From her conversation, Fane gathered that she had no idea of her husband's condition. With a curious and fascinating naturalness she spoke of her marriage, of her intentions for the long future.
“If Reginald is really seedy, Dr Fane,” she said, “get him well quickly, that he may complete his commissions. Because, you know, he has promised, when they are finished, to take me to Italy, and to Greece, to the country of Phidias, whose mantle has fallen upon my husband.”
“Do not force Dr Fane into untruth,” said Brune, with an attempt at a smile.
“And is that statue a commission?” Fane asked, indicating the marble figure, that seemed to watch them and to listen.
“No; that is an imaginative work on which I have long been engaged. I call it, ‘A Silent Guardian.’”
“It is very beautiful,” the doctor said. “What is your idea exactly? What is the figure guarding?”
Brune and his wife glanced at one another—he gravely, she with a confident smile.
Then he said, “I leave that to the imagination.”
Dr Fane looked again at the statue, and said slowly, “You have wrought it so finely that in this light my nerves tell me it is alive.”
Mrs Brune looked triumphant.
“All the world would feel so if they could see it,” she said; “but it is not to be exhibited. That is our fancy—his and mine. And now I will leave you together for a few minutes. Heal him of his ills, Dr Fane, won't you?”
She vanished through the door at the end of the studio. The two men stood together by the hearth.
“She does not know?” Fane asked.
The other leaned his head upon his hand, which was pressed against the oak mantelpiece.
“I am too cowardly to tell her,” he said in a choked voice. “You must.”
“And when?”
“To-day.”
There was a silence. Then, in his gravest professional manner, Fane gave some directions, and wrote others down, while the sculptor looked into the dancing fire. When Fane had finished:—
“Shall I tell her now?” he asked gently.
Brune nodded without speaking. His face looked drawn and contorted as he moved towards the door. His emotion almost strangled him, and the effort to remain calm put a strain upon him that was terrible.
Gerard Fane was left alone for a moment—alone with the statue whose personality, it seemed to him, pervaded the great studio. In its attitude there was a meaning, in its ghost-like face and blind eyes a resolution of intention, that took possession of his soul. He told himself that it was lifeless, inanimate, pulseless, bloodless marble; that it contained no heart to beat with love or hate, no soul to burn with impulse or with agony; that its feet could never walk, its hands never seize or slay, its lips never utter sounds of joy or menace. Then he looked at it again, and he shuddered.
“I am over-working,” he said to himself; “my nerves are beginning to play me tricks. I must be careful.”
And he forcibly turned his thoughts from the marble that could never feel to the man and woman so tragically circumstanced, and to his relation towards them.
A doctor is so swiftly plunged into intimacy with strangers. To the sculptor it was as if Fane held the keys of the gates of life and death for him; as if, during that quarter of an hour in the consulting-room, the doctor had decided, almost of his own volition, that death should cut short a life of work and of love. And even to Fane himself it seemed as if his fiat had precipitated, even brought about, a tragedy that appealed to his imagination with peculiar force. His position towards this curiously interesting girl was strange. He had seen her for a quarter of an hour only, and now it was his mission to cause her the most weary pain that she might, perhaps, ever know. The opening of the studio door startled him, and his heart, that usually beat so calmly, throbbed almost with violence as Mrs Brune came up to him.
“What is it?” she asked, facing him, and looking him full in the eyes with a violence of interrogation that was positively startling. “What is it you have to tell me? Reginald says you have ordered him to keep quiet—that you wish me to help you in—in something. Is he ill? May he not finish his commissions?”
“He is ill,” said Gerard Fane, with a straightforward frankness that surprised himself.
She kept her eyes on his face.
“Very ill?”
“Sit down,” the doctor said, taking her hands and gently putting her into a chair.
With the rapidity of intellect peculiar to women, she heard in those two words the whole truth. Her head drooped forward. She put out her hands as if to implore Fane's silence.
“Don't speak,” she murmured. “Don't say it; I know.”
He looked away. His eyes rested on the statue that made a silent third in their sad conference. How its attitude suggested that of a stealthy listener, bending to hear the more distinctly! Its expressionless eyes met his, and was there not a light in them? He knew there was not, yet he caught himself saying mentally:—
“What does he think of this?” and wondering about the workings of a soul that did not, could not, exist.
Presently the girl moved slightly, and said:—
“He only knew this for certain yesterday?”
“Only yesterday.”
“Ah! but he must have suspected it long ago,”—she pointed towards the statue—“when he began that.”
“I don't understand,” Fane said. “What can that marble have to do with his health or illness?”
“When we first began to love each other,” she said, “he began to work on that. It was to be his marriage gift to me, my guardian angel. He told me he would put all his soul into it, and that sometimes he fancied, if he died before me, his soul would really enter into that statue and watchover and guard me. ‘A Silent Guardian’ he has always called it. He must have known.”
“I do not think so,” Fane said. “It was impossible he should.”
The girl stood up. The tears were running over her face now. She turned towards the statue.
“And he will be cold—cold like that!” she cried in a heart-breaking voice. “His eyes will be blind and his hands nerveless, and his voice silent.”
She suddenly swayed and fainted into Fane's arms. He held her a moment; and when he laid her down, a reluctance to let the slim form, lifeless though it was, slip out of his grasp, came upon him. He remembered the previous day, the doomed man going down the street—his thought as he looked from the window of his consulting-room, “I am sorry that man is going to die.”
Now, as he leant over the white girl, he whispered, forming the very words with his lips, “I am not sorry.”
And the statue seemed to bend and to listen.
Six weeks passed away. Winter was deepening. Through the gloom and fog that shrouded London, Christmas approached, wrapped in seasonable snow. The dying man had finished his work, anda strange peace stole over him. Now, when he suffered, when his body shivered and tried to shrink away, as if it felt the cold hands of death laid upon it, he looked at the completed statue, and found he could still feel joy. There had always been in his highly-strung, sensitive nature an element, so fantastic that he had ever striven to conceal it, of romance; and in his mind, affected by constant pain, by many sleepless nights, grew the curious idea that his life, as it ebbed away from him, entered into his creation. As he became feeble, he imagined that the man he had formed towered above him in more God-like strength, that light flowed into the sightless eyes, that the marble muscles were tense with vigour, that a soul was born in the thing which had been soulless. The theory, held by so many, of re-incarnation upon earth, took root in his mind, and he came to believe that, at the moment of death, he would pass into his work and live again, unconscious, it might be, of his former existence. He loved the statue as one might love a breathing man; but he seldom spoke of his fancies, even to Sydney.
Only, he sometimes said to her, pointing to his work:—
“You will never be alone, unprotected, while he is there.”
And she tried to smile through the tears she could not always keep back.
Gerard Fane was often with them. He sunkthe specialist in the friend, and not a day passed without a visit from him to the great studio, in which the sculptor and his wife almost lived.
He was unwearied in his attendance upon the sick man, unwavering in his attempts to soothe his sufferings. But, in reality, and almost against his will, the doctor numbered each breath his patient drew, noted with a furious eagerness each sign of failing vitality, bent his ear to catch every softest note in the prolongeddiminuendoof this human symphony.
When Fane saw Mrs Brune leaning over her husband, touching the damp brow with her cool, soft fingers, or the dry, parched lips with her soft, rosy lips, he turned away in a sick fury, and said to himself:—
“He is dying, he is dying. It will soon be over.”
For with a desperate love had entered into him a desperate jealousy, and even while he ministered to Brune he hated him.
And the statue, with blind eyes, observed the drama enacted by those three people, the two men and the woman, till the curtain fell and one of the actors made his final exit.
Fane's nerves still played him tricks sometimes. He could not look at the statue without a shudder; and while Brune imaginatively read into the marble face love and protection, the doctor saw there menace and hatred. He came to feel almostjealous of the statue, because Sydney loved it and fell in with her husband's fancy that his life was fast ebbing into and vitalising the marble limbs, that his soul would watch her from the eyes that were now without expression and thought.
When Fane entered the studio, he always involuntarily cast a glance at the white figure—at first, a glance of shuddering distaste, then, as he acknowledged to himself his love for Sydney, a glance of defiance, of challenge.
One evening, after a day of many appointments and much mental stress and strain, he drove up to Ilbury Road, was admitted, and shown as usual into the studio. He found it empty. Only the statue greeted him silently in the soft lamplight, that scarcely accomplished more than the defining of the gloom.
“My master is upstairs, sir,” said the footman. “I will tell him you are here.”
In a moment Sydney entered, with a lagging step and pale cheeks. Without thinking of the usual polite form of greeting, she said to Fane, “He is much worse to-day. There is a change in him, a horrible change. Dr Fane, just now when I was talking to him it seemed to me that he was a long way off. I caught hold of his hands to reassure myself. I held them. I heard him speaking, but it was as if his words came from a distance. What does it mean? He is not—he is not—”
She looked the word he could not speak.
Fane made her sit down.
“I will go to him immediately,” he said. “I may be able to do something.”
“Yes, go—do go!” she exclaimed with feverish excitement.
Then suddenly she sprang up, and seizing his hands with hers, she said in a piercing voice: “You are a great doctor. Surely—surely you can keep this one life for me a little longer.”
As they stood, Fane was facing the statue, which was at her back, and while she spoke his eyes were drawn from the woman he loved to the marble thing he senselessly hated. It struck him that a ghastly change had stolen over it. A sudden flicker of absolute life surely infused it, quickened it even while she spoke, stole through the limbs one by one, welled up to the eyes as light pierces from a depth, flowed through all the marble. A pulse beat in the dead, cold heart. A mind rippled into the rigid, watching face. There was no absolute movement, and yet there was the sense of stir. Fane, absorbed in horror, seemed to watch an act of creation, to see life poured from some invisible and unknown source into the bodily chamber that had been void and dark.
Motionless he saw the statue dead; motionless he saw the statue live.
He drew his hands from Sydney's. He was too powerfully impressed to speak, but she looked up into his face, turned, and followed his eyes.
She, too, observed the change, for her lips parted, and a wild amazement shone in her eyes. Then she touched Fane's arm, and whispered, rather in awe than in horror, “Go—go to him. See if anything has happened. I will stay and watch here.”
With a hushed tread Fane left the studio, passed through the hall, ascended the stairs to the sculptor's room. Outside the door he hesitated for a moment. He was trembling. He heard a clock ticking within. It sounded very loud, like a hammer beating in his ears. He pushed the door open at length, and entered. Brune's tall figure was sitting in an armchair, bowed over a table on which lay an open Art magazine.
His head lay hidden on his arms, which were crossed.
Fane raised the face and turned it up towards him.
It was the face of a dead man.
He looked at it, and smiled.
Then he stole down again to the studio, where Sydney was still standing.
“Yes?” she said interrogatively, as he entered.
“He is dead,” Fane answered.
She only bowed her head, as if in assent. She stood a moment, then she turned her tearless eyes to him, and said:—
“Why could not you save him?”
“Because I am human,” Fane answered.
“And we did not say good-bye,” she said.
Fane was strung up. Conflicting feelings found a wild playground in his soul. His nerves were in a state of abnormal excitement, and something seemed to let go in him—the something that holds us back, normally, from mad follies. He suddenly caught Sydney's hand, and in a choked voice said:—
“He is dead. Think a little of the living.”
She looked at him, wondering.
“Think of the living that love you. He neither hates nor loves any more. Sydney! Sydney!”
As she understood his meaning she wrung her hand out of his, and said, as one trying to clear the road for reason:—
“You love me, and he bought you to keep him alive. Why, then—”
A sick, white change came over her face.
“Sydney! Sydney!” he said.
“Why, then he bought death from you. Ah!”
She put her hand on the bell, and kept it there till the servant hurried in.
“Show Dr Fane out,” she said. “He will not come here again.”
And Fane, seeing the uselessness of protest, ready to strike himself for his folly, went without a word. Only, as he went, he cast one look at the statue. Was there not the flicker of a smile in its marble eyes?
People said Dr Gerard Fane was over-working, that he was not himself. His manner to patients was sometimes very strange, brusque, impatient, intolerant. A brutality stole over him, and impressed the world that went to him for healing very unfavourably. The ills of humanity rendered him now sarcastic instead of pitiful, a fatal attitude of mind for a physician to adopt; and he was even known to pronounce on sufferers sentence of death with a callous indifference that was inhuman as well as impolitic. As the weeks went by, his reception-room became less crowded than of old. There were even moments in his day when he had leisure to sit down and think, to give a rein to his mood of impotent misery and despair. Sydney had never consented to receive him again. Woman-like—for she could be extravagantly yet calmly unreasonable—she had clung to the idea that Fane had hastened, if not actually brought about, her husband's death by his treatment. She made no accusation. She simply closed her doors upon him. She had a horror of him, which never left her.
Again and again Fane called. She was always denied to him. Then he met her in the street. She cut him. He spoke to her. She passed on without a reply. At last a dull fury took possession of him. Her treatment of him was flagrantlyunjust. He had wished the sculptor to die, but he had allowed nature to accomplish her designs unaided, even to some extent hampered and hindered by his medical skill and care. He loved Sydney with the violence of a man whose emotions had been sedulously repressed through youth, vanquished but not killed by ambition, and the need to work for the realisation of that ambition. The tumults of early manhood, never given fair play, now raged in his breast, from which they should have been long since expelled, and played havoc with every creed of sense, and every built-up theory of wisdom and experience. Fane became by degrees a monomaniac.
He brooded incessantly over his developed but starved passion, over the thought that Sydney chose to believe him a murderer. At first, when he was trying day after day to see her, he clung to his love for her; but when he found her obdurate, set upon wronging him in her thought, his passion, verging towards despair, changed, and was coloured with hatred. By degrees he came to dwell more upon the injury done to him by her suspicion than upon his love of her, and then it was that a certain wildness crept into his manner, and alarmed or puzzled those who consulted him.
That his career was going to the dogs Fane understood, but he did not care. The vision of Sydney was always before him. He was for everplotting and planning to be with her alone—against her will or not, it was nothing to him. And when he was alone with her, what then?
He would know how to act.
It was just in the dawn of the spring season over London that further inaction became insupportable to him. One evening, after a day of listless inactivity spent in waiting for the patients who no longer came in crowds to his door, he put on his hat and walked from Mayfair to Kensington, vaguely, yet with intention. He looked calm, even absent; but he was a desperate man. All fear of what the world thinks or says, all consideration of outward circumstances and their relation to worldly happiness, had died within him. He was entirely abstracted and self-centred.
He reached the broad thoroughfare of Ilbury Road, with its line of artistic red houses, detached and standing in their gardens. The darkness was falling as he turned into it and began to walk up and down opposite the house with the big studio in which he was once a welcome visitor. There was a light in one of the bedroom windows and in the hall, and presently, as Fane watched, a brougham drove up to the door. It waited a few moments before the house, then some one entered the carriage. The door was banged; the horse moved on. Through the windows Fane saw a woman's face, pale, against the pane. It was the face of Sydney. For a moment he thought he would callto the coachman to stop. Then he restrained himself, and again walked up and down, waiting. She must return presently. He would speak to her as she was getting out of the carriage. He would force her to receive him.
Towards nine o'clock his plans were altered by an event which took place. The house door opened, and the footman came out with a handful of letters for the post. The pillar-box was very near, and the man carelessly left the hall door on the jar while he walked down the road. Fane caught a glimpse of the hall that he knew so well. A step, and he could be in the house. He hesitated. He looked down the road. The man had his back turned, and was putting the letters into the box. Fane slipped into the garden, up the steps, through the door. The hall was empty. At his right was the passage leading to the studio. He stole down it, and tried the door. It opened. In the darkness the heavy curtain blew against his face. In another instant he closed the door softly at his back, and stood alone in the wide space and the blackness. Here there was not a glimmer of light. Thick curtains fell over the windows. No fire burned upon the hearth. There was no sound except when a carriage occasionally rolled down the road, and even then the wheels sounded distant.
The silence and darkness had their effect upon Fane. He had done a desperate thing; but, untilhe found himself alone in the vacant studio, he had not fully realised the madness of his conduct, and how it would appear to the world. After the first moments of solitude had passed he came to himself a little, and half opened the door with the intention of stealing out; but he heard steps in the hall, and shrank back again like a guilty creature. He must wait, at least, until the household retired to rest.
And, waiting, the old, haunting thoughts came back to assail him once more. He began to brood over Sydney's cruel treatment of him, over her vile suspicions. Here, in the atmosphere which he knew so well—for a faint, strange perfume always lingered about the studio, and gave to it the subtle sense of life which certain perfumes can impart—his emotions were gradually quickened to fury. He recalled the days of his intimacy with the sculptor, of his unrestrained converse with Sydney. He recalled his care for the invalid, persevered in, despite his passion, to the end. And then his thought fastened upon the statue, which, strange to say, he had almost forgotten.
The statue!
It must be there, with him, in the darkness, staring with those white eyes in which he had seen a soul flicker.
As the recollection of it came to him, he trembled, leaning against the wall.
He was in one of those states of acute mentaltension in which the mind becomes so easily the prey of the wildest fantasies, and slowly, laboriously, he began to frame a connection between the lifeless marble creature and his own dreary trouble.
Because of one moment of folly Sydney treated him as a pariah, as a criminal. Her gentle nature had been transformed suddenly.
By what subtle influence?
Fane remembered the day of his first visit to Ilbury Road, and his curious imagination that the statue recognised and hated him.
Had that hatred prompted action? Was there a devil lurking in the white, cold marble to work his ruin? When Sydney sent him out of her presence for ever, the watching face had seemed to smile.
Fane set his teeth in the darkness. He was no longer sane. He was possessed. The tragedy of thought within him invited him to the execution of another tragedy. He stretched out his hand with the rehearsing action of one meditating a blow.
His hand fell upon an oak table that stood against the wall, and hit on something smooth and cold. It was a long Oriental dagger that the dead sculptor had brought from the East. Fane's fingers closed on it mechanically. The frigid steel thrilled his hot palm, and a pulse in his forehead started beating till there was a dull, senseless music in his ears that irritated him.
He wanted to listen for the return of Sydney's carriage.
His soul was ablaze with defiance. He was alone in the darkness with his enemy; the cold, deadly, blind, pulseless thing that yet was alive; the silent thing that had yet whispered malign accusations of him to the woman he loved; the nerveless thing that poisoned a beautiful mind against him, that stole the music from his harp of life and let loose the winds upon his summer.
His fingers closed more tightly, more feverishly upon the slippery steel.
Sydney actually thought, or strove to think, him a criminal. What if he should earn the title? A sound as of the sea beating was in his ears, and flashes of strange light seem to leap to his vision. What would a man worth the name do to his enemy?
And he and his enemy were shut up alone together.
He drew himself up straight and steadied himself against the wall, peering through the blackness in the direction of the statue.
And, as he did so, there seemed to steal into the atmosphere the breath of another living presence. He could fancy he heard the pulse of another heart beating near to his. The sensation increased upon him powerfully until suspicion grew into conviction.
His intention had subtly communicated itself to the thing he could not see.
He knew it was on guard.
There was no actual sound, no movement, but the atmosphere became charged by degrees with a deadly, numbing cold, like the breath of frost in the air. A chill ran through Fane's blood. A sluggish terror began to steal over him, folding him for the moment in a strange inertia of mind and of body. A creeping paralysis crawled upon his senses, like the paralysis of nightmare that envelops the dreamer. He opened his lips to speak, but they chattered soundlessly. Mechanically his hand clutched the thin, sharp steel of the dagger.
His enemy—then Sydney.
He would not be a coward. He struggled against the horror that was upon him.
And still the cold increased, and the personality of Fane's invisible companion seemed to develop in power. There was a sort of silent violence in the hidden room, as if a noiseless combat were taking place. Waves of darkness were stirred into motion; and Fane, as a man is drawn by the retreating tides of the sea out and away, was drawn from the wall where he had been crouching.
He stole along the floor, the dagger held in his right hand, his heart barely beating, his lips white—nearer, nearer to his enemy.
He counted each step, until he was enfolded in the inmost circle of that deadly frost emanating from the blackness before him.
Then, with a hoarse cry, he lifted his arm andsprang forward and upward, dashing the dagger down as one plunging it through a human heart.
The cry died suddenly into silence.
There was the sound of a heavy fall.
It reached the ears of the servants below stairs.
The footman took a light, and, with a scared face, went hesitatingly to the studio door, paused outside and listened while the female servants huddled in the passage.
The heavy silence succeeding the strange sound appalled them, but at length the man thrust the door open and peered in.
The light from the candle flickered merrily upon Fane's bowed figure, huddled face downwards upon the floor.
His neck was broken.
The statue, that was the dead sculptor's last earthly achievement, stood as if watching over him. But it was no longer perfect and complete.
Some splinters of marble had been struck from the left breast, and among them, on the smooth parquet, lay a bent Oriental dagger.
“Itis so impossible to be young,” Claude Melville said very wearily, and with his little air of played-out indifference. He was smoking a cigarette, as always, and wore a dark red smoking-suit that, he thought, went excellently with his black eyes and swarthy complexion.
His father had been a blue-eyed Saxon giant, his mother a pretty Kentish woman, with an apple-blossom complexion and sunny hair; yet he managed to look exquisitely Turkish, and thought himself a clever boy for so doing. But then he always thought himself clever. He had cultivated this conception of himself until it had become a confirmed habit of mind. On his head was a fez with a tassel, and he was sitting upon the hearthrug with his long legs crossed meditatively. His room was dimly lit, and had an aspect of divans, Attar of roses scented the air. A fire was burning, although it was a spring evening and not cold. London roared faintly in the distance, like a lion at a far-away evening party.
“It is so impossible to be young,” Claude repeated, without emphasis. “I was middle-aged atten. Now I am twenty-two, and have done everything I ought not to have done, I feel that life has become altogether improbable. Even if I live until I am seventy—the correct age for entering into one's dotage, I believe—I cannot expect to have a second childhood. I have never had a first.”
He sighed. It seemed so hard to be deprived of one's legal dotage.
His friend, Jimmy Haddon, looked at him and laughed. Jimmy was puffing at a pipe. His pipe was the only one Claude ever allowed to be smoked among his divans and his roses.
After thoroughly completing his laugh, Jimmy remarked:—
“Would you like to take a lesson in the art of being young?”
“Immensely.”
“I know somebody who could give you one.”
“Really, Jimmy! What strange people you always know; curates, and women who have never written improper novels, and all sorts of beings who seem merely mythical to the rest of us!”
“This is not a curate.”
“Then it must be a woman who has never written an improper novel.”
“It is.”
“And you mean to tell me seriously that there is such a person? To see her would be to take whatPunchcalls a pre-historic peep. She must be ingeniously old.”
“She is sixty-four, and she is my aunt.”
“How beautiful of her. I am an only child, so I can never be an uncle. It is one of my lasting regrets, although I daresay that profession is terribly overcrowded like the others. But why is she sixty-four? It seems a risky thing for a woman to be?”
“She takes the risk without thinking at all about it.”
“She must be very daring.”
“No; she's only completely natural.”
“Natural. What is that?”
Jimmy laughed again. He was fond of Claude, but he and Claude met so often chiefly because they were extremes. Jimmy was a handsome athlete, who had been called to the bar, and persistently played cricket or football whenever the courts were sitting. He was cursed with a large private income, which he spent royally, and blessed with a good heart. Once he had appeared for the defence in a divorce case, which—lasting longer than he had anticipated, owing to the obvious guilt of all parties concerned in it, and the consequent difficulty of getting an innocent jury to agree about a verdict—had cost him a cricket match. Since then he had looked upon the law in the legendary way, as an ass, and spent most of his time in exercising his muscles. In the intervals of leisure which he allowed himself from sports and pastimes, he saw a good deal of Claude, who amused him, and whom he never bored. Hecalled him a boudoir boy, but had a real liking for him, nevertheless, and sometimes longed to wake him up, and separate him from the absurdchiffonswith which he occupied his time. Now he laughed at him openly, and Claude did not mind in the least. They were really friends, however preposterous such a friendship might seem.
“What is that? Well—my aunt. When you see her you will understand thoroughly.”
“Does she live in Park Lane or in Clapham?”
“She lives in the country, in Northamptonshire, is very well off, and has a place of her own.”
“And a husband?”
“No. She is a prosperous spinster, dines the local cricket team once a year, keeps the church going, knows all the poor people, and all the rich in the neighbourhood, and has only one fad.”
“What is that?”
“She always wears her hair powdered. Come down and stay with her, and she will teach you to be young.”
“Well—but I am afraid she will work me very hard.”
“Not she. You would like a new experience.”
Claude yawned, and blinked his long dark eyes in a carefully Eastern manner.
“I am afraid there is no such thing left for me,” he said with an elaborate dreariness. “Still, if your aunt will invite me, I will come. Of course you will accompany me, I must have a chaperon.”
“Of course.”
“Ah!” Claude said, as a footman came softly into the room, “here is our absinthe. Now, Jimmy, please do forget your horrible football, and I will teach you to be decadent.”
“As my aunt will teach you to be young—you old boy.”
“Mr Haddon has left, sir,” said the footman, standing by Claude's bedside in the detached manner of the well-bred domestic. “Here is a note for you, sir; I was to give it you the first thing.”
And he handed it on a salver.
Claude stretched out his thin white arm and took it, without manifesting any of the surprise that he felt. When the footman had gone, he poured out a cup of tea from the silver teapot that stood on a small table at his elbow, sipped it, and quietly opened the square envelope. The Northamptonshire sun was pouring in with a countrified ardour through the bedroom window. Outside the birds twittered in Miss Haddon's cherished garden. For Claude had come down at that contented spinster's invitation to spend a week with her, bringing Jimmy as chaperon, and this was the very first morning of his visit. Now he learnt that his chaperon had already “left,” possibly to be a “half-back,” or something equally ridiculous, at alocal football match in a neighbouring village. Claude spread the note out and read it, while the birds chirped to the very manifest spring.
“Dear Boy,—Good-bye, and good luck to you. I know you are never angry, so it is scarcely worth while to tell you not to be. I am off. Back in a week. You will learn your lesson better alone with Aunt Kitty. There is no absinthe in her cellar, but she knows good champagne from bad. You will be all right. Study hard.—Yours ever,Jim.”
“Dear Boy,—Good-bye, and good luck to you. I know you are never angry, so it is scarcely worth while to tell you not to be. I am off. Back in a week. You will learn your lesson better alone with Aunt Kitty. There is no absinthe in her cellar, but she knows good champagne from bad. You will be all right. Study hard.—Yours ever,
Jim.”
Claude drank two cups of tea instead of his usual one, and read the note four times. Then he lay back, wrapping his dressing-gown—a fine specimen of Cairene embroidery—closely round him, shut his eyes, and seemed to go to sleep. All he said to himself was:—
“Jimmy writes a very dull letter.”
At half-past nine, Miss Haddon's house reverberated in a hollow manner with the barbarous music of a gong, the dressing-gong. Claude heard it very unsympathetically, and felt rather inclined merely to take off his dressing-gown, as an act of mute defiance, and go deliberately to sleep, instead of getting up and putting things on. But he remembered his manners wearily, and slid out of bed and into a carefully-warmed bath that was prepared in the neighbouring dressing-room. Having completed an intricate toilette, and tied a marvellouslysubtle tie, shot with rigorously subdued, but voluptuous colours, he sauntered downstairs in time to be thoroughly immersed in the full clamour of the second—or breakfast—gong, which he encountered in the hall.
“Why will people wake the dead merely because they are going to eat a boiled egg and a bit of toast?” he asked himself as he entered the breakfast-room.
Miss Haddon was standing by the window, reading letters in the proper English manner. The sun lay on her grey hair, which she wore dressed high, and void of cap.
“You are very punctual,” she said with a smile. “I was going to send up to know whether you would prefer to breakfast in your room. My nephew told me you might like to. I shall be glad to have your company. Jimmy has run away and left us together, I find.”
“Yes, Jimmy has run away,” Claude answered, beginning slowly to feel the full force of Jimmy's perfidy. He looked at Miss Haddon's cheerful, rosy face, and bright brown eyes, and wondered whether she had been in the plot.
“I hope you will not be bored,” Miss Haddon went on, as they sat down together, the intonation of her melodious elderly voice seeming to dismiss the supposition, even while she suggested it. “But, indeed, I think it is almost impossible to be bored in the country.”
Claude, who was always either in London or Paris, looked frankly astonished. In handing him his cup of tea, Miss Haddon noticed it.
“You don't agree with me?” she asked.
“I cannot disagree, at least,” he said; “because, to tell the truth, I am always in towns.”
“Probably you are happy there then,” she rejoined, with a briskness that was agreeable, because it was not a hideous assumption, like the geniality that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.
But Claude could not permit his hostess to remain comfortable in this utterly erroneous belief.
“Oh, please—” he said, with gentle rebuke, “I am not happy anywhere.”
Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and whimsical, but decidedly acute, scrutiny.
“Perhaps you are too young to be happy,” she said; “you have not suffered enough.”
“I have never been young,” he answered, eating his devilled kidney with a silent pathos of perseverance—“never.”
“And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel old. It can't be done. I'm sixty-four, and look it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take an interest in people, and regard life as my half-opened oyster. It is a pity one can't go on living till one is two or three hundred or so. There is so much to see and know. Our existence in the world is like a day at the Stores. We have to go awaybefore we have been into a quarter of the different departments.”
“I don't find life at all like that. I have seen all the departments till I am sick of them. But perhaps you never come to London?”
“Every year for three months to see my friends. I stay at an hotel. It is a most delightful time.”
Her tone was warm with pleasant memories. Claude felt himself more and more surprised.
“You enjoy the country, and London?” he said.
“I enjoy everything,” said Miss Haddon. “And surely most people do.”
“None of the people I know seem to enjoy anything very much. They try everything, of course. That is one's duty.”
“Then the latest literature really reflects life, I imagine,” Miss Haddon said. “If what you say is true, everything includes the sins as well as the virtues. I have often wondered whether the books that I have thought utterly and absurdly false could possibly be the outcome of facts.”
“Such as what books?”
“Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?”
“They ignore nothing.”
“Not even duty?”
“Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored.”
Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon. She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to the egg.
“That, I understand,” she remarked briskly, “is the doctrine of what is called in London the young decadent; and in the country—forgive me—sometimes the young devil of the day.”
“I am decadent, Miss Haddon,” Claude said with a gentle pride that was not wholly ungraceful.
The elderly lady swept him with a bright look of fresh and healthy interest.
“How exciting,” she exclaimed, after a moment's decisive pause, but with a completely natural air. “You are the first I have seen. For Jimmy isn't one, is he?”
“Jimmy! No. He plays football, and eats cold roast beef and cheese for lunch.”
“Do tell me—how does one do it?”
She seemed intensely interested, and was merrily munching an apple grown in one of her own orchards.
Claude raised his dark eyebrows.
“I beg your pardon?”
“How does one become a decadent? I have heard so much about you all, about your cleverness, and your clothes, and the things you write, and draw, and smoke, and think, and—and eat—”
She seemed suddenly struck by a bright idea.
“Oh, Mr Melville!” she exclaimed, leaning forward behind the great silver urn, and darting at him a glance of imploring earnestness, “will you do me a favour? We are left to ourselves for a whole week. Teach me, teach me to be a decadent.”
“But I thought you were going to teach me to be yo—” Claude began, and stopped just in time. “I mean—er—”
He paused, and they gazed at each other. There was meditation in the boy's eyes. He was wondering seriously whether it would be possible for an elderly spinster lady, of countrified morals and rural procedure, to be decadent. She was rather stout, too, and appeared painfully healthy.
“Will you?” Miss Haddon breathed across the urn and the teapot.
“Well, we might try,” Claude answered doubtfully.
He was remarking to himself:—
“Poor, dear Jimmy! He certainly doesn't understand his aunt!”
She was murmuring in her mind: “I have always heard they have no sense of humour!”
“Mr Melville, Mr Melville,” cried Miss Haddon's voice towards evening on the following day, “the absinthe has arrived!”
Claude came out languidly into the hall.
“Has it?” he said dreamily.
“Yes, and Paul Verlaine's poetry, and the blue books—I mean the yellow books, and” (rummaging in a just-opened parcel) “yes, here are two novels by Catulle Mendez, and a box of those rose-tipped cigarettes. Now, what ought I to do? Shall we have some absinthe instead of our tea, or what?”
Claude looked at her with a momentary suspicion, but her grey hair crowned an eager face decorated with an honest expression. The suspicion was lulled to rest.
“We had better have our tea,” he answered slowly. “I like my absinthe about an hour or so before dinner.”
“Very well. Tea, James, and muffins.”
The butler retired with fat dignity, but wondering not a little at the unusual vagaries of his mistress. Miss Haddon and Claude, laden with books, repaired to the drawing-room and sat down by the fire. Claude placed himself, cross-legged, upon a cushion on the floor. The box of rose-tipped cigarettes was in his hand. Miss Haddonregarded him expectantly from her sofa. Her expression seemed continually exclaiming, “What's to be done now?”
The boy felt that this was not right, and endeavoured gently to correct it.
“Please try to be a little—a—”
“Yes?”
“A little more restrained,” he said. “What we feel about life is that it should never be crude. All extremes are crude.”
“What—even extremes of wickedness?”
He hesitated.
“Well, certainly extremes of goodness, or happiness, or anything of that kind. When one comes to think of it seriously, happiness is really absurd, is it not? Just consider how preposterous what is called a happy face always looks, covered with those dreadful, wrinkled things named smiles, all the teeth showing, and so on. I know you agree with me. Happiness drives all thought out of a face, and distorts the features in a most painful manner. When I go out walking on a Bank Holiday, a thing I seldom do, I always think a cheerful expression the most degrading of all expressions. A contented clerk disfigures a whole street—really.”
Miss Haddon's appearance had gradually grown very sombre during this speech, and she did not brighten up on the approach of tea and muffins on a wicker table whimsical with little shelves.
“Perhaps you are right,” she said. “I daresay happiness is unreasonable. Ought I to sit on the floor too?”
Claude deprecated such an act on the part of his hostess. Sitting on the floor was one of his pet originalities, and he hated rivalry. Besides, Miss Haddon was distinctly too stout for that sort of thing.
“I do it because I feel so Turkish,” he explained. “Otherwise, it would be an assumption, and not naïve. People make a great mistake in fancying the decadent is unnatural. If anything, he is too natural. He follows his whim. The world only calls us natural when we do everything we dislike. If Rossetti had played football every Saturday, his poetry would have been much more read in England than it has been. Yes, please, I will have another muffin.”
“But I think I feel Turkish too,” Miss Haddon said calmly. “Yes, I am sure I do. I ought not to resist it; ought I? Otherwise I shall be flying in the face of your beautiful theories.” And she squatted down on the floor at his elbow.
Claude had a wonderful purple moment of acute irritation, during which he felt strangely natural. Miss Haddon did not appear to notice it. She went on bombarding him with questions in a cheery manner until he began to be rather ill, but her face never lost its expression of grave sadness, a strange, inexplicable melancholy that was not in the leastBank Holiday. The contrast between her expression and her voice worried Claude, as an intelligent pantaloon might worry a clown. He felt that something was wrong. Either face or voice required alteration. And then questions are like death—extremely irksome. Besides, he found it difficult to answer many of them, difficult to define precisely the position of the decadent, his intentions and his aims. It was no use to tell Miss Haddon that he didn't possess either the one or the other. Always with the same definitely sad face, the same definitely cheerful voice, she declined to believe him. He fidgeted on his cushion, and his Turkish placidity threatened to be seriously disturbed.
The appearance of the absinthe created a diversion. Claude arranged a glass of it, much diluted with water, for the benefit of his hostess, and she began to sip it with an air of determined reverence.
“It tastes like the smell of a drag hunt,” she said after a while.
Claude's gently-lifted eyebrows proclaimed misapprehension.
“When they drag a trail over a course and satisfy the hounds with a dead rabbit at the end of it,” she explained.
“My dear lady,” he protested plaintively. “Really, you do not grasp the inner meaning of what you are drinking. Presently the most perfect sensation will steal over you, a curious happy detachment from everything, as if you were floating in some exquisite element. You will not care what happens, or what—”
“But must I drink it all before I feel detached?” she asked. “It's really so very nasty, quite disgusting to the taste. Surely you think so.”
“I drink it for its after-effect.”
“Is it like a good act that costs us pain at the moment, and gives us the pleasure of self-satisfaction ultimately?”
“I don't know,” the boy exclaimed abruptly. To compare absinthe to a good act seemed to him quite intolerable.
He let his rose-tipped cigarette go out, and was glad when the dressing gong sounded in the hall.
Miss Haddon sprang up from the floor briskly.
“I rather admire you for drinking this stuff,” she said. “I am sure you do it to mortify the flesh. A Lenten penance out of Lent is most invigorating to the mind.”
As Claude went up to dress, he felt as if he never wished to touch absinthe again. The glitter of its personality was dulled for him now that it was looked upon as merely a nasty sort of medicine to be indulged in as a mortification of the flesh, like wearing a hair shirt, or rejecting meat on Fridays. He found Miss Haddon painfully prosaic. It seemed almost silly to be a decadent in her company. To feel Turkish alone was graceful and quaint, almost intellectual, but to have an old ladyfeeling Turkish, too, and squatting on the floor to emphasise the sensation, was tragic, seemed to bring imbecility very near. Claude dressed with unusual agitation, and made a distinct failure of his tie.
All through dinner Miss Haddon talked optimistically about her prospects as a successful decadent, much as if she were discussing her future on the Stock Exchange, or as the editor of a paper. She calculated that at her present rate of progress she ought to be almost on a level with her guest by the end of the week, and spoke hopefully of ceasing to take any interest in the ordinary facts of life, of learning a proper contempt for all healthy-minded humanity, and of appreciating at its proper value what seems to ordinary people, weak-kneed affection in literature, in art, and, above all, in movement and in appearance. Her bright eyes flashed upon Claude beneath her crown of powdered hair, as she talked, and the big room rang with her jovial voice.
The boy began to feel exceedingly confused. Yet he had never been less bored. Miss Haddon might be stout and sixty-four. Nevertheless, her net personality was far less wearisome than that of many a town-bred sylph. Unconsciously Claude ate with a hearty appetite, indulged immoderately in excellent roast beef, and even swallowed a beautifully-cooked Spanish onion without thinking of the committal of a crime. During dessert Miss Haddon gave him a racy description of a ruralcricket match and of the supper and speeches which followed it, and he found himself laughing heartily and wishing he had been there. He pulled himself up short with a sudden sensation of horror, and his hostess rose to go into the drawing-room.
“Shall we play Halma or Ek Bahr?” she asked; “or would they be out of order? I wish particularly to conform to all your tenets.”
“Dear lady, please, we have no tenets,” he protested. “Do remember that, or you will never become what you wish. But I do not care for any games.”
“Then shall we sit down and each read a volume of the ‘Yellow Book’?”
She hastened towards a table to find copies of that work, but something in her brisk and anxious movement caused Claude to exclaim hurriedly:
“Please—please teach me Halma.”
That night he went up to bed flushed with triumph.
Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple of games. Never before had he felt so absolutely certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect.
Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude Melville were feeding chickens—under protest.
“I mean to give it up, of course,” the formersaid. “It's a degrading pursuit; it's almost as bad as the ‘things that Jimmy does,’ the things that give him such a marvellous complexion and keep his figure so magnificent.”
She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied denizens of the enlarged meat-safe before them, and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness:
“Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which, as you have taught me, are unworthy of thinking people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the limbs straight and supple?”
All the time that she was speaking her glance crept musingly over Claude's tall, but weak-looking and rather flaccid form, seeming to pause on his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his slightly yellow face. That face began to flush. She sighed.
“There must be something radically wrong in the scheme of the universe,” she continued. “But, of course, one ought to live for the mind and for subtle sensations, even though they do make one look an object.”
Her eyes were on the chickens now, who were fighting like feathered furies, pouncing, clucking, running for safety, grain in beak, or, with a fiery anxiety, chasing the favoured brethren who had secured a morsel and were hoping to be permitted to swallow it. Claude glanced at her furtively out of the corner of his eye, and endeavoured,for the first time in his life, to stand erect and broaden his rather narrow chest.
Silently he resolved to give instructions to his tailor not to spare the padding in his future coats. He was glad, too, that knee-breeches, for which he had occasionally sighed, had not come into fashion again. After all, modern dress had its little advantages. Miss Haddon was still scattering grain, rather in the attitude of Millet's “Sower,” and still talking reflectively.
“We must try to convert Jimmy,” she said. “I have a good deal of influence over him, Mr Melville. We must try to make him more like you, more thoughtful, more inactive, more frankly sensual, more fond of sofas, in the future than he has been in the past. Do you know, I am ashamed to say it, but I don't believe I have ever seen Jimmy lying on a sofa. Poor Jimmy! Look at that hen! She is choking. Hens gulp their food so! And then, he's inclined to be persistently unselfish. That must be stopped too. I have learnt from you that to be decadent one must be acutely and untiringly selfish. The blessings of selfishness! What a volume might be written upon them! Mr Melville, all chickens must be decadent, for all chickens are entirely selfish. It is strange to think that the average fowl is more advanced in ethics—is it ethics I mean?—than the average man or woman, is it not? And we ate a decadent at dinner last night. I feel almost like a cannibal.”
She threw away the last grain, and was silent. But suddenly Claude spoke.
“Miss Haddon,” he said, and his voice had never sounded so boyish to her before, “you have been laughing at me for nearly a week.” He paused, then he went on, rather unevenly, in the up-and-down tones induced by stifled excitement, “and I have never found it out until this moment. I suppose you think me a great fool. I daresay I have been one. But please don't—I mean, please let us give up acting our farce.”
“But have we reached the third act?” she said.
They were walking through the garden, among the crocuses and violets now.
“I am sure I don't know,” he answered, trying to seem easy. “Perhaps it is a farce in one act.”
“Perhaps it is not a farce at all, my dear boy,” she said very gently and with a sudden old-world gravity that was not without its grace.
They reached the house. She put her basket down on the oak table in the wide hall, and faced him in the eager way that was natural to her, and that was so youthful.
“Mr Melville—Claude,” she said, as she held out her hand, clad in a very countrified brown glove, with a fan-like gauntlet, “of all Jimmy's friends I think I shall like you the best. People who have acted together ought to be good comrades.”
He took the hand. That seemed necessary.
“But I haven't been acting,” he said.
“Oh, yes, you have,” she answered, “and I have only been on the stage for a week; while you—well, I suppose you have been on it for at least two or three years. I am taking my farewell of it this morning, and you—?”
The boy's face was deeply flushed, but he did not look, or feel, actually angry.
“I don't know about myself yet,” he said.
“Think it all over,” the old lady exclaimed. “And now let us have lunch. I am hungry.”
Jimmy arrived that evening.
“How old are you, Claude?” he exclaimed, clapping his friend on the back.
“I am not sure,” Claude replied. “But I almost begin to wish that I were sixty-four.”