V
As Julian pursued his acquaintance with Miss Marchrose—and he was by no means minded to let it drop—he came more and more to the conclusion that she had been quite as conscious as himself of the mutual antagonism which Edna and she had roused in one another on the rather disastrous occasion of their meeting.
She neither came over to Culmhayes nor showed any disposition to join Lady Rossiter's cherished nature-classes, the final sessions of which were drawing near with the approach of the colder weather.
Julian saw her at the College, where she worked hard and successfully, and once or twice at his own estate office, where she frequently replaced Mark Easter's absent clerk.
"I don't know that we ought to let you spend so much time here, though it is quite invaluable to the business," he once said to her.
To which Miss Marchrose returned very candidly that it was always the greatest possible pleasure to her to do anything for Mr. Easter.
Julian quite believed it.
The friendship established between her and Mark was founded on excellent good comradeship, a mutual respect for one another's power of work, and the very admirable sense of humour possessed by each.
Julian, watching the frank gaiety of her manner as she came to accept him in the light of Mark's friend instead of merely as a director of the College, found himself wondering from time to time if Miss Marchrose, sharp-tongued and quick-witted, apt at satire even at her gentlest, could by any possibility ever have been the heroine where Captain Clarence Isbister, youthful, sporting, and essentially British, had once been the hero. His wife appeared inclined to let the question rest, and Julian had no desire to remind her of it; but for the satisfaction of his own curiosity, he told himself, he would have liked to establish the proof or otherwise of Fuller's verdict to which he was only half inclined to subscribe—"hard as nails."
It was Edna, however, who returned to the charge of Miss Marchrose's identity.
"I might have known it," her husband reflected.
He heard with his accustomed phlegm of manner, that Edna, conducting the nature-class through a certain small wood just off the Rossiter estate, in order to introduce it to a sunset effect visible through the beech-trees, had met with an interruption before anyone had had time to do more than ejaculate a preliminary "Wonderful!"
"They are apt to be a shade blatant, poor dears! and talk about the sun looking like a ball of fire in the sky and that sort of thing."
"You could scarcely ask for a more accurate description, after all," murmured Julian.
"But what one's there for, of course, is to get them to see a little deeper, a little more into the heart of Nature's beauty and wonderful, wonderful tenderness. I wanted to show them the glint of red on the stems of those trees, and the miracle ofhushthat comes over the world just as the sun goes down...."
Lady Rossiter paused, absorbed in the regretful retrospect of the showman whose curtain has accidentally come down with a run in the midst of his star performer's best turn.
"Well, what happened? Did the sun refuse to go down after all?" was Julian's rather ribald interruption to her thoughts.
"The sun was in the most exquisite blaze of red and gold, and one could only hold one's breath in awe at the most wonderful pageant the world can show, when that Marchrose woman from Culmouth College came crashing through the undergrowth, ringing a bicycle-bell, and with her back—actually,her back—to that sunset!"
"What did you do?" asked Julian, with considerable interest.
Lady Rossiter made the strangely contradictory statement that her sex, when describing the character of a crisis, so frequently appears compelled to proffer.
"I didn't say one word, Julian. I felt that I simply couldn't have spoken. I couldn't help holding up my hand and saying very quietly indeed: 'Ah, hush! Can't you feel that ithurts, somehow, to disturb such a moment as this?' It was such hideous profanity, Julian!"
"Did you tell her so?"
"I could never say anything that would deliberately hurt another," Lady Rossiter made grave reply. "But I laid my hand on that terrible bicycle, and the girl had to keep still for a minute or two."
"Was she angry?"
"I hope I sent out some calming, loving thoughts, for the whole evening was terribly jarred, one could feel it. Poor foolish, defiant creature! I could see her hands shaking, as she tried to take her machine from me. I couldn't let her go like that, of course, and I tried to say a little something, very quietly, about the glory of God's own evening light all round us. But she kept her back to the sunset all the time.
"And, Julian, to my dismay and astonishment, she was not alone. Mark was with her."
"Why shouldn't he be?"
"Have you forgotten my poor Clarence so soon?" reproachfully enquired Lady Rossiter, whose cousinly affection for her poor Clarence appeared to increase by leaps and bounds in proportion to the growth of her disesteem for Miss Marchrose.
"Clarence has nothing to do with it. The circumstances are entirely dissimilar."
"We can't tell that in the case of a woman whom Imust, much as I dislike uttering any shadow of condemnation, call utterly heartless. Shall I ever forget what that hospital nurse told me of poor Clarence's state of mind after that heartless betrayal——"
"In any circumstances, Edna, Mark isn't in the least likely to knock his head against the walls of the cottage, and if he does, they will very probably fall about his ears. I wish he would attend to his own house, before doing up the tenants'! Those children have nearly broken down the whole of the garden palings. But go on—did you achieve anyrapprochementbetween Mark and the sunset, or was he also ringing bicycle-bells and turning his back on it?"
"Mark made some foolish explanation about seeing the girl back to Duckpool Farm, but they were evidently walking, and pushing the bicycle between them."
"I don't see how they could do anything else, if there was only one bicycle," said Julian, idly desirous of making more obvious a want of sympathy that was already perfectly wellen evidence.
"You may not understand it, Julian, but Mark is very dear to me. To you he may be merely a good fellow, and an excellent estate agent, but to me he has been something more ever since that ghastly tragedy of his wife. I gave him all the help that a woman could give, then, and I can't ever forget it. I can't let Mark break his heart a second time. Not that she's attractive, or even pretty," said Edna, distinctly divided between her determination to exploit Mark Easter's peril and her reluctance to allow to Miss Marchrose any of the usual advantages attributed to a charmer of men....
"I know no one less likely than Mark Easter to make a fool of himself in that particular way," said Julian emphatically.
"It's not Mark that I'm afraid of," inconsistently said Lady Rossiter. "A friendship with a good, true woman is often a man's best safeguard."
Julian wondered whether it would be worth while to simulate a belief that the good, true woman in question was Miss Marchrose, but Edna left him no time to adopt this amiable pose.
"I am going to find out once and for all whether that girl—I suppose she calls herself a girl—is really poor Clarence's evil genius or not. Personally, I believe she is."
Julian left it at that, not desirous of sparing his wife the trouble of her proposed investigation by telling her Miss Marchrose's identity without more ado.
Making his own observations, he thought Mark in no danger of falling a victim to thebeaux yeuxwhich, if their smile was chiefly kept for answering his, were far more often bent upon a typewriter or an account-book than diverted towards him. Fuller continued to extol the Lady Superintendent, and Sir Julian went oftener to the College than usual, not concealing from himself that he found the enigma of her personality of interest.
She continued gaily impersonal towards him until one evening in October, when he overtook her at the door of the College, and on an impulse born of unacknowledged, overwhelming loneliness, suddenly asked her if she would care to drive down to the shore with him and go on to the farm afterwards.
He had long ago decided that Miss Marchrose, although her manner was often abrupt, was devoid of shyness as of conventional politeness. If his suggestion displeased her, she would undoubtedly decline it.
But she exclaimed with undisguised pleasure, and took her place in the car beside him.
Julian was more than usually dissatisfied with life, and made no attempt at conversation. It struck upon him with relief that Miss Marchrose was equally silent, and presently he glanced at her.
She was leaning back, her hair blown from her temples by the soft, salt-laden breeze, and she looked neither young nor pretty in the waning light, but exceedingly weary.
"Do you like your work?" Julian enquired with extreme abruptness, and a sudden, genuine desire for information.
"At the College? Very much indeed."
Her tone was guarded, he felt.
"I mean the whole thing. What made you take up this sort of thing? Tell me about it."
He almost heard her hesitate before she answered with careful lightness:
"Oh, I had to do something, and I should dislike teaching children—and do it very badly. I trained as a shorthand-typist, and am really qualified for a secretary. I rather like doing shorthand."
The acuteness of his disappointment actually surprised Sir Julian. He realised that he had made the most tentative of efforts to get into touch with one whom he vaguely thought of as a kindred spirit, and that he had been lightly and unmistakably rebuffed. He kept silence, making a pretence of absorption in his driving.
Unexpectedly, Miss Marchrose made a sort of inarticulate sound of interrogation.
"Sir Julian?"
He turned his head.
"I'm sorry," she said gently. "You really wanted to know, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"After I'd said that, I—I thought you were disappointed."
"You are very quick to detect an atmosphere."
"I'm sorry," she said again. "Sometimes I don't realise when the platitudes that one keeps as stock answers to enquiries are unnecessary."
"Thank you," said Julian.
"I took up work because I was tired of living at home. A good many girls are like that. However, in our case there was very little money, and it was just as well that I should do something. I thought I should like secretarial work; it all sounded interesting, and I had always cared for books and writing. I didn't know in the least what it was going to be like. I'd never even been to school. The six months at the training institute wasn't bad; it was all quite new, and I liked learning the things, and doing well in the shorthand tests. At the end of the course, the training institute undertook to find one a post—and they got me a job with a firm in London. It was supposed to be a very good one—short hours and decent pay. My mother—my father was dead—was upset at the thought of my staying on in London alone, but I wrote and said that I'd been able to manage perfectly while I was at the institute—one lived 'in' there, as a matter of fact—and that anyway I'd made up my mind to do it, and to make a success of it. After all, I was twenty-two—and she could give me a small allowance, and I thought that with that and my salary it wouldn't be very difficult."
"I should imagine that by yourself, in London, at twenty-two, it might, on the contrary, be very difficult indeed," said Julian significantly.
"Not in the way you mean," Miss Marchrose remarked candidly. "From what one reads in novels, girls who work have to be on their guard from morning till night against—undesirable attentions. It was the one thing I thought I should have to beware of.... And all I can say is, that unless one asks for trouble of that sort, it simply doesn't happen to the average woman."
Julian thought of his own inward verdict on a beauty that had probably been very much too subtle and unvivid for universal recognition, and said nothing.
"I was five years working in London," Miss Marchrose told him simply, "and I have never in my life been spoken to or followed in the street. And no one has ever tried to make love to me."
Julian noted with a flash of appreciation that she did not add, "against my will."
"All the difficulties and all the miseries were quite different. Things I'd never thought of, or realised at all...."
"Tell me about them."
"I was ashamed of minding it so much—but the difference between being a girl living at home, however poor, and a girl going out every day to earn her own living. There were such a lot of things I didn't know. For instance, I had to be told, at that first office I went to, about calling the manager 'sir' when I spoke to him, and his son was 'Mr. Percy' to the clerks and typists, always.
"And then I'd never lived in London, and at first I used to go to Slater's Restaurant for lunch, and think how economical I was, and all the time the other typists were laughing at me and thinking I was giving myself airs because, of course, I ought to have gone to Lyons or an A.B.C. or bought sandwiches and eaten them in the office. And another thing I hadn't realised beforehand was the deadly monotony of it—day after day, sitting in the clatter of all those machines, and typing as hard as one could go. Nothing to look forward to, except Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and then I was dead tired, and I hated my rooms, because they were cheap and ugly and uncomfortable. They weren't really, you know—I had a bedroom and a sitting-room, that first year, and a fire whenever I wanted it—most people have a bed-sitting-room and go to bed when they want to keep warm—but I'd come straight from my home."
She paused.
"How long did you stand it?"
"Eight months. And then I knew I'd been a fool, and I thought that if my mother would forgive me and let me come home, I'd try again. She had a small business and I could have helped her—she always wanted me to. But of course my pride didn't like giving in, and after I'd once made up my mind that Iwasgoing back, it seemed easier to bear it all, and so I kept on putting off writing the letter, thinking I'd at least have done a year of it before collapsing. And then my mother died, quite suddenly, and so I never went home at all, except just to settle everything up—it wasn't even our own house. And there was not much more money than before, so when I'd sold the business, which was luckily quite easy, I took another post."
"Was that the only alternative?" asked Julian, his voice as matter-of-fact as hers had been throughout.
"There was an aunt, but she had two daughters of her own, and they seemed to think it extremely providential that Icoulddo something for myself. They are very kind, and I generally spend my holidays with them. They live near London."
"You don't like London," Julian affirmed, guided by something in her tone.
"No, not much. However, the aunt's husband got me the offer of a post as shorthand teacher at that big place in Southampton Row, and I went there, and it was a success. I got a lot of private tuition work, and they raised my salary every year, and I actually saved money. That's why I'm here now."
Julian remembered Mark Easter: "She comes here for love of the country, I think."
"But I've never liked any work better than this," said Miss Marchrose warmly, "and I wanted to be in the country. In some ways, I'm happier here than I've been anywhere in my life."
"I'm glad. Only I'm afraid perhaps it's lonely, if you don't know anyone here. Do they make you comfortable at the farm?"
"Very, and I've always wanted to live on a farm."
Julian stopped the car as they came in sight of the shelving declivity of fine, powdery sand, lying in uneven hillocks, with tufts of stiff grasses amongst the boulders.
A broken line of white, flecking the darkness, showed the receding tide.
"Would you like to go down to the edge of the sea?" Julian asked her.
"I'd like to very much."
She did not ask whether he meant to accompany her, but after a moment moved away, and Julian remained in the car, feeling the sting of the salt on his lips and listening to the faint sound of the water on the grey expanse of gleaming sand.
No one knew how many nights in the year he came to the edge of Culmouth sands and paid silent, involuntary tribute there.
He came nearer to making a confidence than perhaps ever before when Miss Marchrose came back again, and took her place beside him.
"I always wanted to go to sea," said Sir Julian Rossiter slowly. "It wasn't practicable because I was the only son, and my father wouldn't hear of it, on account of the place. But that was what I wanted."
"Yes, I see," said Miss Marchrose.
And something underlying the note of beauty which he had before admired in her voice carried to Sir Julian the conviction that she did see.
He drove her to the gate of the farm, and they talked a little, with comfortable inconsequence, on the way.
When she got out of the car, Miss Marchrose thanked him cordially, and her movements, as she crossed the yard and went up the stone steps to the house door, were no longer eloquent of weariness.
Julian drove back to Culmhayes through the dark lanes.
It was characteristic of him that he should observe, as he took his place opposite to his wife at the end of the dinner-table that evening:
"I took Miss Marchrose back in the car this evening. She came out of the College just as I was going past."
He was quite aware, without looking at her, of the exact angle to which Edna's eyebrows raised themselves.
"I thought she stayed at the College working till all hours, and then had to be escorted home by unfortunate Mark?"
"Apparently the procedure is not invariable."
Edna waited until the servants were out of the room, and then spoke again.
"Julian—about that girl—I couldn't leave it at that, you know. God knows how much I dislike any form of interference, but then it's for Mark Easter—I can never feel that Mark hasn't a very real claim on me."
"In the name of fortune, Edna, what are you talking about?"
"You mean," said Edna, fixing him with a coldly thoughtful eye, and perfectly aware that he meant nothing of the sort. "You mean that, with my ideals,allhumanity has a claim on me. I do hold that it is so, and, as you know, I am always ready to give what I can, though it may not be silver or gold. I was rather struck by a curious little incident this morning, Julian, which illustrates my meaning. I think I must tell you."
Edna placed her white arms upon the table and leant a little forward, her handsome face full of the absorption that is the expression common to most faces, handsome or otherwise, of which the owner is talking freely about him or herself.
"For the last week or two I have been having a poor woman out from Culmouth in here to do some sewing, because Miss Brown is ill. I went in to talk to her for a minute or two, the first day she came. I hate them to feel as though they weren't of the same flesh and blood as oneself—and I was struck by the sort of hard dreariness in her face, as though she had never known the meaning of love or gladness. I asked no questions, of course, but just laid my hand on her shoulder and said quietly, 'I don't know if you've ever read Browning—perhaps not—but there is a line of his that I want you to think about while you're mending those curtains: "God's in His Heaven—all's right with the world!"' And then I left her.
"Well, she didn't make very much response, poor thing, but every time I saw her when she came here I've just, in my own thoughts, thrown a little Cloak of Love round her. It seemed to me all that I could do. And this morning—after all these weeks, when one just went quietly on without any visible sign of success—this morning, Julian, when I came into the sewing-room—she looked up and smiled."
Julian looked as though this consummation struck him as being in the nature of an anti-climax.
"Day after day, I'd thrown my little Cloak of Love round her—and she'd come to feel the warmth of it at last. It has made me very happy, Julian. You will smile at me, very likely, but the winning of that poor little seamstress to a brighter, truer outlook seems to me—well, just extraordinarily worth while."
There was silence, while Lady Rossiter's softened expression denoted that she was devoting her reflections to the recent conquest. But presently she went back to her original ground of departure.
"About Mark, though—I care for him too much to see him take any risks. And I find—would to God I hadn't!—that my original instinct was correct."
Lady Rossiter waited, but her husband showed no disposition to ask for elucidation, and she was obliged to go on unquestioned.
"It was this very girl—Pauline Marchrose—who threw over Clarence Isbister because of his accident."
For once, Sir Julian displayed astonishment in the right place.
"Good Lord!" he said, in a startled voice. "I'd forgotten all about that business."
There was a long pause. Then Julian remarked slowly:
"Yes—I should rather like to hear the rights of that story. Perhaps, after all, Clarence Isbister wasn't quite such an ass as I always thought him."