VII
“Weshall have a very dull winter,” complained Mrs. Carfax, “with so many of you away. Sylvia and Mrs. Dakin have gone already, and now you are going to desert us. We shall feel quite lost.”
It was a damp afternoon in mid-October, and the wood-fire in Miss Page’s drawing-room glowed cheerfully.
The tea-table was drawn up near its blaze, and Mrs. Carfax leant back comfortably in the corner of the sofa, sipping her tea and eating hot cakes appreciatively.
“So you’re going to Rome?” she continued. “We hoped as you didn’t go away last year you had become reconciled to an English winter.”
“I didn’t mean to go,” confessed Anne. “I was very happy here last year. But somehow this autumn I have begun to long for more sunshine. I know we’ve had a lovely summer, and I ought to be content, but the rain of the last fortnight has decided me.”
She glanced with a little shiver towards the drenched garden. The rain had been too persistent to make much sweeping of leaves practicable, and the grass was strewn with them, yellow, battered and rotting.
“Tell me about Sylvia!” she inquired. “I heard from her the other day, but I dare say you have later news. She seems very happy.”
“Oh, she writes in excellent spirits, as of course she would, now she’s got her own way.”
Mrs. Carfax’s expression was one of rather irritable displeasure, and Anne’s inward reflections turned on that deplorable yet possibly comprehensible antagonism which so frequently exists between children and parents; the tie of blood so binding, yet so provocative of mutual adverse criticism, involuntary irritation and impatience.
“Do you like the boarding-house?” she asked.
“Oh yes. Very nice. Her father and I took her there last week, you know. I couldn’t be easy till I’d seen what sort of place she was in. And men are no good at that sort of thing.” She helped herself to another tea-cake.
“Oh yes,” she repeated, “it’s a very comfortable house; on the Embankment, I thinkyou call it. At any rate, it’s quite close to the school where she takes her lessons. Sylvia shares a sitting-room with Susie Villiers, one of her school-fellows who is studying at the Slade, is it? I always forget the names of these places. It’s a house built on purpose for students, I understand.Mostcomfortable. Hot and cold water on every floor, and bathrooms, and a beautiful dining-room. To my mind it’s alltooluxurious. Everything is done nowadays, it seems to me, to tempt young people from their homes.”
Mrs. Carfax gave an exasperated sigh.
“But Sylvia has a great gift, dear Mrs. Carfax,” pleaded Anne. “It isn’t as though she leaves home to do nothing.”
“That’s what her father says now. He never used to. He always upheld me in maintaining that the place of the eldest daughter is at home. I don’t know what you could have said to change him so, Miss Page, but ever since he talked to you about Sylvia, his cry is that it’s sinful not to use the gifts with which God has endowed us. Men are so inconsistent; and if they’re clergymen they always seem able to quote some text to annoy you. I don’t mean to be profane, but sometimes I have found the Bible most trying.”
Mrs. Carfax sighed again.
“She has a lovely voice. You will be proud of her one day,” declared Miss Page, with her disarming smile.
“But what is she going to do with it? I would never consent to a child of mine singing in public, with her name in newspapers, and on placards and all that! It would break my heart.”
“Still you needn’t think of the future yet, need you? She has years of training before her.”
“But if she’s not going to do anything with it, what a waste of money!” exclaimed Mrs. Carfax, tragically. “I think it’s much better for girls not to have gifts,” she added.
Miss Page was rather disposed to consider that her guest had uttered a great truth.
Her reply however, was non-committal.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But if theydopossess them don’t you agree with Mr. Carfax that it’s right to cultivate them? A gift of any sort is such a worrying thing,” she added persuasively. “And if it’s allowed to rust, it chiefly worries its possessor. Now that she’s doing what she was born to do, Sylvia will be contented. Idon’tthink it’s just because she’s getting her own way that she’s happy. It’s deeper than that. She’s satisfied because she’s fulfilling a need of her nature for whichshe’s no more responsible than she is for the colour of her very pretty eyes.”
Anne’s voice was so gentle, her smile so irresistible, that Mrs. Carfax was visibly softened.
“At any rate I’m glad it’s not art she’s got a taste for,” she conceded.
To Mrs. Carfax, painting, to the exclusion of all the other activities of the Muses, was art, as Miss Page understood.
“You wouldn’t like her to paint?”
“Oh landscapes and flowers, and that sort of thing is all right. A very nice amusement. I’ve got lots of water-colour sketches I did as a girl, and hand-painted screens, and sofa cushions too. But nowadays art is such a shocking thing, isn’t it? I hear that Susie Villiers draws from the nude, as they call it. To me, it’s a perfectly disgusting idea. And they drawmen, as well as women. Imagine a young girl having the boldness to draw a man without his clothes!”
“Do have some of this toast before it gets cold,” urged Anne. “Oh! while I think of it I wish you would tell me how to make that delicious shortbread I tasted the last time I came to you.”
Mrs. Carfax, adroitly switched off the topic of art as she understood it, was on firm groundnow that culinary operations held the conversational field.
She gave minute directions to which her friend listened with flattering attention.
“I must write that down before I forget it,” said Anne, opening a bureau to take from it her book of recipes.
“How beautifully orderly you are!” exclaimed her guest, glancing with admiration at the packets of papers tied with ribbon, the piles of little books which filled the pigeonholes. “What a pity you never married. You would have madesucha good wife. The wives of to-day are shocking housekeepers. Look at that flighty little Mrs. Dakin! The doctor, poor man, must suffer a good deal. I doubt whether he ever gets a decent meal. Don’t you think it’s very extraordinary of him to let her go away for such a long visit as she proposes to make? I think that kind of thing is a mistake, you know.”
Launched upon the stream of gossip for which she possessed a considerable weakness, Mrs. Carfax shook her head portentously.
“He thinks it will be good for her health. She’s not very strong, is she? And this place doesn’t suit her in the winter.”
“Oh! I don’t think there’s much the matter with her health,” answered Mrs. Carfax witha touch of scorn. “She hasn’t anything else to think of. She hasn’t enough to do, that’s what’s the matter with her. One or two children would soon make her forget her ailments. Poor Dr. Dakin! Idon’tthink she’s very nice to him, do you? I often pity him.”
“But I’m quite sure they’re devoted to one another,” began Miss Page, hailing with relief the entrance of the Vicar, who had called to fetch his wife, and to bid their hostess farewell.
“Well, dear lady!” he exclaimed in his hearty voice. “So you’re off to the land of perpetual sunshine to-morrow. Lucky woman! And Rome too, a city which I have always had a great desire to visit. Most interesting. Most interesting. But you leave us desolate.”
“How kind of you to come and say good-bye! My farewells this week have made me quite sad,” declared Anne. “I hate last days.”
“We shall all miss you terribly. You leave a heart-broken community behind you,” said the Vicar. “Poor Dakin is already bemoaning his fate, bereft of his wife and of you. It’s a good thing Sylvia isn’t here, or we should have had nothing but lamentations till the spring.”
“You all spoil me,” Anne said in a moved voice. “We have been talking about Sylvia,”she went on rather hurriedly. “I’m so glad she’s happy.”
“Best thing for her. Quite the right thing!” declared the Vicar emphatically. “I’m always telling my wife that gifts are ours as a sacred trust. Moreover, when the girl comes back for the holidays and so on, she will appreciate her home, and we shall all get on much better in consequence. Girls as well as boys must find their own paths, and make their own lives. To thwart them only leads to unnecessary friction, and is after all unjust. Every girl should have her chance.”
If Miss Page smiled in secret to find the ideas she had implanted in the Vicar’s mind so well assimilated that they re-appeared in the form of original conviction, no trace of her amusement was visible.
“I’m sure Mrs. Carfax will find that you’re right,” was her remark, as she smiled at the lady in question.
Mrs. Carfax kissed her affectionately. “Good-bye. I’m sure we’re preventing you from looking after your packing,” she said.
“Good-bye,” echoed her husband, enclosing Anne’s frail hand in his vigorous clasp. “Don’t let Sylvia bother you with too many letters. I am convinced that I’ve done the right thing by the child in sticking to my own ideas.”
He smiled the manly smile of self-confidence and wisdom denied to women, and Miss Page, following her visitors to the hall-door, waved to them as they went down the drive together.
The amusement that she need no longer repress, was in her eyes, as she went upstairs to her room; the gentle tolerant amusement of a woman old enough to look at life with kindly sympathy for its absurdities, and that charity without which the spectacle has a tendency to move to a mirth as bitter and more cruel than anger.
She found Burks on her knees before a trunk, still engaged in packing.
“That will do, Burks. I’ll finish it myself,” she said. “You go down and get your tea.”
After the maid had left, Anne opened the door which led from her bedroom into her sitting-room, and examined the shelves with the idea of choosing one or two favourite books to take with her on her journey.
The books in this room were chiefly modern, supplementing the library downstairs.
She chose one or two French novels, and a little volume of Herrick, which had found its way to the shelves mostly devoted to French literature. Then she returned to the bedroom,which was already bright with lamp and firelight.
She hesitated a moment, then went to the bureau, from which several months before she had taken her old journal.
This time she sought for, and found another book. After adjusting the spring, and locking the writing part of the piece of furniture, she thrust this volume, without looking at it, deep into her nearly filled trunk.