence was what she called “fuss” of any sort, and as she frequently preferred to be alone, she left Anne for the most part free.

Her duties gradually became those of general supervision of the household, which composed as it was of elderly well-trained servants, proved no arduous task.

Few callers came to the house. There was never anything in the nature of entertainment at Fairholme Court. The days went on. Monotonously, peacefully, spring glided into summer, summer to autumn; the winters came and went.

A good understanding, a quiet comradeship was gradually established between the old woman and her companion, who moved so gently, whose voice was so soothing, who was always at hand when she happened to be wanted—never in the way when her presence was not required.

Anne practically led her own isolated life. Too shy to make any advances, the people of her own grade in the village, from the outset,ignored the companion of a woman who had never been popular. She was just a quiet, harmless creature, lady-like certainly, but very dull, whom they occasionally pitied for being shut up with “that disagreeable Mrs. Burbage.”

Anne found the bedroom she had loved as a child, now her own, almost unchanged. The rosebuds on the wall were faded certainly, but the dimity valance at the window, the white curtains to the bed were fresh and spotless, and the “spindly” furniture remained. The white roses had grown much taller. They clambered round the window now, and far above her head, looked down at her as she opened it in the morning.

The library was also unaltered, and in this room, and in the garden, Anne found all the joy of her life.

She was permitted to do what she liked with the garden, and, under the direction of the old gardener, who rejoiced to find some one who loved the work, and, delighted in its results, Anne planned and planted and laid the foundation for the beauty that now surrounded her. The hours in the open air restored her health. Insensibly, she grew strong and straight. Her always graceful figure developed, and though it was marredby the ill-cut gowns of the village dressmaker, she carried it superbly.

Through the long winter days, the library was her solace and delight. At first, imperfectly educated as she was, unused to reading, owing to lack of time and lack of opportunity, she was bewildered by the numberless books through which she was free to range.

But gradually she found her way; made a path for herself, and followed it to find it leading her to distant prospects. Mr. Burbage, a gentle and scholarly recluse with a catholic taste in literature, had left a fine and widely representative library behind him, containing not only the masterpieces of French as well as English prose and poetry, but many curious and rare volumes dealing with the less frequented roads of mental travel.

Anne found history, biography, philosophy, in sufficient quantities to last her for a lifetime.

She found curious memoirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as books on magic, on alchemy, on all the strange and recondite studies which at various periods have exercised human thought. French literature was well represented, and impelled by interest and curiosity, Anne began to recallthe little of the language she had learnt with her governess as a child. In this endeavour she unexpectedly found a ready teacher in Mrs. Burbage, who, educated in a French convent up to the time of her marriage, spoke the language fluently, and liked to speak it. Naturally gifted as a linguist, Anne learnt quickly, and often from choice, as time went on, the two women spoke French together, rather than English.

But it was to the English poets that Anne most often returned. Poetry suited her nature. It was the form of art which to her, most fully expressed the heights and depths, the beauty and the terror, the haunting melancholy, the fear, the inexpressible longings, the regrets, the sadness, the innocent delights of life, which, in all its complexity, she had begun to recognize through the world of books.

In life, men went down to the sea in ships, and did business in great waters. In life, there had been beautiful cities, in which a many-coloured crowd of citizens and soldiers, of artists and thinkers, had jostled and fought, and painted their thoughts in churches, and on palace walls; built them into soaring towers, and mighty cathedrals; woven them into immortal books, and lived them in schemes for the regeneration of the world. In life, asAnne had come to know it through her reading, there had been, and still were, fierce passions of love and hate, swaying men and women as the trees of a forest are swayed by a rushing wind. Passions which had given birth to the great stories of the world—the stories of Helen of Troy, of Abelard and Heloise, of Launcelot and Guinevere, of Romeo and Juliet. In life, running like a dark mysterious stream, among the simpler sensations, the more elemental passions of humanity, there had been strange terrors, haunting curiosities, insatiable longings for the unattainable, the unknowable, the unrealized—the desire of the moth for the star.

In life too, there had always existed the fresh unspoiled delight in Nature’s loveliness; in the charming natural embroidery of earth’s garment. Delight in the simple things out of which, as her favourite Herrick told her, he rejoiced to make his songs.

“I sing of Books, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers;Of April, May, of June, and July flowers——”

“I sing of Books, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers;Of April, May, of June, and July flowers——”

“I sing of Books, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers;Of April, May, of June, and July flowers——”

“I sing of Books, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers;

Of April, May, of June, and July flowers——”

In poetry, as in a mirror, Anne found the result of all her reading reflected and transfigured.

It summed up for her all that she had learnt from other books, of love and life, and hope of immortality.

She began with Chaucer, and found him sweet and fresh and hardy as the hawthorn blossom with which he powders his English meadows. She found in him all the simple and tender emotions which have existed in the heart of man since he became human. The love of Custance for her child delighted her.

“Pees litel sone, I wol do thee no harm:With that hire couverchief of hire hed she braid,And over his litel eyen she it laid.O litel child, alas! what is thy giltThat never wroughtest sinne as yet parde?”

“Pees litel sone, I wol do thee no harm:With that hire couverchief of hire hed she braid,And over his litel eyen she it laid.O litel child, alas! what is thy giltThat never wroughtest sinne as yet parde?”

“Pees litel sone, I wol do thee no harm:With that hire couverchief of hire hed she braid,And over his litel eyen she it laid.O litel child, alas! what is thy giltThat never wroughtest sinne as yet parde?”

“Pees litel sone, I wol do thee no harm:

With that hire couverchief of hire hed she braid,

And over his litel eyen she it laid.

O litel child, alas! what is thy gilt

That never wroughtest sinne as yet parde?”

The gentle, natural words, written five hundred years ago, went to her heart. She loved the gaiety, the bustle, the gossip, the sense of colour and vitality in that long procession which wound from the Tabard Inn, along the white roads full of sunshine, which led to Canterbury.

She read the ballads which like vivid lightning flashes illumine the darkness of the Middle Ages, and show the mainsprings of human action to be ever the old mainsprings of love and hate.

She came to the Elizabethan poets—to the period when England had become “a nest of singing birds.” She found Spenser’s glorious love-song, and the wonderful cry inwhich Marlowe’s Faust links one great love-story to another.

“Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burnt the topless towers of Ilium?Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss——”

“Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burnt the topless towers of Ilium?Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss——”

“Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burnt the topless towers of Ilium?Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss——”

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss——”

She learnt to know so well that they haunted her thoughts like music, the sonnets of Shakespeare, and the lyrics of all the “singing birds,” Lodge and Peele and Nash, Ben Jonson and Campion, who, a musician in every sense of the word, framed his “Ayres for one voyce with the Lute or Violl,” so as “to couple words and notes lovingly together.” She came to Milton, and the lighter poets of the Restoration, of whom her love was given chiefly to Herrick. The poets of comparatively modern times followed, and led her in due time to Keats and Shelley, who revealed to her the modern note of unrest, and the troubling effect on the human spirit, of beauty, whether revealed as to Keats in the material world, or as to Shelley in the intangible world of ideas. With these two poets, the library, formed in her old friend’s youth, paused abruptly in its representations of English poetry.

Anne found no volume of Browning, nor of Tennyson, on the shelves.

In her friend’s day they were young,untried men, as in a still greater degree, were Swinburne, Morris, and Meredith.

But without them, Anne, like Keats, had travelled in the realms of gold, and the new planet that swam into her ken was the very world in which for thirty years she had lived blind and a prisoner, ignorant of its beauty, deaf to its calling voices.

It was of her five years of solitary reading that Anne was thinking as she sat in the September sunshine with François’s letter open on her lap.

She had read, she had thought. Imaginatively, she had entered into the life of the great world outside her country home.

But of actual individual experience of one personal heart-beat, known to thousands of men and women past and present, she was as ignorant at thirty-five as she had been all through her quiet existence.

Like the Lady of Shalott, she sat weaving her tapestry of dreams before a magic mirror in which the pageant of the world was nothing but a reflection; a shadow-dance of figures, loving, hating, struggling; pursuing brave adventures, triumphing or defeated, hopeful or despairing.

Miss Page folded her letter, and replaced it slowly in its envelope.

It was the day for her class of village children, whom she taught to sew, and to whom, while they wrestled with long seams, she read fairy tales.

There was tea in the garden afterwards, and she had forgotten to tell Burks to put out the strawberry jam.

She rose, and went into the house to repair the omission.

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