"Then marry me," the musician was saying, half-an-hour later. It had not struck him before that she might not possibly want to do so.
"But I have already told you that I do not love you," persisted Lady Joan, who was enjoying herself immensely.
"What does that matter? It will come in time, it is sure to come. Besides, I love you; is not that enough?"
It would have been, to most of his lady friends; but Lady Joan only caught the humor of his words, and laughed derisively.
"You think you are going to put me off by pretending to laugh," he went on patiently; this was to show his superior knowledge of her character; "but the truth is that you dare not be serious, Lady Joan; why don't you give in to your real feelings and stop making a joke of life just this once?"
"I make a joke of life?" she cried; she was half in earnest now; "how is that possible unless one has realized its sadness? You enthusiasts who have never laughed at anything, and are always talking about taking life seriously, you have never gone deep enough to see that itisserious. If you had, you would only laugh for the rest of your life, because—it would be impossible after you had once realizedthatto keep serious and live."
For the first time in his life the musician did not want to argue.
"Don't you see that I love you as I have never loved any one before, as I could never love any one again?" he said humbly.
"How am I to believe that?" she retorted sharply, and he flushed slightly.
"Is that quite fair of you? Have I not been always perfectly open with you? I told you the story of my marriage the first time I ever met you, and I have told you to-day about poor little No—about Miss Bisley. Could any man do more?"
"No," she said carelessly, "but you might very well have done less,—I mean, the whole town told me about Miss Bisley directly I came home from abroad, though, except for the name, the two accounts do not tally in the least. But then, nothing in Relton shrinks in the washing."
The musician flinched, and tried another tactic.
"Then I suppose you merely think I am a brute who is taking advantage of your loneliness to profess an affection for you which he does not feel? A man has to pay a big penalty for your friendship, Lady Joan."
She would not have let him see it for the world, but she felt she had gone a little too far, and a rapid change came over her mood.
"It is not that; I am afraid of myself, I think," she said with a sigh, and she looked down at his boots.
His face lighted up.
"Then—" he began eagerly; but she put up her hand with a gesture of warning.
"No, no, you mistake me; I do not believe that it is in me to love anybody—for long. My friends say it is because I have never known a mother's love; but if my parents had lived they would simply have made me fight with them through their tiresome affection for me. Now, I know what you are going to say—that I am speaking with the spirit of the age, or some of that twaddle I have heard before. If I am, it is you who have taught it me, for I don't allow anybody else to mention the age to me; I am sick of it and the people who make their living out of abusing it. I could never love you, or anybody. That's the truth, and—don't you believe me?"
"Not quite," he said, and looked at her in an unpleasantly direct way.
"Besides," she said, rather awkwardly, catching at another loophole of escape, "there is this Norah Bisley: how am I to know that she will not come back?"
He shook his head, and she smiled at the guilelessness of his reply.
"I don't think it is possible. You see, I wrote three times—"
"The letters may have gone astray."
"The third one I sent by hand, and it was returned to me unopened. I can see now that it is only what I might have expected; she did not have a thought apart from her father, and her father never liked me well enough to look on me in the light of a son-in-law. He took her away directly he suspected our liking for one another, and when they got together and away from me he must have persuaded her to give me up. I wrote to him and I wrote to her, but, as you know, with no avail. She was a lovable little thing, spoiled by her weakness of will, poor little Norah!"
"Poor little Norah!" she echoed half mockingly, and crumbled some mortar off the broken wall and watched it splash into the water below. She was wondering how it was that she had been more fascinated in half-an-hour by handsome, empty-headed Jack Raleigh than she had been in three long years by this large-hearted musician, with the high forehead and the cavernous eyes, with his passion for metaphysics and Socialism, and his ardent desires to reform society and the world in his own lifetime. Yet she found him interesting sometimes, generally when he was not there and she was thinking about him, and she wondered again why he did not interest her more, and whether she would not have tumbled into a commonplace engagement with him if her parents had been alive and he had been asked to dine at the Court, like any ordinary young man, and she had been forbidden, like any ordinary young woman, to come down to the inn and play with his child. But she had no parents to impose conventionality upon her, and she had gloried in her liberty for twenty-five years, and she was loth to give it up now for the sake of a man who, she felt sure, would bore her in a week with his desperate enthusiasms, and whom she was not even sure that she loved. No, she could not marry him, she felt sure, and she looked up to say so, and met his restless eyes watching her with such a boy's eagerness that she again went off on a side issue.
"I am not livable with, that is the truth," she said rather weakly, and crumbled some more mortar off the wall, and wished he would not look at her so gloomily. He was thinking that the courtship was not going as smoothly as he expected it would, and beginning dimly to understand that for the only time in his experience he was humbling himself before a woman who was not going to fall a victim to his persuasions; and the discovery did not make him more eloquent nor less humble, though it tended to make him look at the question still more blindly from his own point of view, and he told himself again, obstinately, that he could not live without her for his wife.
"Lady Joan," he said suddenly, "is it me that you dislike, or marriage?"
"Both," she said, and laughed heartily, and became swiftly grave again, and came up to him and took both his hands, an unwonted action that brought the color to his cheeks; "don't you see, my dear friend, that if we were to marry I should plague your life out, and you would never write another note of music, and Mrs. Reginald Routh and all the others would point at me with invective? And you would bore me to the verge of extinction in a month! Of course if you didn't like me it might work better, because then I should have to make you fall in love with me, and that would prevent it from being such a deadly dull affair. Or if I hated you I might do it, because then we could live our separate lives, and there would be nothing to spoil. Don't you see how marriage always spoils things? It is never romantic; it is expedient, that's all. It does for people who are not fond of one another, or for people who do not feel such things; but for two people who are in love, and one of them a hypersensitive musician—bah! it would be madness! Not that I am in love, of course."
He chose to ignore the feminine way in which she concluded, and as she dropped his hands and swung away from him, he found himself feeling for his tobacco pouch, and he reflected that the courtship was not much more romantic than the married life she pictured.
"Then you believe in perpetual engagements?" he asked, for the sake of saying something.
"Not a bit of it," she replied gayly, leaning over the broken wall and watching the creatures in the water below; "engagements simply mean all the conventional drawbacks without the moral conveniences. No, there is only one way out of it, and that won't work when you come to examine it."
"And what is that?" he asked, like a man, rashly.
"To marry some one who doesn't matter, and be in love with some one else," she replied carelessly, and kept her face averted.
He rolled up his cigarette and lighted it, and wondered whether women ever discussed among themselves these subjects which they had no diffidence in approaching with men.
"No, it would hardly work, I am afraid," he said slowly. "Lady Joan, it is an absurdly old-fashioned thing to say, but do you know I fancy, after all, that marriage is the only way out of it?"
She turned round and faced him with hot cheeks and angry eyes.
"I think you are merely abusing your privilege as my friend," she cried; "I am not going to stay here for you to draw me out and then—then laugh at me. It is time we closed this—this absurd interview, and I wish—I wish I had known you were here before I started for my walk. Do you suppose thatIwould say anything toyouthat the whole world might not hear?"
He certainly did suppose so from quite recent experience, but he only apologized humbly for having his meaning mistaken, and allowed her to retrace her steps across the field without uttering any commonplace about meeting again as friends. Perhaps he knew quite well that when they did meet again she would be by far the most self-possessed of the two.
The musician walked back to the inn and tried to persuade himself that he was a disappointed man.
"My engagements never do seem to go right," he thought dejectedly, as he leaned out of the parlor window and looked vaguely among the fruit-trees. The door was pushed open from without, and a rush of red sunshine and childish footsteps came into the room.
"Here I are, daddy! Where is you, daddy? I've been a naughty boy,wellynaughty Nanny says, 'cos I didn't say grace at tea-time. Why don'tyounever say grace, my daddy? When I are a big man I aren't never going to say grace no more! Nanny says I are to kiss you free times, and did you bring any sweets for me, daddy?"
"That will do, my son, yes," said Digby, nervously, as the boy clambered on his knee and proceeded to cover him with sticky embraces; "Nanny is always right, of course, but I think twice will be enough. Thanks. The sweets are in this pocket, so you need not turn out all the others. And you must not have any unless you stop jumping."
The musician was not fond of children, and he always imagined his own was going to break his neck or damage himself in some way every time he came into the room. Sonny on his part had his own views concerning this mysterious daddy who came and went so strangely, and who was always going to chastise him severely according to Mrs. Haxtell, but never did anything worse than bring him sweets, and hold him by his sash until he was nearly suffocated.
"And now for my story, daddy," he shouted, with his mouth full of sugar-plums. "Be quick please, my daddy; once upon a time—go on, daddy!"
"Once upon a time," began the musician vaguely, and his thoughts strayed away to the lithesome figure swaying to and fro on the broken wall, and he tried hard to realize his crestfallen condition now that she had refused him.
"Yes, daddy, yes; go on, please, my daddy: are you forgotten the end of my story, daddy dear?" pleaded the restless spirit in his arms.
"Oh, dear, once upon a time there was—there was—oh, confound it all, there was a beautiful lady, wasn't there?" he began wearily.
"A booful lady?Wellybooful, daddy?"
"Very beautiful, my son."
"Oh," solemnly, "and what sort of daddy did she have?"
"Eh, what? Daddy? Oh—she didn't have one," said the musician, oblivious of morality; he was going through an eloquent speech in his mind which he might have said in the castle meadow if only he had not been so absurdly nervous.
"Oh," said the baby voice, growing shrill with interest, "didn't she never have no daddy at all?"
Of course, thought the musician, if he had said that to her instead of stuttering over a few commonplaces she would have found him irresistible at once.
"Daddy,dear," implored Sonny, tugging at his coat suggestively.
"Oh, the devil take the story!" shouted the musician; "didn't I tell you she never had a daddy? Don't ask so many questions, Sonny."
The big blue eyes became tearful at the unusual tone of anger and at the untimely end of the story, and Digby's conscience smote him a little.
"I aren't crying, only little girls cry," gasped the child between his hardly suppressed sobs. "I was only just thinking, daddy, what a welly funny booful lady she were, daddy."
"Yes, my son," said the musician, very much in the tone of respect he would have used to a man of his own age who was battling with some terrible grief, "yes, my son, she was a very funny beautiful lady, so funny that daddy could not understand her at all, although he loved her so much. And she laughed at daddy, and wouldn't be kind to him, though she was kind to the whole world besides."
The musician almost choked with his own emotion this time; but Sonny jumped up and down with glee at having at last discovered a human chord in the mythical beautiful lady.
"Oh, so she were anaughtybooful lady, daddy? Then she won't have jam for tea next Sunday, will she, daddy dear?"
The wooden door that led into the yard creaked open again, and again the red light from the setting sun flooded the little room.
"Yes, Sonny, of course, she was a naughty beautiful lady, that's just what she was! But do you know I've come back to say that I won't be naughty any more just yet, at least if daddy lets me, and I'm going to be kind to him—at least, if daddy wants me. Daddy, do say something. May I be good for a change, and will you let me be kind to you? I've come to say I am sorry, like a good little girl; and—I may have jam for tea next Sunday, mayn't I? Oh, daddy, do say something, and don't look so doleful! Don't you understand? I was wrong, and you were right, and—oh, how stupid it all is! Why—daddy—I—I don't believe you want me now!"
And Lady Joan flung herself into the old high-backed wooden settle, and crossed her feet, and broke into her maddening, mocking laugh as if to hide something she was ashamed of showing. But the musician, who knew her better than she thought he did, in spite of his almost childish ignorance of woman's nature, went up to her and put the child on her lap, and smiled down into her upturned, laughing face.
"We both want our beautiful lady, don't we, Sonny? And may I make my confession too, Lady Joan? I was not sure that I did want you so desperately after you sent me away just now. But I found that I did directly you opened the door and the sunshine came in, and I can never do without you again. But it is better to understand one another at starting, isn't it?"
"Much better. And ideals are such bosh when we have grown out of our short frocks. So the understanding is quite complete; you don't know how much you love me, so we will call it desperately, and I don't know how much I love you, so we will call it desperately too. You have been in love shoals of times before, and I—well, I am capable of falling in love with some one else on my wedding-day. So neither of us will be disappointed if it does not answer, but we have agreed to try. Hey-day, what fun it is! The lonely lady at the Court marrying the musician at the inn; the lady has the establishment, and the musician has the money to keep it up: if you were truly modern you would have both, and be a risen cabinet-maker. Relton will have enough to talk about for a year. But you will not behave as if we were engaged,justyet, will you? I—I don't feel as if I could quite stand it; do you understand?"
He had never heard her voice falter like that before, and he nodded to show that he quite understood. But she sprang to her feet with one of her quick gestures before he had time to realize the intoxicating feeling of that moment, and he experienced a sensation of chill.
"What wickedness to keep this child up so late; come along, Sonny lad, I told Nanny that I would put you to bed for a treat, and daddy is going to stay here and smoke his pipe."
And she vanished up the primitive staircase which led straight from the parlor up to the room above; and daddy was left somewhat with the feeling of having consented to Lady Joan's suggestion of marriage without receiving the right to kiss her, and he sat by the window again and looked among the fruit-trees, and called himself the happiest man in the world, and felt that he would be able to write his Swinburne song when the house was quiet.
A third time the wooden door creaked, and a third time the red sunlight filled the room. But the musician did not notice it, for he was still looking out of the window into the orchard, and he was telling himself with a sense of profound relief that his engagement was at last going right.
There was the sound of a low, soft, glad cry in the little inn parlor, and something glided in noiselessly, hesitated for a moment, and then sped across the ray of light to where he sat by the window. And the musician turned his eyes away from the fruit-trees then, and fixed them on the apparition before him, and a look of dumb amazement began to creep slowly over his face.
"Digby, I've come at last. You said you would not mind waiting ten years for me, and it has only been one; yet, oh! such a weary long one to me, Digby! But it has not been my fault, it hasn't really, dear; they never told me, and papa stopped your two first letters, and Roger Brill—it was Roger, wasn't it?—never brought me the last one at all. It was all a mistake, I can't tell you now, but I found it out and gave them the slip, and came straight here. Oh, Digby, you are not angry with me, are you? I never meant to keep you waiting so, but I did not find it all out till yesterday, so I could not come before. Oh, it has been so sad, waiting for you. And I have been so ill too, Digby; they did not know what was the matter with me, butIknew all the time. It is all over now, though, and we are going to be happy at last, aren't we? And may I have my kiss now, the one you promised me? I think if you had kissed me before I went away I should never have been ill. But I am going to be happy now, so happy. Oh, Digby, I feel so greedy over my happiness that I am frightened of its slipping away again. Is it because I have startled you that you are so silent? Tell me you are not angry with me, Digby,—and—when may I have my kiss, please?"
He took her mechanically into his arms and kissed the mouth that was held up to him, and he experienced dully the sort of shock that an unconventional man feels when a woman he has always considered the type of purity does something which a woman of the world would know better than to risk her reputation by doing. Upstairs, in the room overhead, he could hear Lady Joan singing his child to sleep. He passed his hand across his brow and wondered in a vague sort of way how it was all going to end; it seemed years since Lady Joan had spoken to him.
"No, Norah child, of course I am not angry with you; how could any one be that? But—"
"I don't mind anything if you are not angry with me. Only, why are you so quiet? Have you been suffering too, Digby; haven't they been kind to you?"
"Who? the fates? No, I fancy they have not been kind to me. Did you come alone, childie?"
"I came with old nurse; she is at the station. Digby, tell me, have you been ill?"
"No, I have not been ill; I have been working rather hard, and perhaps worrying as well. Forgive me, dear; you must own it is all rather startling?"
She put her arms round him, and laughed her low, soft laugh; and he writhed at the contrast it made to Lady Joan's loud mocking one, which still rang in his ears.
"Of course it is; I feel as if I had begun to live all over again after being asleep in a cold, dark place ever since last year. Have you ever felt like that, Digby? Oh, I have never asked after Sonny; how is he? Has he gone to bed? May I go up and kiss him?"
"No, stay here," he said vehemently, and then bit his moustache savagely when she opened her great eyes at him; and he added in a quieter tone, "he is quite bonny, but we—we won't disturb him yet. There is a lady with him who—who has been kind to me, and—and she will be coming down perhaps—"
"A lady? Oh, I see," wonderingly. "I am glad she has been kind to you—very. Do you like her?"
Should he tell her then? It was not yet absolutely necessary.
"Yes, I like her," he said in a toneless voice, and he forced himself to smile reassuringly at her.
"I should like to see her, then. Hark, she is coming downstairs; how merry she is, your friend!" as the full healthy laugh came down the stairs.
If there had been any means, however desperate, of putting off the crisis for another ten seconds, the musician would have stooped to it. But he realized that there was none, and with the same flash of consciousness as he realized it he braced himself to meet the event as manfully as such a pitiful situation would allow.
"Norah," he said sternly, putting her off his knee and standing up in front of her, "I have something to say to you. Will you be brave and hear me? It may all come right, of course, but—this lady was kind to my boy—and to me, when no one else would hold out a hand to us; and I thought you had forgotten me, and so—I asked her to marry me. It was only this afternoon, and of course—"
The noisy peals of laughter came right into the room through the inner door, and Lady Joan stood in the dull glow which was all that remained of the sunlight.
"Oh, daddy, what do you think Sonny said? Why—who—what is it?"
Something white, and quivering, and small, had fallen with a thud across her feet, and again the low, long child's cry with the joy gone out of it sounded in the stillness of the summer evening.
The musician had sunk on a chair with his face in his hands.
"My engagements never do seem to go right," sighed the musician.
He was sitting in the little bedroom upstairs by the side of his sleeping son, with his thumb tightly clasped in a fat brown hand. But he was not thinking of Sonny, although the clasp of the tiny fingers was comforting, as betokening some one who still believed in him.
"There is a curse upon my love affairs," said the musician. "Why should those letters never reach her? And why did she choose that moment of all others to come back? Another man might do a dirty trick and not be found out. God knows I never wanted to harm a woman in my life, least of all those two; and yet I've blundered in and got engaged to both of them at once; and I've broken the heart of the purest and most innocent child—merciful heavens, what haven't I done? And here I am, left up here like a great fool, while they are tearing my character to ribbons downstairs. Was there ever such an unfortunate brute as myself?"
The musician's voice became husky, whether from self-pity, or from the recollection of the poor little scared face of the child who had found her happiness only to lose it again, it would be impossible to say.
"Women are such deuced odd things," continued the musician, complainingly; "they expect you to look on while they scratch one another's eyes out, and then if you touch a hair of their heads you have the whole lot of them against you. Bless her! I would give my life to undo what I have done to her to-day."
Which did he mean? Perhaps he hardly knew. But Lady Joan did all the while that she sat by Norah Bisley on the horse-hair sofa, downstairs in the oak-panelled parlor.
The child stirred in his sleep.
"Happy Sonny," murmured the musician, sentimentally, "your turn has yet to come. Why can't children always remain children? Norah ought never to have grown up; she was meant for eternal childhood. It was a mistake to make Lady Joan a child at all, she ought to have been born a full-grown woman.Iought never to have been born at all, of course. Who arranges these things?"
Then he went to the table by the window, and cleared it of Sonny's monkey without a tail, and the fat pink pin-cushion, and the pale green glass pot with a lid, and the shining porcelain shepherdess with a chipped crook, and the knitted toilet-cover that entrapped the legs of all these ornaments, and sat down to write the best song he had ever composed, to some words by George Meredith.
"Men are always brutes," said Lady Joan, "but this one has only become so by accident. Stupid people do more harm than bad ones, ever so much. The fates will help you out of a hole if you have been a clever sinner, but they will lay a pitfall for you if you are a blundering, good-intentioned sort of creature. The fact is, this world of ours was made for clever people, and the fools haven't a chance. That is why he has gone wrong."
"Is he a fool then?" asked the weary voice on the sofa. One disillusionment more than another did not matter now that her idol was broken.
"He lives by his emotions, and he has no sense of proportion. It comes to the same thing. He had no intention of being faithless to you, and if you had not gone away he would have married you, and remained dull and virtuous to the end of his days. But you did go away, and I came home; and he can't live without a woman, and so he persuaded himself that his friendship for me was love. That was how it was done. Perhaps I encouraged him too. He was interesting to me, and he was never in love with me, so I amused myself by trying to fascinate him. I can't help being a woman."
"Are women like that too?" thought the other, and she added out loud, "I am a woman too, but—" and left her sentence unfinished.
"No, you are not a woman, you are only a child," said Lady Joan; "the world is a place for you to play in. You were born to be happy, and you will never have to realize the things I have been telling you."
"I shall never be happy again," said the tired voice, with a sob.
"We all say that at eighteen; it comforts us sometimes to be the most miserable person in the world. Then we turn round a bit, and the sun comes out again, and some one gives us a tonic, and we endow a cot at the hospital, or give a farthing meal to five hundred brats in the East End, and then we go on again. You have never been in love before, of course?"
"Don't," moaned the other from the corner of the unsympathetic sofa.
The clear calm tones of her Mentor softened a little.
"I don't want to hurt you, Norah; I only mean that if you go in for loving once in a lifetime and that sort of thing, you really cannot properly understand the utter insouciance of an emotional man like Digby. He will love you more than ever now that you have come back, and you will be ten times happier than if you had been married straight off without any drawbacks. You have got rid of your ideals, to begin with, which most of them do not accomplish until after marriage, and that is always a risk. And you will find there is lots of time to be happy."
"Oh," said the other, in an altered tone, sitting upright, and speaking with startling emphasis, "and do you really mean to say that you think I should marry himnow?"
Lady Joan did not turn a hair, vulgarly speaking; she felt she had done wonders already by getting rid of the battered, hopeless little voice, and she merely smiled to herself in the twilight in a triumphant, self-satisfied manner.
"You are to come home with me now, and I will send down for your maid, and you shall stay the night and get rested. I suppose you have eaten nothing for hours? Then how can you expect to take a proper view of things? Half the troubles of life come from a bad digestion; it's not romantic, but then I don't belong to your musical set."
And she carried Norah off through the back door, leaving Mrs. Haxtell with material for a year's gossip, and a note for the musician to the effect that he was to come up to the Court after dinner and give them some music.
"That is the cleverest woman I know," he sputtered, as he plunged his head into a basin of cold water after reading the scrawled scrap of paper. And he added grimly, "I suppose she will tell me which one I am to marry. And I am not in a position to object."
But he felt grateful to her for asking him in such a commonplace sort of way, and he put the song he had been writing into the pocket of his Inverness coat, and walked up to the Court in the dusk.
She was just as commonplace in her greeting. He found them in the big drawing-room near the open window, and he had to walk the whole length of the room before they took any notice of the butler's announcement, or turned round. Lady Joan was knitting a large white shawl, and talking vigorously; Norah was lying silently on a couch, with her great sentimental eyes looking out into the garden; and the curate, who had also dropped in after dinner, was sipping his coffee and listening deferentially to his hostess.
"Of course, indifference is the characteristic of the times, as you say, Mr. Johnson, but I am not sure that it matters much. There is not much to choose between the negative virtue of the present day and the positive wickedness of our forefathers."
Mr. Johnson ventured the unavoidable reply that negative virtue was worse than positive wickedness, because it professed more.
"That is true, but we must continue to be miserable sinners in some way or other, or else the Litany would have to be expunged, and that would offend the Conservatives," said Lady Joan, with a flippancy which was merely to hide the fact that she was feeling what women call overwrought; and she turned to Digby to conceal her consciousness of having been extravagant instead of witty. "Ah, Mr. Raleigh, how do you do? How good of you to come on such a short notice. You have seen Norah to-day, I think? Our new curate, Mr. Johnson. We were just longing for some music."
Digby was again thankful for hersang froid. He touched her fingers, and bowed to the others, and he took his black coffee from the tray presented to him by the butler, and apologized in the most ordinary manner for not being in evening dress.
"And may we have some music, please? Mr. Raleigh is a musician, you know, Mr. Johnson; perhaps you know his songs, though?"
Mr. Johnson said he was passionately fond of music, and he knew Mr. Raleigh's name quite well, and had once sung a song of his called "Love's Sweet Illusions."
"I have not written a song of that name; I never write ballads," said the musician, crushingly, as he opened the piano.
"Something stormy, please," said Lady Joan, carelessly; "it is so hot that if you played anything sentimental I think it might affect even my unmusical nerves."
"Something of your own," said Norah. They were the first words she had spoken, and the musician glanced nervously in her direction.
He sat down and played the song he had just written, and hummed the words to show how it went. They were taken from the "Shaving of Shagpat," and the music was full of the reckless passion and meaning of the original.
"Whether we die or we live,Matters it now no more;Life hath naught further to give;Love is its crown and its core;Come to us either, we're rife,—Death or life!"Death can take not away,Darkness and light are the same;We are beyond the pale ray,Wrapt in a rosier flame;Welcome which will to our breath,—Life or Death!"
"Whether we die or we live,Matters it now no more;Life hath naught further to give;Love is its crown and its core;Come to us either, we're rife,—Death or life!
"Death can take not away,Darkness and light are the same;We are beyond the pale ray,Wrapt in a rosier flame;Welcome which will to our breath,—Life or Death!"
When he began to play, all the stormy and conflicting feelings of the last few hours passed through his mind, and he was seized with the grimness and humor of the situation in which he found himself, and he played better than either of the two women, who were so strangely woven into his life, had ever heard him play before. When he reached the second verse he stopped humming the words, though none of them noticed it; and when he came to the end no one spoke for some seconds.
The musician was thinking that he knew now which one he wanted to marry, and that it did not matter if his love affairs went wrong so long as there was music to be made.
Lady Joan went on with her shawl, and reflected that if she lived to be a hundred she should never understand musical people or their ways.
Norah lay with her brown eyes full of tears, and she was thinking that love was the strongest thing in the world, for it could outlive its ideals.
The curate was not thinking at all, and he got up and put down his cup with a clatter.
"Very sweet and pretty," he said; "it quite reminds me of a little Italian thing I once heard on a military band at Leamington. Have you ever taken the waters at Leamington, Mr. Raleigh?"
"Play something else," said Lady Joan, abruptly, for the spell was working well, she thought, and she smiled triumphantly again at the tears in Norah's eyes.
This time Lady Joan walked to the window and stepped out on the terrace.
"Have you seen the lake in moonlight, Mr. Johnson?" she called out when the music stopped; and the curate followed her into the garden.
The musician crossed over to the couch by the other window, and sat down on a chair close to it.
"Norah," he said in a low tone, "do you know when I wrote the last thing I played?"
She said nothing, and her fingers trembled.
"I wrote it when you went away, last time, with your father. It was full of tears for you."
She still kept her face turned from him, and she spoke almost in a whisper.
"And the other? The song?"
"Guess," he said, also in a whisper.
She swept her tearful eyes round upon him searchingly, hungrily.
"Was it this evening—after—?"
He bowed his head gravely. Her hands went out to him impetuously.
"Oh, Digby, did it make you feel all that?"
"There is no doubt," said Lady Joan, loudly, "that our sympathies or our antipathies make us sometimes imagine a likeness where it cannot exist. I remember when I was a small child and came to stay with my great-uncle here, I used to invent every kind of excuse for going down to the post-office, because I thought the boy behind the counter was like a cousin of mine I had a romantic admiration for at the time. And of course you know how there are some days when everybody in the street reminds you of some one you don't want to meet, and others when you feel you have not the least affinity to your own sister. The fact is, family likeness is all rubbish, like most of the traditions we have grown up with; I mean, there is just as much chance of two strangers being alike, which you have just proved yourself, Mr. Johnson, by supposing Mr. Raleigh and my little friend Norah to be brother and sister. Shall we go in, now, or would you like another turn round the garden?"
The curate felt he had been sufficiently battered in that one brief stroll to the lake, and he consulted his watch and said he had some work waiting for him at home. So they came back again through the open window, and found Norah still lying on the couch, and the musician on the low chair at her side.
"What a horrid little man," said Lady Joan, when the curate had left.
"Is he?" said Norah, vaguely.
"Oh, I don't think he's bad," said the musician, cheerfully.
Their hostess made a huge effort, and preserved her smile.
"It may be because I had to entertain him," she said, knitting busily at her large white shawl.
"Why didn't you leave him alone?" they asked, with the sublime innocence of the selfish.
"Because that was what you did," she replied.
"Oh, but we thought you were getting on so well with him," said Norah.
"Besides," added Digby, "you need not have asked him into the garden."
"Perhaps I needn't," said Lady Joan, and counted her stitches.
"I am so dreadfully worried about something," she said, presently.
"What about?" they asked, feeling that it had somehow been the atmosphere of the whole day.
"The dilapidation of my pig-styes; Jones says two of them will go on for some time, but the others want repairing. Now, is it worth while to have two repaired, or shall I wait until they all fall to pieces, and put up brick ones?"
"That is a question," said Norah, gravely.
The musician laughed heartily.
"What a fuss ladies make about trifles. If you had a man to manage your affairs—"
"But I haven't," she said quickly, and looked him full in the face; "I thought of getting one, but—it has fallen through."
The musician did not laugh any more, and Norah's big eyes began to shine again. Lady Joan felt she had fully deserved that little bit of revenge. But it was not amusing enough to carry any further, and she was beginning to weary of the protracted love-making of the day, especially now that she was no longer a principal actor in the play. So she folded up her work elaborately, and pinned it in a white silk handkerchief, and put her hand on her mouth to conceal a yawn.
"It has been the longest day I have ever spent. I suppose it is the weather. Would you shut the piano, Mr. Raleigh? You look tired to death, Norah, and I am going to take you to bed. Come along at once, please."
They all rose to their feet, and there was an embarrassing moment. But Lady Joan took another little bit of revenge here, and kept her arm round Norah's waist, and her sharp eyes on both of them.
"You will come to breakfast to-morrow, and bring Sonny with you? Say good-night and come, Norah, I am so sleepy."
So they all shook hands frigidly, and the musician asked what time breakfast was; and they left him alone in the long drawing-room, and went upstairs. Lady Joan still found him there when she came down again, half-an-hour later; he was at the piano, but he got up as she came in.
"You are the finest woman I ever met," he said with emotion.
She made a gesture of impatience.
"Don't cover me with virtues I don't possess; I can't stand it," she said sharply; she had a very unmusical voice, he thought. "Don't you know that my god is expediency? It is the only one that is any good for this world. I don't want you to marry Norah, or I should not have come back to the inn to ask you to marry me. Do you suppose my pride suffered nothing by that? However, you are going to marry her because it is absolutely the only way out of it, and I have been obliged to give in to you both. But for Heaven's sake don't imagine I am doing it from unselfishness, or any of that bosh, because I'm not."
"Then you have not forgiven me?" he asked humbly.
"I shall never forgive you," said Lady Joan, decidedly; "is it not an insult that you should suppose me capable of forgiveness?"
"Perhaps it is," said the musician, thoughtfully. "Why was I born so accursedly unlucky?"
"I'm afraid I can't tell you. But you seem to be going to have all you want now, so it is about time you ceased railing at your fate. I suppose if I were properly unselfish I should efface myself at once, and part from you in an affecting scene. But the people who make affecting scenes are apt to forget that they have got to meet again afterwards as ordinary actors in an ordinary play, and then the memory of the affecting scene makes them sheepish; so I prefer to tell you that I am merely and vulgarly angry with you for inviting me to make a fool of myself. Not that I envy that poor child upstairs either; she doesn't understand you a bit, and you will wound her half-a-dozen times a day. It is not my affair, however, and you will have to get through it together somehow; I wash my hands of you both."
The musician said he thought they might manage it, perhaps; and Lady Joan pulled down the blind in eloquent silence, and rang the bell. He took the hint and held out his hand.
"Good-night. You will come to breakfast?"
"Since you say so; I always do what you tell me," he said, with truth.
"No, you don't," she contradicted, "or you would never have cajoled me into saying I would marry you. If you had done what I told you to-day all this trouble would not have arisen. How brutally forgetful men are!"
Which was hardly fair of her, he thought, as it was his distinct recollection that she had really ended in asking him to marry her, and had hardly waited for his assent to the proposal; if she had meant what she said in the castle meadow, and kept to it, there would have been no complications at all. And the musician finished his cigar in the orchard of the "Relton Arms," and came to the conclusion that Lady Joan with all her excellent qualities had an unpleasant amount of worldly wisdom and egoism in her composition, which he had never discovered until he had seen it contrasted with the womanly innocence of his dear little betrothed.
"How brutally forgetful men are!" were the words that remained on the lips of the worldly wise woman all through that hot night in August.
There were many and various opinions concerning the fresh engagement of the musician. His lady friends could at first hardly believe that he should overlook them all, and choose a wife who was not one of themselves, and had never attended the receptions in the West End studio; but when they learnt that it was not only a fact, but that the date of the marriage was fixed, they at once did their best to meet the situation gracefully by buying the most appropriate wedding presents they could find, in the shape of biscuit boxes shaped like drums, and clocks mounted in lyres. This caused considerable rivalry among his pupils, which was not lessened by their desire to meet his betrothed, and their jealousy when this benefit was vouchsafed to one or another of them; they wondered among themselves whether they would be asked to call, and they allowed the musician to talk about her with a generosity which was three parts diplomacy.
Mrs. Reginald Routh presumed upon her intimacy with the musician so far as to invite Norah to stay with her.
"It has been the wish of my heart to see dear Mr. Digby married," was what she told every one, with her frank smile; "indeed, I have been trying to get him a wife for some years now, only it was so impossible to find one good enough. I have no doubt that Miss Bisley is all that could be desired, and one must leavesomethingto a higher power sometimes; but I cannot help taking a little to my own credit as well, and I am convinced that Mr. Digby would never have thought of looking out for a wife at all if it had not been for my persuasions; he was far too fond of Ibsen, and Schopenhauer, and Bernard Shaw, and all those tiresome people. At all events, I never allowed a week to pass without asking him to dinner, and the picture of my domestic happiness must have done something for him. Ah, well, my work is done now; and thank God my ideal of friendship is too high to stand in the way of his marrying, though I have felt towards him like a sister, and it is hard at first to give up my place to another. But at least I know how to be generous, and she shall come and stay with me at once, so that there may be one friend in London for her when she is married. She willhaveto let me call then! And I shall be able to give her a hint or two about her future husband; I'm sure no one could know him better than I do. No doubt she is one of those artful little dolls who will annoy him until every nerve of his musical soul is on end, and he has to give up composing; and what will posterity do then?"
Mr. Reginald Routh, who never did anything but sign blank checks when he was told, was sent about town to buy the most expensive dessert service he could find; and when he brought back specimens to his invalid wife of choice plates with floral designs, he was sent out again to hunt for more suitable patterns, until the search ended, as his wife had intended it should, in a whole set being ordered from Paris, costing a guinea a plate, and decorated with a dainty design of pink cupids playing trumpets and harps in impossible positions.
The Raleighs, as a family, were glad. Owing to Norah's intervention the subject of Digby's first marriage was allowed to be mentioned, and a new toy was brought to the old manor in the shape of his four-year old son; and as the Squire was not asked to support the child, and as he learned furthermore that Digby's new wife would bring him money, he raised no objection to his marrying again, and allowed himself meanwhile to be completely enslaved by the tyrannical Sonny. The musician's sisters regarded Norah with the feelings of most sisters, excepting the most callous; that is, they wrote affectionately to her, with smiles on their lips and murder at their hearts, and they received affectionate letters in reply, which they declared they could "see through;" they were angry with every one who did not approve of the match, and they told one another gloomily that she was sure to be "designing;" they drew out long descriptions of his intended bride from the musician, and they only smiled when he told them that they would not like her at first, because she was so very different from all their friends. Lady Raleigh, who had always expected her eldest son to marry an opera singer or an actress, openly showed her relief at his engagement to an ordinary gentleman's daughter, who did not play or sing and had no particular talent for anything, who had never wished to be independent and to leave her home, and who went to church on Sunday morning with as much sense of duty and enjoyment as she bestowed on her breakfast.
And when Norah came to stay at Murville Manor, the impression she made was so pleasing that even the suspicious Digby had to acknowledge his engagement was at last going right. The Squire liked her because she never complained when he took her over the biggest duckery in the village, and because she read the whole of his pamphlet called "How to make £50 a year out of ducks," without disagreeing with it. Lady Raleigh liked her because she had always said she would; besides, Norah agreed that England was the only place for Jack. The boys said she "wasn't bad, but wanted backing up at times," which was a kindly criticism considering their bitter disappointment at not having Lady Joan for their sister-in-law. The girls fell in love with her because they could not help it; and their old nurse grudgingly allowed that she "couldn't have been nicer brought up, not if she had been your mamma's own child." There was something exemplary about Norah which always made her do the thing that was expected of her at the right moment. She never had a headache when the boys wanted her to romp with them, she did not hurt the children's feelings by speaking French before them, she always wanted music when Helen was going to sing, and she did not obtrude her affection for the family hero in public. Perhaps this last evidence of good breeding had more weight with the Raleighs than anything else she did.
Shortly before the marriage there was a monster reception in the studio in the West End. All the lady pupils lined the walls, and examined critically the names on the wedding presents, and wondered enviously where Norah bought her hats, and manœuvred anxiously for a few words with the musician. Mrs. Reginald Routh, in consideration of her being an invalid, sat in the most comfortable chair in the room, while Lady Raleigh, on the edge of an extremely straight-backed one, had to listen to her eulogies of Mr. Digby's music and Mr. Digby himself. The bride-elect as usual played her part excellently; she made her way through the toast-racks, and the plated spoons in pale-blue cases, and the pepper-pots, and the clocks with the musical devices, which were spread out on little tables all over the room; and she said a few gracious words to each lady pupil, in which she thanked her for her particular toast-rack or case of spoons, and hoped she would call after the marriage on the musician and herself in their flat in Victoria Street. And she ended her circuit of the room, as was, inevitable, beside the throne of Mrs. Reginald Routh, where she relieved Lady Raleigh for a time, and whence she was, from a quick survey of the attitude of every one present, that there was little chance of being relieved herself at all.
"This is the happiest moment of my life," murmured Mrs. Reginald, with a tremor in her voice; "you will excuse my foolish tears, will you not? He has been like a dear brother, an elder brother, to me ever since I have known him, and it is natural that I should have the jealous feeling of a sister in seeing him belong to another. It is only at first, of course—dear me! what a terrible tyrant deep affection is, to be sure! Don't mind me dear, I shall be better directly;" and she applied a lace handkerchief to a perfectly dry eye, and followed the passage of the musician among the wedding presents with the other.
"Why, there is that forward person who used to throw herself at Mr. Digby's head last season," she continued, recovering with rapidity, "Lady something or another,—came into the title by a fluke, I believe. Who is the handsome fellow she is flirting with now, eh? So that's Jack Raleigh, is it? Oh! I've heard about him. Not at all like his brother, is he?"
"He's very nice," said Norah, gently.
"Nice, is he? Then he doesn't know what he's got hold of in that young woman. I suppose she thinks as she can't get one, she'll have the other. Have you been introduced to her, my dear?"
"Yes—I have. That is, I—I stayed with her—for a night."
"I'm not surprised at that. She wants to know you after your marriage, my dear. That is where you will feel your inexperience, when these designing clever women come and play upon your ignorance in order to get at your husband. You will feel the want of some nice sensible married woman, not too old, who has been through it all, and can help you to see through them. I've no patience with these women who won't have husbands of their own, but must needs go running after other people's. Ah-h, Mr. Digby, is itreallytrue that we are to hear the last movement of the trio this afternoon? How quitetoolovely!"
The musician cleverly introduced his father to her at this point, and hastened off to the piano; and Sir Marcus, who had not been enjoying himself at all in a circle whose interests were not his own, settled himself down to a denunciation of town life, which necessarily led him on to the allotment question; and Mrs. Reginald Routh for the first time in her life found she had met her match.
"You're feeling played out, aren't you?" Jack Raleigh was saying to his companion while the instruments were being tuned.
"Oh, no, only bored to death. I wonder which is the worst, to be married or musical? But both at once—poor Mr. Raleigh!"
Jack broke into a laugh, which was hardly warranted by the smallness of the joke; and as the first chord was struck on the piano simultaneously, Lady Joan's reputation was not improved among the disturbed audience by the circumstance. At any other time she would have enjoyed the shocked glances that were thrown in her direction; but this afternoon she was feeling too cross to be perverse, and she hardly waited for the end of the trio to take leave of the smiling host.
"So you're off already? I knew you were played out," said Jack, whose vocabulary, like his perception, was limited; "shall I let fly for a hansom?"
"Oh, no; didn't I tell you before that I had the carriage?" answered Lady Joan, impatiently, though she realized the futility of censuring an offender who was always blind to his offence. "And I can see myself out, thank you."
"But—you will let me come with you? It's beastly foggy out, and something might easily happen, don't you know. You said you hadn't brought the man along, and I'd sooner see you through, 'pon my honor I would. I won't bother, I won't really, don't you know, and you can fire me at the next block if I'm in the way. That's straight, isn't it?"
In spite of the American drawl, there was something familiar in the pleading tones of his voice that reminded her unpleasantly of an incident she had been trying to forget, and she would have curtly refused his offer had she not found the pale eyes of Mrs. Reginald Routh fixed inquiringly upon her.
"If you like, I shall be delighted," she said, with a sudden show of graciousness that both pleased and surprised him; "you will see if the brougham is there? Good-bye, Mrs. Routh; so glad to see you looking so well. I suppose I can't give you a lift? Auf Wiedersehen, Norah; shall expect you both to lunch to-morrow; don't forget. What detestable weather it is; I shall go and vegetate at Relton if this fog goes on. Is it there, Mr. Jack? Oh, thanks very much."
In the brougham, she leaned back and closed her eyes, and wished the fog did not make them smart, and that she had managed to evade her companion after all, in spite of the exquisite annoyance he had enabled her to inflict on Mrs. Reginald. But Jack guessed nothing of her thoughts, and plodded on with his own instead, which all related to her and to a certain desire that filled his mind at that moment; he could only think about one thing at a time.
"I say, you—you didn't rightly mean what you said just now, did you?" he began slowly, as they stopped in the Circus in a dead block of omnibuses and traffic.
"What did I say? I've forgotten long ago. You promised not to bother," returned Lady Joan, shortly, which was not encouraging.
But Jack was not easily snubbed.
"You said that marriage was tommy rot, don't you know," he pursued steadily.
She opened her eyes wide and stared at him.
"I didn't say so. But it is. Why?"
"Oh, well, you know, because I don't think it is exactly. At least I mean I don't see why it should be, don't you know."
"Then perhaps it isn't. It doesn't matter, does it? Oh, why don't we go on?"
"I say, how jolly smart you are to-day," he said crossly, and dropped the drawl.
"Why? Because I don't wish to discuss the marriage question? I am so sick of it. If that is all you want, go and read Björnson and all the others. Modern fiction is crammed with it, so is the modern drama. Your brother can lend you crowds of books about the marriage question—he won't want them for a year or two." She ended with a little hard laugh.
"You know I don't care a hang for the marriage question," he said sulkily.
"No more do I," she said cheerfully, "so we'll let it drop. I am so glad you are not modern. Do you know, the first night I saw you—"
"Yes?" he said eagerly, as she stopped. It is a sure sign of comradeship when two people begin comparing notes about their first meeting.
"Oh," she continued carelessly, "I only felt relieved that you had no views and no ideas, and didn't want a revolution like your brother, and never fell in love with people. It made you so nice to flirt with, that was all. Thank Heaven, we are going on again at last."
Jack only hated the policeman for letting them pass; the fog was lifting in Oxford Street, and they were rolling along quickly in the direction of Pont Street; there was no time to be lost.
"Do listen seriously for once," he suggested; "why shouldn't marriage between two fellows—"
"I thought we had agreed to let it drop," she interrupted impatiently.
"But it isn't the marriage question. It—it's marriage itself," he cried desperately, and then held his breath.
They had turned down Park Lane into the yellow darkness again, and the two in the brougham could not even see each other's features. Outside, the policemen were shouting directions; within the carriage, Lady Joan was leaning back far in her corner, and thinking swiftly. Was this to be the solution of all that had been puzzling her this afternoon? It was not often that Lady Joan was depressed; but when she was, a yellow fog was not more gloomy than her mood.
"Don't you see how I've loved you all the time? It's not my form to gas like Digby, and I suppose I'm a bally idiot, because the guvnor always says I am, and of course I haven't any oof; so it's all confounded cheek on my part, it is really, don't you know. But—you said you hated to be married, so why shouldn't we be engaged, just enough to stop people from talking, don't you know, so that we could belong, sort of; do you twig? I'd give you my word of honor to go back to the States, and work like a nigger till—till you sent for me again. That wouldn't bother you, and it might be rather jolly, don't you know. And that's all there is to it."
She was still silent. If he had known that she was comparing his proposal with the one she had had in the summer, and calculating how much happiness and comfort she was likely to get out of his romantic attachment to her, his ideal of her might have received a shock. But for the sake of ideals some thoughts are allowed to go unread; and he only noticed that she moved a little out of her corner, and he at once drew nearer to her.
"I do love you, dear," he said tremulously, and ventured to lay his broad palm on hers; "don't you think—we might—"
One of the blind impulses came to him which were his making and his ruin. Lady Joan would have loathed him at that moment if he had done anything commonplace, or waited for her to take the initiative. But he put his arm round her waist so softly that she scarcely felt it.
"May I kiss you?" he whispered.
Two years later, the musician and his wife went down to Relton for their Easter holiday. They stayed at the "Relton Arms," although they had a warm invitation to the Court instead; but Digby was unusually firm in his determination not to be the guest of Lady Joan, and Norah's objections that there was no nursery for the baby, and that people would "wonder," were for once overruled. She satisfied her sense of the fitness of things by telling Mrs. Reginald Routh and her set that there were early romantic associations in connection with the little old country inn which induced her and her husband to go there again; and to people who spent their lives in straining after unconventional effects with a conventional reason for them in the background in case it was wanted, the explanation was quite sufficient. But the fact remained that the "Relton Arms" offered insufficient accommodation for a baby and a growing boy and a nurse, and there were jars in that holiday in consequence.
"This is what I like," exclaimed the musician, enthusiastically, at breakfast, the morning after their arrival: "fresh eggs and milk straight from the cow—the—the animal I mean, none of your cooked-up stuff such as we've been eating in Victoria Street. I can't think why you don't have it straight up from here, Norah, instead of—"
"Because you said the eggs at the Stores were just as good, dear, and they are cheaper; don't you remember?" said his wife, gently. Digby wished, not for the first time, that her memory were less reliable.
"Well, at any rate, the milk is a different thing; just look at the cream on it. Baby ought to thrive on stuff like that, oughtn't she?"
"That is just what I am anxious about; It has only upset her so far. Hark! is that baby crying? Precious thing! Do you mind managing Sonny's egg and pouring out the coffee, Digby, while I run upstairs?"
"I am inclined to agree with Plato," began the musician, earnestly; but his wife was gone, and Sonny was clamoring for food. He took up an egg, and then almost dropped it again as the wooden door was pushed open from without, with the same creak as of yore.
"Auntie Joan, Auntie Joan," shrieked Sonny, tumbling off his high-chair with a clatter, and dragging the tablecloth with a medley of spoons and knives after him. The musician was thankful for the diversion at that moment, and forebore to swear as he set his son on his feet again, and held out his hand with a smile to Lady Joan. She was in her riding-habit, and he told himself that she looked like Diana, or any other goddess that represents the woman a man admires.
"Well?" she said, with her fresh, breezy laugh, "how soon will you be tired of picknicking and ready to come to terms? And where's Norah?"
"Upstairs. There's a draught under the bedroom door, and Mrs. Haxtell has quarrelled violently with nurse. Baby cries perpetually—teeth. And I can't get any breakfast. That's all so far, I think;" and he laughed as heartily as she, and they bumped their heads together under the table in picking up the fallen utensils, and came up again with red faces just as Norah returned with the baby in her arms.
"Oh, is it you, Joan? So glad to see you, dear; sit down and have some breakfast. Why haven't you poured out the coffee, Digby? How helpless men are! Take baby a minute, will you? There, you have set her off again, just when I had quieted her. She has taken cold in the night, that's what it is. Hush, hush! There then, it sha'n't, that it sha'n't!"
"After all," began the musician in a momentary lull, "I do think Plato—"
"Will you give Digby something to eat, Joan, dear?" interposed Norah gently; and peace presently pervaded the breakfast-table.
"The lambsisfat, isn't they, daddy?" asked Sonny, from the window-seat. "How does the lambs know, daddy, which sheep is their right mother?"
"Confound his precocity," grumbled the musician; "what is one to do with a son like that? Besides, I can't tell him myself; howdothey know?"
"They don't," said Lady Joan, promptly; "it's a fact I used to dispute with my governess in my youth. It is only we who take it upon ourselves to say that they do; we have no means of proving it. The sheep takes them as they come, and looks equally bored with them all."
Digby laughed loudly, and Norah murmured something in a pained voice about maternal instinct.
"All nonsense, my dear," persisted Lady Joan, gayly; "no amount of maternal instinct could help a sheep to tell her own lamb from any other sheep's lamb. Besides, why should she want to? As it is, she can have a change without being called fickle. Happy sheep!"
Sonny was standing with his legs very wide apart and his blue eyes fixed on her face, as she said this.
"Auntie Joan's pertending," he said solemnly. The others laughed, which awoke the slumbering baby again; and Norah, after complaining between its wails that the draught under the bedroom door was answerable for everything, carried it upstairs again by way of curing it.
"Well, what is it?" said the musician, in the peace that ensued on his wife's departure; and he lighted his cigarette and looked across at Lady Joan.
"How did you know there was anything?" she asked.
"I always know," he said, in a superior tone; "we haven't been chums all these years for nothing. Tell me what's up, dear. Hasn't Jack been writing to you, the scamp?"
"Oh, yes. He always writes. He is quite good.Iam the naughty one; I always have been, I think. I am not fit to be engaged; it is true what I told you—that day."
They were very fond of making allusions tothat day; they told themselves it was one of the privileges of their friendship, now thatshewas safely engaged andhewas securely married, to mention subjects which were not always even respectable; it did not occur to them that this constant renewal of back chapters in their lives had more to do with their egoism than their friendship.
"And what dreadful thing have you been doing now, please?" asked Digby.
She flung back her head and laughed mockingly, as she used to do.
"Do you remember telling me that marriage was the only way out of it? I am half inclined to agree with you now, though I wrote to Jack yesterday to break off our engagement. That is all."
Sonny hummed his baby ditty on the window-seat, without interruption, for a few seconds.
Then the musician laid down his cigarette.
"You—did—that?" he said, drawing a long breath; "what a wonderful creature you are, Joan!"
"Only wonderful?" she said lightly; "are you sure you don't mean heartless?"
"Why did you do it? Do stop laughing," he urged her. Her eyes flashed angrily.
"What do you mean?" she cried; "do you think Iamheartless?"
"Surely not," said the musician, looking along his cigarette, and avoiding her direct glance across the breakfast-table.
"Then why do you say I am?"
"I—I didn't say so, if you remember, Joan. The word entirely originated with—"
"Oh, I know," she interrupted impatiently; "but why don't you think so? You ought to—everybody does—Norah would."
"Norah isn't—Norah can't understand—that is, Norah does not know you so well as I do, and she is a little prejudiced sometimes—" stumbled the musician.
"Just so, yes," said Lady Joan, gravely, and there was a pause.
"Then you agree with me that I have done the best thing under the circumstances, the miserable circumstances?" she began again in a few moments.
"I always agree with you," said the musician; "but you must own that—not knowing the circumstances which—which led to your course of action, it—it becomes difficult—"
He yielded to a nervous desire to laugh instead of finishing his sentence; and Lady Joan, after a desperate effort to lose her temper, weakly followed his example.
"Tell me why you did it," he said more naturally when they were grave again, and he walked round the table and leaned over the back of her chair. She fell into the rôle of the penitent child.
"I couldn't help it, it came over me yesterday that I couldn't stand it any longer. I've always said perpetual engagements would not answer, because people could never stand the awful monotony of them. It is only the monotony of Jack's love for me that has exhausted my patience now. If he had really been at all wild after we were engaged, which every one was so fond of prophesying to me, I think I might have got to love him too much to give him up. But—oh! it is the badness in me I think, Digby. Why don't you scold me instead of looking at me like that?"
He stroked her hair idly without speaking, and she had to laugh again to hide the tremor in her lips.
"I always told you I wanted our engagement kept secret; it would have been much better. It was an experiment, rather a disastrous one for Jack—"
"And for you?"
"—and it should never have been made public. Engagements never ought to be made public, and if they were what they claim to be they never would be. It is because they are such miserable, heartless arrangements that we have to take refuge in the approbation of society to make them a success at all; if it were not for the connivance of their friends I don't believe people would ever get to the marriage service at all. No wonder men say such hard things about women; we simply destroy all the sentiment that is in them by our eagerness to cash it at once, and then we go in for a cheap cynicism and call them heartless brutes. If I were a man I would never ask a woman to be my wife, never, never, never! At least, not if I were in love with her."
She spoke rapidly and vehemently, and the musician framed her face in his hands and coughed a little to steady his voice.
"Poor Jack!" he said almost inaudibly.
"Why do you say that?" she asked, in the same tone.
"Because he might have married you, and he has just missed it," he breathed in reply; and their heads drew closer together and remained so for a few seconds. They had had enough in their two lives to make them either sure friends or enemies. And morality is mainly a question of circumstance, and largely dependent on the chances of detection.
"Why are you so good to me?" she asked.
"Am I?" he said with a smile, and he removed one of his hands to brush off the ash of his cigarette. "I am only what you make me. I have always been in your hands, you know."
"Rubbish!" she said, and laughed unnaturally, and freed herself from his touch and walked away to the window. Norah's voice came from the orchard, calling him, and he went out through the door. Lady Joan sat on the window ledge and thought over what he had been saying, and then about the words of her letter to Jack, and then that it was time to walk back to the Court and speak about the mending of a certain fence to the man. And finally she thought about nothing at all as she yielded to the drowsiness of the hot spring morning, and rested her cheek against a background of green creepers and became conscious of nothing but a confused medley of well-known sounds,—the loud ticking of the clock in the way trifles assert their importance after an event, the tuneless humming of the child on the floor, the warning bell of the postman's bicycle as he came round the corner of the street, and the splash of the ducks he frightened into the pond as he came. Then she raised her heavy eyelids, and saw the musician looking at her with a strange, frightened expression on his face.