It was then to this temple of contradictions that Evelyn returned, three steps to a stride, after seeing Madge off. The figure was right; he felt sure of that, but the tone of the background somehow was not yet quite attuned to it. Above all, the mirror must be bright burnished gold, not dull, for the flame of the cloak, if it was the only note of high colour in the picture, consumed itself, burned away ineffectually, and it was with a heart that beat fast, not only from his gallop upstairs, but from excitement in this creation that was his, that he again stood before the picture. Yes, that was it; another high light was necessary.
For a moment he looked at the laughing face on his canvas, almost laughing himself. Then all on a sudden his laughter died, the need of his picture for another high light died too, for though his eyes were looking on his own presentmentof Madge, it was Madge herself that his soul saw. And even as his eyes loved the work of his hands, so he knew in a burning flash of self-revelation that his soul loved her. Up till now, up till this very moment, he had not known that this was so; that it was possible he had long since recognised, that the possibility was reaching its tentacles out into regions of the probable he had recognised, so to speak, out of the corner of his eye, had recognised, but cut it, and now came the knowledge.
Evelyn gave a great sigh, raising his hands, one with the palette on the thumb, the other with the brush it held, to full stretch, and let them fall again, and stood still in front of his own inimitable portrait, drinking in no longer with the artist’s eye only, but with the eye of the lover, the incomparable beauty of his beloved. That rush of sudden knowledge, so impetuous, so overwhelming, for the moment drowned all else; it did not enter his head to consider “What next?” The present moment was so blindingly bright that everything that lay outside it was in impenetrable shadow. The intimate relations into which he was thrown with the girl, by reason of this portrait; the fact that she was engaged, and that to his best friend, did not at first have any existence in his mind; he but looked at this one fact, that he loved her to the exclusion of all else. Then, as must always happen, came reaction from the ecstatic moment, and in the train of reaction, like some grey ghost, thought. But even thought for the time was gilded by the light of that central sun, and it was long before he could frame the situation in the bounding lines of life and conduct. For love is a force which is impatient of opposition, and against opposition it will hurl itself, like a wild bird against the wires of its cage, careless of whether it is dashed to pieces, knowing only the overwhelming instinct and need of liberty, to gain which death is but the snap of a careless finger.
Then, almost with a laugh at himself, came that most important factor that he had overlooked. For a couple of minutes his egoism had run away with him, taking the bit in its teeth, and the thought that he loved her, that he needed her, had not only been uppermost, but alone in his mind. But what of her? She was engaged to Philip, and shortly to be married to him, and he himself was merely to be relegated to that somewhat populous class of “odd man out.” Thatebb from the full flood of his passion was swift; it came in a moment, as swiftly as the other had come. So that was all that was left of him, all that was possible; that he should just stand aside while the other two went on their way, not daring even to touch the hem of her garment, for she would most surely draw it away from him. That clearly was the logical outcome, but logical as it was, not a single fibre of his inmost self accepted it. That, the one thing which to the reasonable mind must assuredly happen was to him the one thing which could not possibly happen. The very strength of his newly-awakened love was the insuperable bar to it; it could not be, for what—and the question seemed to himself at that moment perfectly unanswerable—what on earth was to happen to him in that case? Here was the Pagan, the interesting survival, as Tom Merivale had called him, most unmistakably surviving, shouting, as it were, that its own happiness, its own need, was the one thing which the rest of the world must accept and respect. And, since the only way in which due acceptation could be secured for it was conditional on Madge’s loving him, that had to happen also. Yes, nothing else would do; she had to love him.
This reasoning, if one can call by so deliberate a word these leaping conclusions, was not any act of reflecting egoism. His emotions, his whole being, had been suddenly stirred, and there necessarily rose to the surface the sediment, so to speak, of that which dwelt in its depths. The whole course and habit of his past life no doubt was responsible for what was there, but he was no more responsible at this particular moment for the thoughts and conclusions that leaped in fire into his mind than is a man who is suddenly startled responsible for starting; his nerves have acted without the dictation of his brains. But with Evelyn, as the minutes passed, and he still sat there with heightened colour and flashing eyes, looking at his unfinished picture, he ceased to be comparable to a suddenly startled man; the thoughts that had sprung unbidden to his mind were not put away; they remained there, and they grew in brightness. His conscious reflections endorsed the first instinctive impulse.
It so happened that he had arranged to go down that afternoon to spend a couple of nights in the New Forest with the Hermit, but when this engagement was again remembered by him, it seemed to him at first impossible to go. What hehad learned in this last hour was a thing so staggering that he felt as if all the affairs of life, social intercourse, the discussion of this subject or of that, as if any subject but one contained even the germ or protoplasm of importance, had become impossible. But go or stay, everything was impossible except to win Madge’s love. Then another impossibility, bigger perhaps than any, made its appearance, for the most impossible thing of all was to be alone, anything was more endurable than that; and side by side with that rose another, namely, the impossibility of keeping his knowledge to himself. He must, he felt, tell somebody, and of all people in the world the Hermit was the person whom it would be most easy to tell.
Then a sort of pale image of Philip came into his mind. He was conscious of no disloyalty to him, because he was incapable of thinking of him at all, except as of somebody, a vague somebody, who dwelt among the shadows outside the light. Mrs. Home was no more, nobody was anything more than a dweller in these shadows. Nor, indeed, had he been able to think of Philip directly, concentratedly, would he have accused himself of disloyalty; either Madge would never love himself, in which case no harm was done to anyone, or she would do so, in which case her marriage with Philip was an impossibility—an impossibility, too, the existence of which had better be found out before it was legally confirmed. Yet all this but quivered through his mind and was gone again, he caught but as passing a glimpse of the world of life and conduct as he caught of the stations that his train thundered through in its westerly course; they but brushed by his inward eye, and had passed before they had ever been focussed or seen with anything like clearness.
The Hermit had once told him, it may be remembered, that he wanted deepening, and Evelyn on that occasion had enunciated the general principle that he had no use for deeps, the surface being sufficient for his needs. And even now, though his egotism was so all-embracing, it was in no sense whatever profound. He did not probe himself, it was of the glittering surface alone on which shone this sun of love that he was conscious. Deeps, perhaps, might lie beneath, but they were unexplored; life like a pleasure boat with shallow-dipping oars went gaily across him. Indeed it was probable that before the depth—if depths were there—couldbe sounded the sun, so to speak, would have to go in, for with that dazzle on the water it was impossible to see what lay below.
Tom Merivale’s cottage, which had begun life as two cottages, stood very solitary some mile or two outside Brockenhurst, and though the high road passed within a few hundred yards of it, it was impossible to conceive a place that more partook of the essential nature of a hermitage. Between it and the high road lay a field, with only a rough track across it; beyond that, and nearer to the house, an orchard, while a huge box-hedge, compact and homogeneous with the growth and careful clipping of many years, was to any who wished to be shut off from the outer world a bar as impenetrable as a ring of fire. Immediately beyond this stood the cottage itself, looking away from the road; in front a strip of garden led down to the little river Fawn, and across the river lay a great open expanse of heath, through which, like a wedge, came down a big triangular wood of beech-trees. It was this way, over the garden and the open forest, that the cottage looked; not a house of any kind was in sight, and one might watch, like a ship-wrecked mariner for a sail, for any sign of human life, and yet in a long summer day perhaps the watcher would see nothing to tell him that he was not alone as far as humankind went in this woodland world. Tom had built out a long deep verandah that ran the whole length of the cottage on the garden front; brick pillars at the two corners supported a wooden roof, and a couple of steps led down into the garden. Down the centre of that ran a pergola, over which climbed in tangled luxuriance the long-limbed tribes of climbing roses. Ramblers spilt their crimson clusters over it, or lay in streaks and balls of white and yellow foam, while carmine pillar seemed to struggle in their embrace, and honeysuckle cast loving tendrils round them both and kissed them promiscuously. And though a gardener might have deplored this untended riot of vegetation, yet even the most orderly of his fraternity could not have failed to admire. Nature and this fruitful soil and the warm, soft air to which frost was a stranger, had taken matters into their own hands, and the result, though as fortuitous apparently as the splashed glories of a sunset, had yet a sunset’s lavishness and generosity of colour. On each side of this pergola lay a small lawn of well-tended turf,and a shrubbery on one side of lilacs and syringa and on the other a tall brick wall with a deep garden bed below it gave a fragrant frame to the whole. The Hermit’s avowal, indeed, that for the last year he had done nothing except carpentering and gardening implied a good deal of the latter, for the turf, as has been stated, was beautifully rolled and cut, and the beds showed evidence of seed-time and weeding, and had that indefinable but unmistakable air of being zealously cared for. But since such operations were concerned with plants, no principle was broken.
Evelyn arrived here soon after six, and found himself in undisturbed possession. Mr. Merivale, so said his servant, had gone off soon after breakfast that morning and had not yet returned. His guest, however, had been expected, and he himself would be sure to be in before long. Indeed in a few minutes his cry of welcome to Evelyn sounded from the lower end of the garden, and he left his long chair in the verandah and went down through the pergola to meet him.
“Ah, my dear fellow,” said Tom, “it is delightful to see you. You have come from London, have you not, where there are so many people and so few things. I have been thinking about London, and you have no idea how remote it seems. And how is the picture getting on—Miss Ellington’s, I mean?”
Evelyn looked at him with his direct, luminous gaze. Though he had come down here with the object of telling his friend what had happened, he found that at this first moment of meeting him, he was incapable of making his tongue go on its errand.
“Ah, the portrait,” he said; “it really is getting on well. Up to this morning, at any rate, I have put there what I have meant to put there, and, which is rarer with me, I have not put there anything which I did not mean. Do you see how vastly more important that is?”
The Hermit had passed his day in the open merely in shirt and trousers, but his coat was lying in a hammock slung between two pillars of the pergola, and he put it on.
“Why, of course,” he said, “a thing which ought not to be there poisons the rest; anything put in which should be left out sets the whole thing jarring. That’s exactly why I left the world you live in. There was so much that shouldn’t have been there, from my point of view at least.”
Evelyn laughed.
“But if we all left out all that each of us thinks shouldn’t be there, there would be precious little left in the world,” he said. “For instance, I should leave out Lady Ellington without the slightest question.”
He paused a moment.
“And when the portrait is finished she, no doubt, would leave out me,” he added, with charming candour.
“Quite so,” said Merivale; “and since I, not being an uncontrolled despot, could not ‘leave out’ people, which I suppose is a soft way of saying terminate their existence, I went away instead to a place where they were naturally left out, where for me their existence was terminated. It is all part of the simplifying process.”
They had established themselves in the verandah again, where a silent-footed man was laying the table for dinner; and it struck Evelyn for the moment as an inconsistency that the tablecloth should be so fine and the silver so resplendent.
“But in your simplification,” said Evelyn, indicating the table, “you don’t leave out that sort of thing.”
“No, because if I once opened the question of whether I should live on the bare necessities of life, or allow myself, so to speak, a little dripping on my bread, the rest of my life would be spent in settling infinitesimal points which I really don’t think much matter. I could no doubt sell my silver and realize a few hundred pounds, and give that away. But I don’t think it matters much.”
“All the same, it is inconsistent.”
“In details that does not seem to me to matter either,” said Merivale. “For instance, I don’t eat meat partly because I think that it is better not to take life if you can avoid it. But when a midge settles on my hand and bites me, if possible I kill it.”
“Well, anyhow your inconsistencies make up a very charming whole,” said the other, looking round. “It is all charming.”
“I’m glad, and you think you can pass a day or two here without missing the—the complications you live among? I wish Philip could have come down, too; but he is buried in work, it appears, and we know how his leisure is occupied just now.”
Evelyn moved suddenly in his chair.
“Ah, do you know, I am rather glad Philip isn’t here,” he said. “I don’t think——” and he broke off again. “And as soon as I’ve finished this portrait, I’m going to do his,” he added.
He was silent a moment, feeling somehow that he never would do Philip’s portrait. He would not be able to see him, he would not be able to paint him; something, no shadow, but something so bright would stand between him and the canvas that he would be unable to see beyond or through it.
But Merivale did not seem to notice the check. His eyes were looking out over the glowing garden, where all colours were turned to flame in the almost level rays of the sun as it drew near to its setting. The wall behind the deep garden bed glowed as if the bricks themselves were luminous, light seemed to exude from the grass, the flowers were bells and cups of fire.
“Ah, this is the best moment of all the day,” he said, “when sunset comes like this. The whole of the sunshine of the hours seem distilled into it, it is the very essence of light.”
He rose from his chair, and went to the edge of the verandah, stretching his arms wide and breathing deeply of the warm, fragrant air. Then he turned again to his companion.
“That, too, I hope is what death will be like,” he said. “All the sunlight of life will be concentrated into that moment, until one’s mere body can hold no more of the glow that impregnates it, and is shattered. Look at those clusters of rambler; a little more and they must burst with the colour.”
Evelyn got up too.
“Don’t be so uncomfortable, Tom,” he cried, in a sort of boyish petulance. “I could go mad when I think of death. It is horrible, frightening. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to get old. I want to be young always, to feel as I feel to-day, and never a jot less keenly. That’s what you must tell me while I am here; how am I to remain young? You seem to have solved it; you are much younger than when I knew you first.”
Tom laughed.
“And another proof of my youth is that I feel as I do about death,” he said. “The more you are conscious of your own life, the more absurd the notion that one can diebecomes. Why, even one’s body won’t die; it will make life, it will be grass on one’s grave, just as the dead leaves that fall from the tree make the leaf-mould which feeds that tree or another tree or the grass. It doesn’t in the least matter which, it is all one, it is all life.”
Evelyn shivered slightly.
“Yes, quite true, and not the least consoling,” he said; “for what is the use of being alive if one loses one’s individuality? It doesn’t make death the least less terrible to me, even if I know that I am going to become a piece of groundsel and be pecked at by your canary. I don’t want to be groundsel, I don’t want to be pecked at, and I don’t want to become your canary. Great heavens, fancy being a bit of a canary!”
“Ah, but only your body,” said the other.
Evelyn got up.
“Yes, and what happens to the rest? You tell me that a piece of me, for my body is a piece of me, becomes a canary, and you don’t know about the rest. Indeed it is not a cheerful prospect. If some—some bird pecks my eyes out, is it a consolation to me, who becomes blind, to learn that a bird has had dinner?”
Merivale looked at him; even as Gladys had seen that some change had come in Madge, so he saw that something had happened to Evelyn, and he registered that impression in his mind. But the change, whatever it was, was not permanent—it was a phase, a mood only, for next moment Evelyn had broken out into a perfectly natural laugh.
“You shan’t make me think of melancholy subjects any more,” he cried. “Indeed you may try, but you won’t be able to do it. I have never been more full of the joy of life than to-day. That was why I was so glad to come down here, as you are a sort of apostle of joy. But it’s true that I also want to talk to you some time about something quite serious. Not now though, but after dinner. Also you will have to show me all the bag of conjuring tricks, the mechanical nightingale, the disappearing omelette—I could do that, by the way—and the Pan pipes. Now, I’m going upstairs to change; I’ve got London things on, and my artistic eye is offended. Where shall I find you?”
“I shall go down to bathe. Won’t you come?” said Merivale.
Evelyn wrinkled up his nose.
“No, I’ve not been hot enough. Besides, one is inferior to the frog in the water, which is humiliating. Any frog swims so much better!”
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MERIVALE had scooped out a long bathing-pool at the bottom of the garden, and when Evelyn left him, he took his towel and walked down to it. A little higher up was a weir, and from this he plunged into a soda water of vivifying bubble, and floated down as the woven ropes of water willed to take him till he grounded on the beds of yellow, shining gravel at the tail of the pool, laughing with joy at the cool touch of the stream. The day had been very hot, and since breakfast he had been on the move, now under the shadow of the trees, but as often as not grilled by the great blaze of the sun on the open heaths, and it was with an extraordinary sense of renewed life and of kinship with this beautiful creature that was poured from the weir in never-ending volumes that he gave himself up to the clean, sensuous thrill of the moment. It seemed to him that the strong flood that bore him, with waves and eddies just tipped with the gold and crimson of the sun, entirely interpenetrated and possessed him. He was not more himself than was the stream, the stream was not more itself than it was he. The blue vault overhead with its fleeces of cloud beginning to flush rosily was part of the same thing, the beech-trees with leaves a-quiver in the evening breeze were but a hand or an eyebrow of himself.
Then, with the briskness of his renewed vigour, he set himself to swim against this piece of himself, as if right hand should wrestle with left, breasting the river with vigorous strokes, yet scarcely moving against the press of the running stream, while like a frill the water stood up bubbling round his neck. Then again, with limbs deliciously tired with the struggle, he turned on his back and floated down again, with arms widespread, to increase the surface of contact. Though this sense of unity with the life of Nature was never absent from him, so that it was his last waking thought at night and stood by him while he slept, ready toawake him again, water somehow, live, running water with the sun on its surface, or the rain beating on to it, with its lucent depths and waving water-weeds that the current combed, gave it him more than anything else. Nothing else had quite that certainty of everlasting life about it; it was continually outpoured, yet not diminished; it mingled with the sea, and sprang to heaven in all the forms and iridescent colours of mist and cloud, to return again to the earth in the rain that made the grass to grow and fed the springs. And this envelopment of himself in it was a sort of outward symbol of his own absorption in Nature, the outward and visible sign of it. Every day the mystery and the wonder of it all increased; all cleansing, all renewal was contained here, for even as the water cleansed and renewed him, so through the countless ages it cleansed and renewed itself. And here alone the intermediary step, death, out of which came new life, was omitted. To water there was no death; it was eternally young, and the ages brought no abatement of its vigour.
Then in the bright twilight of the sun just set he dressed and walked back to the house to find that he had been nearly an hour gone, and that it was close on dinner-time.
During the earlier part, anyhow, of that meal Evelyn showed no return of his disquietude, but, as was his wont, poured out floods of surprising stuff. He talked shop quite unashamed, and this evening the drawbacks of an artist’s life supplied his text.
“Yes, everyone is for ever insisting,” he said, “that the artist’s life is its own reward, because his work is creative; but there are times when I would sooner be the man who puts bristles in toothbrushes. Those folk don’t allow for the days when you sit in front of a blank canvas, or a canvas half-finished, and look at it in an absolute stupor of helplessness. I suppose they would say ‘Go on, put down what you see,’ and they are so wooden-headed as not to realise that on such occasions, unfortunately numerous, one doesn’t see anything, and one couldn’t put it down if one did. There is a blank wall in front of one. And it is then I say with Mr. Micawber, ‘No one is without a friend who is possessed of shaving materials’—yet I don’t kill myself. Oh, hang it, here we are talking about death again! Give me some more fish.”
Merivale performed this hospitable duty.
“Ah, but what do you expect?” he asked. “Surely you can’t think it’s possible that a man can live all the time in the full blaze of imaginative vision? You might as well expect him to run at full speed from the day he was born to the day of his—well, all the time, as you dislike the word.”
Evelyn drummed the table with his fingers.
“But it’s just that I want,” he cried. “Whose fault is it that I can’t do what I feel is inside me all the time? If I have what you call the imaginative vision at all, who has got any business to put a cap like the cap of a camera lens over it, so that I can see nothing whatever? Oh, the pity of it! Sitters, too! Sitters can be so antipathetic that I feel when I look at them that the imaginative vision is oozing out of me, like sawdust when you clip a doll’s leg, and that in another moment I shall be just a heap of collapsed rags on the floor, with a silly waxen head and shoulders on the top. If only people would come to me to paint their caricatures I could do some rippers. The next woman I’ve got to paint when these two are finished is a pink young thing of sixty, with a face that has exactly the expression of a pansy. Lord! Lord!”
This was so completely the normal Evelyn Dundas that Merivale, if not reassured, for there was no need for that, at any rate thought that he had been mistaken in his idea that some change had come to him. He was just the same vivid, eager boy that he had always been, blessed with one supreme talent, which, vampire-like, seemed to suck the blood out of all the other possibilities and dormant energies of his nature, and suck, too, all sense of responsibility from him.
“Refuse them then,” he said; “say ‘I won’t paint you; you sap my faculties.’”
Evelyn burst out into a great shout of laughter.
“‘Mr. Dundas presents his compliments to Lady What’s-hername,’” he said, “‘and regrets, on inspection, that he is unable to paint her portrait, owing to the fact that a prolonged contemplation of her charms would sap his artistic powers, which he feels himself unwilling to part with.’ What would be this rising young painter’s position in a year’s time, eh? His studio would be as empty as the New Forest. You might then come and live there, Tom.”
Evelyn finished his wine and lit a cigarette all in one breath.
“Now, strange though it may seem to you,” he said, “I feel that I’ve talked enough about myself for the moment, though I propose to go on afterwards. So, by way of transition, we will talk about you. As I dressed a number of frightful posers came into my head about you, and I want categorical answers. Now you’ve been here how long? More than a year, isn’t it? What can you show for it? Number two: What’s it all about? Number three: How can you call yourself a student of Nature when you deliberately shut your eyes to all the suffering, all the death, all the sacrifice that goes on eternally in Nature? I might as well call myself an artist and refuse to use blue and red in my pictures. I remember asking you something of this sort before, and your answer was eminently unsatisfactory. Besides, I have forgotten it.”
Merivale moved sideways to the table, and crossed one leg over the other.
“Does it really at all interest you?” he said.
“It does, or I should not ask. Another thing, too: I have been looking at you all dinner, and I could swear you look much younger than you did five years ago. Indeed, if I saw you now for the first time I should say you were not much more than twenty. Also you used to be a touchy, irritable sort of devil, and you look now as if nothing in the world had the power to make you cease smiling. Did you know, by the way, that you are always smiling a little?”
Tom laughed.
“No, not consciously,” he said; “but now you mention it, it seems impossible that I should not.”
“Well, begin,” said Evelyn, with his usual impatience. “Tell me all about it, and attempt to answer all those very pertinent questions. Smoke, too; I listen better to a person who is smoking, because I feel that he is more comfortable.”
A sudden wind stirred in the garden, blowing towards them in the verandah the sleeping fragrance of the beds and the wandering noises of the night, which, all together make up what we call the silence of the night, even as the mixture of primary colours makes white.
“Smoke? No, I don’t smoke now,” said Merivale; “but if you really want to know, I will tell you all I can tell you.The conjuring tricks, as you call them, I suppose you will take for granted?”
Evelyn, comfortable with his coffee and liqueur, assented.
“Yes, leave them out,” he said. “Here beginneth the gospel.”
He tried in these words to be slightly offensive; the offensiveness, however, went wide of the mark, and he was sorry. For the Hermit, as he had known him in the world, was singularly liable to take offence, to be irritable, impatient, to be stamping and speechifying on an extremely human platform. But no vibration of any such impatience was in Merivale’s voice, and in his words there was no backhander to answer it. So the gospel began.
“It is all so simple,” he said, “yet I suppose that to complicated people simplicity is as difficult to understand as is complexity to simple people. But here it is, anyhow, and make the best or the worst of it; that is entirely your concern.”
“There is God,” he said, “there is also Nature, which I take to be the visible, tangible, audible expression of Him. There is also man—of which you and I are specimens, and whether we are above or below the average doesn’t matter in the least—and man by a dreadful process called civilisation has worked himself back into a correspondingly dreadful condition. If he were either fish, flesh, or fowl one would know where to put him, but he is none of those. He seems, at any rate to me, to be a peculiar product of his own making, and instead of being a creature compounded of life and joy, which should be his ingredients and also his study, he has become a creature who is mated with sorrow and at the end with death. He has become rotten without ever being ripe, the flower to which he should have attained has been cankered in the bud. Now, all this it has been my deliberate aim to leave behind me and to forget, and to go straight back to that huge expression of the joy of God, which man has been unable to spoil or render sorrowful, to the great hymn of Nature. Listen to that for a moment—and for the more moments you listen to it the more unmistakable will its tenour be—and you will hear that the whole impression is one of life and of joy. There is, it is true, throughout Nature the sound of death, of cruelty, and of one creature preying on another; but the net result is not death,it is ever-increasing life. And so when I went to Nature I shut my ears and eyes to that minor undercurrent of sound. Of the result I was sure; day after day there is more life in the world, in spite of the death that day after day goes on. All the death goes to form fresh life. In the same way with the joy and sorrow of Nature; for every animal that suffers there are two that are glad, for every tree that dies there are two in the full vigour of the joy of life. And that joy and that life is my constant study. I soak myself in it, and shall so do until I am utterly impregnated with it. And when that day comes, when there is no tiny or obscure fibre in my being that does not completely realise it, then, with a flash of revelation, so I take it, I shall ‘grasp the scheme of things entire.’ Whether by life or by death, I shall truly realise that I and that moth flitting by, and the odours of the garden and the river are indivisibly one, just an expression of the spirit of life, which is God.”
He paused a moment.
“There were two other questions you asked me,” he said. “What have I got to show for the years I have spent here? I shrug my shoulders at that; it is I who am being shown. The second concerns my personal appearance, for you say I look younger. That is probably quite true and quite inevitable, for the contemplation of the eternal youth of the world I suppose must make one younger, body and soul alike. And that is all, I think.”
Evelyn was listening with extreme attention; he did not look in the least uninterested.
“My word, you’ve got a perfectly sober plan at the bottom of it all,” he said, “and I thought half of it was moonshine and the other half imagination. There is one more question—two more. What if the whole of the suffering and the cruelty and the death in Nature is made clear to you in a flash, if it is that which will come to make you grasp the scheme of things entire?”
Merivale smiled still, rocking forward in his chair with his hands clasped round his knee.
“That is possible,” he said, “and I recognise that. But I don’t think I am frightened at it If it is to be so, it is to be so. Though I suppose one won’t live after it. Well?”
“And the second question. You think, then, it is our duty to seek happiness and joy and forget the sorrow of the world?”
“I think it is so for me,” said he, “though I do think that there are many people, most, I suppose, that realise themselves through sorrow and suffering. I can only say that I believe I am not one of those. The way does not lie for me there.”
Evelyn got up, and stood leaning on the balustrade of the verandah. This was beginning to touch him more closely now; his own threads were beginning to interweave in the scheme Merivale drew.
“And for me,” he said. “What is your diagnosis of me? Am I one of those who will find themselves through sorrow or through joy?”
Merivale turned to him with almost the same eagerness in his face as Evelyn himself showed.
“Ah, how can I tell you that?” he said, “beyond telling you at least that in my opinion, which after all is only my opinion, it is in joy that you, almost above everyone I know, will ripen and bear fruit. Sorrow, asceticism is the road by which some approach happiness, but I do not see you on that road. Renunciation for you——”
Evelyn got up and came a step closer.
“Yes? Yes?” he cried.
Merivale answered him by another question.
“Something has happened to you,” he said. “What is it?”
“I have fallen in love,” said the other. “I only knew it to-day. Yes, her, Madge Ellington. Good God, man, I love her! And I am painting her—I see her nearly daily alone; it is my business to study her face and get to know her——”
His voice dropped suddenly.
“What am I to do?” he said after a moment. “Philip, the whole thing——”
“Ah, you can’t go on,” said Merivale quickly. “You must see that. Wherever our paths lie, there is honour——”
“Honour?” cried Evelyn almost savagely. “Have I not as good a right to love her as Philip has? You can’t tie one down like that! Besides, how can I help loving her? Night and day are not less in my control. Besides, I have no reason to suppose that she loves me, so what harm is done? But if she does or should——”
Again he stopped, for there was no need to go on; the conclusion of the sentence was not less clear because it was unspoken. After a moment he continued.
“And what was your view just now about renunciation for me?” he asked.
Merivale got up.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” he said. “What do you propose, you yourself?”
“I propose to tell her what I know—that I love her,” said he.
There was a long pause; Merivale was looking out over the dusky garden, and his lips moved as if he was trying to frame some sentence, yet no words came. In the East the moon was soon to rise behind the wedge of beech-wood which came diagonally across the heath, and though it was not yet visible, the sky was changing from the dark velvet blue which had succeeded sunset to the mysterious dove colour which heralds the moon. A night breeze stirred among the shrubs, and the scent of the stocks was wafted into the verandah, twined, as it were, with the swooning fragrance of the syringa. But for once Merivale was unconscious of the witchery of the hour; in spite of himself, the interests, the problems, the suffering and renunciation of human life, from which he had thought he had weaned himself, claimed him again. He had tried, and in great measure succeeded, in detaching himself from them, but he had not completely broken away from them yet. He had enlisted under the banner of joy, but now from the opposing hosts there came a cry to him, and he could not shut his ears to it. Here was the necessity for suffering, it could not but be that of these two friends of his, suffering poignant and cruel lay before one of them, though which that one should be he did not know. But the necessity was dragged before his notice.
Then from the garden his eyes rested on Evelyn again, as he stood close to him with his keen, beautiful face, his eyes in which burned the wonder of his love, his long, slim limbs and hands that trembled, all so astonishingly alive, and all so instinct with the raptures and the rewards of living, and he could not say “Your duty lies here,” even had he been certain that it was so, so grey and toneless, so utterly at variance with the whole gospel of his own life would the advice have been. Yet neither, for his detachment fromhuman affairs was not, nor could it be, complete, could he say to him “Yes, all the joy you can lay hands on is yours,” for on the other side stood Philip. But his sympathies were not there.
He spread out his hands with a sort of hopeless gesture.
“I don’t know what to say: I don’t even know what I think,” he said. “It is one of those things that is without solution, or rather there are two solutions, both of which are inevitably right, and utterly opposed. But you have as yet no reason to think that she loves you; all goes to show otherwise.”
“Yes, all,” said Evelyn softly, “but somehow I don’t believe it. I can’t help that either.”
Then suddenly he took hold of Merivale’s shoulders with both hands.
“Ah, you don’t understand,” he said. “You were saying just now that you and the river were indivisibly one. That is a mere figure of speech, though I understand what you mean by it. But with me it is sober truth; I am Madge. I have no existence apart from her. Some door has been opened, I have passed through it into her. Half oneself! Someone says man alone is only half himself. What nonsense! Till he loves he is complete in himself, but then he ceases to be himself at all.”
Wild as were his words, so utterly was he in the grip of his newly-awakened passion that possessed him, there was something convincing to Merivale about it. He might as well have tied a piece of string across a line to stop a runaway locomotive as hope to influence Evelyn by words or advice, especially since he at heart pulled in the opposite way to the advice he might thus give. The matter was beyond control; it must work itself out to its inevitable end.
“And when will you tell her?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The moment I see she loves me, if that moment comes.”
“And if it does not?”
Again his passion shook him like some great wave combing the weeds of the sea.
“It must,” he said.
That clearly was the last word on the subject, and even as he spoke the rim of the moon a week from full topped the beech-wood, and flooded the garden with silver, and bothwatched in silence till the three-quarter circle swung clear of the trees. Just a month ago Evelyn had watched it rising with Madge on the terrace of Philip’s house, and the sight of it now made the last month pass in review before him like some scene that moved behind the actors, as in the first act inParsifal. The light it shed to-day seemed to flash back and illumine the whole of those weeks, and showed him how in darkness that plant had grown which to-day had flowered rose-coloured and perfect. Every day since then, when the seed had first been planted in his soul, had it shot up towards the light; there had been no day, so he felt now, on which the growth had stood still; it had been uninterrupted from the first germination to this its full flower. But the last word had been spoken, and when the moon had cleared the tree-tops, Merivale turned to him.
“I seldom sleep in the house,” he said, “and I certainly shall not to-night.”
“Where then?” asked the other.
“Oh, anywhere, often in several places. In fact, I seldom wake in the morning where I go to bed in the evening.”
“Sleep-walking?” suggested Evelyn.
“Oh, dear no! But you know all animals wake in the night and turn over, or get up for a few moments and take a mouthful of grass. Well, the same thing happens to me. I always wake about three in the morning, and walk about a little, and, as I say, usually go to sleep again somewhere else. But I suppose the dignity of man asserts itself, and I often go further than animals. For instance, I shall probably go to sleep in the hammock in the garden, and walk up into the beech-wood when I wake for the first time.”
“Ah, that does sound rather nice,” said Evelyn appreciatively.
“Well, come and sleep out too. It will do you all the good in the world. You can have the hammock; I’ll lie on the grass. I always have a rug.”
But Evelyn’s appreciation was not of the practical sort.
“Heaven forbid!” he said. “My bedroom is good enough for me.”
It was already late, and he took a candle and went upstairs, Merivale following him to see he had all he wanted. His servant, however, had arranged the utmost requirementsin the most convenient way, and the sight suddenly suggested a new criticism to Evelyn.
“Keeping a servant, too,” he said. “Is not that frightfully inconsistent?”
Merivale laughed.
“You don’t suppose I keep a servant when I am alone?” he asked. “But I find I am so bad at looking after the requirements of my guests that I hire one if anyone happens to be here. He is a man from the hotel at Brockenhurst.”
“I apologise,” said the other. “But do dismiss him to-morrow. For I didn’t want to come to an hotel; I wanted to see how the Hermit really lived.”
“Stop over to-morrow then, and you will see,” said Merivale. “But I keep a woman in the house, who cooks.”
“That also is inconsistent.”
“No, I don’t think so. It takes longer than you would imagine to do all the housework yourself. I tried it last winter and found it not worth while. Besides, dusting and cleaning are so absorbing. I could think of nothing else.”
“But doesn’t she find it absorbing?”
Merivale laughed.
“I feel sure she doesn’t,” he said, “or she would do it better. But when I dusted for myself, nothing short of perfection would content me. I was dusting all day long.”
Evelyn looked doubtfully at his bed.
“Shall I have to make it—whatever ‘making’ means?” he asked, “if I sleep in it? If so, I really don’t think it would be worth while. Besides, I know I shan’t sleep, and if I don’t sleep I am a wreck.”
Merivale raised his eyebrows.
“Surely you sleep when you want sleep just as you eat when you are hungry,” he said, “or is that an exploded superstition?”
“Quite exploded. I shan’t sleep a wink,” said Evelyn, beginning to undress. “Oh, how can I?” he cried.
“And you really want to?”
“Why, of course. I’m as cross as two sticks if I don’t.”
Merivale shook his head.
“I’ll make you sleep if you wish,” he said. “Get into bed. I must go and turn out the lights. I’ll be back in two minutes.”
He left the room, and Evelyn undressed quickly.
All that had happened to-day ran like a mill-race in his head, and, arguing from previous experience, he knew perhaps the tithe of what awaited him when the light was out. For often before, when a picture, not as now the original of it, occupied him, misshapen parodies of rest had been his till cock-crow. First of all would come a sense of satisfaction at being alone, at being able to let his thoughts take their natural course uninterrupted; he would feast his eyes on the untenanted blackness, letting his imagination paint there all that it had been so intensely occupied with during the day. But then as the brain wearied, in place of the ideal he had been striving for would come distorted reflections of it, seen as if in some bloated mirror, and still awake he would see his thoughts translated into some horrible grotesque that would startle him into sitting-up in bed, just for the grasping of the bed-post, or the feeling of the wall, to bring himself back into the realm of concrete things. Otherwise the grotesques would grow into dancing, shapeless horrors, and in a moment he would have to wrench himself free from the clutches of nightmare and start up, with dripping brow and quivering throat that could not scream, into reality again. But to-night he feared no nightmare; he knew simply that sleep could not come to him, his excitement had invaded and conquered the drowsy lands, and though he felt now that he would be content to think and think and love till morning, morning, he knew, would, like an obsequious waiter, present the bill for the sleepless night. Consequently, when Merivale again entered, he welcomed him.
“I demand a conjuring-trick,” he said, “I know I shan’t sleep at all, unless you have some charm for me. Good God, how can I sleep? And, after all, why should I want to? Isn’t waking good enough?”
Merivale paused; waking and sleeping seemed to him no more matters for concern than they seem to an animal which sleeps when it is sleepy, and wakes when its sleepiness has gone.
“That is entirely for you to settle,” he said. “If you want to sleep I can make you; if you don’t, I shall go to sleep myself. I shall do that in any case,” he added.
Evelyn was already overwrought with the events of the day, and he spoke petulantly.
“Oh, make me sleep, then!” he said. “There is to-morrowcoming. I can do nothing to-night, so let’s get it over.”
“Lie down, then,” said the Hermit, “and look at me, look at my eyes, I mean.”
He sat down on the edge of Evelyn’s bed, and spoke low and slow.
“The wind is asleep,” he said, “it sleeps among the trees of the forest, for the time of sleep has come, and everything sleeps, your love sleeps too. Lie still;” he said, as Evelyn moved, “the trees of the forest sleep; and their leaves sleep, and high in the branches the birds sleep. Everything sleeps, the tired even and the weary sleep, and those who are strong sleep, and those who are weak.”
Evelyn’s eyelids quivered, shut a moment, then half-opened again.
“The flowers sleep,” said Merivale, “and the eyelids of their petals are closed, as your eyelids are closing. Sleep, the black soft wing, has shut over them, as the wings of birds shut over their heads. The earth sleeps, the very stones of her sleep; she will not stir till morning, or if she stirs it will be but to sleep again. The sad and the happy sleep, the very sea sleeps and is hushed, and the tides of the sea are asleep. Sleep, too,” he said, slightly raising his voice, “sleep till they wake—sleep till I wake you.”
He waited a moment, but Evelyn’s eyelids did not even quiver again. Then he blew out the light and left the room.
Merivale stepped softly down the stairs, and went out on to the verandah, where they had dined a few hours before. At the touch of the soft night-air all the trouble that during this evening had been his was evaporated and vanished. The sum of his consciousness was contained in the bracket, that he was alive, and that he was part of life. It was like stepping into an ocean that received him and bore him on its surface, or took him to its depths; which mattered not at all—the thing embraced and encompassed him. He went back again to it from the fretful trivialities that had arrested him as the midge on his wrist could for the moment arrest him, trivially and momentarily causing him some infinitesimal annoyance. But that was over; the huge sky was above him, the world was asleep, and was his possession. It—the material part of it—was but a dream, the spirit of it all suffused him. There was life everywhere, life in its myriad forms, its myriad beauties. The sleepy voice of the river was part ofhim, the moon was he, the utmost twinkle of a star was he also. Yet no less the smallest blade of grass was he; there was no atom of the universe with which he did not claim identity.
Yes, there was one, the fretting of the human spirit, whereas his own did not fret. What he could interpret existence into was to him satisfying. For himself he longed and wished for nothing, except to hold himself open, as he indeed held himself, for the moods of Nature to play upon. Yet in that bedroom upstairs he had left one, asleep indeed by the mere exercise of a stronger will on his, who would to-morrow awake and combat and perhaps succumb to forces that were stronger than he. For himself, he combatted with no force; he but yielded in welcome to what to him was irresistible. But Evelyn, who slept now, would awake to try his strength against another. Which was right?
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GLADYS ELLINGTON, as has been remarked, was not in the least ill-natured, and never even hinted ill-natured things against anybody unless she was certain to be undiscovered. So, as all the world knew, since she was not “quite devoted,” a phrase of her’s, to her mother-in-law, the merest elements of wisdom demanded of her that she should be unreserved in her commendation of Madge’s engagement. Unreserved, in consequence, she was, even to her own husband. He also was quite unreserved, but his unreserve was whiskered and red-faced like himself, and bore not the slightest resemblance to his wife’s voluble raptures.
“Seems to me,” he said, “that Madge has married him for his money. Don’t believe she loves him. Cold-blooded fish like that. Don’t tell me. Hate a girl marrying for money. American and so on. Good love match, like you and me, Gladys. I hadn’t a sou, you hadn’t a penny. Same sort of thing, eh?”
Lord Ellington usually ended his sentences with “Eh?” If he did not end them with “Eh?” he ended them with “What?” The effect in either case was the same, for, like Pilate, he did not wait for an answer. “Eh” or “what,” in fact, meant that he had not finished; if he had finished, he ended up his period with “Don’t tell me.” As a consequence, perhaps, nobody told him anything. All worked together for good here, because he would not have understood it if they had. He was fond of his wife, and slightly fonder of his dinner. Why she had married him was a mystery; but there are so many mysteries of this kind that it is best to leave them alone.
Gladys, on this occasion (a speech which had given rise to his, in so far as any speech or connected thought would account for what Lord Ellington would say next), had merely remarked that the engagement was very, very nice.
“You seem to object to him,” she said, “because he is rich. That is very feeble. I never knew riches to be a bar to anything except the kingdom of heaven, with which you, Ellington, are not immediately concerned. But you are much more immediately concerned with South African mines. Now, he is dining here to-night, and so is Madge. If you can’t get something out of him between the time we leave the room and you join us, I really shall despair of you.”
A heavy, jocular look came into Lord Ellington’s face.
“You don’t despair of me yet, Gladys?” he said.
“No, not quite. Very nearly, but not quite. Oh, Ellington, do wake up for once to-night! Philip Home moves a finger in that dreadful office of his in the City, somewhere E.C., and you and I are beggars, even worse than now, or comparatively opulent. Ask him which finger he moves. If only I were you, I could do it in two minutes. So I’ll allow you ten. Not more than that, because we’ve got the Reeves’ box at the opera, and Melba is singing.”
“Lot of squawking,” said he. “Why not sit at home? Who wants to hear squawking? All in Italian too. Don’t understand a word, nor do you. And you don’t know one note from another, nor do I. Don’t tell me.”
Gladys required all her tact, which is the polite word for evasion, sometimes, in getting her way with her husband, and all her diplomacy, which is the polite word for lying. If he got a notion into his head it required something like the Lisbon earthquake to get it out; if, on the other hand, a thing commoner with him, he had not a notion in his head, it required a flash of lightning, followed by the steady application of a steam-hammer to get it in. Also in talking to him it was almost as difficult to concentrate one’s own attention as it was to command his, for the fact that he was being talked to produced in him, unless he was dining, an irresistible tendency to make a quarter-deck of the room he was in, up and down which he shuffled. When this became intolerable, Gladys told him not to quarter-deck, but this she only did as a last resort, because he attended rather more when he was quarter-decking than when not.
“Never mind about the opera then,” she said, “you needn’t go unless you like. But what is important is that since Madge is going to marry Philip Home, we should reap all the advantages we can. Perhaps there is only one, apartfrom having another very comfortable house to stay in, but that is a big one. He can make some money for us.”
This was only the second time she had mentioned this, and in consequence she was rather agreeably surprised to find that her husband grasped it. He even appeared to think about it, and suggested an amendment, though the process required, it seemed to Gladys, miles of quarter-decking.
“Eh, what?” he said. “Something South African? Put in twopence and get out fourpence, with a dividend in the interim? By Gad, yes! But you’d better get it out of him, Gladys, not I. Lovely woman, you know; a man tells everything to lovely woman. Don’t tell me.”
This had never occurred to Gladys, and she always respected anyone to whom things occurred before they occurred to her.
“How very simple,” she said, “and much better than my suggestion. I suppose it was so simple that it never occurred to me.”
Ellington chuckled, and as the conversation was over, sat down again to read the evening paper, which had just come in. He read the morning paper all the morning, and talked of it at lunch, and the evening paper all evening, and talked of it at dinner; these two supplied him with his mental daily bread. All the same, he never seemed well-informed even about current events; he managed somehow to miss the point of all the news he read, and could never distinguish between Kuroki and Kuropatkin.
Three days had passed since Madge had had her last sitting for her portrait, and those three days had passed for her in a sort of dream of disquietude which was not wholly pain. She had not seen Evelyn since, and scarcely Philip, for he had been harder worked than usual, and last night, when he was to have dined with them, had sent word that he could not possibly get there in time. They were to go to the theatre afterwards, and he said he would join them there. She had upbraided him laughingly for his desertion of them, telling him that he put the pleasure of business higher than the pleasure of her society. For retort he had the fact that when he was not at work he was never anywhere else but in her society, whereas two days ago, when he was free one morning, she refused to ride with him because she was togive a sitting to Evelyn. But the moment he had said this he was sorry for it, for Madge had flushed, and turned from him, biting her lip. But though he was sorry for the undesigned pain he had apparently given her, his heart could not but sing to him. She could not bear such a word from him even in jest.
But this had not been the cause of Madge’s disquietude; Philip’s remark indeed had, so far as it alone was concerned, gone in at one ear but to come out at the other. In its passage through it had touched something that made her wince with sudden pain. But the pain passed, and a warmth, a glow of some secret kind, remained. Disquieting it was, but not painful, except that at intervals a sort of pity and remorse would stab her, and at other times her heart, like Philip’s, could not but sing to her for the splendour of love which was beginning to dawn. She could not help that dawn coming, and she could not help glorying in its light.
Of what should be the practical issue she did not at once think. It was but three weeks ago that she had promised to marry Philip, and then her honesty had made her tell him that she gave him liking, esteem, affection, all that she was conscious that it was in her power to give. And now, when she knew that she was possessed of more than these, and that the new possession was not hers to give him, a long day of indecision, this day on which in the evening they were to dine together with Gladys Ellington, had been hers. But gradually, slowly, with painful gropings after light, she had made up her mind.
She had no choice—her choice was already made, and all duty, all obedience, all honour, called her to fulfil the promise she had made, to fulfil it, too, in no niggardly lip-service sense of the word, but to fulfil it loyally. She must turn her back to the dawn which had come too late, she must never look there, she must for ever avert her eyes from it. Above all, she must do all that lay in her power to prevent that brightness growing. She must, in fact, not see Evelyn again of her own free will.
Then the difficulties, each to be met and overcome, began to swarm thick about her. First and foremost there was the portrait, for which she was engaged to give him a sitting to-morrow. That, at any rate, as far as this particular sitting was concerned, was easily managed, a note of three linesexpressing regret did that. This, however, was only a temporary measure, it but put off for this one occasion the necessity of meeting what lay before her. For she knew she must not sit to him again; she dared not risk that, she must not give this strange new rapture in her heart the food that would make it grow. Yet, again, she must not act like a mad-woman, and what reasonable cause could she give for so strange a freak? Perhaps if she went there with Philip, or if she took her mother with her.
Yet that did not dispose of the question. Evelyn was one of her future husband’s warmest friends. In the ordinary course of things they must often meet, but till she had conquered herself, made sure of herself, such meetings were impossible. And how could she ever be sure of herself, to whom had come this utterly unlooked for thing, a thing so unlooked for that only a few weeks before she had consented to its being dismissed as a practical impossibility?
Then came a thought which, for the very shame of it, was bracing. Not by word or look or sign had Evelyn ever showed that he regarded her with the faintest feeling that answered hers. She remembered well the rise of the full moon on the terrace of Philip’s house above Pangbourne, how he had called attention to it, merely to point out that it was not in drawing, how she herself on that occasion had noticed how different he was to the ordinary moonlight-walker. No hint of sentiment, no sign of the vaguest desire towards the most harmless flirtation had appeared in him then, nor had any appeared since. While she was sitting to him, half the time he scowled at her, the other half he bubbled with boyish nonsense. For very shame she must turn her back on the dawn.
Dinner was to be early to-night, as the objective was Melba and the opera, and her maid came in to tell her that dressing-time was already overstepped. She got up, but paused for a moment at the window, looking out from Buckingham Gate over the blue haze that overhung St. James’ Park, driving her resolution home. She half-pitied, half-spurned herself, telling herself at one moment that it was hard that she had to suffer thus, at another that she was despicable for thinking of suffering when her road was so clearly marked for her. If what had happened was not her fault, still less should there be any fault of hers in whatshould happen. Clearly the future was in her own control; of the future she could make what she would.
Her mother was not coming with her to-night; indeed, she seldom wasted the golden evening hours at the opera, when there was a rubber of bridge so certainly at her command, and Madge went into the drawing-room to wish her good-night before she set off. Prosperity—and the last three weeks seemed to Lady Ellington to be most prosperous—had always a softening effect on her, and she was particularly gracious to her daughter, since Madge was responsible for so large a part of these auspicious events.
“So you’re just off, dear,” she said. “Dear me, you are rather late, and I mustn’t keep you. But give my love to Philip, and let him see you home, and if I am in—you can ask them at the door—bring him in for a few minutes. And don’t forget your sitting with Mr. Dundas to-morrow.”
“Ah, I have put that off,” said Madge, “I am rather busy!”
“A pity, surely.”
“Well, I have sent the note, I am afraid. Good-night, mother, in case I am in first.”
Philip had already arrived when she got to her cousin’s house, and they went down to dinner. Lord Ellington had got the news of the evening feverishly mixed up in his head, and was disposed to mingle fragments of Stock Exchange with it, forgetful, apparently, that this had been relegated to his wife. But his natural incoherence redeemed the situation, and when dinner was over it was already time to start for the opera. While Gladys got her cloak, however, the two lovers had a few private minutes, as the master of the house remained in the dining-room when they went out. Philip had sent her that day a diamond pendant which she was wearing now.
“It is too good of you, Philip,” she said, “and I can’t tell you how I value it. It is most beautiful. But why should you always be sending me things?”
Philip was usually serious, and always sincere.
“Because I can’t help it,” he said. “I must give you signs of what I feel, and even these clumsy, material signs are something.”
That sincerity touched the girl.
“I know what you feel,” she said. “I want to have itnever absent from my mind. I want to think of nothing else but that.”
This was sincere too, the outcome of this long day of thought. But Philip came a little closer to her, and his voice vibrated as he spoke.
“That contents me utterly,” he said—“that and the gift of yourself that you made me.”
She gave a long sigh.
“Oh, Philip!” she began. But the voice of Gladys called to her from the passage outside the drawing-room.
“Come, Madge. Come, Mr. Home,” she cried. “We are already so late, and I can’t bear to miss a note ofBohême.”
Apparently to be present in the opera-house whenBohêmewas going on was sufficient for Gladys, and constituted not missing a note, for she spent that small portion of the first act which still remained to be performed after their arrival in an absorbed examination of the occupants of the other boxes, and whispered communications as to the result of her investigations to Madge. The fall of the curtain had the effect of rendering these more audible.
“Yes, absolutely everybody is here; so good of you, dear Mr. Home, to ask us to-night. Of course, it is the last night Melba sings, is it not? How wonderful, is she not? That long last note quite thrilled me. So sad, too, the last act, it always makes me cry! Oh! there is Madame Odintseff, dearest Madge, did you ever see such ropes of pearls—cables you might call them. Who is that she is talking to? I know her face quite well. That’s her daughter, yes, the sandy-coloured thing, rather like a rabbit. They say she’s engaged to Lord Hitchin, but I don’t believe it. Dear Madge, is it not brilliant? You look so well, dear, to-night. If only Mr. Dundas could paint you as you are looking now! By the way, how is the portrait getting on?”
Philip also had risen when the act ended, and was looking out over the house. Here he joined in.
“Evelyn was absolutely jubilant when I saw him a few days ago,” he said. “And though he is usually jubilant over the last thing, I saw he thought there was something extra-special about this. By-the-way, Madge, you are sitting to him to-morrow afternoon, are you not? I shall try to look in; my spate of work is over, I hope.”
“Oh! I’m afraid I have had to put it off,” said she. “I couldn’t manage it to-morrow.”
She fingered her fan nervously for a moment.
“In fact, Philip,” she said, “I am so dreadfully full of engagements for the next week or two that I don’t see how I can squeeze in another sitting. I am so ashamed of myself, but I can’t help it. I wish you would go down to Mr. Dundas’ studio to-morrow and tell him so.”
Philip looked at her a moment in blank surprise.
“Ah, but you can’t do that,” he said; “a painter isn’t like a tailor to whom you say, ‘I am not coming to try on; send it home as it is.’”
Madge lost her head a little; the burden of the hours of this day pressed heavily on her.
“Ah! but that is what I want him to do,” she cried. “It is a wonderful portrait; he said so himself. There is a little background that must be put in, but I needn’t be there for that.”
Gladys Ellington had turned her attention again to the house, and, with her opera-glasses glued to her eyes, was spying and observing in all directions. Philip cast one glance at her, and rightly considered himself alone with Madge, for the other was blind and deaf to them.
“Madge, is anything wrong?” he asked gently.
“No, nothing is wrong,” she said, recovering herself a little. “But I ask you to do as I say. I can’t bear sitting for that portrait any more, and Mr. Dundas—he bores me.”
That got said, also she managed to smile at him naturally.
“That is all, dear Philip,” she added. “Pray don’t let us talk of it any more.”
“And you wish me to tell Evelyn what you say?” he asked.
“Yes, anything, anything,” she said. “I don’t want to sit to him again. But make it natural, if you can. Look at the portrait; tell him you don’t want it touched any more. Believe me, that is best.”
She paused a moment.
“I am excited and rather overwrought to-night somehow,” she said, “and you mustn’t indeed think that there is anything the matter. Indeed, there is nothing. Tell me you believe that?”
“Why, dear, of course, if you tell me so,” he said.
“I do tell you so.”
As has been mentioned before, there were two Philips; one known only to the four people who knew him best, the other the Philip who showed a sterner and harder face to the world. And though, since he was with Madge, the Philip of the inner sanctum, where only the intimates were admitted, was in possession, yet the door of the sanctum, as it were, opened for a moment, and the other Philip, quick as a lizard, glanced in. His appearance was of the most momentary duration, but he did look in.
She laid her hand on his arm as she said these last words, then left the back of the box, where they had been standing, and took a chair next Lady Ellington.
“How full it is!” she said. “Look at the stalls too; they are like an ant-heap, covered with brilliant, crawling ants. How hard it is to recognise people if one is above them. I’m sure there are a hundred people I know, but the tops of heads are like nothing except the tops of heads. How many bald heads too! What a blessing we don’t go bald like men. Who is that walking up the gangway now? I’m sure I know him. Ah! it’s Mr. Dundas.”
The sudden stream of her talk stopped, as if a tap had been turned on. Her eyes left the stalls and gazed vacantly over the boxes opposite. She was conscious of wondering what would happen next—whether she would speak, or her companion, or whether Philip would say something. Then it seemed to her nobody would say anything any more; there was to be this dreadful silence for ever. That possibility, at any rate, was soon averted, for Gladys signalled violently to Evelyn, and spoke.
“Yes, he sees us,” she said. “Mr. Home, do put the door of the box open, it is so stuffy. And Mr. Dundas I am sure is coming up. He’s such a darling, isn’t he?”
The greater part of her speech was justified by realities. Evelyn had seen them; the heat was undeniable; also, in answer to the violent signalling he had received, mere politeness, to say nothing of inclination, would have made him come. But he had seen too who sat in profile by Lady Ellington, and he took two and three steps in the stride as he mounted the staircases. And before Madge had time to put into execution her very unwise idea of asking Philip not to let him in, he was at the door of the box.
“You lordly box-holder,” he said to him, “just let me in. How are you, Lady Ellington? Yes, I’m just back from the Hermitage, to-night only, from three days in the forest with Merivale. How are you, Miss Ellington? I had to come up to-night, or I shouldn’t have been able to keep the appointment to-morrow.”
A sense of utter helplessness seized Madge; she could not even respond by a word to his greeting, for his presence merely was the only thing that mattered, the only thing she loved and dreaded. And he continued:
“Half-past two, isn’t it?” he said. “I could have come up to-morrow, of course, but it was necessary for me to have a morning’s work at the background before I troubled you again.”