“How horrible!” said Stella. “Must one take it?”
“If you want to enter into the essential Teutonic spirit you must. You might as well hope to feel like an Anglo-Saxon without being always in a rage or playing violent games as try to be German without jam. How I hate women who play games! They are nearly as odious as men who don’t. Let us go indoors, and Martin shall play to us till tea-time. Afterwards he shall play till dinner-time.”
Lady Sunningdale surged slowly to her feet and looked helplessly about.
“Where are the dogs?” she said. “It is too tiresome. They are sure to stray into the woods, and Flints’s horrid pheasants will peck them. My darlings! Ah, there they are amid what was once begonias. It looks more like a battlefield now. How naughty! Come at once, all of you!”
There was no doubt whatever that Martin’s piano-playing was of a very remarkable order, and before he was half-way through Chopin’s firstballade, Stella,who had been accustomed to consider the piano as an instrument for the encouragement of conversation after dinner, or at the most as the introduction to the vocal part of a concert, found herself sitting bolt upright in her chair with a strange tingling excitement spreading through her and a heightened and quickened beating of the blood. She was essentially unmusical; but something in this was extraordinarily arresting; her nerves, if not her sense of melody, were at attention. As for Lady Sunningdale, she always gasped when Martin played, and did so now.
“Too heavenly,” she said at the end. “Now make me miserable. Play the rain on the roof. Tum, tum, tum, tum, don’t you know. Yes, how clever of you to guess.”
It was rather clever, for Lady Sunningdale’s rendering did not really resemble any one tune in the world more than any other.
Martin paused a moment. Then the slow, sullen drip of hot, steady rain on the roof began, as it sounded to a man who was alone in an alien land. It fell with hopeless regular iteration from grey skies, then there was the gurgle of some choked gutter, and the collected water overflowed and was spilt with a little chuckle. Very distantly on the horizon remote lightning winked and flickered, but there was as yet no sound of thunder in the dark sultriness of the afternoon, but only the endless, monotonous rhythm of the dropping rain. Then, faintly at first but with slow crescendo, there was heard the distant drums of thunder, buffeting and rumbling among the hills. Then all at once the rain grew heavier; larger drops, as if of lead, fell beating with a resonant insistance on the roof,and the voice of the storm grew angry and articulate. Suddenly with an appalling crash it burst immediately overhead, drowning for a moment the beat of the rain, and by the blaze of the simultaneous flash sea, sky, and the wave-beaten rocks of Majorca leapt into light. Then, as thunder will, it drew away, and for a time the rain was not so heavy, but again the storm swept up, and once more the chariots of God crashed on their way above them, and the wild lantern of the storm flared this way and that, and once more again after that stupendous riot in the skies the hot darkness was punctuated by the dreadful melancholy of the dripping rain. Then the storm growled itself away into the distance; a little light came back into the weeping skies; the pulse of the rain grew fainter, and again a choked gutter gurgled and overflowed. Suddenly, through some unconjectured rift in the clouds, one beam of the sun, divinely clear, shot down for a moment on them with excellent brightness. Yet it was only for a moment; again the clouds drifted up, and the rain, which for that minute had ceased, began again, dripping with hopeless regular iteration on to the roof as evening closed in, some evening far away in a land of exile beneath an alien sky.
Effusive as she usually was, and accustomed to fill any interval of silence that might conceivably occur with discursive volubility, even Lady Sunningdale was silent except for an “Oh, Martin,” which she no more than whispered. For there was that in the room which, in spite of her superficial frivolity and the dragon-fly dartings of her mind, she knew and recognized and adored, that the touch of art which makes even of things that are common and unclean gems and jewels.Stella too said nothing, but sat still, much more upright than her lolling wont, holding the arms of her chair. From where she sat she could see Martin’s profile cut with great clearness of outline against a brocaded screen of scarlet and gold that stood beyond the piano, and between the music and the musician she was dumb. Even in the desultory accidental conversation which she had had with him during the slumbers of Lady Sunningdale there had been something arresting to her in his brilliant boyish personality, and now from his finger-tips there flowed out, so it seemed to her, a personality just as brilliant, but either very mature or by the instinct of genius still boyish, but clad, as it were, in the purple of the artistic nature. There was nothing amateurish about it; and, unmusical as she was, she could not help recognising the certainty of the performance.
For a few moments after the last note had died into silence he sat silent also, with head bent over the keys. Then he looked up.
“Is that enough, Lady Sunningdale?” he asked.
“No, you angel from heaven, it is never enough!” she cried; “but play something different—something brilliant; I should expire with several hollow church-yard groans if you played that again. It makes me miserable. Play somethingvirtuoso, and let me come closer, where I can see your hands.”
She moved to a low chair to the right of the piano.
“Brahms’s ‘Paganini Variations,’”he suggested.
“Ah, yes, do. It makes me shriek with laughter.”
Then, with the same absolute facility and certainty, with the same cleanness and perfection, suggesting, indeed, a slim poised figure, he took a header into thatridiculous theme. But out of the foam and bubble beneath his hands flowers grew, stars were scattered, and all nature went mad with dancing. But when the riot of jubilance was at its height, a tall, severe figure suddenly appeared at the French window of the drawing-room, advanced very audibly on the bare boards, and spoke sufficiently loud to be heard.
“Ah, Lady Sunningdale,” said Mr. Challoner, “how are you? And Martin wasting his time at the piano, as usual. How kind of you to let him play to you!”
Martin wasted no more time there; at the noise of interruption, before his brain had conjectured who it was, his hands stopped, the eager, active vitality died out of his face, as when a candle is blown out, and he banged a random chord in sheer rage. Then, instantaneously, he recognized the voice, and he rose quickly from the music-stool, trembling.
“Yes, wasting my time, as usual,” he said, excitedly, the artist in him suddenly struck dead, leaving just an angry, startled boy. “I must go home, Lady Sunningdale. Thank you so much for letting me play to you, and I hope I haven’t bored you. Good-bye. I have a lot of work to do.”
He closed the piano lid as he spoke, but it slipped from his fingers and shut with a bang that set all the strings jarring.
“Ah, how could you interrupt like that?” cried Lady Sunningdale to his father. “Yes, how are you, Mr. Challoner? Martin, pray begin it again. We will all sit quite quiet without stirring a finger or breathing. You are superb!”
His father sat down, distressed at Martin’s rudeness, but honestly desirous of being sympathetic.
“Dear boy, I am so sorry,” he said. “Pray, play your piece.”
“I can’t,” said Martin. “I don’t know it.”
For a moment father and son looked at each other, the one with surprise and indignation, the other in impetuous rebellion and anger.
“Lady Sunningdale asks you to play again what you were playing,” said his father, the desire to be sympathetic vanishing, the sternness deserved by this deplorable lack of manners in Martin increasing every moment.
“It is quite impossible that I should play it,” said Martin. “I couldn’t play a note of it.”
“You seemed to me to know it,” said Mr. Challoner. “Surely you have played it a hundred times at home.”
Martin was really incapable in the shock of this transition from the world which he loved and in which he was at home to this other world of decent behaviour.
“More like a thousand times,” he said and simply, and directly left the room.
There was a somewhat awkward pause. Mr. Challoner was seriously angry with his ill-behaved son; Lady Sunningdale was disgusted at being deprived of her music, and Stella, with a natural eye for drama, was immensely interested. It seemed to her there might be a good deal of drama behind this little incident. Then, luckily perhaps, Lady Sunningdale remembered that she was, so to speak on a mission to the dark ignorance of Mr. Challoner, that savage in matters of art, on behalf of Martin, and she put her disgust in her pocket.
“It was charming of you to have come over to see me,” she said to him, with her easy-natured charm.“Yes, I suppose Martin wastes a terrible lot of time at the piano when he should be doing Greek history. Demosthenes! How fascinating! Stella dearest, do see what Suez Canal is doing, and slap him. And will you tell us when tea is ready? Do you know, Mr. Challoner, Martin plays remarkably,—really remarkably?”
Stella, as she was wont to do, strolled out through the window by which catastrophe had entered, leaving the two others alone.
“Yes, it is that incessant waste of time that distresses me,” said Mr. Challoner. “But the piano at the parsonage is so old that he hardly cares to play on it. But, first, I must apologise to you, Lady Sunningdale, for the extremely rude way in which Martin behaved to you. I promise you he shall make his apologies in person.”
For a moment her irritation mastered her.
“He apologise?” she cried. “It ought to be you. Dear Mr. Challoner, how rude I am! Pray forgive me. But you don’t know, you can’t know, what music is to Martin. You don’t know what divine, glorious mood in him you shattered. It was like throwing a brick at an iridescent soap-bubble. I suppose Brahms is a name to you like Smith or Jones.”
Then she recalled diplomacy again.
“So difficult to understand Brahms, is it not?” she said. “That is the fascination of it. But I assure you it is worth thinking over. Martin is wonderful. He has improved so enormously, too. He is not second-rate or third-rate, but first-rate. What have you been doing to him?”
“You mean at playing the piano?” asked Mr. Challoner, as if he had said “sweeping a crossing.”
Lady Sunningdale longed for Sahara to bite him.
“Yes, at playing the piano,” she said, swallowing her irritation again. “He ought to study, you know. He is wasting his time, that is quite true, but not at the piano. I am dreadfully impertinent, am I not? But Flints is an old friend and Martin is his nephew, and music is music, so I feel it very strongly. Of course it is only natural that you, Mr. Challoner, with your earnest nature and your serious aims and all that,—you were too interesting last night, I lay awake for hours thinking over what you had said,—should consider poor Martin very frivolous, but he is an artist to his finger-tips. It is his nature. Mon Dieu! what finger-tips, too! You know he was playing, and playing, I assure you, with consummate ease when you interrup—when you came in, a thing that really great pianists require to practice for months!”
“You are too kind to take such an interest in my lazy son,” said Mr. Challoner, still very stiffly,—so stiffly, in fact, that Lady Sunningdale looked hastily at the fireplace, thinking he must have swallowed the tongs.
“I assure you it is not kindness that prompts me at all,” she said. “It is mere justice and mere economy. I am very economical. Ask Sunningdale. The world cannot afford to lose a talent like that. If he is like that when he is practically uneducated, to what may not he grow? Heaven knows, the world is so very stupid that we should hoard and save every grain of talent that exists. It is like what you so beautifully said to me last night about the ten talents in a napkin.”
“Surely not,” said Mr. Challoner, a faint smile breaking his gravity.
“Well, the one talent, then. I have no head for numbers. And poor Martin’s talent seems to me to be put in a very damp napkin, except now and then when somebody like me lifts up a corner of it and lets the sparkle of gold appear.”
It happened very rarely that Lady Sunningdale was stirred into such coherence and earnestness. As a rule, her multifarious little interests were like children playing “King of the Castle,” rapidly pulling each other down from their momentary pre-eminence, first one and then another perching precariously on the summit. But certainly the most long-lived “King” there was music, and Martin’s future, with the rain-storm of Chopin and the mad frolic of Brahms still in her ears, was very securely throned.
“Think me impertinent, my dear Mr. Challoner,” she went on. “Think me what you will, only do give your most serious attention to what I say. Martin devoting his fingers, his brain, the power of his extraordinary artistic nature to ancient history is a thing to make Julius Cæsar weep. The pity of it when he might be starting us all on a new chapter in music! Really I believe that to be possible. And really I am in earnest; and when, as I hope, you know me better, and see how completely scatter-brained I usually am, you will appreciate how deeply I feel this.”
“You mean that my son should devote the most useful, the most active years of his life to playing the piano?” he asked.
“Playing the piano?” she cried, feeling it was almost hopeless to try to make him understand. “That is, of course, a thread in the golden garment of music; but to take piano-playing as synonymous with musicwould be the same as calling the baptism of those of riper years the same thing as Christianity. Music—music, that must be his life. Flints told me this morning that you found him slack, lazy. So would you be if you had to learn scales, just as he may be—I am sure he is—at classical studies.”
“What do you propose, then?” he asked, inwardly rather rebelling at the consideration he felt somehow forced to give to her eagerness. For, in spite of her discursiveness, it was clearly impossible not to recognise the surprising quickness and intuition of her mental processes.
“Why, just what I have been telling you. First let him throw his dictionaries and histories into the fire.”
“I have an immense, a vital belief in the educating power of the classics,” said Mr. Challoner.
“For everybody? You cannot mean it! Can you tell from looking at a picture if the artist knew Latin? Or pick me a piece of Greek out of ‘Tristan und Isolde.’ In any case, Martin has spent some ten years at them, he tells me, and what is the result? He fails to pass his examinations. Whether they are a criterion of education, or whether they are an instrument, he or they have failed. He is second-rate at that, third-rate,—it is all one. There is first-rate, and—the rest of the world. What is the good of turning another second-rate person into the sheepfold of the second-rate, particularly when on other lines that person has all the appearance, anyhow, of being first-rate? Well, that is what I think. How kind of you to let me talk so. Where are my angels? Is it not tea-time?”
Lady Sunningdale’s unparalleled effort in concentrationof thought here broke completely down, and a whole tribe of clamouring competitors invaded the castle of her mind, dethroning the “King.”
“Yes, Martin really was playing too divinely,” was the “King’s” expiring cry. “So like a great artist, too, to bang down the piano lid when he was interrupted. Beethoven did it too, you know, and shouted, ‘I play no more to such swine.’ So delicious of him. And Helen, how is she? You must bring her over. Frank Yorkshire is dying, if not dead, to see her. He is one of those people, you know, who does nothing and appreciates so much. So infinitely better than doing a great deal rather badly, and not recognizing the first-rate when you see it. And are you going to preach on Sunday? I should have been so happy if I had been a man, to have lived in a country-place like this and just spend my days in doing a little good among these simple people. How beautiful it must be! I abhor London,—so shallow. Yes. You really must preach on Sunday, Mr. Challoner; otherwise I shall stay at home and read improper novels. You would not like to have that on your conscience, would you? People are growing terribly slack about Sunday, are they not? Yes, shall we try to find some tea? Talking makes one so hungry.”
Mr. Challonerwas seated at the very orderly table in his study, on which, neatly corrected, revised, and arranged, were the sheets of his sermon for the next Sunday. In front of him, with his face towards the window, stood Martin. Neither father nor son wore a very pleasant expression: Martin looked like some timid wild animal, at bay in a corner, frightened into a sort of desperation, while his father’s thick, bushy eyebrows were contracted into a very heavy frown and his mouth was tightly compressed, as if he were holding back with difficulty some impulse of anger that nearly mastered him.
“I was ashamed of you,” he said; “I was ashamed that a son of mine could behave with such abominable rudeness to Lady Sunningdale and me. A few years ago, when such behaviour would have been more excusable, because you were younger, I should have given you a whipping!”
“I am sure you would,” said Martin.
Mr. Challoner’s face grew a shade paler.
“Martin, I wish you to understand once and for all,” he said, “that I will be treated by you both in public and in private with ordinary respect and courtesy.”
“I have already told you I was sorry I was rude to you,” said Martin, speaking very quickly and incisively, with an odd little tremor of angry fright in his voice.
“You have often told me you were sorry lately,” said his father, “and almost before the words were out of your mouth I have had occasion to find fault with you for something else.”
Martin gave a short, mirthless laugh.
“That is quite true,” he said; “I can’t do right, it appears.”
Mr. Challoner paused a moment; Martin had never before come to open words with him like this.
“What do you mean by speaking to me like that?” he asked, in a voice scarcely audible.
There was no answer.
“I have asked you a question, Martin,” he said, his voice rising suddenly.
Martin pushed back his hair with a hopeless gesture.
“What answer do you expect me to give?” he asked, impatiently. “There is no answer to such a question. You get angry with me and you frighten me. I think you do it on purpose. You have frightened me into silence all my life, now you have frightened me at last into answering you. I hate anger; it makes me sick. And you have been angry with me every day since I came home for my holidays.”
He sat down on a chair behind him with a sort of dull, indifferent acquiescence in whatever might happen, his face sullen, frightened, joyless. It seemed as if it could scarcely be the same radiant boy who had played Brahms an hour ago.
There was a pause, and all the imprisoned longing for love in the father beat dismally at its bars, for he felt, and felt truly, that just now Martin almost hated him. It seemed terribly hard that his own daily and constant desire that Martin should grow up a usefulGod-fearing man, industrious and earnest, should be the bar that separated them, yet so he knew it to be. Had he been a weak, indulgent father, one who had not implanted in him the unbending, ineradicable sense of his duty towards the son whom God had given him, how sweet might have been the human relations between them. His love for his son was the very reason why he corrected him,—that and the duty attached to his own fatherhood; and when he saw him slack, lazy, or as now wanting in courtesy and respect, it was still from sheer duty that his anger sprang. And now for the first time from Martin’s own lips he heard the effect. He frightened him, on purpose, so it appeared. Was this, then, one of the hopeless, incomprehensible puzzles that God seems sometimes to set his groping children, this fight between duty and love, in which one must lose, and be vanquished. It seemed to him cruelly hard if this was so.
Martin felt his mouth go suddenly dry as he spoke, but he was past really caring what might happen. His father, he knew, was about as angry with him as he could be, and he himself hated and feared his anger in the instinctive unreasoning way in which a grown man will fear something which can really hurt him no longer, but which he feared in childhood. That vibrating note was in his father’s voice which he associated with early failures of his own in Latin declensions, and the hint of what would have happened to him if he had been younger also carried him back to early, dreadful scenes. But finding his father did not reply, he looked up at him, and saw that the anger in his face had been extinguished like a wind-blown lamp. But all tenderness, all sense of being intimate with himwas so alien to Martin that he did not trouble to guess what emotion had taken the place of anger. Anger, however, was gone, taking his own fear with it, and with a certain mercilessness characteristic of youth, he deliberately, so to speak, hit back.
“Whatever I do, you find fault with,” he said. “I try to please you, it is no use. Would it not be better if I went away? There is no good in my stopping here; I don’t suppose this sort of thing gives you any pleasure. Uncle Rupert, I am sure, would let me go and stay with him in London next week till the Long Term begins at Cambridge. That will be in another fortnight. You told me you wished me to be up there all the time. So would it not be much better if I went away?”
His father did not reply at once, but sat fingering his writing things with rather tremulous hands.
“Are you not happy at home?” he asked at length.
“No,” said Martin, shortly.
The brevity and certainty of this struck more deeply yet. If Martin a few months before had felt sick at his father’s anger, the latter was certainly the more to be pitied now.
“Martin, what is the matter between us?” he said.
“I don’t know; but it’s the same as it has always been, only it’s rather worse. I can’t please you, I suppose, and you are always down on me for something. It is to be hoped it is doing some good, because otherwise it seems,—well, rather unnecessarily unpleasant. First it was my work, then what I said to Helen, then ‘The Mill on the Floss,’ and now this. To-morrow it will be something else. There is sure to be something. I daresay I don’t understand you, and I know youdon’t understand me. This afternoon, for instance. Oh, it’s no use trying to explain,” he said.
“It may be the utmost use. It may make the greatest difference. I only wish that you had said to me years ago what you are saying now. I have tried to be a good father to you, but sometimes, often, I have been puzzled as to what to do. You don’t confide in me, you don’t tell me your joys and pleasures, and let me share them. I often hear you laughing when I am not with you. But when I am, not so often.”
Martin half shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “There we are again.”
“That is quite true,” he said. “But what can I do when music, which to me is the greatest joy and pleasure in life, seems to you just a waste of time. You have often told me so. You don’t know one bit what it means to me; and as it seems to you a waste of time, how can I confide in you about a thing you don’t really approve of and of which, you will pardon me, you are absolutely ignorant? In the middle of the Brahms, or whatever it was, you come in and interrupt by saying that I am wasting my time, as usual. I might as well come in in the middle of prayers and say you were wasting—there I go again. I am sorry. That will show you how hopeless it all is.”
Mr. Challoner was silent a moment, really too much pained to speak. But he was wise enough to recognise that to say anything just then would be to effectually stop the only confidence that Martin had reposed in him for years.
“Well, Martin,” he said, after a moment.
“Ah, it’s no use,” he said. “Even at the very instant when I am consciously trying to be careful, Isay something like that, and you are shocked at it. But I meant it: it exactly expressed what I meant. Music is to me like that. You never thought that possible. All these years you have been thinking that I was very fond of music—just that—and wasted a great deal of time at the piano. Whereas it seems to me that I am wasting time when I am reading ‘Thucydides.’”
“That is what Lady Sunningdale said. She talked to me about it after you went away. You know her well, do you not?”
“Yes; she has been tremendously kind to me.”
His father rose.
“You must go now, dear lad,” he said. “I have got some work to do before to-morrow. And let us try, both of us, to find more of a friend in each other. I shall never have another son, and you will never have another father. It would be very sad, would it not, if we did not, each of us, make the best of that relation?”
There came into his beautiful brown eyes the shadow of tears, and Martin wondered.
“I will try, father,” he said.
Mr. Challoner did not at once begin the work which he wished to finish before bedtime when Martin left him, but sat with his head resting on his hand, thinking very deeply. He was much troubled and perplexed, and his future line of action, usually so clear to him, so precisely indicated by his sense of duty, and, to do him justice, so undeviatingly followed, was now very misty and ill defined. Hitherto he had never entertained any serious doubts that he was not doing the best possible for Martin, both in always correcting and admonishing when he seemed to be idle, even in trifles where some small carelessness on his part indicatedthe danger of his falling into slack or slovenly habits, and in his convictions that school and college education in classical subjects was the best possible method of training and developing his mind. He did not in the least even now, with regard to the latter, think it certain that he was mistaken, but it had been brought home to him very clearly in the last twenty-four hours that other people thought he was. For his brother’s opinion he always felt a considerable respect, but for Lady Sunningdale’s, though he wondered at it, he could not help feeling more. A dozen times yesterday at dinner, a dozen times more this afternoon, he had asked himself how the observations of a woman who really appeared to be scarcely capable of consecutive orderly thought could be worth consideration, but as often some plump grain of solid sense, showing acuteness and perception amid the husks and chaff, answered the question. He himself was conscious of not being quite at his ease with her, but he could not help admiring her intense vitality, her speed, her busy, acute inquisitiveness. And it was she who hailed Martin, poor, desultory, idle Martin, as a genius.
Suppose he took their advice and let his son go free into that world of which he himself knew so little, of which, however, he had so abundant a mistrust, how dangerous and hazardous an experiment! Martin, with his slackness, his ineradicable tendency to what was easy and pleasant; Martin, above all, with this apparently so great musical gift, unsuspected by his father, but adored by others, was exactly the sort of boy to be petted, spoiled, ruined by the careless, highly-coloured butterflies which Mr. Challoner believed to dance there all day in the sun. To them music, painting,drama, the visible arts, were ends in themselves, the object being enjoyment, while to him such a doctrine savoured almost of profanity. To him painting, sculpture, music, were recreations which might at intervals be innocently allowed to the earnest worker, but even in such times of refreshment the Christian would look for something more, and find in beauty that which should lead his thoughts to the Fountain and Creator of it. Such, however, was not the view, as he was aware, of the world of Art into which he was invited to let Martin plunge; to them music was sweet sound and led the soul nowhere but to music; painting was line and colour; sculpture was form, and the end and fulfilment and consummation of it was perfection of form and the appreciation thereof. About this latter branch of art he had never been able to come to a definite conclusion. Certainly studies in the nude seemed to him to be things dangerous, if not inherently sensual.
“All Art is perfectly useless.” He remembered having read that sentence in some book of Martin’s which he had found lying about. A rapid glance at it on that occasion had justified its confiscation and a few words to Martin on the subject. But that sentence occurred to him again now, for there in half a line was expressed tritely and unmistakeably the exact opposite of what he held to be the truth. All Art, he would have said himself, that does not—apart from the natural and innocent enjoyment of it—raise and elevate the soul, is not art at all. As a corollary, the highest form of painting in his eyes was religious painting, because it led by a direct road to its goal, the highest form of music, religious music. These twowere wholly laudable; Raphael, so to speak, shook hands with missionaries, and Handel took Luther’s arm. But at the other end of the line of artists came those who, however consummate was their art, treated of themes which in themselves were dangerous, or, worst of all, who by clothing sin in melodious and beautiful garb rendered it, even if not attractive, at any rate more venial. He himself, as has been seen, was not musical; but when a few weeks ago he had found himself in London with Martin, and with the eminently laudable desire of getting more into sympathy with his son, had taken him to see “Tannhäuser” at the opera, the evening had not been wholly a success, for the curtain had not risen ten minutes on Venusberg before his incredulous horror had deepened into certainty, and he had got swiftly up and peremptorily ordered Martin to leave also. And Wagner was hustled by him into the outer darkness to gnash teeth in company with Zola, George Eliot, and Titian.
Here, then, is stated in brief, so that the real and soul-searching difficulty in his course of action with regard to Martin’s future may be better understood, the attitude of Mr. Challoner towards Art. With the whole force of his strenuous, upright soul he believed that one thing in the world alone mattered, and that art, science, knowledge were at the best but by-paths that led on to the great high-road of the Gospel. In that they contained many things of beauty the worker was allowed to wander in their coolnesses at times for the refreshment of his weariness, but all the beauty he found there was but the sign-post pointing him back to the high-road. Other by-paths were there also, beautiful as these, if one looked on the outward formonly, but instinct with danger, and of an evil glitter. Such led through tangled gardens of vivid meretricious gaudiness, but if one stooped to pluck those poisonous flowers, they were vitriol to the fingers, and the unnameable beasts of darkness, coiled among the leaves, alert and ready to spring, would fasten on the hand.
Martin had left his father’s presence that evening with an idea that was really quite new to him. The truism, in fact, that a father loved his son had suddenly emerged from those dull ranks and taken its place in the far more notable array of truths. For the interview which had begun in a manner so dismally familiar to him, except that in this case it was set one or two octaves higher than usual, had ended in a manner unexpected and unprecedented. Never before had he known, though he had vaguely taken it for granted, that his father really cared for intimacy and love in his relations with himself. At any rate he had never seen the fact bare and exposed, for whenever it had shewn itself it had always been wrapped up, so to speak, in the memory of some rebuke. But to-night it had flashed on him; he had seen through these coverings, and a heart of gold shone and beat within. And with the natural instinctive generosity of youth he himself was quick to respond; and though his habitual reserve and shyness with his father could not at once be dispersed, so as to allow him any effusive rejoinder, his response had been very genuine, and his resolve, as he left the study, to explore and develop the reef which had suddenly gleamed in what, to be frank, he had considered hard unyielding rock, very vivid. With this in his head, ready to be matured bythe unconscious processes of sleep, during which the mind, though the senses lie dormant, goes on delving in its difficulties and groping for light, he went up to bed.
As he undressed, his mind flashed quickly backward and forward through the events of the day; for a moment a smile uncurled his lips as he thought of some extravagance or incoherence of Lady Sunningdale’s, the next his mouth was pursed again into a low whistle of some half-dozen bars of a tune that ran in his head. That Brahms,—to which had come so fruitful an interruption,—what a delicious piece of boisterous irresponsibility! It had infected Stella Plympton, too; he had known that from a glance at her wide eyes and half-opened mouth when he began. Then suddenly, just before the interruption came, she had given one heavenly ripple of unconscious laughter at some surprising piece ofvirtuosité. Yes, she understood, understood probably better than Lady Sunningdale, who always gasped. The gasp, it is true, was a great compliment to his nimble fingers, but it should be as impossible to think of fingers or nimbleness, when that was going on, as to think about the chemical constituents of water when one is satisfying a noble thirst. Then came that dreadful scene in the study, with its utterly unexpected end. Well, he would try, anyhow.
The moon was shining outside against the blind with an amazing white brilliance, and as he undressed he went across to the open window and let the flood of cool light shine in. It made the yellow flame of his bedroom candle look insufferably vulgar and tawdry, and blowing it out he again crossed to the window andsat there while the stirring of some fragrant breeze sent its soft ripples against his skin. As Lady Sunningdale had said, he was a gourmet in sensations, and the exquisiteness of the sleeping summer night, peopled with ivory lights and ebony shadows, and the great velvet vault of the sky pricked by the thin, remote fires of innumerable stars and lit by that glorious sexless flame of the moon smote him with a sudden pang of pleasure. Somehow all this must be translatable into music, the stars scattered over the sky were likely staccato notes of strings across the great tune of the moonshine; it was the first slow movement in the great symphony of night and day. At sunrise the scherzo would laugh and dance down the breeze of morning with a thousand quivering leaves and a million nodding flowers, trees waving, birds among the branches. Noonday would combine all the powers of light and air into a third movement of intolerable splendour....
He got up from where he sat, and stretched his arms wide, as if to embrace it all. Then half-laughing at himself, he dived into his nightshirt, leaving the rest of his clothes in a heap on the floor, and, as his custom always was, laid his face on his hand and fell asleep.
It was still early when he woke, but the sun was up, and even as he had anticipated before he went to sleep, the slow movement of the moon had given place to a dancing, rapturous scherzo. A breeze stirred with a short sweeping rhythm among the trees, birds chirped in the leafy temples, and the sparkle of the early sunlight gave an inimitable briskness to the young day. Then with a sudden ebb in the full tide of his joy of life came the thought that it was Sunday, a day in that house neither of rest or gladness in his view, butone much taken up with lengthy unmusical services, in which there was a great deal of singing, with intervals in which no amusement could be indulged in.
He walked from his window back to his bed and looked at his watch. It was still not yet seven, but the “land of counterpane” was no longer desirable or even possible, and putting on coat and trousers he went quietly downstairs and out across the lawn into the fields beyond, where a bathing-place had been scooped out of the river-bed. Till breakfast, at any rate,—still two hours away,—he need put no restraint on the flood of vitality and joy that ran this morning in spate through him and this beautiful world. There were two hours of it, with the cool shock of the racing water, the caress of the warm wind, the sense of being alone, and young, and out-of-doors. Pagan it might be, but irresistibly delightful.
Then suddenly, while still thrilling with these joys, the mellow tones of the church-bell struck across the staccato sounds of life, and all at once the scene with his father the evening before and his own resolve to try to please him flashed into his mind. The bell, he knew, must be for the early celebration in the parish-church, and he had still twenty minutes, enough, if he was quick, in which to dress in the prescribed Sunday garb (though why black was suitable to Sunday he had long given up trying to guess, leaving it to rot away among the unconjecturable riddles of life), and, a thing which pleased his father so intensely, play the hymn on the melancholy one-manualled organ, the curious quavering tones of which formed so remarkable a contrast to the nasal notes of village voices. So with something of a sigh for his renunciation of theriver-bank, he hurried back home, and before the bell had ceased ringing passed through the church-yard where yew-trees of noble growth looked down upon the horrors of the modern stone-mason with his “chaste” designs and “handsome” crosses into the grey, cool church.
To judge by the interior it is probable that the mouth which Lady Sunningdale so much admired in the vicar and the Bishop of Tavistock was a low-church mouth, for Mr. Challoner at any rate did not attempt to make any appeal to the souls of his parishioners by means of the senses. Two brass flower-vases, of that curiously feeble design that somehow suggests at once low-church ecclesiasticism, stood on the altar, over which a flood of mauve and magenta light poured in through misshapen figures of apostles and prophets in the east window. In one transept stood the organ to which Martin directed his steps, the pipes of which, framed in a wooden border ornamented with fretsaw work, were painted white with a scroll of red pattern in line embellishing their top ends. Behind the organ-bench was a red plush curtain with golden fleurs-de-lys stamped on it, to screen the person of the organist from the eyes of the congregation. The seats for the people, who were thinly scattered over the church, were faced eastwards, and were made of shiny, varnished pitch-pine, while the floor of the aisles and accesses was tiled with a cheerful ecclesiastical pattern in violent blue and Indian red, and pierced here and there with gratings of cast-iron work through which, in winter, came the hot, stale blasts from the warming apparatus. A black iron stove stood near the font at the west end of the church, and rows of somewhatdilapidated rush-bottomed chairs denoted the place allotted to the school-children.
To Martin, who for the last two months had been accustomed to the grey dimness and carved spaciousness of King’s Chapel, the first sight of these staring crudenesses came with a shock of almost physical repulsion. Why had it been done? What did it all mean? What emotions were the ill-coloured, badly designed windows intended to arouse or what was the affinity between pitch-pine and worship? Impressionable and impatient as he always was, he nearly turned back after he had opened the door and was confronted by this half-forgotten tawdry brilliance. Then the motive which had made him forsake the cool riverside, the desire to please his father, prevailed.
The organ was blown by a small boy with a highly polished face, who stood directly by the player’s left-hand, and, since the bellows were not powerful enough to supply the lungs of the organ, unless plied by an energetic arm, was often blown too, and breathed heavily into the organist’s ear. It was still a few minutes to eight when Martin came in, and found the village school-master preparing to begin that series of somewhat elementary harmonies to which is given the vague title of a “voluntary.” But he slid quickly off the seat with a smile of welcome to the other, and in a searching whisper told him what the hymns were going to be, and what “Kyrie” would be sung between the commandments. This later information was given with a self-depreciatory blush, for Mr. Milton was not at all mute and inglorious, but composed chants and hymn-tunes with so many accidentals that the choir quailed before them, and garnished them with accidents.
Martin glanced at the organ-stops: there were “Bourdon” (which sounded as if you were playing pedals when you were not, and was much in request), “Open Diapason,” “Flute,” “Cor Anglais,” and a few others of more doubtful import. He added “Tremolo” to certain other soft stops, in curiosity as to what it meant, and began the first bar of the prelude to “Lohengrin.” But as “Tremolo” seemed to convert other sounds into a distant bleating of sheep, he hastily put it in. Five minutes later the vestry-door in the transept opposite opened and the curate, followed by his father, came out. Mr. Challoner looked up as he entered, saw Martin’s head above the curtains of the organ, and a sudden warm tide of thankfulness and love glowed in his heart. Surely the dear lad could not go very far wrong, if he sought strength here.
The worshippers were but few, and it was not long before Martin was out in the sunshine again, but with all the joy and exhilaration of the earlier hour by the river driven out of him. Like most very emotional people, religion was as essential to him as breathing, but in him it was a natural, child-like religion that springs primarily from the huge enjoyment of the beautiful things in this world, for which he had to thank somebody. And though it would be impossible to say that it was not real to him, yet a London fog, so to speak, would make a pagan of him for the time being. And now, though he did believe in the truth and reality of the service in which he had taken part, the deadly ugliness of the church, the melancholy voices, Mr. Milton’s “Kyrie” ten times repeated, the intolerable voices singing absurd tunes had risen like a London fog between him and it. The service had passed over hishead like a flight of birds unseen in this dreadful atmosphere, he had heard only the rustle of their wings. But what he had been conscious of with every jarred fibre in his being was the gross material ugliness of the sights and sounds of this last hour. Why should “throne” be allowed to rhyme with “join” in sacred subjects, whereas it would be admissible in no other class of poetry? Was it because anything was good enough in a hymn, or because those who were responsible for the “form” of English worship were entirely without any sense of “form” themselves? Or why in church allow music that would be tolerated nowhere else? Or why have windows in the house of God which for colouring and design could only be paralleled in the worst type of suburban villa? Pitch-pine seats, tiles again only to be found in the fireplaces of villas and the aisles of churches! Often before, though never perhaps so vividly, had the ugliness of Protestantism struck him; often before, though never perhaps so insistently, had his nature, wishing to aspire, demanded beauty as its ladder. Most of all here was beauty necessary, for the sublimest act of all was here performed, the worship and praise of God, the sacramental approach to him. Even as a little thing, a little rhythmical noise, may utterly distract a man’s attention from a subject which requires concentration, so this ambient ugliness utterly distracted Martin. Only ugliness was no little thing to him.
He had not long to wait for his father, for he followed him almost immediately out of the vestry, and his face lit up with extraordinary pleasure when he saw that Martin had waited for him. Here was his highest joy: to see his children with him in thatdivine act, and find them caring, lingering for him, and the consciousness of that compact the night before was as vividly present in his mind as it had been in Martin’s when he left the delights of the river-bank at the sound of the church-bell.
“Dear lad,” he said, “the first thing I saw when I came into church was you, and I was so thankful.”
Then with the active desire to get into Martin’s sympathy he went on.
“And what was that beautiful, exquisite tune you played us before service?”
Martin brightened.
“Ah, I am glad you liked it,” he said, cordially. “Is it not beautiful? It was Wagner,—the beginning of the overture to ‘Lohengrin.’”
Mr. Challoner’s face grew suddenly grave. Wagner was identified with “Tannhäuser” to him.
“Certainly it was most, beautiful,” he said; “but do you think it is quite—quite suitable to play something from an opera in church, before the Holy Communion, too? One wants everything, is it not so, to be of the highest?”
Mr. Milton’s “Kyrie” occurred to Martin, but he dismissed it.
“I don’t see why one shouldn’t play an opera overture, father,” he said. “Does not the fact that it is beautiful make it suitable?”
“But the associations of it?” said his father.
“I don’t suppose anybody knew what it was except me,” said Martin. “I am sorry if you think I should not have played it. But really I had no time to think. I was nearly late, and on the organ there was only a book of dreadful extracts, chiefly by organists. But Iwill play something definitely sacred at the eleven o’clock service. That is if you would like me to play again.”
“Thank you, dear lad, thank you. Ah, what a lovely morning! Look at the hills. ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills.’ How wonderful the appreciation of natural beauty in the Psalms is,—‘Sweeter also than honey,’—so many of David’s similes are drawn from ordinary, every-day sensations, but lifted up, ennobled, dedicated. But how was it you were nearly late? I looked into your room before I started for church and found you had already gone!”
“I went down to bathe,” said Martin; “in fact, it was only the bell beginning that reminded me there was service at eight.”
Mr. Challoner looked at him a moment with a sort of appeal.
“But, dear Martin,” he said, “you did not come without preparation?”
“I am afraid I did,” said Martin, and the joy of his waking hours dropped utterly dead, while the hopelessness of the compact of the evening before rose close in front of him.
They took a turn up and down the lawn before going in, and his father very gently, but very firmly impressed on him the positive sin of his omission. His voice trembled with the earnestness of his feeling, for to him the danger of coming to the Communion unprepared was as vital as the need for coming. He hated to say what he felt he must say; it was so soon after their compact to try to understand one another, to get on without perpetual correction and admonishment. But this could not be left unsaid. Once it occurredto Martin to tell him the truth, to say, “I came in order to please you; otherwise I should not,” but the impulse passed. There was no need to give his father such pain as that; and he merely assented dully where assent was needed, said, “Yes, I see,” at intervals, and gave the promise required. But it was a dreary beginning to the day.
The Chartries pew, the only family pew remaining in the church, was well attended at the eleven o’clock service, Lady Sunningdale being, as usual, the brightest object present; indeed, among the rest of the congregation she resembled a bird of paradise which had by mistake found its way into a colony of sparrows. But what this violation of her habits in appearing so long before lunch had cost her none but her maid knew. However, there she was, and the colours of the spectroscope blossomed together in her hat, and in a fit of absence of mind, to which she was prone, she as nearly as possible put up a pink sunshade, forgetting where she was, to shield her from the sun which was shining through a mauve-coloured saint on to the middle of her face in a manner which she felt to be aggressive and probably unbecoming. So she moved to behind the shadow of a neighbouring pillar, from where, looking at the organ, she could see who sat there.
“Too heavenly,” she said in a shrill whisper to Stella Plympton. “Martin is at the organ. I’m afraid he won’t play the Brahms, though. What a pity it is not Good Friday; he would be sure to give us the Charfreitag music.”
That, however, was not to be, and instead the familiar strains of “O Rest in the Lord” were the prelude to which six choir-boys, four choir men, includingthe carpenter, who in a fluty falsetto sang a steady third below the trebles and believed it to be alto, advanced to their places. But Martin, in Lady Sunningdale’s opinion, could do no wrong, and again she whispered shrilly to Stella,—
“Is he not wonderful? That tune is exactly like the stained glass. It is absolutely the ‘air’ of the place. Look, there is Helen Challoner sitting with the choir. Is she not a dream? Tell Frank to look at her.”
But this was unnecessary, as Frank Yorkshire was already looking. He was a rather stout, very pleasant-faced young man of about thirty, with smooth flaxen hair, rather prominent blue eyes, and an expression of extraordinary amiability, which his character fully endorsed. He was remarkably adaptable, and while he would willingly talk flippancies with Lady Sunningdale, his tenantry adored him for his friendliness and his great common sense if the baby was ill or the pig would not put on flesh. In other respects he was a Baron of the realm, immensely wealthy, and unmarried, so that he was perpetually drenched by showers of eligible girls, whom aspiring mothers hurled at his head. These he returned with thanks, uninjured.
He had, in fact, many pleasant qualities and one notable one, which Lady Sunningdale had already mentioned as being characteristic of him, namely, his undeviating pursuit of the first-rate. It was this which turned a character that would otherwise have been rather materialistic into something of an idealist, and supplied a sort of religion to a mind which otherwise, an extremely rare phenomenon, was completely atheistic, not with an atheism into which he had drifted fromcarelessness orinsouciance, but with one that sprang from a reasoned and clear conviction that there could not possibly be any God whatever. On all other matters he had an open mind and was extremely willing to adopt any opinion that seemed to him reasonable, but on this one point he was hopelessly bigoted. This reasonableness and willingness to be convinced had led people to suppose that he was weak. But this was not in the least true, he was only fair. Another quality, and a fine one, was his also: he was practically unacquainted with fear, either physical or moral, and would, had he lived in those uncongenial times, have gone as cheerfully to the stake for his entire absence of religious beliefs as he would now blandly uphold his abhorrence of sport on the ground of cruelty to animals in a roomful of hunting-men. His faculty of reverence finally, of which he possessed a considerable measure, he exercised entirely over the talents of other people, on whatever line they ran. He knelt, for instance, at the shrine of Lady Sunningdale’s acute perceptions, he hung up votive offerings to Martin’s music, he even, at this moment, bowed the knee before the village carpenter, whose talent for singing the wrong note was of that instinctive and unerring quality which approaches genius.
He was a great friend of Martin’s. Helen he only knew slightly. And, after service, desultory conversation in the church-yard ended in the twins going back to lunch at Chartries. Though Mr. Challoner was opposed on principle to anything, however remote, connected with festivity taking place on Sunday, he raised no objection, merely reminded Helen that her Sunday-school class met at three. Lord Yorkshire, strolling byher, thought he heard anuanceof impatience in her assent, and his question had a touch of insincerity about it.
“Don’t you find that charming?” he asked. “I think there can be nothing so interesting as helping to form a child’s mind. It is so plastic—like modelling clay. You can mould it into any shape you choose!”
Helen glanced quickly at him.
“Do you really want to know if I find it charming?” she asked.
“Immensely.”
“I detest it. I don’t think they have any minds to mould. Why should one think they have? But they have shiny faces, and they fidget. And I point out Ur of the Chaldees on the map.”
He laughed.
“I suppose the chances are in favour of their not having minds, as you say,” he remarked. “But I had to allow for your delighting in it, when I started the subject. What do they think about then? Do they just chew their way through life like cows? You know some people don’t chew enough. I expect Martin doesn’t. But that is why he is so extraordinary.” There was intention in this, and it succeeded. Any one who admired Martin had found a short cut to his sister’s favour.
“Ah, Martin never chews,” she said. “I don’t think he ever thinks; he just—just blazes. Now, do tell me, Lord Yorkshire, because you know him well. He isn’t stupid, is he, because he can’t or doesn’t pass examinations?”
“He couldn’t conceivably be stupid, any more than I could be a Red Indian. But it is by a misguided ingenuitythat he contrives not to pass examinations. It is hardly worth while doing it.”
“Ah, do tell him that,” said Helen. “I think you have influence with him.”
“What on earth makes you think that?”
“He quotes you.”
“Are you sure you do not mean he mimics me? He does it to my face, too, so why not behind my back. It is quite admirable. Ah, I see he has shown you a specimen. Don’t I talk wonderfully like him? But influence,—one might as well sit down and think how to influence a flash of lightning.”
Helen considered this a moment.
“Well, there are such things as lightning-conductors,” she said. “Besides, there are times when Martin isn’t the least like a flash of lightning. He is often like a stagnant pool.”
“I don’t recognise that,” said Frank.
“No, you probably have never seen it.”
They had passed out of the narrow path from the church-yard during this, and their way lying across the open fields, Lady Sunningdale, as her habit was, annexed Frank as well as Martin.
“Dear Helen, it is too bad,” she said as she manœuvred. “You will have to go back immediately after lunch. What is a Sunday-school? It sounds so beautiful, like a hymn tune. Yes, I adore church-music; really there is nothing like it. And it was so wonderful of you to play the lucubrations of Mendelssohn, Martin.”
“Yes, I felt that, too,” said Frank, in his low, slow voice. “There was a stained-glass window just opposite me which was exactly like the tone-colour of Mendelssohn.A figure which I take to have been a prophet, probably minor, in jewelled slippers was directing an enamoured gaze towards a pink town,—which may or may not have been the New Jerusalem. I always wonder where artists in stained-glass get their botany from. Nameless herbs enveloped the feet of the minor prophet.”
Martin laughed.
“I know that window,” he said. “When I was little it used to come into my nightmares. Now it has become a daymare. I don’t know which is worst.”
Lady Sunningdale sighed.
“Church is very fatiguing,” she said. “I had quite forgotten how tiring it was. I shall not go any more for a year or two. Dear me, these tiresome shoes! And my darlings wanted to come with me. But that isn’t allowed, is it? It is only in Scotland that dogs go to church, I think. I went to Scotland once. I can’t bear the Scotch. They are so plain and so extremely truthful. There is nothing in the least unexpected about them. Dear me, there’s the other shoe. Yes, thank you, Martin. And they use a silly slang instead of talking English. Martin, I had a talk to your father yesterday about you. I really think I made an impression.”
“Telling the truth produces a very marked type of face,” said Frank, “and in later life mutton-chop whiskers. That is why one always engages butlers with mutton-chop whiskers. They are sure to be reliable. Truth-telling is quite incurable, and so has a certain claim to distinction.”
Martin listened to this with something of the air of aparrot “taking notice,” and then turned to Lady Sunningdale.
“Do you really mean that?” he asked, eagerly.
“Yes, of course I do. It seemed news to him that playing the piano could be taken seriously. And he took me seriously. There are my treasures come to meet me. I am so hungry. Don’t jump up, Suez Canal. My darlings!”
Helen, as Lady Sunningdale had mentioned, had to start back again for her Sunday-school soon after lunch. They had all moved out under the cedar on the lawn, and when she arose, Lord Yorkshire also got up and offered himself as an escort. This was perfectly agreeable to the girl, though she wondered exactly how high Aunt Clara’s eyebrows would rise if she knew that her niece might have been found walking on Sunday afternoon with a young man who could not possibly be brought under the elastic bonds of cousinship. But the eyebrows of Lady Sunningdale, who, it must be supposed, was chaperone, remained low and level, and the two started.
Frank had been admirably entertaining in his own way during lunch, capping the extravagancies of Lady Sunningdale with incongruities that rivalled her own, and giving wings of epigram and paradox to his speech; but Helen had received a very distinct impression that under his flippancy, which Martin imitated so faithfully, there lay something of sterling and very human solidity. And this unknown factor interested her quite apart from and much more than his conversational fireworks, which were as obviously superficial to the essential “he” as his eyebrow or moustache. Perhaps he also knew the unimportance of their leadings, for certainly, as soon as they were alone, such coruscations died slowly down, and it seemed to Helen that a very pleasant mellow light, restful after fireworks, took its place.
“I think it is unkind of you not to admit me into the school itself,” he was saying. “Why am I to be debarred from the knowledge of Ur of the Chaldees? Geography has an enormous fascination for me. I can pore for hours over maps of countries which I have never seen and almost certainly shall never see, just reading the names of unheard of places with gusto.”
“Ah, you feel that, too,” she said. “Martin always tells me I am a gypsy. Certainly I want to wander, to go on just for the sake of going on. The exploration, that is the point. And I think it is the playing at exploration that is so fascinating in a map. Dictionaries, too,—new words. And, best of all, new books with new ideas.”
“There is one thing better,” said he; “I cap your new books with new people, new ideas.”
The personal note entered, however slightly, into this, and Helen was silent a moment.
“Ah, but new books implies new people,” she said. “Nothing can be more real than the people in some books.”
“Quite true; and nothing can be less real than some people in real life. Do you know what I mean? One wonders with some people if there is anybody there. My impression is that there often isn’t.”
“I have an aunt——“ Helen began, and stopped, feeling that it was not quite kind to lay Aunt Clara on the dissecting-table.
Frank guessed this.
“Ah, I have three,” he said; “perhaps mine will do.”
Helen laughed, and, after a moment, he went on:
“I believe that curiosity which is a convenient expressionto sum up all this passion for the new,” he said, “is quite modern. I don’t think, at least, that the generation to which our aunts belong had it, with certain adorable exceptions, like Lady Sunningdale, anything like to the extent we have it. What was good enough for our grandfathers was nearly good enough for our fathers. But what was good enough for our fathers is not nearly good enough for us.”
She turned a quick, luminous glance at him. He was talking about things that very much concerned her.
“Ah, that is interesting,” she said, eagerly. “Give me more news of that.”
“It has struck you, too?” he asked.
“Your saying it reminds me that I knew it all the time.”
“I know what you mean. Yes, I think it is the case. At any rate, take yourself, Martin, and me,—all, I expect, quite normal people. Well, we all want to wander, to experience everything. We are probably not really afraid of any experience that could conceivably happen to us. And we claim the right to all experience. We claim the right to our own individuality, too. It seems to us quite certainly ours; the only possession we have which is inalienable. We may lose everything else, from our character to our teeth, but not our individuality. Do you remember how Magda throws her arms wide, and cries, ‘Son Io!’—‘I am I’? That somewhat important point had never struck her father or mother. Poor things! They thought she was a sort of them. Is that bad grammar?”
Their way lay at this point through one of the game covers, and a sudden piteous crying, dreadfully human,arose from the bushes near the path. Helen stopped with fright and horror in her face.
“A child—is it a child?” she asked.
“No; nearly as bad though,—a hare,” said he, and pushed his way through tangled bracken and brambles in the direction of the sound. In a moment he called to her.
“Will you come here, Miss Challoner?” he said. “Come round to the right: it is a clearer path.”
She followed his directions, and found him kneeling a few yards off, holding in both hands a hare that was caught by the hind-leg in a horrible jagged-toothed trap.
“Pull the two sides of the trap apart,” he said, “as quickly as you can. Be quick. The poor brute is struggling so I can hardly hold it.”
His voice was so changed that she would hardly have recognised it. It was no longer low and courteous, but sharp and angry. She knelt down by him and, exerting her full strength, did as he bade her. The leg was caught only by the skin, and holding the animal in one hand he gently disimpaled it where the iron teeth had clutched. But just as it was free a sudden tremor of nerves passed through Helen at this humane surgery; the trap slipped from her hand, and caught Frank’s finger just at the base of the nail. He took his breath quickly with the pain and let go of the hare, which, none the worse, ran off up the winding path down which they had come.
“I must trouble you to open the trap once more,” he said, the blood streaming from his finger. But now his voice was quite normal again.
“Oh, I’m an absolute fool,” cried Helen. “Oh,I’m so sorry,” and again she wrenched the trap open.
Frank was rather pale, but he laughed quite naturally.
“Thank you so much,” he said, as she released his finger. “What strong hands you have. But I should dearly like to clap that thing on the nose of the brute who set it. What an infernal contrivance. How can men be such butchers! I shall take it and show it to your uncle.”
He shook the blood off his finger and bound it tightly round with the handkerchief.
“Oh, Lord Yorkshire, I’m so sorry,” said Helen again. “I am an absolute born idiot. How could I be such a fool?”
He laughed again.
“My dear Miss Challoner,” he said, “nothing whatever has happened which can justify your violent language. Besides, it would have been worth while to set that poor, jolly beast free at the cost of real pain, and not just a finger-scratch. Well, we’ve vindicated the liberty of one individual anyhow. Did you see its eyes? They said ‘I am I,’ like Magda.”
He held the bushes back for her to regain the path.
“But you’ll have your finger attended to?” she said.
“Yes, at once, please. I’ll ask you to tie it rather tighter, if you don’t mind the sight of blood. I always think blood is such a beautiful colour,” he chattered on, to prevent her apologising further. “One talks of a blood-red sunset and admires it, and dragon’s-blood china; but when it comes to the real article, so many people shrink from it. That’s better,thanks; that’s excellent. I assure you it is nothing at all.”
His manner was so entirely natural that there was nothing left for her except to be natural too; and they walked on out of the cool, green-shadowed path, flecked here and there with the sunshine that filtered through the trees that met above them, into the blaze and brightness of the fields that bordered the church-yard.
“Yes, the cry of Magda for her right to her own individuality,” he said. “At last this generation has said, ‘I will lead my own life, not the life dictated to me by other people.’ I wonder what we shall make of it.”
Helen looked at him again, eagerly.
“And do you mean that the assertion of one’s own individuality is a duty?” she asked.
“Ah, that is a difficult question. Certainly, I think there are—are indications that one is supposed to play one’s hand for all it’s worth. But duty? Probably you and I mean different things by it.”
“I mean the will of God for me,” she said, simply.
They paused at the gate into the church-yard, and their eyes met. It seemed to Frank that she waited for his answer with some eagerness. And he shook his head.
“No, I don’t mean that,” he said.
She held out her hand to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I, very sorry, indeed. But I can’t help it.”
Her eyes wandered over the woods behind him. Then came back to his face.
“No, I recognise that,” she said. “Good-bye, Lord Yorkshire. Thank you so much for coming with me. And please have your finger attended to.”
She smiled at him and went up the church-yard path towards the shining corrugated-iron Room. As she passed the walk leading to the vicarage, she met her father.
“You are nearly ten minutes late, Helen,” he said.
“I know, dear. I am sorry. But you know you are late, too.”
He did not smile.
“I was detained by other parish work,” he said. “I was not amusing myself. Pray do not delay any longer.”