ATfirst, when Florrie told her, the verdict had seemed unescapable. She had said, after the little silence in which she received it,—the silence in which much had happened to her,—she had said, in a very quiet voice that had surprised herself, “I’m afraid it’s no good, then, Florrie dear. I can’t afford to go away.”
Aunt Kate had left her only the house and its contents. She had saved only the tiniest sum herself—just enough to yield an income that paid for her food and light and coal. To pay for Jane, her good old servant, to pay for her clothes and washing, to pay for the trips to London and the crumpets and cakes that she gave her friends at tea in Acacia Road, she had still to depend upon the pupils that, fortunately, she had found in the small Surrey town. On three afternoons a week she sallied forth, peacefully indeed, with no sense of anxiety or pressure, and made her way to the houses of the doctor, the rector, the big London manufacturer, and instructed their young daughters in the excellent Munich method that she had imbibed in youth. With these delightfully convenient strings to her bow she could manage perfectly.But to give them up and to pay for an open-air cure in Switzerland was outside the bounds of her possibilities.
So she explained, in the quiet voice, to Florrie; and it was then that Florrie, revealing herself as a more wonderfully kind friend than even in Miss Glover’s grateful eyes she had always been, said, the tears suddenly hopping down her cheeks and making dark spots on the pink silk blouse,—
"Stuff and nonsense, my dearest Edie! What do a few pounds more or less matter at a time like this? Youshallgo! It’s a question of life or death. Now, not a word, my dear, and listen to me.I’llsend you. It’ll be the proudest day of my life that sees you off. What’s all my good luck worth to me if I can’t give a friend a helping hand when she needs it? I can sell out some investments. I’ve more than enough, and I’ll soon fill my stocking again. And you shall go as soon as we can get you ready; and first class, my dear, all the way, boatandtrain. Don’t I know the difference it makes—and getting off to sleep on the way? Jane shall go with you to take care of you—oh, yes, she shall!—I won’t hear of your going alone; and you’ll come back next spring a sound woman.
“I know all about those Swiss open-air cures,” Florrie rushed on.“They’re magical. Poor Lady Forestalls was at death’s door three years ago—there she is—over there on the piano—that tall, regal-looking woman with the Pekinese: worse than you she was, by far. And she went to Switzerland and came back in six months' time, cured; absolutely cured. Never a touch of it since. She does everything and goes everywhere. And such scenery, my dear, such flowers! You’ll revel in it. And Julia Forestalls told me that the people were so interesting. She made a number of friends—Italian, German, Russian. You shall take my tea-basket, my dear. Jane can carry it easily. It’s a gem; everything complete and so convenient. It makes simply all the difference on a journey if you can get a steaming hot cup of tea at any time you like, dayornight. I saved Cora Clement’s life with my tea-basket in Venice; she says so herself. She got chilled to the bone on the lagoons. Over there on the writing-bureau she is; American. Not a beauty, butjolie laide, and dresses exquisitely—as you can see. She’s always taken for a French-woman.”
Miss Glover, even more than usual, felt to-day that dear Florrie dazed and bewildered her a little; but the mere fact that Florrie’s tears had dried so soon, that she could, so soon, be telling her about Lady Forestalls and Cora Clement, was encouraging. Miss Glover felt that her case was evidently but one among many to which Florrie had seen the happiest endings—a comparatively unalarming affair; entirely unalarming, though exceedingly engrossing, Florrie’s tone and demeanour indicated, when taken in hand by such as she.
And how she took it in hand! There was no use protesting against anything. As always, Florrie made her feel that she knew better than she herself could what was good for her. It was all arranged before they parted that day, and Florrie had further smoothed her path by declaring that nothing would suit her better, if Edie really felt fussed about the money, than to take The Nook during her absence. “The very thing I need,” said Florrie.“I’ve been thinking for some time that I must have a little place near London to run down to for week-ends. And you’ve that duck of a spare-room, too, I remember, where I can put up a friend; and it’s so near town that people can motor down and have tea with me of an afternoon. My dear, nothing could be more providential.”
During the three weeks that followed, Florrie, in London, shopped for her, decided on the clothes she would need and the conveniences that she must take; and interesting parcels arrived at The Nook every morning. It was strange and exciting to be made much of, strange and exciting to be on a journey; she had not been out of England since that stay, in girlhood, in Munich; and in spite of the shadow hanging over her, the sense of haste lest she be overtaken, she felt the days of preparation as almost happy ones. Jane, it was true, was rather gloomy about everything, but even beneath her sombre demeanour Miss Glover felt sure that she, too, was touched by the sense of adventure, for Jane had never been out of England at all.
And now the boxes were all packed and Miss Glover’s dressing-case stood open, half filled, in her bedroom, waiting only for her sponge bag and pin-tray and brush and comb to be added next morning, when she and Jane and Florrie were to go up together to Victoria, and Florrie was to see them off; and while Jane prepared her most festive tea, Miss Glover had been showing Florrie all over her new domain on that August afternoon when she had spoken of her garden as horrid. Florrie, in answer to her shy request that she might, perhaps, if it wasn’t too much bother, sow some mignonette and sweet peas for her next spring, had answered with reassuring decision,“To be sure I will, my dear. I’ll take care of everything and have it all waiting for you spick and span when you get back.” And then Jane’s gong had summoned them in, and it had been reassuring, too, to see how benignant were the glances that Florrie cast about the little sitting-room while she stirred her tea and commended Jane’s cakes. “Beeswax and turpentine for all the furniture once a week.Iknow. And dusted every morning without fail.”
Yes, it was safe in Florrie’s competent hands, dear little room. In her heart of hearts, though she had no faintest flicker of criticism or comparison except for that one strangely painful memory of the rush of pinkness,—Miss Glover very much preferred her own room, shabby and simple as it was, to Florrie’s; just as, though so well aware of the relative insignificance of her garden, she knew that she would prefer it to the Isaacsons', with its arches of roses and its geraniums in white stone vases. She liked quiet, soft, gentle things; the ever-so-faded ancient chintzes on her aunt’s chairs and sofa, showing here and there a ghostly bird of paradise or a knot of nearly obliterated flowers, her aunt’s absurd, faded, old-fashioned carpet,—fortunately faded!—and her grandmother’s Lowestoft cups ranged above the mantelpiece. Everything was in its place; her knitting-basket between her chair and the fireplace; her beaded footstool before the best armchair, where Florrie sat; the little table, with a bowl of white and purple pansies on it, where lay the daily paper and the two books from the circulating library. All were dear to her; all spoke of continuity with the past, of long association, of quiet, small, peaceful activities; and as she looked about she knew that her heart wouldhave sunk a little at the thought of leaving them, had it not been for Florrie’s sustaining presence.
Florrie, while her second cup of tea was being made, drew forth and laid beside the tea-tray, with an air of infinite sagacity, the coupons for the reserved seats in the first-class carriage. “I’llkeep my eyes on those,” said Florrie. It was almost as if they had been tickets for some brilliant entertainment—as if, Miss Glover felt, she and Jane were going to be taken to the opera rather than to Switzerland. It was owing to Florrie that she had almost come to feel that Switzerlandwasthe opera.
But that night, when they had gone upstairs and the house was still, the sense of adventure deserted her. Sitting in her dressing-gown before her mirror while, with hands that tired so easily, she brushed and braided her hair, she felt, suddenly, very middle-aged, very lonely, ill, and almost frightened. The look of her gaping dressing-case, as she glanced round at it, was frightening, as was the emptiness of the mantelpiece, from which the family photographs had all been taken to be packed, together with the Bible and prayer-book from the table near her bed. It was a room already deserted. It looked as it might look if she had died. What, indeed, in spite of Florrie’s good cheer, if she were to die out there, alone, away from everything and every one she knew? And, with a curious impulse, rising to go and close the gaping dressing-case, she realized that she had not said good-bye to anything. The morning had all been spent in packing—in that and in preparations for Florrie’s arrival; and all the afternoon Florrie had been with her, and she was to be with her till her departure to-morrow. She would not again be alone in her littlehouse; she would not again be alone in her garden. The thought of her pansies came with a pang of reproach; it was as if she had forgotten them, like children sent to bed without a good-night kiss.
She drew her curtain and looked out. Yes; there they were. The moon was shining brightly and the white pansies lay below like pools of milk upon the ground. She looked at them for some moments, while the soft fragrance of the night mounted to her and seemed with gently supplicating hands to draw her forth; and then, cautiously—for Florrie slept across the way—but with decision, she put on her heavy cloak over her dressing-gown, wrapped a shawl about her head and shoulders, and stole downstairs.
The drawing-room was very dark; she felt her way swiftly through it past the familiar objects, and the conservatory door opened on a flood of silvery light. She saw the high, shining disk of the moon, and the great black poplar tree that grew in the neighbouring garden seemed vast against the sky. As she stepped out, she made herself think of Diamond in “At the Back of the North Wind.” It was like stepping into a fairy-tale; only something more sweet and solemn than a fairy-tale, as that book was; something, for all its beauty, a little awful. But when she looked down from the moon, the sky, the poplar, there was only sweetness. The fragrance that had solicited her seemed now to welcome her, to clasp and caress her. The pansies were all looking up at her. On the wall Madame Alfred Carrière was more beautiful than she had ever before seen her, her pale flowers and buds making a constellation against the darkness.
She walked round the path, looking at it all, soglad that she had come, smiling—a child in fairyland, or a spirit arrived in Paradise and finding it strange yet familiar—as Paradise should be. Perhaps, she thought, dying would be like that: a stepping out from the darkness into something vast and solemn that would slowly gather about one into well-known and transfigured shapes, into white pansies growing thickly at one’s feet. She stooped in the moonlight and passed her hands over their upturned faces. They were flowers entranced, neither sleeping nor awake; and she felt, as her fingers touched their soft, dewy petals, as if their dreams with their whiteness flowed into her. To leave them was like leaving her very self, yet the parting now was all peace and innocent acquiescence, like them, and she was still smiling as she whispered to them, “Good-bye, darlings.”
SWITZERLANDwas like the opera, and for her first months there Miss Glover felt as if she watched it from a box—very much at the back and looking past many heads at the vast display. Everything that Florrie had said was true: the scenery was more magnificent than she could have imagined, oppressively more, and the people, again oppressively, more interesting. They were, these people, engaged all of them in trying to keep alive, and, when they failed in that, in dying, dying under one’s eyes from day to day; and in the publicity of such occupations there was something as abnormal as was the size of the mountains. Some of these people she came to know a little—those, usually, who had given up: the dear little Russian girl who,alas, died in December; the sulky, affectionate French boy; and the large yet wasted German singer who made Miss Glover think of a splendid fruit keeping still its shell of form and colour while eaten away inside by wasps. Fraülein Schmidt liked to have her play Schubert and Schumann songs to her, and still tried to sing attainable passages here and there in a queer, booming, hollow voice that made Miss Glover, again, think of the wasps imprisoned and buzzing. But most of the people remained parts of the spectacle to her. They engaged, when they were well enough, in winter sports; they talked together of books she had never heard of, and of things she had never thought of; and often, moreover, she could not understand what they said, as her languages did not extend beyond rather simple French and German, and Dante with a dictionary.
The only other English person there was a young man who made her think of the Prince Charlie roses; he was sombre and delicate and beautiful and did not talk to anybody, sitting apart and reading all day long. Miss Glover wondered a good deal about him, and watched him sometimes from her place on the snow-sifted balcony when they lay there encased in fur bags and buttressed with hot-water bottles. His name was Lord Ninian Carstairs; and that was like the roses, too.
Once, when they were alone on the balcony, their recumbent chairs near one another, he lifted his eyes suddenly and found hers fixed upon him, and perhaps their wistful and ingenuous absorption touched him, for, flushing faintly,—he was a shy young man,—he asked if she were feeling better.
She said she couldn’t quite tell. It was difficultto tell what one felt, didn’t he find? Everything was so different; so exciting in a way; and when one was excited one felt, perhaps, better than one was.
Lord Ninian laughed shortly at that, and said that he didn’t feel excited; he wished he could.
“I’m depressed, too, sometimes,” said Miss Glover; and then he sighed.
“One gets so abominably homesick in this hole,” he said.
She had never thought of such splendour as being, possibly, to anybody, a hole; but she knew what it was to feel homesick. They smiled at each other when they met after that, she and Lord Ninian, and he lent her magazines and books. When she heard that he had died,—she had not seen him for a week and had feared for him,—she felt very, very sad and her thoughts turned in great longing to Acacia Road and to her garden.
She wanted very much to live to see her garden again; but she could not help being frightened lest she should not; for, as the winter wore on, it became evident to her, and all the more because every one else was so carefully unaware of it, that one of the things that Florrie had predicted was not to come true. She was not to return cured. She was not going to get better. At first the slow burning of fever had seemed only part of the excitement, but she could not go on thinking it that when it began to leave her breathless, trembling, faint. By the time that the miracle of the Alpine flower-meadows was revealed to her and she had watched the snow recede and the jonquils and anemones advance, she knew that if she wished to die at home she must soon go. They would not consent to that at once. They said that the spring months were full ofmagic, and she was persuaded to stay on. They were magically beautiful and she was glad to see them, but she longed more and more to see her little garden. She dreamed sometimes of her pansies at night, and it seemed to her once that as she stooped in the moonlight and touched them she was cured; the fever fell from her; a cool white peace flowed into her veins; and when she looked up from them, the night was gone and the sun was rising over her Surrey hills.
At the beginning of June they consented that she should go. They did not tell her the truth, of course. They said that she might pass the summer in England, since she wished so much to return there, and that she must come back for next winter; but she knew that if her state had not been recognized as hopeless they would not have let her go. It was hopeless, and she summoned all her strength and resolution, that she might live until she reached Acacia Road.
FLORRIEmet her at Victoria. Florrie did not know that it was hopeless, though she knew that it was not as yet, a cure; but from the way that she controlled her features to a determined joviality Miss Glover could infer her shock, her grief, her consternation. The glance, too, that Jane and Florrie exchanged was revealing, had she been in need of revelations.
After a night in Florrie’s flat, however, she knew that she looked so much better that poor Florrie, when she came to see her in the morning, was quite erroneously cheered.“You’reall right,” Florrie declared. “The journey’s knocked you about a bit; but once we get you down to Surrey, Jane and I, you’ll pick up in no time. After all, there’s no place like home, is there?”
Miss Glover, from her pillows, smiled. She felt very fond of kind Florrie and sorry for her that she must, so soon, suffer sadness on her account.
It was difficult, in the train, to listen to Florrie’s talk. After her fright of the day before, Florrie had cheered up so tremendously that she talked even more than usual, of her friends, her enterprises, of how she was going yachting that autumn with the Forestalls, and of how Di Haymouth had just had a baby.
“A splendid boy, and Mr. and Mrs. Isaacson are fairly off their heads with pride and pleasure. Such a layette, my dear, you never saw! Real lace through and through—and the cradle of a regular little prince! I gave him a silver porringer for his christening; a lovely thing, all heavyrepousséwork with his initials on a shield at one side. Di say it’s the prettiest porringer she ever saw.”
It was difficult to listen to Florrie and to nod and smile at the right moment when she was thinking of her garden and wondering if Florrie had really remembered to sow the sweet peas and mignonette. Even if she hadn’t, the Madame Alfred Carrière and the Prince Charlie roses would be out, and the last tulips, and the pansies, of course. And it was such a beautiful day, just such a day as that she had risen to look at when, in her dream, the pansies had cured her.
The drive from the station up to Acacia Road was a short one. The dear, foolish little porch was there, the bow-window, the laurel-bushes. Herown home. As she saw it she felt such a lift of the heart that it seemed to her, too, that she might be going to get better after all. Florrie and Jane helped her out and she and Florrie went into the sitting-room. She looked round it, smiling, while she felt her happy, fluttering breaths like those of some wandering bird put back into its own dear cage again, safe, secure, bewildered a little in its contentment. She was like such a trivial little cage-bird; she was meant for Acacia Road, and not for Swiss mountains.
Everything was the same: even her knitting-basket stood waiting for her, and all that caught her eye with their unfamiliarity were the flowers, the profusion of flowers, standing in bowls and vases everywhere; perhaps almost too many flowers,—that was like dear, exuberant Florrie,—and all pink.
“Oh—how lovely they are!” she said, finding the fluttering breath fail her a little. “How dear of you, Florrie, to have it all arranged like this!”
“They look welcoming, don’t they?” said Florrie, who laughed with some excitement. “Will you rest, dear, or come into the garden?”
“Oh, the garden, please. I’m not at all tired. I can rest later.”
Florrie still led her by the arm. They went into the conservatory and there came to her then the strangest, dizziest sense of pink—everywhere pink!—shining in at her through the sea-green glass, bursting in at her through the open door.
For a moment she thought that her mind was disordered, and looked up with large, startled eyes at Florrie; but, beaming as she had never yet seen her beam, all complacency and triumphant benevolence,Florrie nodded, saying, “Now for your surprise, my dear. Now for your garden. Just see what I’ve made of it to welcome you!”
They stepped out. Pink. Pink everywhere, above, below, around one. The paths were arched with swinging iron chains on which, already, the long festoons advanced. The border, heaping itself up splendidly against the wall, was splashed with white, yellow, blue and purple, a blaze of colour indeed, but pink dominated, like the sound of trumpets in an orchestra. It also made Miss Glover think, strangely, sickly, of the sound of a gramophone. There was no lawn. The centre of the garden was flagged, with a highly ornamental sun-dial in the middle and a white garden seat and a wonderful white stone basin for the birds. There were no Prince Charlie roses, no mignonette and sweet peas, there were no pansies. Her garden had disappeared.
“There!” said Florrie.
She led her to the garden seat. From here Miss Glover, as she sank down upon it, could see that the back of the house was also dappled with the incessant colour.
“Isn’t it a marvel!” said Florrie.“I hardly dared hope they’d grow as they have, but Dorothy Perkins is a winner, and these latest climbers run her close. I spared nothing, my dear, nothing—manure, bone-meal, labour. The men were working here for a week last autumn. All the old soil was carted away and a rich loam put in three feet deep. I put them in big. I knew I could get them to take if I took enough pains over it. Those chains will be covered in another month. I knew it would do you more good than any open-air cure to find such a garden waiting for you. I’d defy anybody to have the blues in this garden! In its little way it’s just an epitome of joy, isn’t it? It’s donemegood, to begin with! I’ve been having tea out here every day in my week-ends and every one who’s seen it and heard about my plan says I’m a regular old fairy with a wand. Mrs. Isaacson motored down only last Saturday and thought it was a perfect poem. And so it is, though I say it as shouldn’t.”
Florrie had paused on the deepest breath of purest satisfaction, and the time had come when Miss Glover must speak. She must find words to express gratitude and astonishment. She must not burst into tears. She felt that if she began to cry she would at once be very ill. She did not want to be taken ill before dear, good, kind Florrie. And it was, of course, a beautiful garden; far more beautiful than hers had ever been, no doubt; yet it hurt her so—to find her garden gone—that she heard her voice come in gasps as she said, “Dear Florrie—you are a wonderful friend—you are indeed.—I can never thank you enough. It’s a miracle.”
Florrie patted her shoulder—she had her arm around her shoulders.“My best thanks will be to see you happy in it, Edie dear, and getting well and strong again in it. It’s a regular surprise-packet, this garden, let me tell you, my dear. It’ll go on, that border, right up till November, one thing after another: I thought it all out, pencil and paper and catalogue in hand. I went over the whole colour-scheme with Mrs. Isaacson—there’s no one who knows more about it. And since most of the herbaceous things came from her garden, it didn’t cost as much as you’d think. They’ve always heaps of plants left over when they divide in autumn, and everything was at my disposal; and all the latest varieties, as I needn’t say. Wait till you see the lilies—yes, my dear, I’ve found room for everything; where there’s a will there’s a way is my motto, you know—and the phloxes and the chrysanthemums.”
She would never see them, though she was sure that they would all be very beautiful; she would never see these latest varieties from Mrs. Isaacson’s garden. And she would never see her own little garden again. How wonderfully fortunate it was—the thought went through her mind confusedly as she sat there, feeling herself droop against Florrie’s shoulder—that she was not to live with Florrie’s and to go on missing her own garden. How fortunate—but her thoughts swam more and more and tears dazed her eyes—that she had not to say good-bye twice to her pansies. She had died, then, really,—that was it,—on the moonlight night when she had last seen them. And she had left the house to Florrie, dear kind Florrie, and Florrie would go on having tea happily under the festoons of roses.
decorative bar
THEY were only beginning to revert. Last summer they had stood, spires of fretted snow tapering at the points to jade-coloured buds, at the edge of the little copse where the garden path lost itself among young larches, birches, hazels, and poplars, black and white. The sun set behind the copse, spreading in the summer evenings a pale gold background, and often when he went to look at his foxgloves and to listen to the lonely song of the willow-wren, rippling, like a tiny rill of water, from the heart of the wood, Aubrey Westmacott had felt that there was something almost dangerous in such bliss as this. To breathe this limpid air, to hear the willow-wren, to look at white foxgloves, and to know himself free forever from the long oppression of London—if he could have sung his wistful gratitude, his melancholy joy, the song might have been like the bird’s.
This year the change in the foxgloves had come as a complete surprise; he was still a novice at gardening. He had left his beloved garden for a week; regretfully, for he could not bear to lose a day of it—he was like a lover with a bride, long pined for, who each day grows dearer and lovelier;but he had gone, because it seemed churlish to refuse the old don friend at Cambridge—and when he returned, at evening, and had walked down to the copse and had seen them standing there, so delicately yet so decisively altered, the shock of the surprise had seemed all delight. He had intended white foxgloves to rise, always, against the copse; but then he had not known how lovely pink foxgloves could be. He had never seen them of such a shade, each bell of palest rose brimmed with shadows of mauve, and finely freaked within. Regiments of the white flowers had remained steadfast, so that there could be no sense of loss, and he had picked an armful of the pink ones and carried them back to the house, feeling, as he looked at them against his shoulder, that he would have liked to kiss them. He spent the remaining hours of dusk in arranging them. He never allowed the parlourmaid to arrange the flowers. That she saw him, tolerantly, if with a flavour of irony, as a very eccentric gentleman, he was aware, just as he was aware, quite cheerfully, that many of his kind neighbours found him a rather absurd one. But one of the deepest joys this new life afforded him, after the paternal bliss of seeing the darlings grow, was in disposing them about the rooms, with a loving discrimination that Ridley’s skilled but cold and conventional hands could never have accomplished.
This evening he put the foxgloves in the drawing-room, a tall jar on the bureau, a taller jar on the piano, and a group in the vast white Chinese bowl, wedged cunningly into place with stones among the stems. Here he could look at them next morning as he worked at his history. He always workedin the drawing-room, for there he had the morning sun, and, if he could not see his massed and tiered herbaceous border, could look out at the cherry tree and at the tiny squares of terraced lawns, dropping from level to level, with their stone steps and low stone walls and narrow jewelled bordering of flowers.
There was a very nice little study behind the dining-room—it was from the dining-room that one saw the herbaceous border, and he could meditate future rearrangements and harmonies while he ate his breakfast—but the study looked out on the stable shrubberies. He liked, too, to feel himself encompassed by his treasures, old and new, while he wrote of mediæval customs; his mother’s incompetent but loveable water-colours, sketches of her old home, the grey, ancient, gabled house among just such Cotswold slopes and uplands as his western windows looked out upon, though his mother’s old home, passed long since to alien hands, lay on the other side of the county; and his father’s seafaring trophies, from China and Japan and far Pacific islands, and all the lately acquired delightful solidities of Jacobean oak, and his maturest choice in printed linen. Here, on their background of mullioned window or dark wainscoting—such a gem of a little Jacobean house it was—the pink foxgloves greeted him next morning, set among feathery heads and sharp green spears of meadow grass, glimmering and poised on tiptoe, like groups of softly blushing nymphs, and he stood for a long time looking at them, his hands clasped behind his back.
He was forty-six, a fragile little man, blanched and stooping from the long years of imprisonment inthe Government office, from which the undreamed-of inheritance had released him only three years ago, with faded gold hair hanging across his forehead and a gentle face of stifled dreams, the mouth slightly puckering as if in intentness on some task. The eyes, of a dim yet dense pastel blue that told darkly in his faded face, were intent, too, but not acute; they dwelt; they did not penetrate. He wore a small, short moustache, and a pair of goldpince-nezdangled at his coat button.
Delicate as he had always been, and ineffectual, as he had always so dejectedly been aware of being, he, too, with all his relatives, had thought it very fortunate when, on leaving the university, he had secured the tiny post in the Civil Service. There, he knew, he would stay; he was not of the type that rises, and he had never during the long years that followed rebelled consciously against his fate. He was, he often told himself reproachfully, so very fortunate compared with men far abler and more deserving than himself. He found that he could not write, as he had hoped to do, after the conscientious hours at the office. He read a great deal, and crept away to the country for every week-end, sitting by meadow or river, like a dusty mouse let loose from its trap and softly panting in the sunlight. He was often ill, and the doctors always recommended a country life, but it was not on hygienic grounds that he pined for limpid spaces and starry solitudes. There was a soft passion in his blood, inherited from the mother whom he so much resembled, for the sights and sounds and occupations of rurality. He adored flowers. He often dreamed of them at night, and in waking hours the thought of a garden of his own haunted him. Sometimeshe went to stay with friends in their gardens; but this was an ambiguous joy; it was like seeing the pink and white babies playing about their nurses and perambulators in the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, and having no claim to kiss any of them. He loved children, too.
And now he found himself transplanted to this wonderful fairy tale by Uncle Percy’s legacy. He still, often, could hardly realize it. There was a haze of dizzy delight over all the memory of the last three years; the search for a house, the securing of Meadows, the furnishing and ordering of his household—he who had lived in rooms in Kensington for twenty-four years, ruled over by a flawlessly honest but relentless landlady! To think that he could have other fish for breakfast than finnan haddock, and other vegetables in winter than cabbage! This was a minor but an emphatic pleasure.
But above all, around all, the garden! He had planned and planted it all, studying books, brooding over catalogues, making lists, writing labels ever so neatly. The vegetables were given over to the gardener; but his flowers, except for deep trenching—and oh, how deep, how rich, he saw to it that it was! he tended single-handed. His seed-boxes, his cold-frames, his tools and baskets, how he adored them all, and how happy he was in any small personal economies, so that extravagance in manure and bone-meal and leaf-mould should be well justified. The history of mediæval customs was also a long-cherished ideal, but it remained of secondary interest; his heart, always, was in the garden, meditating mulchings, waterings, or hoeings. Every dream had come true, had more thanrealized itself. Was it any wonder that he should feel himself going softly in his amazed gratitude, should sometimes, as when he listened to the willow-wren at evening, feel that such happiness was dangerous.
It had not seemed to flaw the happiness, it had seemed but to add a sweeter undertone to it, melancholy yet blissful, that into the new Paradise there should have stolen a new longing, and that, as of old, he should find himself haunted by an unattainable loveliness. He thought of this as he looked at the pink foxgloves, for they made him think of the face of Leila Pickering. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said to himself, as he turned to the mediæval history, for he had the habit, caught from his long loneliness, of speaking much to himself and with a quaint repetition of words that stole into his social speech, “it is she they are like; she they are like. Lovely, lovely, like her.”
Later in the morning, privileged as she was to interrupt even the history, it was Mrs. Pomfrey who informed him that the strange, delicate beauty was transitory, an unfixed type, and that, next year, or in a very few years, the palely rosy nymphs would be purple.
“They’ll revert. You can get pink ones, you know, from the seedsmen; rosy carmine they call it; but not at all this colour. I’ve never seen a colour quite like this. Your soil must do it. I’ve always thought the soil of Meadows had magic in it.”
Mrs. Pomfrey was the late rector’s widow, and lived in a thicket of roses half a mile away in the village. She was tall, black-robed, majestic, and melancholy, with a deep voice and black eyes and ahigh, hooked nose and large false teeth that shifted slightly and slightly clashed together when she spoke. She had survived all emotions except the grief of having to grow her roses on a clayless soil, and to this grief she often returned. A girlhood friend of Aubrey Westmacott’s mother, she had been his link with Windbury. His week-ends with her there had been the very comets of his dark London sky, and for years he had seen Meadows inadequately tenanted, with an eye of brooding love.
“Oh! they’ll revert to purple, then,” he said, somewhat distressed; and he repeated “purple, purple,” several times, as if to familiarize himself with the sound and very sight of it, while Mrs. Pomfrey answered him, “Give 'em time and they’ll all revert. You must dig 'em up and sow again from year to year if you want to keep 'em pure.”
“Not that I don’t care very much for the purple ones,” said Aubrey; “they are most beautiful flowers, most beautiful; but it’s wild in woods, that I like best to see them. It will be a business to replant; dear me! It took me a day of hard work to establish my white ones in that haphazard-looking little colony down there.”
“Gardening is all hard work,” said Mrs. Pomfrey, “and all disappointment, for the most part, too. It’s only the things you didn’t expect to succeed that ever do, and any effect you particularly count on is pretty sure to fail you.” She tempered her grimness by a slight, bleak smile, however, for she and Aubrey Westmacott understood each other and had the gardener’s soul, for which no work is too hard and no disappointments too many.
“It will be very wonderful to have the intervals of pink to look forward to, though,” Aubrey found the atonement. “They are singularly lovely, aren’t they? Will you think me very silly, now, I wonder, or sillier than you always think me?”
“I don’t think you silly, my dear Aubrey,” Mrs. Pomfrey interposed, “only guileless; you are very guileless; I’ve thought that ever since you were taken in by that dreadful cook of yours, who had red hair, and got drunk and rubbed the whitebait through a sieve.”
“Well,” Aubrey continued, smiling his gentle, tentative smile, “my foxgloves, at all events, can’t take me in, and since they are so very unusual and so lovely I thought I’d ask a few people in to-day to see them. The Carews, you know, and Barton, and Mrs. and Miss Pickering. And you—if you can come. I’ll put it off till to-morrow, if that will secure you, only the foxgloves may not be quite so lovely by then.”
“I will come with pleasure, my dear Aubrey,” said Mrs. Pomfrey, “and though nobody will appreciate your foxgloves as you do, we shall all enjoy your tea.”
“Miss Pickering cares very much for flowers, you know, very much. We’ve talked a great deal about flowers,” said Aubrey, swinging his eyeglass and nodding as he looked at his old friend.
“Does she? She doesn’t know much about 'em though.”
“No; all those years in India, and in towns. She has lived so much in towns. Such an inappropriate life it seems for such an exquisite creature.”
“Does it?” said Mrs. Pomfrey. She added aftera moment, as if with concession, “She is a very pretty girl.”
Aubrey Westmacott was not acute. “Isn’t she?” he said eagerly. “A beautiful and noble and lovely head, isn’t it? like a flower; she is altogether like a flower, with her slenderness and height. Do you know,” he went on, swinging his glasses more quickly, while he kept his ingenuous eyes on his friend, “can you guess the flower she makes me think of? In that pale pink dress, that pink dress she wore the other day at the rectory garden party, and with that white hat lined with pink. Can you guess?” His eyes overflowed with their suggestion.
Mrs. Pomfrey moved hers from his face to the foxgloves. “Like those, I suppose you mean.”
“Isn’tshe?” he repeated. “Now, isn’t it quite remarkable? You see it, too.”
“Yes; I see it,” said Mrs. Pomfrey. She studied the flowers and again, after a deliberating pause, went on, “Do you think Mrs. Pickering is like purple foxgloves?”
Aubrey’s eyeglass tumbled from his hand. He was astonished, almost indignant. “Mrs. Pickering?”
“She looks like her daughter,” said Mrs. Pomfrey; “as much like her, that is, as a purple foxglove looks like a pink one.”
“I can imagine nothing more unlike a flower than Mrs. Pickering,” said Aubrey, with gathered repudiation.
“No; certainly; she’s not at all like a flower. She’s more like a sparrow—something sharp and commonplace and civic. I only intended an analogy, for she must have been a very pretty girl.”“Nothing could be less sharp or commonplace or civic than Miss Pickering.” Aubrey was now deeply flushed.
“Oh, of course not, my dear Aubrey; she is very unusual looking,” Mrs. Pomfrey again conceded. “And she is tall and her mother is short. Old Colonel Pickering, too, was tall, I remember. I saw him once or twice when they were living at Cheltenham the year before he died! a bleached, dull, oppressed old man, a much better type than the wife; she ruled him, I heard, with a rod of iron. One may be sure that she doesn’t rule Miss Leila. She is a young lady with a will of her own, unless I am much mistaken in her.”
"A will of her own; yes, yes"—Aubrey eagerly, pathetically to Mrs. Pomfrey’s ear, gathered up the ambiguous fragments—“and great firmness of will; great decision of character; and the serenity, you know, the sweet dignity that go with it, that so often go with it. You have noticed her serenity, her dignity. And she is very silent—a great contrast to her mother. I often wonder what brought them here. It’s very fortunate for all of us; but Mrs. Pickering is, as you say, so civic, yes, so commonplace, that I don’t understand what she can find in this quiet place to please her. She certainly doesn’t care about her garden. Those beds about The Cottage are very distressing; they distress Miss Pickering.”
“It’s quite clear to me why they came,” said Mrs. Pomfrey.“They can’t afford London, and, I suppose, know nobody there if they could; and there is more chance of a pretty girl like Miss Leila marrying well here than there is in Cheltenham. She doesn’t hunt, it’s true; but the hunting makes a difference, and there is a good deal going on in one way and another. Mrs. Pickering hoped to capture Arthur Barton; she made that very evident. But he has never looked at another woman since his wife died, and never will, I imagine; at all events, he didn’t look at Miss Leila.”
Aubrey’s eyes, dwelling on her, expressed reprobation and almost horror. “She tried to marry her daughter to Barton! That lovely child and Barton! What a terrible woman!”
“Miss Pickering must be a good twenty-five, my dear Aubrey, and I was married at eighteen. No; I don’t like Mrs. Pickering, but I can see nothing reprehensible in her determination to settle her daughter well in life.”
“But Barton! He is fifty! He must be fifty! He must be older than I am; yes, very considerably older than I am.”
“Well?” said Mrs. Pomfrey, and there was a mingled reluctance and grimness in her smile, “and do you think of yourself as unmarriageable?”
He ran his hand several times over his head and through his hair. He was still flushed, but suddenly he became pale, swallowing quickly several times.
“Do you know—you have said something—you have made me think something—put something before me. Yes; I must tell you, I must tell you,” he said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and fixing his eyes on the wall above Mrs. Pomfrey’s head.“I love her; I love Miss Pickering. You may think it absurd. I know I’m a dull old bachelor; everything of that sort; but there it is. Ever since I saw her, a year ago, when they first came. I never dreamed of anything else. A dull old bachelor, nothing to offer, and twice her age. But I can’t help wondering—it’s only a wonder—whether there might just be a chance for me—if you don’t think my age, and all that, makes it impossible. What I mean,” Aubrey finished, with a sort of quiet desperation, “is—could she love me? It would have to be love with a girl like Miss Pickering. Am I a man that a girl like that could love?”
Tears now were in his eyes as he brought them back to Mrs. Pomfrey’s, and seated upon the sofa, the pink foxgloves in the Chinese bowl beside her, she looked back at him very gravely. She was so grave that for some moments she was silent. Then, before speaking, she took out her spectacles and polished them and put them on. She saw him quite well without them. It was as if in emphasis of the gravity of the moment. And, in the first place, she did not answer his question.
“How much have you seen, my dear Aubrey, of this young lady?” she enquired.
He said, faltering, that he had seen a good deal of Miss Pickering during this spring and summer. Mrs. Pickering had been very kind, had asked him there quite often for tennis; and Miss Pickering had been far more kind, for she had played with him and he was a wretched player, though he was so fond of the game. “And we’ve had one or two little walks. She came with me to the woods this spring and helped me to dig anemone roots. Oh! I don’t pretend it’s anything at all; it’s only, I know, her kindness; I never thought it anything else. But—if you really don’t think me absurd for dreaming of it—?” He faltered to a long gazing question.
Mrs. Pomfrey now rose. She stood looking awayfrom him, then moved towards the door. “My dear Aubrey,” she said, “I think of you what anybody who knows you must think—that the woman who wins your love is one of the most fortunate of women. Whether you are the kind of man that a girl like Miss Pickering could love, I cannot say. I’ve really seen very little of her. All that I know of her is that she is very pretty and has nice quiet manners. If she marries you, she is, as I say, the most fortunate of women.”
Mrs. Pomfrey stepped out into the little square, flagged hall. He accompanied her to the garden gate, following her speechless, while, lifting up her skirts, displaying large, flat-heeled shoes, she stepped down from terrace to terrace. She paused at the last.
“Your Alpine phlox is doing very nicely. You’ll find that by next year it will have spread to a foot across,” she said. He had put in the Alpine phlox the autumn before under her supervision. She added at the gate, “By that time there may be a Mrs. Westmacott at Meadows.”
Pale, almost tearful, he pressed her hand over the gate. “I can’t say how I thank you,” he murmured.
After a little while he was able to compose his thoughts and write his notes. Thompson took them round, and before lunch he had his answers. They could all come, except Mr. Barton, the dapper, fussy, kindly, pepper-and-salt little squire, who lived in the beautiful big house just over the nearest hill; he had gone up to London for the day.
Aubrey very much enjoyed giving little tea-parties at Meadows. In London he had not enjoyed them at all. He had given them when duty requiredit, and he had sometimes been very extravagant and had taken a couple of young girl cousins, up for the season, to a restaurant and a play. But he had never enjoyed these occasions. He was shy and a poor talker, and in London the demands upon one’s personality were too heavy to make his entertaining a success. The demands upon one’s personality in the country were so small and so easily satisfied; a garden talked for one and entertained for one. All his neighbours, except Mrs. Pickering, whose formal beds did not count, had gardens and were profoundly interested in them. The mild, middle-aged Carews were authorities, and to-day he remembered, with all the pressure of his new preoccupations, that he must question them about that matter of mulching.
At four-thirty he saw two parasols approaching along his box hedges—one was black and one was rose-colour; his heart stood still when he saw it. She would be wearing, then, the dress that made her look more than ever like a pink foxglove. He went down the terraces to greet mother and daughter at the gate.
Mrs. Pickering was short and stout and blonde, her slightly rapacious features—small aquiline nose, small smiling mouth, and small projecting chin—embedded and muffled, as it were, in powdery expanses of cheek and throat. She had an unsmiling, steel-blue eye, appraising, determined, deliberate, under its level bar of dark eyebrow. She did not please Aubrey. Her voice in especial, metallic yet glossy, as if with a careful veneer, disturbed him. A gossiping lady of the neighbourhood had informed him that Mrs. Pickering’s origins were quite lacking in distinction and that in herhandsome girlhood she had stalked the stupid Colonel—of a quite good family—and had brought him down, resistless, at the first shot. These stories, for which he had not liked his informant the more, seemed to hover in Mrs. Pickering’s glance and smile, and her voice to preserve the flavour of many strategies and triumphs. But Aubrey did not look for long at Mrs. Pickering. She rustled in, dressed in her fashionable black and white, a long chain of steel and brilliants crossing her buttressed bosom, a crest of plumes, black and white, waving upon her head.
Miss Pickering followed her mother. Tall, very tall, and poised with a lovely grace, she was, but for the arresting darkness of brows and lashes, fair; with the infantile fairness, the wild-rose tints, that to the ingenuous male will always seem to vouch for a spiritual exquisiteness to match. And she, too, had small, aquiline features, and her hair was as golden as the heart of a wild rose. She did not smile, like her mother; she was a serene young lady, and silent, as loveliness should be.
“This sweet place!” said Mrs. Pickering. “How charmingly you are improving it, Mr. Westmacott; it looks prettier every time I see it.”
“It will take years before it looks as I mean it to look,” said Aubrey, leading them up the terraces. “That’s the joy of gardening, isn’t it? It gives one something to plan for one’s whole future.” He smiled with a slight appealingness at Miss Pickering. “I am afraid I make myself rather foolish sometimes; I talk so much about my garden.”
“I don’t wonder that you do,” said Mrs. Pickering;“it’s quite a little Paradise.”
In the drawing-room it was Mrs. Pickering who continued to talk. She renewed her laments over the water-colours. "To think that these beautiful old places should get into the hands of common middle-class people!"—Aubrey had again to assure her that the people who had bought his mother’s old home were very nice indeed.—And Mrs. Pickering said that she doted upon his room, “So old-world, so peaceful!” and expatiated on the view of the terraced lawns and further meadows from the window. She made no comment on his foxgloves, and it seemed like a presage of happiness when Miss Pickering, from her chair, remarked, looking up at them, “How lovely your pink foxgloves are!”
“You think so? You like them? Yes, yes, are they not lovely?” He was delighted with her commendation.
“It’s such a pretty idea, putting them with the grasses,” said Miss Pickering. “I do like lots of flowers in a room.”
He did not have an opportunity of speaking with her alone till after tea. Then, when they had all gone into the garden—how it happened he did not know, for he would not have dared arrange it—he found himself walking down the path towards the copse with Miss Pickering, while behind them, quite far already behind them, Mrs. Pickering paused and exclaimed over the herbaceous border, Mr. Carew beside her. Mrs. Carew and Mrs. Pomfrey had sat down under the trees near the house.
“Would you like to see the pink foxgloves growing?” he asked her.“They are very beautiful growing—more beautiful, I think you’ll feel, than in the house.”
“I’d love to see them,” said Miss Pickering.
They crossed the slip of meadow among the tall grasses and, “There,” said Aubrey, pointing, with a faint smile, “there they are!”
“Howsweet!” said Miss Pickering, with her serene emphasis. They stood to look.
“Do you know,” said Aubrey, wondering at himself, but he felt upborne, “that I find they look like you—the pink ones.”
“Really?” She smiled now, turning her calm, blue eyes upon him. “That’s very flattering.”
“No, no; not flattering; not at all flattering,” said Aubrey. “Not at all, not at all,” he repeated under his breath. He could say no more just then. They walked on, his heart in a flutter.
“Have you ever heard a willow-wren, Miss Pickering?” he asked suddenly.
“A willow-wren? I don’t think so. I don’t know much about birds.”
“It is usually singing in the wood at this hour. Would you care to come and see if we can hear it?”
“I’d love to. I wish you’d teach me all about birds,” said Miss Pickering.
His heart was thumping now. They entered the copse. It seemed to him, as they passed them, that the foxgloves were tall angels set about Paradise and welcoming him there. It was very still among the trees. Miss Pickering walked lightly beside him. She, too, looked like an angel. They reached a clearing, where an old fallen log lay, and here they sat down. “We shall hear it, I think,” said Aubrey, “if we sit here quietly.”
Presently, in the stillness, the little bird began to sing its song, the descending chromatic chain of liquid notes, melancholy and happy; the song of hisvery soul, Aubrey felt, and that the bird said for him all that he could not say as, with head bent, he sat listening, the beloved presence beside him. She was part of the song; and in it, as they listened together, their very hearts were mingling. They knew each other, he felt sure, very well.
“How sweet!” she murmured, and he nodded, not able to look at her.
There was a silence, and then the bird sang again. He raises his eyes to hers now, and they turned to him and smiled. Her hand lay on the rough bark of the log, and his was near it. Was it her hand that responded to the unconscious appeal of his, or had he dared? He held it. That was the bewildering, the transcending fact.
“Oh, Miss Pickering! Miss Leila—Leila,” he stammered. “May I tell you? May I ask you? Can you care for me?”
Her eyes still smiled, if very gravely. “Do you really love me?” she murmured.
“Oh, Leila!” he repeated. The willow-wren still sang, but all the little chains of sound seemed to be woven into a mist about him, trembling, shining. He held her hand to his lips. He wished to kneel before her. This was Paradise.
“It’s so very sudden,” said Leila Pickering. “I never dreamed you cared till just now.”
“Ever since I saw you first—ever since I saw your eyes. It has been like the fragrance of my flowers at evening, like the moon rising on my flowers. I did not dare to hope—you so young, so lovely;—life before you.”
“I think we can be very happy together,” said Leila Pickering.“I knew you were a dear from the first moment I saw you, too.”
The willow-wren stopped singing now and flew away. In the distance, then, he heard the liquid, dropping notes, and they sounded very sad. His arm was around Leila Pickering, and she leaned her head on his shoulder, so that in an ecstasy of wonder he felt the warm brightness of her hair against his cheek. He had never heard her talk so much. She told him that she had had such a dull, horrid life, so poor, knowing such tiresome, second-rate people. And she did not get on at all well with her mother.
“Nobody has ever really understood me—till you came,” she said, sitting upright now beside him, the lovely colour in her cheeks delicately heightened, her eyes shining while she talked. She confided in him. She loved him. They were betrothed—this was the blissful, culminating thought that seemed to go in waves of music through him as he gazed at her. He had ceased to hear the willow-wren’s melancholy little song. And then he heard her say:
“I don’t want to live in the country, you know. You won’t mind? Of course I love it; but we can pay week-end visits, always;—you must know such heaps of nice people; friends. And we’ll travel too—I long to see the world. India doesn’t count. Only think, I’ve never been to Paris except once—on a horrid, cheap trip, for a week. We never could afford to do anything really amusing or buy any really nice things. My life has been so frightfully dull, and I do want to stretch my wings and see lots of people and entertain and go to plays, you know. I adore London. I’m sure I shall be a good hostess.”
It was as if a sword had transfixed him. He seemed to hear a great bell booming—a greatLondon bell—Big Ben; he had always heard Big Ben from his office in Whitehall, and there had been a jangle of bells in Kensington, too, and a roar, a ceaseless roar. And he seemed to hear the words “Dangerous, dangerous.” He had been too happy.
He kept his mild, kind eyes of a pastel blue upon her, and he told himself, while he wrestled, transfixed, that she must not guess; but, as if pressed from his anguish, he heard himself murmuring helplessly, though the gentle, fixed smile held his lips, “You don’t care for my little place, then? You wouldn’t care to go on living at Meadows? It’s a nice little place, Meadows—a nice little place; we could make it very pretty, and we could have people here, as many as you wanted.”
Had a note of pleading, almost desperate, crept in unawares? He saw her calm eyes harden slightly, fixed on him. And he saw, then, tears rise in them.
“Oh! it’s so dull, so dull, down here!” she breathed. “It’s a darling little place, Meadows—of course, of course I love it. I wish we could afford to keep it, just to run down to for a quiet week-end now and then; but you couldn’t, could you? And it’s far too small for entertaining, isn’t it? And no one really smart cares to come and stay with one if one has no shooting, nothing to offer. One can reallylivein London—I’ve always felt that. You do care more for me than you do for Meadows?” she finished with a smile, half appealing and half challenging.
And looking into the blue eyes, blurred and enlarged, like a child’s, with their tears, he saw himself as mean and petty and selfish. He loved her, and was it only as another flower to place among his flowers, another treasure to place among his treasures,a possession of his own, without end or purpose for itself? He loved her, and, unimaginably, she loved him and would marry him. Love must know pain and sacrifice—"pain and sacrifice"—he seemed to hear himself repeating. This was a young life, with its rights to life, and it must stretch its wings.
He smiled at her and raised her hand again to his lips, saying, “Of course I care more for you than for Meadows, dear Leila. Of course we will live where you choose.”
And very radiant now, rising and smiling down upon him, Leila Pickering said,“Youarea dear. I’m sure it’s best for us both; we’d get so pokey here. I know we couldn’t afford Mayfair—I wouldn’t dream of that; but I think a house in one of those little new streets near Cadogan Square would be just right for us; don’t you?”
decorative bar
RUPERT WILSON came into the studio where his wife, who had been out sketching all the morning, was washing her paint-brushes, carefully turning and rubbing them in a pot of turpentine. She wore her painting apron, for Marian in the midst of her artistic avocations was always neat and spotless; and, half turned from him as she was, she did not look round as he entered. Rupert carried his stick, a rustic, ashen stick of which he was very fond, and his Panama hat; he was going out and Marian probably knew that he was going out, and where; this made it more difficult to say in a sufficiently disengaged voice, “I’m just going down to see Mrs. Dallas for a little while.”
“Oh! are you?” said Marian. She continued to stir her brushes, and though her wish, also, very evidently was to appear disengaged and indifferent, she was not able to carry it out, for she added, as if irrepressibly, “You need hardly have taken the trouble to come and tell me that.”
Rupert looked at her, and since she did not look at him, it was very intently, as if to measure to the full the difference between this Marian and theMarian he had known and believed in. It was hard to realize that his wife should show a trivial and unworthy jealousy and should strike him such a blow; for that it was a blow he knew from the heat in his cheek and the quickening of his pulse; but, as he looked at her, standing there turned from him, her blue apron girt about her, her black hair bound so gracefully around her head, the realization uppermost in his mind was that Marian, since the second baby had come, had grown very stout and matronly. He seemed to see it to-day for the first time, as if his awareness of it came to emphasize his sudden consciousness of her spiritual deficiency.
When he had met and fallen so very deeply in love with Marian, she had been, if not slender, yet of a supple and shapely form, with just roundness and softness enough to contrast delightfully with her rather boyish head, her air, clear, fresh, frank, of efficiency and swiftness. He had, of course, found her a great deal more than clear and fresh and frank; but, entangled as he had been in that wretched love-affair with Aimée Pollard,—the pretty, untalented young actress who had so shamefully misused him,—torn to pieces and sunken in quagmires as he had been, these qualities in Marian had reached him first like a draught of cold spring water, like dawn over valley hills. These were the metaphors he had very soon used to her when she had applied her firm, kind hands to the disentangling of his knots and her merry, steady mind to tracing out for him the path of honourable retreat. He had found her so wonderful and lovely and had fallen so much in love with her that his ardour, aided by her quiet fidelity, had overborne all theopposition of her people. Foolish, conventional people they were,—their opposition based, it appeared, almost unimaginably to his generous young mind, on the fact that Marian happened to have money and that he had none, except what he might make by his books; and also, though it was nearly as unimaginable, on the fact that a good many of these people were in the peerage. Marian, a year before he had met her, had broken away from the stereotyped routine of their country life and had come to London to study painting; and it was that Marian of the past who had seemed to share to the full all his idealisms. They had married within three months of their meeting.
From such a dawn, white, fresh, blissful, to this dull daylight! from such a Marian to this narrow-minded matron! Marian still had beauty. Her clear eyes were as blue, her wide, pale lips as sweet; but she was a matron. Her neck had grown shorter, her chin heavier; the girlish grace of glance and smile seemed muted, muffled by their setting; there was no longer any poetry in her physique. And as Rupert stood looking at her and seeing all this, his sense of grievance, though he was unaware of this factor in it, grew deeper.
A little while passed before he said,—and it was, he felt, with dignity,—“I really don’t know what you mean by that, Marian.”
She had now finished her brushes and had taken up her palette. She began to scrape the edges as she answered,—and her voice was not schooled, it was heavy with its irony and gloom,—“Don’t you? I’m sorry.”“I trust indeed that it doesn’t mean that you are jealous of my friendship for Mrs. Dallas?”
“Friendship? Oh, no; I’m not jealous of any friendship.”
“Of my affection, then; of my love, if you like,” said Rupert. “You know perfectly well what I feel about all that—and I thought you felt it, too. It’s the very centre of my life, of my art; my books turn on it. It’s the thing I have most of all to say to the world. Love isn’t a measured, limited thing; its nature is to grow and give. My love for Mrs. Dallas doesn’t touch your and my relation; it enriches it rather.”
Marian scraped her palette and said nothing. He could see her cheek, the cheek that ran too massively into her neck. Marian’s skin was white and fine; a faint colour now rose to it; a faint colour was, in Marian, a deep blush.
To see her blush like that gave him an odd sensation. It was as if the blush were echoed in his heart; he felt it grow and melt softly, and there drifted through his mind a thought of Mrs. Dallas and of her magic.
Through the studio window, draped with its summer creepers, he could see the two perambulators moored in the shade of the lime tree on the lawn. The babies were having their afternoon sleep. He was very fond of his children; and to feel, now, mingling with the strange, yearning glow, this pause of contemplative fondness, was to feel himself justified anew and anew aggrieved. The glow of tenderness seemed to envelope the babies as well as Mrs. Dallas. And it shut out Marian.
What had she to complain of? Was he not a tender husband and a loving father? Could she suspect his love for Mrs. Dallas—it was she herself who had forced him to use that word—of grossness orvulgarity? It was as high and as pure as his love for her.
His love for Marian had evolved into the perambulators, and this recognition, flitting unseasonably, vexed him with a sense of slight confusion that made him feel more injured than before. It was true that, theoretically, he held views so advanced as to justify, in true, self-dedicating passion, all manifestations. Practice and theory in his young life had been far apart; but the thought of passion, in connection with Mrs. Dallas, had, as it were, been made visible by Marian’s blush; and, slightly swinging his hat, slightly knotting his brows as he looked at the matronly Marian, he groped for some new formulation of his creed, since it was evident that however much he might love Marian it was no longer passion he felt for her. One must perhaps allow that passions could not be contemporaneous; but he had always combated this shackling view.
He stood there, gazing, trying to think it out,—a tall young man, well made yet slightly uncouth, with ruffled, heavy locks and large intent eyes. Something of the look of a not quite purely bred Saint Bernard puppy he had; confiding, young and foolish, with his knotted brow and nose a little overlong. And as he found himself unable to think it out and as Marian still stood silent, scraping, scraping away at the palette in an exasperating fashion, he said,—and now in an openly aggrieved voice,—“I thought you liked her yourself; I thought you quite loved her. You seemed to.”
Now that he was losing his temper, Marian was regaining hers. Her voice had all the advantage of quiet intentions as she answered,“I did like her; I thought her very charming. I don’t dislike her now. But I’m sorry to see a woman of her age behaving with so little dignity.”
“A woman of her age! Dignity!”
“She is at least forty-five.”
“I don’t follow your meaning. Is a woman of forty-five cut off from human relationships?”
“From some, certainly; if she has any regard, as I say, for her dignity. And a woman in Mrs. Dallas’s position ought to be particularly careful.”
“Mrs. Dallas’s position!” She really reduced him to disgusted exclamations.
“You know, Rupert, that there are all sorts of stories about her. You know that Mrs. Trotter told us that her first husband divorced her on account of Colonel Dallas.—Other stories, too.”
"Upon my word! You astonish me, Marian! You heard all these vile tales when we first came here,—from people, too, who you’ll observe, run to Mrs. Dallas’s dinner-parties whenever they have the chance,—and you didn’t seem to mind them much when you were going there almost every day—and taking every one you knew to see her. What about your Aunt Sophy—if you believed these stories?—An old dragon of conventionality like your Aunt Sophy! You took her again and again, and arranged that luncheon in London with her when you and Mrs. Dallas went up—so that they should have another chance really to make friends. I remember you used the expression, ‘really make friends.’ It’s odd to hear you talking of stories at this late hour."“I only talk of them because Mrs. Dallas has made me remember them. I am quite as open-minded as you are about such things. I was just as ready to think well of her—even if they were true. Why do you call them vile? You wouldn’t think it wrong for a woman to leave her husband if she didn’t love him, and to go with a man she did love. If Mrs. Dallas did that, why is it vile to say so?—Aunt Sophy, as a matter of fact, said it was a different story. And she was charmed with Mrs. Dallas, just as I’d determined she should be, stories or no stories. I did all I could for her, because I counted myself her friend and thought it a shame that any one so charming should be handicapped in any way. But I didn’t imagine that a friend would try to take my husband from me.” Marian spoke with severe and deliberate calm.
“I like that! I really do like that!” said Rupert, laughing bitterly. “It’s really funny to hear you talk as if Mrs. Dallas could owe you anything! I wish she could hear you! I wish we could have her dispassionate opinion of that hideous old bore of an Aunt Sophy. It was obvious enough that she put up with her simply and solely through friendship for you. Do all you could for her! A woman who has hordes of friends—charming, finished, cosmopolitan people of the world! Why, my dear girl, it’s she, let me tell you, who has given you more chances than you ever had in your life for meeting really interesting people! They’re not the sort you’d be likely to meet at your Aunt Sophy’s, certainly. They’d perish in hermilieu!”
“Mrs. Dallas doesn’t perish in it,” Marian coldly commented.“On the contrary, I never saw her more alert. She didn’t seem to find Aunt Sophy in the least a bore. She was very much pleased indeed to lunch there and she has looked her up every time she’s gone to London since; moreover, she’s going to stay with her at Crofts this autumn. It doesn’t look like boredom.”
“I wish her joy of Crofts! She’s a complete woman of the world, of course, and she knows how to put up with all sorts and conditions of bores. She’s taken on Lady Sophy because she’s your friend. It’s pitiful—it’s unbelievable to see her so misjudged!—Take me from you! I’ve never gone there but she’s asked me why you didn’t come. She still sends you flowers pretty well every day. Those are hers, I see. I’m glad that you’ve deigned to put them in water.”
The tall sheaf of carnations, white and rose and yellow, that stood in a jug on a shelf in the studio must, evidently, have come from Mrs. Dallas’s garden. No other person grew such carnations. The garden at Ashleigh Lodge, this pleasant country house that they had taken for the six summer months, was not its strong point, and Mrs. Dallas had kept them reinforced from her abundance. Rupert associated the carnations, their soft and glowing colours, their formal grace and spicy sweetness, with the whole growth of his devotion to Mrs. Dallas. He fixed his indignant eyes on them now.
“Of course I put them into water. I am going to arrange them and take them into the drawing-room presently,” said Marian with her hateful calm.“But they give me no more pleasure. Nor does she. She is like them. They are heartless flowers and she is a heartless woman. I see quite plainly now what I didn’t see before. She’s that type,—the smiling, calculating siren. She lives for admiration; she’s herself only when she has someone at her feet, and she’s seen to it that you should be,—though I’m bound to say that you haven’t made it difficult for her. It fits in with all the stories.”
Rupert, at this, turned away and went out. He thrust his hat firmly down on his fair locks and swung his stick as he strode by the little footpath through the woods. Bitter disappointment with Marian surged in him, and hot anger, but above all an atoning tenderness that seemed almost to break his heart in its longing to protect and justify the woman so traduced by her. His head throbbed and drummed as he went. To have it come to this! To have such hands laid on it—their love! their silent, hidden love! That Mrs. Dallas returned his love he seemed to see, with many other things, clearly, rapturously, if with trembling, for the first time to-day. He saw it with Marian’s unworthiness; Marian’s unworthiness had shown it to him; and now, exulting, he claimed it. She loved him, veiling the depth in her vagueness, her aloofness, her indulgent irony. His mind retraced, with yearning gratitude, the steps of their relationship. No one had ever been to him what she was. How she helped and lifted him! How juvenile and undiscriminating in their happy acceptances were Marian’s appreciations of his work beside Mrs. Dallas’s half-idle comments. He had read through to her, in manuscript, all his last novel; and Marian had not seen it yet. He had not wanted to read it to Marian; and she, besides, had been very busy with her painting.