The windows were deep set and hung forward, it seemed, over the hill, so that town, gardens, trees, were all lost and you saw only the sea.
At this hour you seemed to swing in space; the division lost between sea and sky in the now nearly horizontal rays of the sun—only a golden glow covering the blue with a dazzling blaze of colour. He stood there drinking it in, then sat in one of the window-seats, his hands clasped, lost in happiness.
After a while he turned back to the room. Flecks of dust, changed into gold by the evening light, floated in mid-air. The room was disregarded indeed. The walls were panelled. The little Minstrels' Gallery was supported on two heavy pillars. The floor was bare of carpet and had even a faint waxen sheen, as though, in spite of the room's general neglect, it was used, once and again, for dances.
But what pathos the room had! He did not know that almost fifteen years before Maradick had felt that same thing. How vastly now that pathos was increased, how greatly since Maradick's day the world's history had relentlessly cut away those earlier years. He saw that round the platform of the gallery was intricate carving, and, going forward more closely to examine, saw that in every square was set the head of a grinning lion. Some high-backed, quaintly-shaped chairs, that looked as though they might be of great age, were ranged against the wall.
Being now right under the gallery he saw some little wooden steps. He climbed up them and then from the gallery's shadow looked down across the room. How clearly he could picture that old scene, something straight from Jane Austen with Miss Bates and Mrs. Norris, stiff-backed, against the wall, and Anne Elliott and Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Collins and the rest. The fiddlers scraping, the negus for refreshment, the night darkening, the carriages with their lights gathering. . . .
The door at the far end of the room closed with a gentle click. He started, not imagining that any one would choose that room at such an hour.
Two figures were there in the shadow beyond the end room. The light fell on the man's face—Harkness could see it very clearly. The other was a woman wearing a white dress. He could not see her face.
For an instant they were silent, then the man said something that Harkness could not hear.
The girl at once broke out: "No, no. Oh, please, Herrick."
She must be a very young girl. The voice was that of a child. It had in it a desperate note that held Harkness's attention instantly.
The man said something again, very low.
"But if you don't care," the girl's voice pleaded, "then let me go back. Oh, Herrick, let me go! Let me go!"
"My father does not wish it."
"But I am not married to your father. It is to you."
"My father and I are the same. What he says I must do, I do."
"But you can't be the same." Her voice now was trembling in its urgency. "No one could love their father more than I do and yet we are not the same."
"Nevertheless you did what your father asked you to do. So must I."
"But I didn't know. I didn't know. And he didn't know. He has never seen me frightened of anything, and now I am frightened. . . . I've never said I was to any one before, but now . . . now . . ."
She was crying, softly, terribly, with the terrified crying of real and desperate fear.
Harkness had been about to move. He did not, unseen and his presence unrealised, wish to overhear, but her tears checked him. Although he could not see her he had detected in her voice a note of pride. He fancied that she would wish anything rather than to be thus seen by a stranger. He stayed where he was. He could see the man's face, thin, white, the nose long pointed, a dark, almost grotesque shadow.
"Why are you frightened?"
"I don't know. I can't tell. I have never been frightened before."
"Have I been unkind to you?"
"No, but you don't love me."
"Did I ever pretend to love you? Didn't you know from the very first that no one in the world matters to me except my father?"
"It is of your father that I am afraid. . . . These last three days in that terrible house. . . . I'm so frightened, Herrick. I want to go home only for a little while. Just for a week before we go abroad."
"All our plans are made now. You know that we are sailing to-morrow evening."
"Yes, but I could come afterwards. . . . Forgive me, Herrick. You may do anything to me if I can only go home for just some days. . . . You may do anything. . . ."
"I don't want to do anything, Hesther. No one wishes to do you any harm. But whatever my father wishes that every one must do. It has always been so."
She seemed to be seized by an absolute frenzy of fear; Harkness could see her white shadow quivering. It appeared to him as though she caught the man by the arm. Her voice came in little breathless stifled cries, infinitely pitiful to hear.
"Please, please, Herrick. I dare not speak to your father. I don't dare. I don't dare. But you—let me go—Oh! let me go—just this once, Herrick. Only this once. I'll only be home for a few days and then I'll come back. Truly I'll come back. I'll just see father and Bobby and then I'll come back. They'll be missing me. I know they will. And I'll be going to a foreign country—such a long way. And they'll be wanting me. Bobby's so young, Herrick, only a baby. He's never had any one to do anything for him but me. . . ."
"You should have thought of that before you married me, you cannot leave me now."
"I won't leave you. I've never broken my word to any one. I won't break it now. It's only for a few days."
"How can you be so selfish, Hesther, as to want to upset every one's plans just for a whim of your own? For myself I don't care. You could go home for ever for all I care. I didn't want to marry any one. But what my father wished had to be."
She clung to him then, crying again and again between her sobs:
"Oh, let me go home! Let me go home! Let me go home!"
Harkness fancied that the man put his hands on her shoulders. His voice, cold, lifeless, impersonal, crossed the room.
"That is enough. He is waiting for us downstairs. He will be wondering where we are."
The little white shadow seemed to turn to the window, towards the limitless expanse of sunlit sea. Then a voice, small, proud, empty of emotion, said:
"Father wished me——"
Harkness was once more alone in the room.
They had gone but the girl's fear remained. It was there as truly as the two figures had been and its reality was stronger than their reality.
Harkness had the sense of having been caught, and it was exactly as though now, as he stood alone there in the gallery staring down into the room, some Imp had touched him on the shoulder, crying, "Now you're in for it! Now you're in for it! The situation has got you now."
He was, of course, not "in for it" at all. How many such conversations between human beings there were: it simply was that he had happened against his will to overhear a fragment of one of them. Yes, "against his will." How desperately he wished that he hadn't been there. What induced them to choose that room and that time for their secret confidences? He felt still in the echo of their voices the effect of their urgency.
They had chosen that room because there was some one watching their every movement and they had had only a few moments. The child—for surely she could not be more—had almost driven her companion into that two minutes' conversation, and Harkness could realise how desperate she must have been to have taken such a course.
But after all itwasno business of his! Girls married every day men whom they did not love and, although apparently in this case, the man also did not love her and they were both of them in evil plight, still that too had happened before and nothing very terrible had come of it.
Itwasno business of his, and yet he did wish, all the same, that he could get the ring of the girl's voice out of his ears. He had never been able to bear the sight, sound or even inference of any sort of cruelty to helpless humans or to animals. Perhaps because he was so frantic a coward himself about physical pain! And yet not altogether that. He had on several occasions taken risks of pretty savage pain to himself in order to save a horse a beating or a dog a kicking. Nevertheless, those had been spontaneous emotions roused at the instant; there was something lingering, a sad and tragic echo, in the voice that was still with him.
The very pathos of the room that he was in—the lingering of so many old notes that had been rung and rung again, notes of anticipation, triumph, disappointment, resignation, made this fresh, living sound the harder to escape.
By Jupiter, the childwasfrightened—that was the final ringing of it upon Harkness's heart and soul. But he was going to have his life sufficiently full were he to step in and rescue every girl frightened by matrimony! Rescue! No, there was no question of rescue. It wasn't, once again, his affair. But he did wish that he could just take her hand and tell her not to worry, that it would all come right in the end. But would it? He hadn't at all cared for the fragment of countenance that fellow had shown to him, and he had liked still less the tone of his voice, cold, unfeeling, hard. Poor child! And suddenly the thought of his Browning's "Duchess" came to him:
I was the man the Duke spoke to:I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke too;So, here's the tale from beginning to end,My friend!
I was the man the Duke spoke to:I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke too;So, here's the tale from beginning to end,My friend!
Well, here was a tale with which he had definitely nothing to do. Let him remember that. He was here in a most beautiful place for a holiday—that was his purpose, that his intention—what were these people to him or he to them?
Nevertheless the voice lingered in his ear, and to be rid of it he left the room. He stepped carefully down the wooden steps, and then at the bottom of them, under the dark lee of the gallery, he paused. He was so foolishly frightened that he could not move a step.
He waited. At last he whispered "Is any one there?"
There was no answer. He pushed his way then out of the shadow, his heart drumming against his shirt. There was no one there. Of course there was not.
In his room once more with his friend Strang and the Rembrandt Donkey to take him home he sat on his bed holding his hands between his knees.
He was positively afraid of going down to dinner. Afraid of what? Afraid of being drawn in. Drawn into what? That was precisely what he did not know, but something that ever since his first glimpse of Maradick at the Reform Club had been preparing. It was that he saw, as he sat there thinking of it, that he feared—this Something that was piling up outside him and with which he had nothing to do at all.
Why should he mind because he had heard a girl say that she was frightened and wanted to go home? And yet he did mind—minded terribly and with increasing violence from every moment that passed. The thought of that child without a friend and on the very edge of an experience that might indeed be fatal for her, the thought of it was more than he could endure.
He was clever at escaping things did they only give him a moment's pause, but in this case the longer he thought about it the harder it was to escape from. It was as though the girl had made her personal appeal to himself.
But what an old scamp her father must be, Harkness thought, to give her up like this to a man for whom she has no love, who doesn't love her. Why did she do it? And what kind of a man is the father-in-law of whom she is so afraid and who dominates his son so absolutely? In any case I must go down to dinner. I must just take what comes. . .
Yes, but his prudence whispered, don't meddle in this affair actively. It isn't the kind of thing in which you are likely to distinguish yourself.
"No, by Jove, it isn't."
"Well, then, be careful."
"I mean to be." Then suddenly the girl's voice came sharp and clear. "Damn it, I'll do anything I can," he cried aloud, jumped from the bed and went downstairs.
As he went downstairs he felt a tremendous sense of liberation. It was as though he had, after many hesitations and fears, passed through the first room successfully and closed the door behind him. Now there was the second room to be confronted.
What he immediately confronted was the garden of the hotel. The sun was slowly setting in the west, and great amber clouds, spreading out in swathes of colour, ate up the blue.
The amber flung out arms as though it would embrace the whole world. The deep blue ebbed from the sea, was pale crystal, then from length to length a vast bronze shield. The amber receded as though it had done its work, and myriads of little flecks of gold ran up into the pale blue-white, thousands of scattered fragments like coins flung in some God-like largesse.
The bronze sea was held rigid as though it were truly of metal. The town caught the gold and all the windows flashed. In the fresh evening light the grass of the lawn seemed to shine with a fresh iridescence—the farther hills were coldly dark.
Several people were walking up and down the gravel paths pausing before going in to dinner. In the golden haze only those things stood out that were more important for the scene, nature, as always, being more theatrical than any man-contrived theatre. The stage being set, the principal actor made his entrance.
A window running to the gravel path caught the level rays of the setting sun. A man stepped before this, stopping to light a cigarette and then, being there, stayed like an oriental image staring out into the garden.
Harkness looked casually, then looked again, then, fascinated, remained watching. He had never before seen such red hair nor so white a face, nor so large a stone as the green one that shone in a ring on the finger of his raised hand. He was lighting his cigarette—it was after this that he fell into rigid immobility, and the fire of the match caught the ring until, like a great eye, it seemed to open, wink at Harkness, and then regard him with a contemptuous stare.
The man's hair wasen brosse, standing straight on end as Loge's used to do in the old pre-war Bayreuth "Ring." It was, like Loge's, a flaming red, short, harsh, instantly arresting. Evening dress. One small black pearl in his shirt. Very small feet in shining shoes.
There had stuck in Harkness's mind a phrase that he had encountered once in George Moore's description of Verlaine inMemories and Opinions—"I shall not forget the glare of the bald prominent forehead (une tête glabre). . . ." That was the phrase now,une tête glabre—the forehead glaring like a challenge, the red hair springing from it like something alive of its own independence. For the rest this interesting figure had a body round, short and fat like a ball. Over his protruding stomach stretched a white waistcoat with three little plain black buttons.
The colour of his face had an unnatural pallor, something theatrical like the clown inPagliacci, or again, like one of Benda's masks. Yes, this was the truer comparison, because through the mask the eyes were alive and beautiful, dark, tender, eloquent, but spoilt because above them the eyebrows were so faint as to be scarcely visible. The mouth in the white of the face was a thin hard red scratch. The eyes stared into the garden. The body soon became painted into the window behind it, the round short limbs, the shining shoes, the little black pearl in the gleaming shirt.
Harkness, from the shadow where he stood, looked and looked again. Then, fearing that he might be perceived and his stare be held offensive, he moved forward. The man saw him and, to Harkness's surprise, stepped forward and spoke to him.
"I beg your pardon," he said; "but do you happen to have a light? My cigarette did not catch properly and I have used my last match."
Here was another surprise for Harkness. The voice was the most beautiful that he had ever heard from man. Soft, exquisitely melodious, with an inflection in it of friendliness, courtesy and culture that was enchanting. Absolutely without affectation.
"Why, yes. Certainly," said Harkness.
He felt for his little gold matchbox, found it, produced a match and, guarding it with his hand, struck it. In the light the other's forehead suddenly sprang up again like a live thing. For an instant two of his fingers rested on Harkness's hand. They seemed to be so soft as to be quite boneless.
"Thank you. What an exquisite evening!"
"Yes," said Harkness. "This is a very beautiful place."
"Yes," said the other, "is it not? And this is incidentally the best hotel in England."
The voice was so beautiful to Harkness, who was exceedingly sensitive to sound, that his only desire was that by some means he should prolong the conversation so that he might indulge himself in the luxury of it.
"I have only just arrived," he said; "I came only an hour ago, and it is my first visit."
"Is that so? Then you have a great treat in store for you. This is splendid country round here, and although every one has been doing their best to spoil it there are still some lovely places. Treliss is the only town in Southern England where the place is still triumphant over modern improvements."
There was a pause, then the man said:
"Will you be here for long?"
"I have made no plans," Harkness replied.
"I wish I could show you around a little. I know this country very well. There is nothing I enjoy more than showing off some of our beauties. But, unfortunately, I leave for abroad early to-morrow morning."
Harkness thanked him. They were soon talking very freely, walking up and down the gravel path. The exquisite modulation of the man's voice, its rhythm, gentleness, gave Harkness such delight that he could listen for ever. They spoke of foreign countries. Harkness had travelled much and remembered what he had seen. This man had been apparently everywhere.
Suddenly a gong sounded. "Ah, there's dinner." They paused. The stranger said: "I beg your pardon. You tell me that you are American, and I know therefore that you are not hampered by ridiculous conventionalities. Are you alone?"
"I am," said Harkness.
"Well, then—why not dine with us? There is myself, my son and a charming girl to whom he has lately been married. Do me that pleasure. Or, if people are a bore to you be quite frank and say so."
"I shall be delighted," said Harkness.
"Good. My name is Crispin."
"Harkness is mine."
They walked in together.
He had, as he walked into the hall, an overwhelming sense that everything that was occurring to him had happened to him before, and it was only part of this dream-conviction that Crispin should pause and say:
"Here they are, waiting for us," and lead him up to the girl who, half an hour before, had been with him in the little gallery. He had even a moment of protesting panic crying to the little imp whose voice he had already heard that evening: "Let me out of this. I am not so passive as you fancy. It is a holiday I am here for. There is no knight errantry in me—you have caught the wrong man for that."
But the girl's face stopped him. She was beautiful. He had from the first instant of seeing her no doubt of that, and it was as though her voice had already built her up for him in that dim room.
Straight and dark, her face had child-like purity in its rounded cheeks, its large brow and wondering eyes, its mouth set now in proud determination, but trembling a little behind that pride, its cheeks very soft and faintly coloured. Her hair was piled up as though it were only recently that it had come to that distinction. She was wearing a very simple white frock that looked as though it had been made by some little local dressmaker of her own place. She had been proud of it, delighted with it, Harkness could be sure, perhaps only a week or two ago. Now experiences were coming to her thick and fast. She was clutching them all to her, determined to face them whatever they might be, finding them, as Harkness knew from what he had overheard, more terrible than she had ever conceived.
She had been crying, as he knew, only half an hour ago, but now there were no traces of tears, only a faint shell-like flush on her cheeks.
The man standing beside her was not much more than a boy, but Harkness thought that he had seldom perceived an uglier countenance. A large broad nose, a long thin face like a hatchet, grey colourless eyes and a bony body upon which the evening clothes sat awkwardly, here was ugliness itself, but the true unpleasantness came from the cold aloofness that lay in the unblinking eyes, the hard straight mouth.
"He might be walking in his sleep," Harkness thought, "for all the life he's showing. What a pair for the girl to be in the hands of!" Harkness was introduced:
"Hesther, my dear, this is Mr. Harkness who is going to give us the pleasure of dining with us. Mr. Harkness, this is my boy, Herrick."
The little man led the way, and it was interesting to perceive the authoritative dignity with which he moved. He had a walk that admirably surmounted the indignities that the short legs and stumpy body would, in a less clever performer, have inevitably entailed. He did not strut, nor trot, nor push out his stomach and follow it with proud resolve.
His dignity was real, almost regal, and yet not absurd. He walked slowly, looking about him as he went. He stopped at the entrance of the dining-hall now crowded with people, spoke to the head waiter, a stout pompous-looking fellow, who was at once obsequious, and started down the room to a reserved table.
The diners looked up and watched their progress, but Harkness noticed that no one smiled. When they came to their table in the middle of the room, Mr. Crispin objected to it and they were at once shown to another one beside the window and looking out to the sea.
"It will amuse you to see the room, Hesther. You sit there. You can look out of the window too when you are bored with people. Will you sit here, Mr. Harkness, on my right?"
Harkness was now opposite the girl and looking out to the sea that was lit with a bronze flame that played on the air like a searchlight. The window was slightly open, and he could hear the sounds from the town, the merry-go-round, a harsh trumpet, and once and again a bell.
"Do you mind that window?" Crispin asked him. "I think it is rather pleasant. You don't mind it, Hesther dear? They are having festivities down there this evening. The night of their annual ceremony when they dance round the town—something as old as the hill on which the town is built, I fancy. You ought to go down and look at them, Mr. Harkness."
"I think I shall," Harkness replied, smiling.
He noticed that now that the man was seated he did not look small. His neck was thick, his shoulders broad, that forehead in the brilliantly-lit room absolutely gleamed, the red hair springing up from it like a challenge. The mention of the dance led Crispin to talk of other strange customs that he had known in many parts of the world, especially in the East. Yes, he had been in the East very often and especially in China. The old China was going. You would have to hurry up if you were to see it with any colour left. It was too bad that the West could not leave the East alone.
"The matter with the West, Mr. Harkness, is that it always must be improving everything and everybody. It can't leave well alone. It must be thrusting its morals and customs on people who have very nice ones of their own—only they are not Western, that's all. We have too many conventional ideas over here. Superstitious observances that are just as foolish as any in the South Seas—more foolish indeed. Now I'm shocking you, Hesther, I'm afraid. Hesther," he explained to Harkness, "is the daughter of an English country doctor—a very fine fellow. But she hasn't travelled much yet. She only married my son a month ago. This is their honeymoon, and it is very nice of them to take their old father along with them. He appreciates it, my dear."
He raised his glass and bowed to her. She smiled very faintly, staring at him for an instant with her large brown eyes, then looking down at her plate.
"I have been driven," Crispin explained, "into the East by my collector's passions as much as anything. You know, perhaps, what it is to be a collector, not of anything especial, but a collector. Something in the blood worse than drugs or drink. Something that only death can cure. I don't know whether you care for pretty things, Mr. Harkness, but I have some pieces of jade and amber that would please you, I think. I have, I think, one of the best collections of jade in Europe."
Harkness said something polite.
"The trouble with the collector is that he is always so much more deeply interested in his collection than any one else is, and he is not so interested in a thing when he owns it as he was when he was wondering whether he could afford it.
"However, women like my jade. Their fingers itch. It is pleasant to see them. Have you ever felt the collector's passion yourself?"
"In a tiny way only," said Harkness. "I have always loved prints very dearly, etchings especially. But I have so small and unimportant a collection that I never dream of showing it to anybody. I have not the means to make a real collection, but if I were a millionaire it is in that direction that I think I would go. Etchings are so marvellously human, unaccountably personal."
"Why, Herrick, listen to that! Mr. Harkness cares about etchings! We must show him some of ours. I have a 'Hundred Guilders' and a 'De Jonghe' that are truly superb. Do you know my favourite etcher in the world? I am sure that you will never guess."
"There is a large field to choose from," said Harkness, smiling.
"There is indeed. But Samuel Palmer is the man for me. You will say that he goes oddly enough with my jade, but whenever I travel abroad 'The Bellman' and 'The Ruined Tower' go with me. And then Lepère—what a glorious artist! and Legros's woolly trees and our old friend Callot—yes, we have an enthusiasm in common there."
For the first time Harkness addressed the girl directly:
"Do you also care about etchings, Mrs. Crispin?"
She flushed as she answered him: "I am afraid that I know nothing about them. Our things at home were not very valuable, I am afraid—except to us," she added.
She spoke so softly that Harkness scarcely caught her words. "Ah, but Hesther will learn," Crispin said. "She has a fine taste already. It needs only some more experience. You are learning already, are you not, Hesther?"
"Yes," she answered almost in a whisper, then looked up directly at Harkness. He could not mistake her glance. It was an appeal absolutely for help. He could see that she was at the end of her control. Her hand was trembling against the cloth. She had been drinking some of her Burgundy, and he guessed that this was a desperate measure. He divined that she was urging herself to some act from which, during all these weeks, she had been shuddering.
His own heart was beating furiously. The food, the wine, the lights, Crispin's strange and beautiful voice were accompaniments to some act that he saw now hanging in front of him, or rather waiting, as a carriage waits, into which now of his own free-will he is about to step to be whirled to some terrific destination.
He tried to put purpose into his glance back to her as though he would say "Let me be of some use to you. I am here for that. You can trust me."
He felt that she knew that she could. She might, such was her case, trust any one at this crisis, but she had been watching him, he felt sure, throughout the meal, listening to his voice, studying his movements, wondering, perhaps, whether he too were in this conspiracy against her.
He had the sudden conviction that on an instant she had resolved that she could trust him, and had he had time to do as was usual with him, to step back and regard himself, he would have been amazed at his own happiness.
They had come to the dessert. Crispin, as though he had no purpose in life but to make every one happy, was cracking walnuts for his daughter-in-law and talking about a thousand things. There was nothing apparently that he did not know and nothing that he did not wish to hand over to his dear friends.
"It is too bad that I can't show you my 'Hundred Guilders.'" He cracked a walnut, and his soft boneless fingers seemed suddenly to be endued with an amazing strength. "But why shouldn't I? What are you doing this evening?"
"I have no plans," said Harkness; "I thought I would go perhaps down to the market and look at the fun."
"Yes—well. . . . Let me see. But that will fit splendidly. We have an engagement for an hour or two—to say good-bye to an old friend. Why not join us here at—say—half-past ten? I have my car here. It is only half an hour's drive. Come out for an hour or two and see my things. It will give me so much pleasure to show you what I have. I can offer you a good cigar too and some brandy that should please you. What do you say?"
Harkness looked across at the girl. "Thank you," he said gravely, "I shall be delighted."
"That's splendid. Very good of you. The house also should interest you. Very old and curious. It has a history too. I have rented it for the last year. I shall be quite sorry to leave it."
Then, smiling, he lent across—"What do you say, Hesther? Shall we have our coffee outside?"
"Yes, thank you," she answered, with a curious childish inflection as though she were repeating some lesson that was only half remembered.
She rose and started down the room. Harkness followed her. Half-way to the door Crispin was stopped for a moment by the head waiter and stayed with his son.
Harkness spoke rapidly. "There is no time at all, but I want you to know that I was in the room at the top of the house just now when you were there. I heard everything. I apologise for overhearing. I could not escape, but I want you to know that if there's anything I can do—anything in the world—I will do it. Tell me if there is. We have only a moment."
On looking back afterwards he thought it marvellous of her that, realising who was behind them, she scarcely turned her head, showed no emotion, but speaking swiftly, answered:
"Yes, I am in great trouble—desperate trouble. I am sure you are kind. There is a thing you can do."
"Tell me," he urged. They were now nearly by the door and the two men were coming up.
"I have a friend. I told him that if I would agree to his plan I would send a message to him to-night. I did not mean to agree, but now—I'm not brave enough to go on. He is to be at half-past nine at a little hotel—'The Feathered Duck'—on the sea-front. Any one will tell you where it is. His name is Dunbar. He is young, short, you can't mistake him. He will be waiting there. Go to him. Tell him I agree. I'll never forget . . ."
Crispin's forehead confronted them. "What do you say to this? Here is a sheltered corner."
Dunbar? Dunbar? Where had he heard the name before?
They all sat down.
Quarter of an hour later he left them, making his excuses, promising to return at half-past ten. He could not have stayed another moment, sitting there quietly in his wicker armchair looking out on the darkening garden, listening to Crispin's pleasure in Peter Breughel, without giving some kind of vent to his excitement.
He must get away and be by himself. Because—yes, he knew it, and nothing could alter the vehement pulsating truth of it—he was in love for the first time in his life.
As he threaded his way along the garden paths that was at first all that he could see—that he was in love with that child in the shabby frock who was married to that odious creature, that bag-of-bones, who had not opened his mouth the whole evening long—that child terrified out of her life and appealing to him, a stranger, in her despair, to help her.
In love with a married woman, he, Charles Percy Harkness? What would his two sisters, nay, what would the whole of Baker, Oregon, say did they know?
But, bless you, he was not in love with her like that—no hero of a modern realistic novel he! He had no thought in that first ecstatic glow, of any thought for himself at all—only his eyes were upon her, of how he could help her, how serve her, now—at once—before it was too late.
He was deeply touched that she should trust him, but he also realised that at that particular moment she would have trusted anybody. And yet she had waited, watching him through all the first part of that meal, making up her mind—there was some tribute to him at least in that!
It was a considerable time before he could fight his way behind his own singing happiness into any detailed consideration of the facts.
He was in touch with real life at last, had it in both hands like a magic ball of crystal, after which for so long he had been searching.
Where had he been all his life, fancying that this was love and that? That ridiculous touching of hands over a tea-cup, that fancied glance at a crowded party, that half uttered suggested exchange of gimcrack phrases? And this! Why, he could not have stopped himself had he wished! None of the old considered caution to which he had now grown so accustomed that it had seemed like part of his very soul, could have any say in this. He was committed up to his very boots in the thing, and he was glad, glad, glad!
Meanwhile he had lost his way. He pulled himself up short. He had been walking just in any direction. He was in a far part of the garden. A lawn in the twilight like dark glass beneath whose surface green water played, stretched between scattered trees and beds of flowers now grey and shadowy. Sparks of fire were already scattered across a sky that was smoky with coils of mist as though some giant train had but now thundered through on its journey to Paradise. Little whistles of wind stole about the garden making secret appointments among the trees. Somewhere near to him a fountain was splashing, and behind the lingering liquid sound of it he could hear the merry-go-round and the drum. He cared little about the dance now, but in some fashion he must pass the time until nine-thirty when he would see her friend and learn what he might do.
Her friend? A sudden agitation held him. Her friend? Had she a lover? Was that all that there was behind this—that she had married in haste, for money, luxury, to see the world, perhaps, and now that she had had a month of it with that miserable bag-of-bones and his painted, talkative father, discovered that she could not endure it and called to her aid some earlier lover? Was that all that his fine knight-errantry came to that he should assist in some vulgar ordinary intrigue? He stopped, standing beside a small white gate that led out from the garden into the road. It was as though the gate held him from the outer world and he would never pass through it until this was decided for him. Her face came before him as she had sat there on the other side of the table, as it had been when their glances met. No, he did not doubt her for an instant.
Whatever her experiences of the last month she was pure in heart and soul as some child at her mother's knee. She had her pride, her pluck, her resolve, but also, above all else, her innocent simplicity, her ignorance of all the evil in the world. And as though the most urgent problem of all his life had been solved, he gave the little white gate a push and stepped through it into the open road.
He was now in the country to the left of, and above, the town. He could see its lights clustered, like gold coins thrown into some capacious lap, there below him in the valley.
He struck off along a path that led between deeply scented fields and that led straight down the hill. He began now more soberly to consider the facts of the case, and a certain depression stole about him. He didn't after all see very well what he would be able to do. They were going, on the following morning, the three of them, abroad, and once there how was he to effect any sort of rescue?
The girl was apparently quite legally married and, although the horrible young Crispin had been silent and sinister, there were no signs that he was positively cruel. The deeper Harkness looked into it the more he was certain that the secret of the whole mystery lay in the older Crispin—it was of him that the girl was terrified rather than the son. Harkness did not know how he was sure of this, he could trace no actual words or looks, but there—yes, there, the centre of the plot lay.
The man was strange and queer enough to look at, but a more charming companion you could not find. He had been nothing but amiable, friendly and courteous. His attitude to his daughter-in-law had been everything that any one could wish. He had seemed to consider her in every possible way.
Harkness, with his American naïveté of conduct, was fond of the word "wholesome," or rather, had he not spent so much of his life in Europe, would have found it his highest term of praise to call his fellow-man "a regular feller!" Crispin Senior wasnot"a regular feller" whatever else he might be. There had, too, been one moment towards the end of dinner when a waiter, passing, had jolted the little man's chair. There had been for an instant a glance that Harkness now, in his general survey of the situation, was glad to have caught—a glance that seemed to tear the pale powdered mask away for the moment and to show a living moving visage, something quite other, something the more alive in contrast with its earlier immobility. Once, years before, Harkness had seen in the Naples Aquarium two octopuses. They lay like grey slimy stones at the bottom of the shining sun-lit tank. An attendant had let down through the water a small frog at the end of a string. The frog had nearly reached the bottom of the tank when in one flashing instant the pile of shiny stone had been a whirling sickening monster, tentacles, thousands of them it seemed, curving, two loathsome eyes glowing. In one moment of time the frog was gone and in another moment the muddy pile was immobile once again. An unpleasant sight. Were the etchings of Samuel Palmer Crispin's only appetite? Harkness fancied not.
Plunging almost recklessly down the hill he was soon in the town and, pushing his way through two or three narrow little streets, found himself in the market-place.
He caught his breath at the strange transformation of the place since his last view of it more than three hours before. He learnt later that this dance was held always as the Grand Finale of the Three Days' Annual Fair, and on the last of the days there is an old custom that, from four-thirty to six-thirty no trading shall be done, but that every one shall entertain or be entertained within their homes. This pause had its origin, I should fancy, in some kind of religious ceremony, to ask the good God's blessing on the trading of the three days, but it had become by now a most convenient interval for the purpose of drinking healths, so that when, at seven o'clock, all the citizens of the town poured out of their doors once again, they were truly and happily primed for the fun of the evening.
Harkness found, therefore, what at first seemed to be naked pandemonium and, stepping into it, crossed into the third room of his house of delivery. The old buildings—the town hall, the church, the old grey tower—were lit up as though by some supernatural splendour, all the lights of the booths, the hanging clusters of fairy lamps, and, in the very middle of the place, a huge bonfire flinging arms of flame to heaven.
In one corner there was the merry-go-round. A twisting, heaving, gesticulating monster screaming out "Coal Black Mammy of Mine," and suddenly whooping with its own excitement, showing so much emotion that it would not have been surprising to find it, at any moment, leap its bearings and come hurtling down into the middle of the crowd.
The booths were thick with buyers and sellers, and every one, to Harkness's excited fancy, seemed to be screaming at the highest pitch of his or her strident voice.
Here was everything for sale—hats, feathers, coats, skirts, dolls, wooden dolls, rag dolls, china dolls, monkeys on sticks, ribbons, gloves, shoes, umbrellas, pies, puddings, cakes, jams, oranges, apples, melons, cucumbers, potatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers, broaches, diamonds (glass), rubies (glass), emeralds (glass), prayer books, bibles, pictures (King George, Queen Mary), cups, plates, tea-pots, coffee-pots, rabbits, white mice, dogs, sheep, pigs, one grey horse, tables, chairs, beds, and one wooden house on wheels. More than these, much more. And around them, about them, in and out of them, before them and beside them and behind them men, women, children, singing, crying, shouting, sneezing, laughing, hiccuping, quarrelling, kissing, arguing, denying, confirming, whistling, and snoring. Men of the sea bronzed with dark hair, flashing eyes, rings on their fingers and bells on their toes; men of the fields, the soil interpenetrated with the very soul of their being, bearded to the eyes, broad-shouldered, broad-buttocked, their Sunday coats flapping over their corduroyed thighs, their rough thick necks moving restlessly in their unaccustomed collars; women of the fair with eyes like black coals; gipsy women straight from the tents with crimson kerchiefs and black hair piled high under feathered hats; women of the town with soft voices, sidling eyes and creeping hands; women of the farm with gaze wondering and adrift, hands like leather, children at their skirts; women householders with their purses carefully clutched, their hands feeling the cabbages, pinching the cauliflowers, estimating the chairs and tables, stroking the china; young boys and girls, confidence in their gaze, timidity in their hearts, suddenly catching hands, suddenly embracing, suddenly triumphant on their merry-go-round, suddenly everything, conscious of the last penny burning deep down in the pocket, conscious of love, conscious of appetite, conscious of possible remorse, conscious of blood pounding in their veins. And the magicians, the wonder workers, the steal-a-pennies, the old men with white beards and trays of coloured treasures, the bold bad men with their thimble and their penny, the little stumpy, fellow with his cards, the long thin melancholy fellow with his medicines, the thick jolly drunken fellow with his tales of the sea, the twisty turn-his-head-both-ways fellow with his gold watches and silver chains, the red wizard with his fortunes in envelopes, his magic on strings of coloured paper, his mysterious signs and countersigns whispered into blushing ears. And then the children that should have been in bed hours ago—little children, large children, young children, old children, fat children, thin children, children clinging-to-mother's-skirts, children running in and out, like mice, between legs and trousers, children riding on father's shoulder, children sticky with sweets and sucking their thumbs, children screaming with pleasure, shrieking with terror, howling with weariness—and one child all by itself on the steps of the town hall, curled up and fast asleep.
Away, to one side of the place, just as he had been there fifteen years ago when Maradick had been present, was a preacher, aloft on an overturned box, singing with hand raised, his thin earnest face illumined with the lights, his scant hair blowing in the breeze. Around him a thin scattering of people singing just as fifteen years ago they had sung: