Miss Buchanan was well on the way to complete recovery, was able to have tea every afternoon with Althea, and to be taken for long drives in the Bois, when Aunt Julia and the girls arrived at the Hôtel Talleyrand.
Mrs. Pepperell was a sister of Althea's mother, and lived soberly and solidly in New York, disapproving as much of millionaires and their manners as of expatriated Americans. She was large and dressed with immaculate precision and simplicity, and had it not been for a homespun quality of mingled benevolence and shrewdness, she might have passed as stately. But Mrs. Pepperell had no wish to appear stately, and was rather intolerant of the pretension in others. Her sharp tongue had indulged itself in a good many sallies on this score at her sister Bessie's expense; Bessie being the lady of the lorgnette, Althea's deceased mother.
Althea, remembering that dear mother so well, all dignified elegance as she had been—too dignified, too elegant, perhaps, to be either so shrewd or so benevolent as her sister—always thought of Aunt Julia as rather commonplace in comparison. Yet, as she followed in her wake on the evening of her arrival, she felt that Aunt Julia was obviously and eminently 'nice.' The one old-fashioned diamondornament at her throat, the ruffles at her wrist, the gloss of her silver-brown hair, reminded her of her own mother's preferences.
The girls were 'nice,' too, as far as their appearance and breeding went, but Althea found their manners very bad. They were not strident and they were not arrogant, but so much noisiness and so much innocent assurance might, to unsympathetic eyes, seem so. They were handsome girls, fresh-skinned, athletic, tall and slender. They wore beautifully simple white lawn dresses, and their shining fair hair was brushed off their foreheads and tied at the back with black bows in a very becoming fashion, though Althea thought the bows too large and the fashion too obviously local.
Helen was in her old place that night, and she smiled at Althea as she and her party took their places at a table larger and at a little distance. She was to come in for coffee after dinner, so that Althea adjourned introductions. Aunt Julia looked sharply and appraisingly at the black figure, and the girls did not look at all. They were filled with young delight and excitement at the prospect of a three weeks' romp in Paris, among dressmakers, tea-parties, and the opera. 'And Herbert Vaughan is here. I've just had a letter from him, forwarded from London,' Dorothy announced, to which Mildred, with glad emphasis, cried 'Bully!'
Althea sighed, crumbled her bread, and looked out of the window resignedly.
'You mustn't talk slang before Cousin Althea,' said Dorothy.
'What Cousin Althea needs is slang,' said Mildred.
'I shan't lack it with you, shall I, Mildred?'Althea returned, with, a rather chilly smile. She knew that Dorothy and Mildred considered her, as they would have put it, 'A back number'; they liked to draw her out and to shock her. She wanted to make it clear that she wasn't shocked, but that she was wearied. At the same time it was true that Mildred and Dorothy made her uncomfortable in subtler ways; she was, perhaps, a little afraid of them, too. They, too, imposed their own standards, and were oppressed and enlightened by none.
Aunt Julia smiled indulgently at her children, and asked Althea if she did not think that they were looking very well. They certainly were, and Althea had to own it. 'But don't let them overdo their athletics, Aunt Julia,' she said. 'It is such a pity when girls get brawny.'
'I'm brawny; feel my muscle,' said Mildred, stretching a hard young arm across the table. Althea shook her head. She did not like being made conspicuous, and already the girls' loud voices had drawn attention; the French family were all staring.
'Who is the lady in black, Althea?' Mrs. Pepperell asked. 'A friend of yours?'
'Yes, a most charming friend,' said Althea. 'Helen Buchanan is her name; she is Scotch—a very old family—and she is one of the most interesting people I've ever known. You will meet her after dinner. She is coming in to spend the evening.'
'Where did you meet her? How long have you known her?' asked Aunt Julia, evidently unimpressed.
Althea said that she had met her here, but thatthey had mutual friends, thinking of Miss Buckston in what she felt to be an emergency.
Aunt Julia, with her air of general scepticism as to what she could find so worth while in Europe, often made her embark on definitions and declarations. She could certainly tolerate no uncertainty on the subject of Helen's worth.
'Very odd looking,' said Aunt Julia, while the girls glanced round indifferently at the subject of discussion.
'And peculiarly distinguished looking,' said Althea. 'She makes most people look so half-baked and insignificant.'
'I think it a rather sinister face,' said Aunt Julia. 'And how she slouches! Sit up, Mildred. I don't want you to catch European tricks.'
But, after dinner, Althea felt that Helen made her impression. She was still wan and weak; she said very little, though she smiled very pleasantly, and she sat—as Aunt Julia had said, 'slouched,' yet so gracefully—in a corner of the sofa. The charm worked. The girls felt it, Aunt Julia felt it, though Aunt Julia held aloof from it. Althea saw that Aunt Julia, most certainly, did not interest Helen, but the girls amused her; she liked them. They sat near her and made her laugh by their accounts of their journey, the funny people on the steamer, their plans for the summer, and life in America, as they lived it. Dorothy assured her that she didn't know what fun was till she came to America, and Mildred cried: 'Oh, do come! We'll give you the time of your life!' Helen declared that she hoped some day to experience this climax.
Before going to bed, and attired in her dressing-gown, Althea went to Helen's room to ask her how she felt, but also to see what impression her relatives had made. Helen was languidly brushing her hair, and Althea took the brush from her and brushed it for her.
'Isn't it lamentable,' she said, 'that Aunt Julia, who is full of a certain sort of wise perception about other things, doesn't seem to see at all how bad the children's manners are. She lets them monopolise everybody's attention with the utmost complacency.'
Helen, while her hair was being brushed, put out her hand for her watch and was winding it. 'Have they bad manners?' she said. 'But they are nice girls.'
'Yes, they are nice. But surely you don't like their slang?'
Helen smiled at the recollection of it. 'More fun than a goat,' she quoted. 'Why shouldn't they talk slang?'
'Dear Helen,'—they had come quite happily to Christian names—'surely you care for keeping the language pure. Surely you think it regrettable that the younger generation should defile and mangle it like that.'
But Helen only laughed, and confessed that she really didn't care what happened to the language. 'There'll always be plenty of people to talk it too well,' she said.
Mrs. Pepperell, on her side, had her verdict, and she gave it some days later when she and her niece were driving to the dressmaker's.
'She is a very nice girl, Miss Buchanan, and clever, too, in her quiet English way, though startlingly ignorant. Dorothy actually told me that she had never read any Browning, and thought that Sophocles was Diogenes, and lived in a tub. But frankly, Althea, I can't say that I take to her very much.'
Aunt Julia, often irritating to Althea, was never more so than when, as now, she assumed that her verdicts and opinions were of importance to her niece. Althea shrank from open combat with anybody, yet she could, under cover of gentle candour, plant her shafts. She planted one now in answering: 'I don't think that you would, either of you, take to one another. Helen's flavour is rather recondite.'
'Recondite, my dear,' said Aunt Julia, who never pretended not to know when a shaft had been planted. 'I think, everydaymère de familleas I am, that I am quite capable of appreciating the recondite. Miss Buchanan's appearance is striking, and she is an independent creature; but, essentially, she is the most commonplace type of English girl—well-bred, poor, idle, uneducated, and with no object in life except to amuse herself and find a husband with money. And under that air of sleepy indifference she has a very sharp eye to the main chance, you may take my word for it.'
Althea was very angry, the more so for the distorted truth this judgment conveyed. 'I'm afraid I shouldn't take your word on any matter concerning my friend,' she returned; 'and I think, Aunt Julia, that you forget that it is my friend you are speaking of.'
'My dear, don't lose your temper. I only say it to put you on your guard. You are so given toidealisation, and you may find yourself disappointed if you trust to depths that are not there. As to friendship, don't forget that she is, as yet, the merest acquaintance.'
'One may feel nearer some people in a week than to others after years.'
'As to being near in a week—she doesn't feel nearyou; that is all I mean. Don't cast your pearls too lavishly.'
Althea made no reply, but under her air of unruffled calm, Aunt Julia's shaft rankled.
She found herself that afternoon, when she and Helen were alone at tea, sounding her, probing her, for reassuring symptoms of warmth or affection. 'I so hope that we may keep really in touch with one another,' she said. 'I couldn't bear not to keep in touch with you, Helen.'
Helen looked at her with the look, vague, kind, and a little puzzled, that seemed to plant Aunt Julia's shaft anew. 'Keep in touch,' she repeated. 'Of course. You'll be coming to England some day, and then you'll be sure to look me up, won't you?'
'But, until I do come, we will write? You will write to me a great deal?'
'Oh, my dear, I do so hate writing. I never have anything to say in a letter. Let us exchange postcards, when our doings require it.'
'Postcards!' Althea could not repress a disconsolate note. 'How can I tell from postcards what you are thinking and feeling?'
'You may always take it for granted that I'm doing very little of either,' said Helen, smiling.
Althea was silent for a moment, and then, with adistress apparent in voice and face, she said: 'I can't bear you to say that.'
Helen still smiled, but she was evidently at a loss. She added some milk to her tea and took a slice of bread and butter before saying, more kindly, yet more lightly than before: 'You mustn't judge me by yourself. I'm not a bit thoughtful, you know, or warm-hearted and intellectual, like you. I just rub along. I'm sure you'll not find it worth while keeping in touch with me.'
'It's merely that I care for you very much,' said Althea, in a slightly quivering voice. 'And I can't bear to think that I am nothing to you.'
There was again a little pause in which, because her eyes had suddenly filled with tears, Althea looked down and could not see her friend. Helen's voice, when she spoke, showed her that she was pained and disconcerted. 'You make me feel like such a clumsy brute when you say things like that,' she said. 'You are so kind, and I am so selfish and self-centred. But of course I care for you too.'
'Do you really?' said Althea, who, even if she would, could not have retained the appearance of lightness and independence. 'You really feel me as a friend, a true friend?'
'If you really think me worth your while, of course. I don't see how you can—an ill-tempered, ignorant, uninteresting woman, whom you've run across in a hotel and been good to.'
'I don't think of you like that, as you know. I think you a strangely lovely and strangely interesting person. From the first moment I saw you you appealed to me. I felt that you needed something—love and sympathy, perhaps. The fact thatit's been a sort of chance—our meeting—makes it all the sweeter to me.'
Again Helen was silent for a moment, and again Althea, sitting with downcast eyes, knew that, though touched, she was uncomfortable. 'You are too nice and kind for words,' she then said. 'I can't tell you how kind I think it of you.'
'Then we are friends? You do feel me as a friend who will always be interested and always care?'
'Yes, indeed; and I do so thank you.'
Althea put out her hand, and Helen gave her hers, saying, 'Youarea dear,' and adding, as though to take refuge from her own discomposure, 'much too dear for the likes of me.'
The bond was thus sealed, yet Aunt Julia's shaft still stuck. It was she who had felt near, and who had drawn Helen near. Helen, probably, would never have thought of keeping in touch. She was Helen's friend because she had appealed for friendship, and because Helen thought her a dear. The only comfort was to know that Helen's humility was real. She might have offered her friendship could she have realised that it was of value to anybody.
It was a few evenings after this, and perhaps as a result of their talk, that, as they sat in Althea's room over coffee, Helen said: 'Why don't you come to England this summer, Althea?'
Aunt Julia had proposed that Althea should go on to Bayreuth with her and the girls, and Althea was turning over the plan, thinking that perhaps she had had enough of Bayreuth, so that Helen's suggestion, especially as it was made in AuntJulia's presence, was a welcome one. 'Perhaps I will,' she said. 'Will you be there?'
'I'll be in London, with Aunt Grizel, until the middle of July; after that, in the country till winter. You ought to take a house in the country and let me come to stay with you,' said Helen, smiling.
'Will you pay me a long visit?' Althea smiled back.
'As long as you'll ask me for.'
'Well, you are asked for as long as you will stay. Where shall I get a house? There are some nice ones near Miss Buckston's.'
'Oh, don't let us be too near Miss Buckston,' said Helen, laughing.
'But surely, Althea, you won't give up Bayreuth,' Aunt Julia interposed. 'It is going to be specially fine this year. And then you know so few people in England, you will be very lonely. Nothing is more lonely than the English country when you know nobody.'
'Helen is a host in herself,' said Althea; and though Helen did not realise the full force of the compliment, it was more than satisfactory to have her acquiesce with: 'Oh, as to people, I can bring you heaps of them, if you want them.'
'It is a lovely idea,' said Althea; 'and if I must miss Bayreuth, Aunt Julia, I needn't miss you and the girls. You will have to come and stay with me. Do you know of a nice house, Helen, in pretty country, and not too near Miss Buckston?' It was rather a shame of her, she felt, this proviso, but indeed she had never found Miss Buckston endearing, and since knowing Helen she had seenmore clearly than before that she was in many ways oppressive.
Helen was reflecting. 'I do know of a house,' she said, 'in a very nice country, too. You might have a look at it. It's where I used to go, as a girl, you know, and stay with my cousins, the Digbys.'
'That would be perfect, Helen.'
'Oh, I don't know that you would find it perfect. It is a plain stone house, with a big, dilapidated garden, nice trees and lawns, miles from everything, and with old-fashioned, shabby furniture. Since Gerald came into the place, he's not been able to keep it up, and he has to let it. He hasn't been able to let it for the last year or so, and would be glad of the chance. If you like the place you'll only have to say the word.'
'I know I shall like it. Don't you like it?'
'Oh, I love it; but that's a different matter. It is more of a home to me than any place in the world.'
'I consider it settled. I don't need to see it.'
'No; it certainly isn't settled,' Helen replied, with her pleasant decisiveness. 'You certainly shan't take it till you see it. I will write to Gerald and tell him that no one else is to have it until you do.'
'I am quite determined to have that house,' said Althea. 'A place that you love must be lovely. Write if you like. But the matter is settled in my mind.'
'Don't be foolish, my dear,' said Aunt Julia. 'Miss Buchanan is quite right. You mustn't think of taking a house until you see it. How do youknow that the drainage is in order, or even that the beds are comfortable. Miss Buchanan says that it is miles away from everything, too. You may find the situation very dismal and unsympathetic.'
'It's pretty country, I think,' said Helen, 'and I'm sure the drainage and the beds are all right. But Althea must certainly see it first.'
It was settled, however, quite settled in Althea's mind that she was to take Merriston House. She bade Helen farewell three days later, and they had arranged that they were, within a fortnight, to meet in London, and go together to look at it.
And Althea wrote to Franklin Winslow Kane, and informed him of her new plans, and that he must be her guest at Merriston House for as long as his own plans allowed him. Her mood in regard to Franklin had greatly altered since that evening of gloom a fortnight ago. Franklin, then, had seemed the only fact worth looking at; but now she seemed embarked on a voyage of discovery, where bright new planets swam above the horizon with every forward rock of her boat. Franklin was by no means dismissed; Franklin could never be dismissed; but he was relegated; and though, as far as her fondness went, he would always be firmly placed, she could hardly place him clearly in the new and significantly peopled environment that her new friendship opened to her.
Helen Buchanan was a person greatly in demand, and, in her migratory existence, her pauses at her Aunt Grizel's little house near Eaton Square were, though frequent, seldom long. When she did come, her bedroom and her sitting-room were always waiting for her, as was Aunt Grizel with her cheerful 'Well, my dear, glad to see you back again.' Their mutual respect and trust were deep; their affection, too, though it was seldom expressed. She knew Aunt Grizel to the ground, and Aunt Grizel knew her to the ground—almost; and they were always pleased to be together.
Helen's sitting-room, where she could see any one she liked and at any time she liked, was behind the dining-room on the ground floor, and from its window one saw a small neat garden with a plot of grass, bordering flower-beds, a row of little fruit-trees, black-branched but brightly foliaged, and high walls that looked as though they were built out of sooty plum cake. Aunt Grizel's cat, Pharaoh, sleek, black, and stalwart, often lay on the grass plot in the sunlight; he was lying there now, languidly turned upon his side, with outstretched feet and drowsily blinking eyes, when Helen and her cousin, Gerald Digby, talked together on the day after her return from Paris.
Gerald Digby stood before the fireplace looking with satisfaction at his companion. He enjoyed looking at Helen, for he admired her more than any woman he knew. It was always a pleasure to see her again; and, like Aunt Grizel, he trusted and respected her deeply, though again, like Aunt Grizel, he did not, perhaps, know her quite down to the ground. He thought, however, that he did; he knew that Helen was as intimate with nobody in the world as with him, not even with Aunt Grizel, and it was one of his most delightful experiences to saunter through all the chambers of Helen's mind, convinced that every door was open to him.
Gerald Digby was a tall and very slender man; he tilted forward when he walked, and often carried his hands in his pockets. He had thick, mouse-coloured hair, which in perplexed or meditative moments he often ruffled by rubbing his hand through it, and even when thus disordered it kept its air of fashionable grace. His large, long nose, his finely curved lips and eyelids, had a delicately carved look, as though the sculptor had taken great care over the details of his face. His brown eyes had thick, upturned lashes, and were often in expression absent and irresponsible, but when he looked at any one, intent and merry, like a gay dog's eyes. And of the many charming things about Gerald Digby the most charming was his smile, which was as infectious as a child's, and exposed a joyous array of large white teeth.
He was smiling at his cousin now, for she was telling him, dryly, yet with a mocking humour all her own, of her Paris fiasco that had delayed herreturn to London by a fortnight, and, by the expense it had entailed upon her, had deprived her of the new hat and dress that she had hoped in Paris to secure. Talking of Paris led to the letter she had sent him four or five days ago. 'About this rich American,' said Gerald; 'is she really going to take Merriston, do you think? It's awfully good of you, Helen, to try and get a tenant for me.'
'I don't know that you'd call her rich—not as Americans go; but I believe she will take Merriston. She wanted to take it at once, on faith; but I insisted that she must see it first.'
'You must have cried up the dear old place for her to be so eager.'
'I think she is eager about pleasing me,' said Helen. 'I told her that I loved the place and hadn't been there for years, and that moved her very much. She has taken a great fancy to me.'
'Really,' said Gerald. 'Why?'
'I'm sure I don't know. She is a dear little person, but rather funny.'
'Of course, there is no reason why any one shouldn't take a fancy to you,' said Gerald, smiling; 'only—to that extent—in so short a time.'
'I appealed to her pity, I think; she came in and took care of me, and was really unspeakably kind. And she seemed to get tremendously interested in me. But then, she seemed capable of getting tremendously interested in lots of things. I've noticed that Americans often take things very seriously.'
'And you became great pals?'
'Yes, I suppose we did.'
'She interested you?'
Helen smiled a little perplexedly, and lit a cigarettebefore answering. 'Well, no; I can't say that she did that; but that, probably, was my own fault.'
'Why didn't she interest you?' Gerald went on, taking a cigarette from the case she offered. He was fond of such desultory pursuit of a subject; he and Helen spent hours in idle exchanges of impression.
Helen's answer was hardly illuminating: 'She wasn't interesting.'
'It was rather interesting of her to take such an interest in you,' said Gerald subtly.
'No.' Helen warmed to the theme. It had indeed perplexed her, and she was glad to unravel her impressions to this understanding listener. 'No, that's just what it wasn't; it might have been if one hadn't felt her a person so easily affected. She had—how can I put it?—it seems brutal when she is such a dear—but she had so little stuff in her; it was as if she had to find it all the time in other things and people. She is like a glass of water that would like to be wine, and she has no wine in her; it could only be poured in, and there's not room for much. At best she can only beeau rougie.'
Gerald laughed. 'How you see things, and say them! Poor Miss Jakes!—that's her name, isn't it? She sounds tame.'
'She is tame.'
'Is she young, pretty?'
'Not young, about my age; not pretty, but it's a nice face; wistful, with large, quite lovely eyes. She knows a lot about everything, and has been everywhere, and has kept all her illusions intact—a queer mixture of information and innocence. It's difficult to keep one's mind on what she's saying;there is never any background to it. She wants something, but she doesn't know whether it's what other people want or whether it's what she wants, so that she can't want anything very definitely.'
Gerald still laughed. 'How you must have been taking her in!'
'I suppose I must have been, though I didn't know it. But I did like her, you know. I liked her very much. A glass of water is a nice thing sometimes.'
'Nicer thaneau rougie; I'm afraid she'seau rougie.'
'Eau rougiemay be nice, too, if one is tired and thirsty and needs mild refreshment, not altogether tasteless, and not at all intoxicating. She was certainly that to me. I was very much touched by her kindness.'
'I shall be touched if she'll take Merriston. I'm fearfully hard up. I suppose it would only be a little let; but that would be better than nothing.'
'She might stay for the winter if she liked it. I shan't try to make her like it, but I'll do my best to make her stay on if she does, and with a clear conscience, for I think that her staying will depend on her seeing me.'
'Wouldn't that mean that she'd be a great deal on your hands?'
'I shouldn't mind that; we get on very well. She will be here next week, you know. You must come to tea and meet her.'
'Well, I don't know. I don't think that I'm particularly eager to meet her,' Gerald confessed jocosely.
'You'll have to meet her a good deal if you are to see much of me,' said Helen; on which he ownedthat, with that compulsion put upon him, he and Miss Jakes might become intimates.
Gerald Digby was a young man who did very little work. He had been vaguely intended, by an affectionate but haphazard family, for the diplomatic service, but it was found, after he had done himself some credit at Eton and Oxford, that the family resources didn't admit of this obviously suitable career for him; and an aged and wealthy uncle, who had been looked to confidently for succour, married at the moment, most unfeelingly, so that Gerald's career had to be definitely abandoned. Another relation found him a berth in the City, where he might hope to amass quite a fortune; but Gerald soon said that he far preferred poverty. He thought that he would like to paint and be an artist; he had a joyful eye for delicate, minute forms of beauty, and was most happily occupied when absorbed in Japanese-like studies of transient loveliness—a bird in flight, a verdant grasshopper on a wheat-blade, the tangled festoons of a wild convolvulus spray. His talent, however, though genuine, could hardly supply him with a livelihood, and he would have been seriously put to it had not his father's death left him a tiny income, while a half-informal secretaryship to a political friend, offered him propitiously at the same time, gave him leisure for his painting as well as for a good many other pleasant things. He had leisure, in especial, for going from country-house to country-house, where he was immensely in demand, and where he hunted, danced, and acted in private theatricals—usually in company with his cousin Helen. Helen's position in life was very much likehis own, but that she hadn't even an informal secretaryship to depend upon. He had known Helen all his life, and she was almost like a sister, only nicer; for he associated sisters with his own brood, who were lean, hunting ladies, pleasant, but monotonous and inarticulate. Helen was very articulate and very various. He loved to look at her, as he loved to look at birds and flowers, and he loved to talk with her. He had many opportunities to look and talk. They stayed at the same houses in the country, and in London, when she was with old Miss Buchanan, he usually saw her every day. If he didn't drop in for a moment on his way to work at ten-thirty in the morning, he dropped in to tea; and if his or Helen's day were too full to admit of this, he managed to come in for a goodnight chat after a dinner or before a dance. He enjoyed Helen's talk and Helen's appearance most of all, he thought, at these late hours, when, a little weary and jaded, in evening dress and cloak, she lit her invariable cigarette, and mused with him over the events and people of the day. He liked Helen's way of talking about people; they knew an interminable array of them, many involved in enlivening complications, yet Helen never gossiped; the musing impersonality and impartiality with which she commented and surmised lifted her themes to a realm almost of art; she was pungent, yet never malicious, and the tolerant lucidity of her insight was almost benign.
Her narrow face, leaning back in its dark aureole of hair, her strange eyes and bitter-sweet lips—all dimmed, as it were, by drowsiness and smoke, and yet never more intelligently awake than at thesenocturnal hours—remained with him as most typical of Helen's most significant and charming self. It was her aspect of mystery and that faint hint of bitterness that he found so charming; Helen herself he never thought of as mysterious. Mystery was a mere outward asset of her beauty, like the powdery surface of a moth's wing. He didn't think of Helen as mysterious, perhaps because he thought little about her at all; he only looked and listened while she made him think about everything but herself, and he felt always happy and altogether at ease in her presence. There seemed, indeed, no reason for thinking about a person whom one had known all one's life long.
And Helen was more than the best of company and the loveliest of objects; she was at once comrade and counsellor. He depended upon her more than upon any one. Comically helpless as he often found himself, he asked her advice about everything, and always received the wisest.
He had had often, though not so much in late years, to ask her advice about girls, for in spite of his financial ineligibility he was so engaging a person that he found himself continually drawn to the verge of decisive flirtations. His was rarely the initiative; he was responsive and affectionate and not at all susceptible, and Helen, who knew girls of her world to the bone, could accurately gauge the effect upon him of the pleading coquetry at which they were such adepts. She could gauge them the better, no doubt, from having herself no trace of coquetry. Men often liked her, but often found her cold and cynical, and even suspected her of conceit, especially since it was known that she had refused many excellent opportunities for establishing herself in life. She was also suspected by many of abysmal cleverness, and this reputation frightened admiring but uncomplicated young men more than anything else. Now, when her first youth was past, men more seldom fell in love with her and more frequently liked her; they had had time to find out that if she were cold she was also very kind, and that if abysmally clever, she could adapt her cleverness to pleasant, trivial uses.
Gerald, when he thought at all about her, thought of Helen as indeed cold, clever, and cynical; but these qualities never oppressed him, aware from the first, as he had been, of the others, and he found in them, moreover, veritable shields and bucklers for himself. It was to some one deeply experienced, yet quite unwarped by personal emotions, that he brought his recitals of distress and uncertainty. Lady Molly was a perfect little dear, but could he go on with it? How could he if he would? She hadn't any money, and her people would be furious; she herself, he felt sure, would be miserable in no time, if they did marry. They wouldn't even have enough—would they, did Helen think?—for love in a cottage, and Molly would hate love in a cottage. They would have to go about living on their relations and friends, as he now did, more or less; but with a wife and babies, how could one? Did Helen think one could? Gerald would finish dismally, standing before her with his hands thrust deeply into his pockets and a ruffled brow of inquiry. Or else it was the pretty Miss Oliver who had him—half alarmed, half enchanted—in her toils, and Gerald couldn't imagine what she was going to do with him.For such entanglements Helen's advice had always shown a way out, and for his uncertainties—though she never took the responsibility of actual guidance—her reflective questionings, her mere reflective silences, were illuminating. They made clear for him, as for her, that recklessness could only be worth while if one were really—off one's own bat, as it were—'in love'; and that, this lacking, recklessness was folly sure to end in disaster. 'Wait, either until you care so much that you must, or else until you meet some one so nice, so rich, and so suitable that you may,' said Helen. 'If you are not careful you will find yourself married to some one who will bore you and quarrel with you on twopence a year.'
'You must be careful for me,' said Gerald. 'Please warn and protect.'
And Helen replied that she would always do her best for him.
It had never occurred to Gerald to turn the tables on Helen and tell her that she ought to marry. His imagination was not occupied with Helen's state, though once, after a conversation with old Miss Buchanan, he remarked to Helen, looking at her with a vague curiosity, that it was a pity she hadn't taken Lord Henry or Mr. Fergusson. 'Miss Buchanan tells me you might have been one of the first hostesses in London if you hadn't thrown away your chances.'
'I'm all right,' said Helen.
'Yes, you yourself are; but after she dies?'
Helen owned, with a smile, that she could certainly do with some few thousands a year; but that, in default of them, she could manage to scrape along.
'But you've never had any better chances, haveyou?' said Gerald rather tentatively. He might confide everything in Helen, but he realised, as a restraining influence, that she never made any confidences, even to him, who, he was convinced, knew her down to the ground.
Helen owned that she hadn't.
'Your aunt thinks it a dreadful pity. She's very much worried about you.'
'It's late in the day for the poor dear to worry. The chances were over long ago.'
'You didn't care enough?'
'I was young and foolish enough to want to be in love when I married,' said Helen, smiling at him with her half-closed eyes.
And Gerald said that, yes, he would have expected that from her; and with this dismissed the subject from his mind, taking it for granted that Helen's disengaged, sustaining, and enlivening spinsterhood would always be there for his solace and amusement.
Helen was on one side of her and Mr. Digby sat in an opposite corner of the railway carriage, and they were approaching the end of the journey to Merriston House on a bright July day soon after Althea's arrival in England. She had met Mr. Digby at Helen's the day before and had suggested that he should come with them. Gerald had remarked that it might be tiresome if she hated Merriston, and he were there to see that she hated it; but Althea was so sure of liking it that her conviction imposed itself.
Mr. Digby and Helen were both smoking; they had asked her very solicitously whether she minded, and she had said she didn't, although in fact she did not like the smell of tobacco, and Helen's constant cigarette distressed her quite unselfishly on the score of health. The windows were wide open, and though the gale that blew through ruffled her smooth hair and made her veil tickle disagreeably, these minor discomforts could not spoil her predominant sense of excitement and adventure. Mr. Digby's presence, particularly, roused it. He was so long, so limp, so graceful, lounging there in his corner. His socks and his tie were of such a charming shade of blue and his hair such a charmingshade of light mouse-colour. He was vague and blithe, immersed in his own thoughts, which, apparently, were pleasant and superficial. When his eyes met Althea's, he smiled at her, and she thought his smile the most engaging she had ever seen. For the rest, he hardly spoke at all, and did not seem to consider it incumbent on him to make any conversational efforts, yet his mere presence lent festivity to the occasion.
Helen did not talk much either; she smoked her cigarette and looked out of the window with half-closed eyes. Her slender feet, encased in grey shoes, were propped on the opposite seat; her grey travelling-dress hung in smoke-like folds about her; in her little hat was a bright green wing.
Althea wondered if Mr. Digby appreciated his cousin's appearance, or if long brotherly familiarity had dimmed his perception of it. She wondered how her own appearance struck him. She knew that she was very trim and very elegant, and in mere beauty—quite apart from charm, which she didn't claim—she surely excelled Helen; Helen with her narrow eyes, odd projecting nose, and small, sulkily-moulded lips. Deeply though she felt the fascination of her friend's strange visage, she could but believe her own the lovelier. So many people—not only Franklin Winslow Kane—had thought her lovely. There was no disloyalty in recognising the fact for oneself, and an innocent satisfaction in the hope that Mr. Digby might recognise it too.
The day that flashed by on either side had also a festive quality: blue skies heaped with snowy clouds; fields brimmed with breeze-swept grain, green and silver, or streaked with the gold of butter-cups; swift streams and the curves of summer foliage. It was a country remote, wooded and pastoral, and Althea, a connoisseur in landscapes, was enchanted.
'Do you like it?' Helen asked her as they passed along the edge of a little wood, glimpses of bright meadow among its clearings. 'We are almost there now, and it's like this all about Merriston.'
'I've hardly seen any part of England I like so much,' said Althea. 'It has a sweet, untouched wildness rather rare in England.'
'I always think that it's a country to love and live in,' said Helen. 'Some countries seem made only to be looked at.'
Althea wondered, as she then went on looking at this country, whether she were thinking of her girlhood and of her many journeys to Merriston. She wondered if Mr. Digby were thinking of his boyhood. Ever since seeing those two together yesterday afternoon she had wondered about them. She had never encountered a relationship quite like theirs; it was so close, so confident, yet so untender. She could hardly make out that they liked each other; all that one saw was that they trusted, so that it had something of the businesslike quality of a partnership. Yet she found herself building up an absurd little romance about their past. It might be, who knew, that Mr. Digby had once been in love with Helen and that she had refused him; he was poor, and she had said that she must marry money. Althea's heart tightened a little with compassion for Mr. Digby. Only, if this ever had been, it was well over now; and more narrowly observing Mr. Digby's charming and irresponsible face, she reflected thathe was hardly the sort of person to illustrate large themes of passion and fidelity.
A fly was waiting for them at the station, and as they jolted away Gerald remarked that she was now to see one of the worst features of Merriston; it was over an hour from the station, and if one hadn't a motor the drive was a great bore. Althea, however, didn't find it a bore. Her companions talked now, their heads at the windows; it had been years since they had traversed that country together; every inch of it was known to them and significant of weary waits, wonderful runs, feats and misadventures at gates and ditches; for their reminiscences were mainly sportsmanlike. Althea listened, absorbed, but distressed. It was Gerald who caught and interpreted the expression of her large, gentle eyes.
'I don't believe you like fox-hunting, Miss Jakes,' he said.
'No, indeed, I do not,' said Althea, shaking her head.
'You mean you think it cruel?'
'Very cruel.'
'Yet where would we be without it?' said Gerald. 'And where would the foxes be? After all, while they live, their lives are particularly pleasant.'
'With possible intervals of torture? Don't you think that, if they could choose, they would rather not live at all?'
'Oh, a canny old fox doesn't mind the run so much, you know—enjoys it after a fashion, no doubt.'
'Don't salve your conscience by that sophism,Gerald; the fox is canny because he has been terrified so often,' said Helen. 'Let us own that it is barbarous, but such glorious sport that one tries to forget the fox.'
It required some effort for Althea to testify against her and Mr. Digby, but she felt so strongly on the subject of animals, foxes in particular, that her courage did not fail her. 'I think it is when we forget, that the dreadful things in life, the sins and cruelties, happen,' she said.
Gerald's gay eyes were cogitatingly fixed on her, and Helen continued to look out of the window; but she thought that they both liked her the better for her frankness, and she felt in the little ensuing silence that it had brought them nearer—bright, alien creatures that they were.
Her first view of Merriston House hardly confirmed her hopes of it, though she would not have owned to herself that this was so. It was neither so beautiful nor so imposing as she had expected; it was even, perhaps, rather commonplace; but in a moment she was able to overcome this slight disloyalty and to love it the more for its unpretentiousness. A short, winding avenue of limes led to it, and it stood high among lawns that fell away to lower shrubberies and woods. It was a square stone house, covered with creepers, a white rose clustering over the doorway and a group of trees over-topping its chimneys.
Inside, where the housekeeper welcomed them and tea waited for them, was the same homely brightness. Hunting prints hung in the hall; rows of mediocre, though pleasing, family portraits in the dining-room. The long drawing-room at the backof the house, overlooking the lawns and a far prospect, was a much inhabited room, cheerful and shabby. There were old-fashioned water-colour landscapes, porcelain in cabinets and on shelves, and many tables crowded with ivory and silver bric-à-brac; things from India and things from China, that Digbys in the Army and Digbys in the Navy had brought home.
'What a Philistine room it is,' said Gerald, smiling as he looked around him; 'but I must say I like it just as it is. It has never made an æsthetic effort.'
Gerald's smile irradiated the whole house for Althea, and lit up, in especial, the big, sunny school-room where he and Helen found most memories of all. 'The same old table, Helen,' he said, 'and other children have spilled ink on it and scratched their initials just as we used to; here are yours and mine. Do you remember the day we did them under Fräulein's very nose? And here are all our old books, too. Look, Helen, the Roman history with your wicked drawings on the fly-leaves: Tullia driving over her poor old father, and Cornelia—ironic little wretch you were even then—what a prig she is with her jewels! And what splendid butter-scotch you used to make over the fire on winter evenings.'
Helen remembered everything, smiling as she followed Gerald about the room and looked at ruthless Tullia; and Althea, watching them, was touched—for them, and then, with a little counter-stroke of memory, for herself. She remembered her old home too—the dignified old house in steep Chestnut Street, and the little house on the blueMassachusetts coast where she had often passed long days playing by herself, for she had been an only child. She loved it here, for it was like a home, peaceful and sheltering; but where in all the world had she really a home? Where in all the world did she belong? The thought brought tears to her eyes as she looked out of the schoolroom window and listened to Gerald and Helen. It had ended, of course, for of course it had really begun, in Althea's decision to take Merriston House. It was quite fixed now, and on the way back she had made her new friends promise to be often together with her in the home of their youth. She had made them promise this so prettily and with such gentle warmth that it was very natural that Gerald, in talking over the event with Helen that evening, should say, strolling round Helen's little sitting-room, 'She's rather a dear, that little friend of yours.'
Helen was tired and lay extended on the divan in the grey dress she had not had time to change. She had doffed her hat and, thrusting its hatpins through it, had laid it on her knees, so that, as Gerald had remarked, she looked rather like Brünhilde on her rocky couch. But, unlike Brünhilde, her hands were clasped behind her neck, and she looked up at the ceiling. 'A perfect little dear,' she assented.
'Did you notice her eyes when she was talking about the foxes? They were as sorrowful and piteous as a Mater Dolorosa's. She is definite enough about some things, isn't she? Things like right and wrong, I mean, as she sees them.'
'Yes; she is clear about outside things, like right and wrong.'
'It's a good deal to be clear about, isn't it?'
'I suppose so,' Helen reflected. 'I don't feel that I really understand Althea. People who aren't clear about themselves are difficult to understand, I think.'
'It's that that really gives them a mystery. I feel that she really is a little mysterious,' said Gerald. 'One wonders what she would do in certain cases, and feel in certain situations, and one can't remotely imagine. She is a sealed book.'
'Shewonders,' said Helen.
'And you suspect that her pages are empty?'
Helen reflected, but nothing seemed to come. She closed her eyes, smiling, and said, 'Be off, please. I'm getting too sleepy to have suspicions. We have plenty of time to find out whether anything is written on Althea's pages.'
But, when Gerald was gone, Helen found that she was no longer sleepy. She lay, her eyes closed, straight and still, like an effigy on a tomb, and she thought, intently and quietly. It was more a series of pictures than a linking of ideas with which her mind was occupied—pictures of her childhood and girlhood in Scotland and at Merriston House. It was dispassionately that she watched the little figure, lonely, violent, walking over the moors, hiding in the thickets of the garden, choking with tears of fury, clenching teeth over fierce resentments. She almost smiled at the sight of her. What constant resentments, what frequent furies! They centred, of course, about the figure of her mother, lovely, vindictive, and stony-hearted, as she had been and was. Helen's life had dawned in the consciousness of love for this beautiful mother, whom she had worshipped with the ardent humility of a little dog. Afterwards, with a vehemence as great, she had grown to hate her. All her girlhood had been filled with struggles against her mother. Sometimes for weeks they had not spoken to each other, epochs during which, completely indifferent though she was, Mrs. Buchanan had given herself the satisfaction of smartly boxing her daughter's ears when her mute, hostile presence too much exasperated her. There had been no refuge for Helen with her father, a gloomy man, immersed in sport and study, nor in her brother Nigel, gay and pleasant though he was. When once Nigel got away to school and college, he spent as little time at home as possible. Helen was as solitary as a sea-bird, blown far inland and snared. Then came the visits to Merriston House—the cheerful, chattering houseful of happy girls, the kind father and mother, and Gerald. Gerald! From the time that he came into her life all the pictures were full of him, so full that she hardly saw herself any longer; she was only some one who watched and felt.
Her violent nature, undisciplined except by its own pride, did not submit easily to the taming processes of a wholesome family life; she dominated the girl cousins, and they only counted as chorus in the drama of her youth. It was Gerald who counted, at once, counted for everything else. She cared so much for him that, feeling her independence slipping from her, she at first quarrelled with him constantly, as far as he would let her quarrel with him. Her brooding bitterness amazed and amused him. While she stormed, he would laugh at her, gaily and ironically, and tell her that she was an absurd little savage. And, after she had burst into a frenzy of tears and fled from him, he would seek her out, find her hidden in some corner of the garden or shrubberies, and, grieved and alarmed, put his arms around her, kiss her and say: 'Look here, I'm awfully sorry. I can't bear to have you take things like this. Please make up.'
He could not bear to see her suffering, ludicrous though he thought her suffering to be. And it wasthis sweetness, this comprehension and tenderness, like sunlight flooding her gloomy and petrified young heart, that filled Helen with astonished bliss. She was tamed at last to the extent of laughing with Gerald at herself; and, though the force of her nature led him, the sweetness of his nature controlled her. They became the dearest of friends.
Yes, so it had always been; so it had always looked—to all the rest of the world, and to Gerald. Helen, lying on her divan, saw the pictures of comradeship filling the years. It was her consciousness of what the real meaning of the pictures was that supplied something else, something hidden and desperate that pulsed in them all. How she remembered the first time that she had drawn away when Gerald kissed her, putting up between them the shield of a lightly yet decisively accepted conventionality. They were 'growing up'; this was her justification. How she remembered what it had cost her to keep up the lightness of her smile so that he should not guess what lay beneath. Her nature was all passion, and enclosing this passion, like a steady hand held round a flame, was a fierce purity, a fierce pride. Gerald had never guessed. No one had ever guessed. It seemed to Helen that the pain of it had broken her heart in the very spring of her years; that it was only a maimed and cautious creature that the world had ever known.
She lay, and drew long quiet breaths in looking at it all. The day of reawakened memories had been like a sword in her heart, and now she seemed to draw it out slowly, and let the blood come with a sense of peace. She could even, as often, lend to the contemplation of her tragedy the bitter littlegrimace of mockery with which she met so much of life. She could tell herself, as often, that she had never outgrown love-sick girlhood, and that she was merely in love with Gerald's smile. Yet Gerald was all in his smile; and Gerald, it seemed, was made to be loved, all of him, helplessly and hopelessly, by unfortunate her. She felt her love as a misfortune; it was too strong and too unsatisfied to be felt in any sense as joy, though it strung her nature to a painful appreciation of joy. She saw life with a cold, appraising eye; it was like a landscape robbed of all sunlight, and, so robbed, so bleak, and so bereft, it was easy to appraise it, to see, since one could have no warmth or light, what were the next best things to have. She had missed the next best things again and again, when the moment had come for taking them; she had drawn back sick, blanched, shaken with the throes of desperate hope. Only in these last years, when next best things were no longer so plentiful, had hope really died. Her heart still beat, but it seemed to beat thinly, among all the heaped-up ashes of dead hopes. She was free to go forth into the sunless world and choose what place should be hers. She did not care much for anything that world had to give her. But she intended to choose carefully and calmly. She was aware in herself of firm, well-knit faculty, of tastes, sharp and sensitive, demanding only an opportunity to express themselves in significant and finished forms of life; and though Helen did not think of it in these terms, saying merely to herself that she wanted money and power, the background of her intention was a consciousness of capacity for power. Reflectingon this power, and on the paths to its realisation, she was led far, indeed, from any thought of Althea; and Althea was not at all in her mind as, sleepy at last, and very weary, she remembered Gerald's last words. It was the thought of Gerald that brought the thought of Althea, and of Althea's pages. Fair and empty they were, she felt sure, adorned only here and there with careful and becoming maxims. She smiled a little, not untenderly, as she thought of Althea. But, just before sinking to deeper drowsiness, and deciding that she must rouse herself and go upstairs to bed, a further consciousness came to her. The sunny day at Merriston had not, in her thoughts, brought them near to one another—Gerald, and Althea, and her; yet something significant ran through her sudden memory of it. She had moments of her race's sense of second-sight, and it never came without making her aware of a pause—a strange, forced pause—where she had to look at something, touch something, in the dark, as it were. It was there as she roused herself from her half-somnolent state; it was there in the consciousness of a turning-point in her life—in Gerald's, in Althea's. 'We may write something on Althea's pages,' was the thought with which, smiling over its inappropriateness, she went upstairs. And the fancy faded from her memory, as if it had been a bird's wing that brushed her cheek in the darkness.
Althea went down to Merriston House in the middle of July. Helen accompanied her to see her safely installed and to set the very torpid social ball rolling. There were not many neighbours, but Helen assembled them all. She herself could stay only a few days. She was bound, until the middle of August, in a rush of engagements, and meanwhile Althea, rather ruefully, was forced to fall back on Miss Buckston for companionship. She had always, till now, found Miss Buckston's cheerful dogmatism fortifying, and, even when it irritated her, instructive; but she had now new standards of interest, and new sources of refreshment, and, shut up with Miss Buckston for a rainy week, she felt as never before the defects of this excellent person's many qualities.
She had fires lighted, much to Miss Buckston's amusement, and sat a good deal by the blaze in the drawing-room, controlling her displeasure when Miss Buckston, dressed in muddy tweed and with a tweed cap pulled down over her brows, came striding in from a ten-mile tramp and said, pulling open all the windows, 'You are frightfully frusty in here.'
It was not 'frusty.' Althea had a scientific regard for ventilation, and a damp breeze from thegarden blew in at the furthest window. She had quite enough air.
Miss Buckston was also very critical of Merriston House, and pointed out the shabbiness of the chintz and faded carpets. The garden, she said, was shamefully neglected, and she could not conceive how people could bear to let a decent place like this go to ruin. 'But he's a slack creature, Gerald Digby, I've heard.'
Althea coldly explained that Mr. Digby was too poor to live at Merriston and to keep it up. She did not herself in the least mind the shabbiness.
'Oh, I don't mind it,' said Miss Buckston. 'I only think he's done himself very well in getting you to take the place in this condition. How much do you give for it?'
Althea, more coldly, named the sum. It was moderate; Miss Buckston had to grant that, though but half-satisfied that there was no intention to 'do' her friend. 'When once you get into the hands of hard-up fashionable folk,' she said, 'it's as well to look sharp.'
Althea did not quite know what to say to this. She had never in the past opposed Miss Buckston, and it would be difficult to tell her now that she took too much upon herself. At a hint of hesitancy, she knew, Miss Buckston would pass to and fro over her like a steam-roller, nearly as noisy, and to her own mind as composedly efficient. Hesitancy or contradiction she flattened and left behind her.
She had an air of owning Bach that became peculiarly vexatious to Althea, who, in silence, but armed with new standards, was assembling her own forces and observed, in casting an eye over them,that she had heard five times as much music as Miss Buckston and might be granted the right of an opinion on it. She took satisfaction in a memory of Miss Buckston's face singing in the Bach choir—even at the time it had struck her as funny—at a concert to which Althea had gone with her some years ago in London. It was to see, for her own private delectation, a weak point in Miss Buckston's iron-clad personality to remember how very funny she could look. Among the serried ranks of singing heads hers had stood out with its rubicund energy, its air of mastery, the shining of its eye-glasses and of its large white teeth; and while she sang Miss Buckston had jerked her head rhythmically to one side and beaten time with her hand as if to encourage and direct her less competent companions. Sometimes, now, she looked almost as funny, when she sat down to the piano and gave forth a recitative.
After Bach, Woman's Suffrage was Miss Buckston's special theme, and, suspecting a new hint of uncertainty in Althea, whose conviction she had always taken for granted, she attacked her frequently and mercilessly.
'Pooh, my dear,' she would say, 'don't quote your frothy American women to me. Americans have no social conscience. That's the trouble with you all; rank individualists, every one of you. When the political attitude of the average citizen is that of the ostrich keeping his head in the sand so that he shan't see what the country's coming to, what can you expect of the women? Your arguments don't affect the suffrage question, they merely dismiss America. I shall lose my temperif you trot them out to me.' Miss Buckston never lost her temper, however; other people's opinions counted too little with her for that.
At the end of the first week Althea felt distinctly that though the country, even under these dismal climatic conditions, might be delightful if shared with some people, it was not delightful shared with Miss Buckston. She did not like walking in the rain; she was a creature of houses, cabs and carriages. The sober beauty of blotted silhouettes, and misty, rolling hills at evening when the clouds lifted over the sunset, did not appeal to her. She wished that she had stayed in London; she wished that Helen and Mr. Digby were with her; she was even glad that Aunt Julia and the girls were coming.
There was a welcome diversion afforded for her, when Aunt Julia came, by the prompt hostility that declared itself between her and Miss Buckston. Aunt Julia was not a person to allow a steam-roller to pass over her without protest, and Althea felt that she herself had been cowardly when she saw how Aunt Julia resented, for them both, Miss Buckston's methods. Miss Buckston had a manner of saying rude things in sincere unconsciousness that they could offend anybody. She herself did not take offence easily; she was, as she would have said, 'tough.' But Mrs. Pepperell had all the sensitiveness—for herself and for others—of her race, the British race, highly strung with several centuries of transplantation to an electric climate. If she was rude it was never unconsciously so. After her first talk with Miss Buckston, in which the latter, as was her wont, told her anumber of unpleasant facts about America and the Americans, Mrs. Pepperell said to her niece, 'What an intolerable woman!'
'She doesn't mean it,' said Althea feebly.
'Perhaps not,' said Aunt Julia; 'but I intend that she shall see what I mean.'
Althea's feeling was of mingled discomfort and satisfaction. Her sympathies were with Aunt Julia, yet she felt a little guilty towards Miss Buckston, for whom her affection was indeed wavering. Inner loyalty having failed she did not wish outer loyalty to be suspected, and in all the combats that took place she kept in the background and only hoped to see Aunt Julia worst Miss Buckston. But the trouble was that Aunt Julia never did worst her. Even when, passing beyond the bounds of what she considered decency, she became nearly as outspoken as Miss Buckston, that lady maintained her air of cheerful yet impatient tolerance. She continued to tell them that the American wife and mother was the most narrow, the most selfish, the most complacent of all wives and mothers; and, indeed, to Miss Buckston's vigorous virginity, all wives and mothers, though sociologically necessary, belonged to a slightly inferior, more rudimentary species. The American variety, she said, were immersed in mere domesticity or social schemes and squabbles. 'Oh, they talked. I never heard so much talk in all my life as when I was over there,' said Miss Buckston; 'but I couldn't see that they got anything done with it. They had debates about health, and yet one could hardly for love or money get a window open in a train; and they had debates on the ethics of citizenship,and yet you are governed by bosses. Voluble and inefficient creatures, I call them.'
Aunt Julia, conscious of her own honourable career, with its achievements in enlightened philanthropy and its background of careful study, heard this with inexpressible ire; but when she was dragged to the execrable taste of a retaliation, and pointed to the British countryside matron, as they saw her at Merriston—a creature, said Aunt Julia, hardly credible in her complacency and narrowness, Miss Buckston rejoined with an unruffled smile: 'Ah, we'll wake them up. They've good stuff in them—good, staying stuff; and they do a lot of useful work in keeping down Radicalism and keeping up the sentiment of our imperial responsibilities and traditions. They are solid, at all events, not hollow.' And to this poor Aunt Julia, whose traditions did not allow her the retort of sheer brutality, could find no answer.
The absurd outcome of the situation was that Althea and Aunt Julia came to look for succour to the girls. The girls were able—astonishingly so, to cope with Miss Buckston. In the first place, they found her inexpressibly funny, and neither Althea nor Aunt Julia quite succeeded at that; and in the second, they rather liked her; they did not argue with her, they did not take her seriously for a moment; they only played buoyantly about her. A few months before, Althea would have been gravely disturbed by their lack of reverence; she saw it now with guilty satisfaction. Miss Buckston, among the nets they spread for her, plunged and floundered like a good-tempered bull—at first with guileless acquiescence in the game, and then withgrowing bewilderment. They flouted gay cloaks before her dizzy eyes, and planted ribboned darts in her quivering shoulders. Even Althea could not accuse them of aggressiveness or rudeness. They never put themselves forward; they were there already. They never twisted the tail of the British lion; they never squeezed the eagle; they were far too secure under his wings for that. The bird, indeed, had grown since Althea's youth, and could no longer be carried about as a hostile trophy. They took it for granted, gaily and kindly, that America was 'God's country,' and that all others were schools or playgrounds for her children. They were filled with a confident faith in her future and in their own part in making that future better. And something in the faith was infectious. Even Miss Buckston felt it. Miss Buckston felt it, indeed, more than Althea, whose attitude towards her own native land had always been one of affectionate apology.
'Nice creatures,' said Miss Buckston, 'undisciplined and mannerless as they are; but that's a failing they share with our younger generation. I see more hope for your country in that type than in anything else you can show me. They are solid, and don't ape anything.'
So by degrees a species of friendship grew up between Miss Buckston and the girls, who said that she was a jolly old thing, and more fun than a goat, especially when she sang Bach. Mildred and Dorothy sang exceptionally well and were highly equipped musicians.
Althea could not have said why it was, but this progress to friendliness between her cousins and MissBuckston made her feel, as she had felt in the Paris hotel drawing-room over a month ago, jaded and unsuccessful. So did the fact that the vicar's eldest son, a handsome young soldier with a low forehead and a loud laugh, fell in love with Dorothy. That young men should fall in love with them was another of the pleasant things that Mildred and Dorothy took for granted. Their love affairs, frank and rather infantile, were of a very different calibre from the earnest passions that Althea had aroused—passions usually initiated by intellectual sympathy and nourished on introspection and a constant interchange of serious literature.
It was soon evident that Dorothy, though she and Captain Merton became the best of friends, had no intention of accepting him. Mrs. Merton, the vicar's wife, had at first been afraid lest she should, not having then ascertained what Mrs. Pepperell's fortune might be; but after satisfying herself on this point by a direct cross-examination of Althea, she was as much amazed as incensed when her boy told her ruefully that he had been refused three times. Althea was very indignant when she realised that Mrs. Merton, bland and determined in her latest London hat, was trying to find out whether Dorothy was a good enough match for Captain Merton, and it was pleasant to watch Mrs. Merton's subsequent discomfiture. At the same time, she felt that to follow in Mildred and Dorothy's triumphant wake was hardly what she had expected to do at Merriston House.
Other things, too, were discouraging. Helen had hardly written at all. She had sent a postcard from Scotland to say that she would have to put offcoming till later in August. She had sent another, in answer to a long letter of Althea's, in which Gerald had been asked to come with her, to say that Gerald was yachting, and that she was sure he would love to come some time in the autumn, if his plans allowed it; and Althea, on reading this, felt certain that if she counted for little with Helen, she counted for nothing with Mr. Digby. Whom did she count with? That was the question that once more assailed her as she saw herself sink into insignificance beside Mildred and Dorothy. If Mildred and Dorothy counted for more than she, where was she to look for response and sympathy? And now, once again, as if in answer to these dismal questionings, came a steamer letter from Franklin Winslow Kane, announcing his immediate arrival. Althea had thought very little about Franklin in these last weeks; her mind had been filled with those foreground figures that now seemed to have become uncertain and vanishing. And it was not so much that Franklin came forward as that there was nothing else to look at; not so much that he counted, as that to count so much, in every way, for him might almost atone for counting with no one else. Physically, mentally, morally, Franklin's appreciations of her were deep; they were implied all through his letter, which was at once sober and eager. He said that he would stay at Merriston House for 'just as long as ever she would let him.' Merely to be near her was to him, separated as he was from her for so much of his life, an unspeakable boon. Franklin rarely dealt in demonstrative speeches, but, in this letter, after a half-shy prelude to his own daring, he went on to say: 'Perhaps,considering how long it's been since I saw you, you'll let me kiss your beautiful hands when we meet.'
Franklin had only once kissed her beautiful hands, years ago, on the occasion of her first touched refusal of him. She had severe scruples as to encouraging, by such graciousness, a person you didn't intend to marry; but she really thought, thrilling a little as she read the sentence, that this time, perhaps, Franklin might. Franklin himself never thrilled her; but the words he wrote renewed in her suddenly a happy self-confidence. Who, after all, was Franklin's superior in insight? Wrapped in the garment of his affection, could she not see with equanimity Helen's vagueness and Gerald's indifference? Why, when one came to look at it from the point of view of the soul, wasn't Franklin their superior in every way? It needed some moral effort to brace herself to the inquiry. She couldn't deny that Franklin hadn't their charm; but charm was a very superficial thing compared to moral beauty.