MRS. FULLERTON had gone to the study, to consult with her husband on some matter of domestic importance. It was a long, low-pitched room, situated in the part of the house that stood at right angles to the central block, with long, narrow windows looking on to a rough orchard. A few old portraits, very yellow and somewhat grotesque, hung on the walls; a wood fire burnt on the hob-grate, and beside it stood a vast arm chair, considerably worn, with depressions shewing where its owner had been leaning his head, day after day, when he smoked his pipe, or took his after-dinner nap. The bookshelves were stocked with scientific works, and some volumes on philosophy of a materialistic character. With the exception of Robert Burns, not one poet was represented.
The owner of the house sat before a big writing-table, which was covered with papers. His face was that of a hard thinker; the head was fine in form, the forehead broad and high; the features regular, almost severe. The severity was softened by a genial expression. Mrs. Fullerton, though also obviously above the average of humanity, shewed signs of incomplete development. The shape of the head and brow promised many faculties that the expression of the face did not encourage one to expect. She was finely built; and carried herself with dignity. When her daughters accompanied her on a round of calls in the neighbourhood, they expressed a certain quality in her appearance, in rough and ready terms: “Other married women always look such fools beside mother!”
And they did.
Mrs. Fullerton wore her fine black hair brushed neatly over her forehead; her eyes were large, and keen in expression. The mouth shewed determination. It was easy to see that this lady had unbounded belief in her husband’s wisdom, except in social matters, for which he cared nothing. On that point she had to keep her ambitions to herself. In questions of philosophy, she had imbibed his tenets unmodified, and though she went regularly every Sunday to the close little Scottish church at Ballochcoil, she had no more respect than her husband had, for the doctrines that were preached there.
“No doubt it is all superstition and nonsense,” she used to say, “but in this country, one can’t afford to fly in the face of prejudice. It would seriously tell against the girls.”
“Well, have your own way,” Mr. Fullerton would reply, “but I can’t see the use of always bothering about what people will think. What more do the girls want than a good home and plenty of lawn-tennis? They’ll get husbands fast enough, without your asphyxiating yourself every Sunday in their interests.”
In her youth, Mrs. Fullerton had shewn signs of qualities which had since been submerged. Her husband had influenced her development profoundly, to the apparent stifling of every native tendency. A few volumes of poetry, and other works of imagination, bore testimony to the lost sides of her nature.
Mr. Fullerton thought imagination “all nonsense,” and his wife had no doubt he was right, though there was something to be said for one or two of the poets. The buried impulses had broken out, like a half-smothered flame, in her children, especially in her younger daughter. Singularly enough, the mother regarded these qualities, partly inherited from herself, as erratic and annoying. The memory of her own youth taught her no sympathy.
It was a benumbed sort of life that she led, in her picturesque old home, whose charm she perceived but dimly with the remnants of her lost aptitudes.
“Picturesque!” Mr. Fullerton used to cry with a snort; “why not say ‘unhealthy’ and be done with it?”
From these native elements of character, modified in so singular a fashion in the mother’s life, the children of this pair had drawn certain of their peculiarities. The inborn strength and authenticity of the parents had transmuted itself, in the younger generation, to a spirit of free enquiry, and an audacity of thought which boded ill for Mrs. Fullerton’s ambitions. The talent in her daughters, from which she had hoped so much, seemed likely to prove a most dangerous obstacle to their success. Why was it that clever people were never sensible?
The gong sounded for luncheon. Austin put his head in at the door of the study, to ask if his father would shew him a drop of ditch-water through the microscope, in the afternoon.
“If you will provide the ditch-water, I will provide the microscope,” promised Mr. Fullerton genially.
Luncheon, usually a merry meal at Dunaghee, passed off silently. There was a sense of oppression in the air. Algitha and her sister made spasmodic remarks, and there were long pauses. The conversation was chiefly sustained by the parents and the ever-talkative Fred.
The latter had some anecdotes to tell of the ravages made by wasps.
“If Buchanan would only adopt my plan of destroying them,” said Mr. Fullerton, “we should soon get rid of the pest.”
“It’s some chemical, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Fullerton.
“Oh, no; that’s no use at all! Wasps positively enjoy chemicals. What you do is this——.” And then followed a long and minute explanation of his plan, which had the merit of extreme originality.
Mr. Fullerton had his own particular way of doing everything, a piece of presumption which was naturally resented, with proper spirit, by his neighbours. He found it an expensive luxury. In the management of the estate, he had outraged the feelings of every landlord and land-agent within a radius of many miles, but he gained the affection of his tenants, and this he seemed to value more than the approval of his fellow-proprietors. In theory, he stuck out for his privileges; in practice, he was the friend and brother of the poorest on the estate. In his mode of farming he was as eccentric as in his method of management. He had taken Croachmore into his own hands, and this devoted farm had become the subject of a series of drastic scientific experiments, to the great grief and indignation of his bailiff.
Mrs. Fullerton believed implicitly in the value of these experiments, and so long as her husband tried science only on the farm she had no misgivings; but, alas, he had lately taken shares in some company, that was to revolutionize agriculture through an ingenious contrivance for collecting nitrogen from the atmosphere. Mr. Fullerton was confident that the new method was to be a gigantic success. But on this point, his wife uneasily shook her head. She had even tried to persuade Mr. Fullerton to rid himself of his liability. It was so great, she argued, and why should one be made anxious? But her husband assured her that she didn’t understand anything about it; women ought not to meddle in business matters; it was a stupendous discovery, sure to make the fortunes of the original shareholders.
“When once the prejudice against a new thing has been got over,” said the man of science, “you will see——the thing will go like wild-fire.”
Many years afterwards, these words were remembered by Mrs. Fullerton, and she bitterly regretted that she had not urged the matter more strenuously.
“Well, Algitha,” said her father, wondering at her silence, “how are the roses getting on? And I hope you have not forgotten the sweet-brier that you promised to grow for me.”
“Oh, no, father, the sweet-brier has been ordered,” returned Algitha, without her usual brightness of manner.
“Have you a headache?” enquired Mrs. Fullerton. “I hope you have not all been sitting up talking in Hadria’s room, as you are too fond of doing. You have the whole day in which to express your ideas, and I think you might let the remainder wait over till morning.”
“Wewererather late last night,” Algitha confessed.
“Pressure of ideas overpowering,” added Fred.
“WhenIwas young, ideas would never have been tolerated in young people for a moment,” said Mrs. Fullerton, “it would have been considered a mark of ill-breeding. You may think yourselves lucky to be born at this end of the century, instead of the other.”
“Indeed we do!” exclaimed Ernest. “It’s getting jolly interesting!”
“In some respects, no doubt we have advanced,” observed his mother, “but I confess I don’t understand all your modern notions. Everybody seems to be getting discontented. The poor want to be rich, and the rich want to be millionaires; men want to do their master’s work, and women want to do men’s; everything is topsy-turvy!”
“The question is: What constitutes being right side up?” said Ernest. “One can’t exactly say what is topsy-turvy till one knowsthat.”
“When I was young we thought wedidknow,” said Mrs. Fullerton, “but no doubt we are old-fashioned.”
When luncheon was over, Mr. Fullerton went to the garden with his family, according to a time-honoured custom. His love of flowers sometimes made Hadria wonder whether her father also had been born with certain instincts, which the accidents of life had stifled or failed to develop. Terrible was the tyranny of circumstance! What had Emerson been dreaming of?
Mr. Fullerton, with a rose-bud in his button-hole, went off with the boys for a farming walk. Mrs. Fullerton returned to the house, and the sisters were left pacing together in the sheltered old garden, between two rows of gorgeous autumn flowers.
Hadria felt sick with dread of the coming interview.
Algitha was buoyed up, for the moment, by a strong conviction that she was in the right.
“It can’t be fair even for parents to order one’s whole life according to their pleasure,” she said. “Other girls submit, I know——”
“And so the world is full of abortive, ambiguous beings, fit for nothing. The average woman always seem to me to bemuffled——or morbid.”
“That’s whatIshould become if I pottered about here much longer,” said Algitha—“morbid; and if there is one thing on the face of the earth that I loathe, it is morbidness.”
Both sisters were instinctively trying to buttress up Algitha’s courage, by strengthening her position with additional arguments.
“Is it fair,” Hadria asked, “to summon children into the world, and then run up bills against them for future payment? Why should one not see the bearings of the matter?”
“In theory one can see them clearly enough; but it is poor comfort when it comes to practice.”
“Oh, seeing the bearings of things isalwayspoor comfort!” exclaimed the younger sister, with sudden vehemence. “Upon my word, I think it is better, after all, to absorb indiscriminately whatever idiotcy may happen to be around one, and go with the crowd.”
“Nonsense!” cried Algitha, who had no sympathy with these passionate discouragements that alternated, in Hadria, with equally passionate exaltations.
“When you have gone, I will ask Mrs. Gordon to teach me the spirit of acquiescence, and one of those distracting games—bésique or halma, or some of the other infernal pastimes that heaven decrees for recalcitrant spirits in need of crushing discipline.”
“I think I see you!” Algitha exclaimed with a dispirited laugh.
“It will be a trial,” Hadria admitted; “but it is said that suffering strengthens the character. You may look forward before long, to claiming as sister a creature of iron purpose.”
“I wonder, I wonder,” cried Algitha, bending her fine head; “we owe everything to her.”
“I know we do. It’s of no use disguising the unpleasant side of the matter. A mother disappointed in her children must be a desperately unhappy woman. She has nothing left; for has she not resigned everything for them? But is sacrifice for ever to follow on sacrifice? Is life to go rolling after life, like the cheeses that the idiot in the fable sent running downhill, the one to fetch the other back?”
“Yes, for ever,” said Algitha, “until a few dare to break through the tradition, and then everyone will wonder at its folly. If only I could talk the matter over, in a friendly spirit, with mother, but she won’t let me. Ah! if it were not that one is born with feelings and energies and ambitions of one’s own, parents might treat one as a showman treats his marionettes, and we should all be charmed to lie prone on our backs, or to dance as may be convenient to our creators. But, as it is, the life of a marionette—however affectionate the wire-pullers—does become monotonous after a time.”
“As to that,” said the younger sister, with a little raising of the brows, as if half shrinking from what she meant to say, “I think most parents regard their children with such favourable eyes, not so much because they aretheyas because they aretheirs.”
The sisters paced the length of the garden without speaking. Then Hadria came to a standstill at the sun-dial, at the crossing of the paths, and began absently to trace the figures of the hours, with the stalk of a rose.
“After all,” she said, “parents are presumably not actuated by humanitarian motives in bringing one into this wild world. They don’t even profess to have felt an unselfish desire to see one enjoying oneself at their expense (though, as a matter of fact, what enjoyment one has generallyisat their expense). People are always enthusiastically congratulated on the arrival of a new child, though it be the fourteenth, and the income two hundred a year! This seems to point to a pronounced taste for new children, regardless of the consequences!”
“Oh, of course,” said Algitha, “it’s one of the canons! Women, above all, are expected to jubilate at all costs. And I think most of them do, more or less sincerely.”
“Very well then,” cried Hadria, “it is universally admitted that children are summoned into the world to gratify parental instincts. Yet the parents throw all the onus of existence, after all, upon the children, and makethempay for it, and apologise for it, and justify it by a thousand sacrifices and an ever-flowing gratitude.”
“I am quite ready to give gratitude and sacrifice too,” said Algitha, “but I don’t feel that I ought to sacrificeeverythingto an idea that seems to me wrong. Surely a human being has a right to his own life. If he has not that, what, in heaven’s name,hashe?”
“Anything but that!” cried Hadria.
While the momentous interview was going on, Hadria walked restlessly up and down the garden, feverishly waiting. The borders were brilliant with vast sunflowers, white lilies, and blazing “red-hot pokers” tangled together in splendid profusion, a very type of richness and glory of life. Such was the sort of existence that Hadria claimed from Fate. Her eyes turned to the bare, forlorn hills that even the August sunshine could not conjure into sumptuousness, and there she saw the threatened reality.
When at last Algitha’s fine figure appeared at the further end of the path, Hadria hastened forward and took her sister’s arm.
“It was worse than I had feared,” Algitha said, with a quiver in her voice. “IknowI am right, and yet it seems almost more than I am equal for. When I told mother, she turned deadly white, and I thought, for a moment, that she was going to faint. Let’s sit down on this seat.”
“Oh, it was horrible, Hadria! Mother must have been cherishing hopes about us, in a way that I don’t think she quite knew herself. After that first moment of wretchedness, she flew into a passion of rage—that dreadful, tearing anger that people only feel when something of themselves is being wrenched away from them. She said that her children were all bad and unnatural; that she had spent her whole life in their interests; that if it had not been for her, we should all of us have grown up without education or accomplishments, or looks, or anything else; that she watched over us incessantly when we were little children, denying herself, spending her youth in devotion to us, when she might have gone into the world, and had some brightness and pleasure. If we imagined that she had never felt the dulness of her life, and never longed to go about and see people and things, we were much mistaken. But she had renounced everything she cared for, from her girlhood—she was scarcely older than I when her sacrifices began—and now her children gave no consideration to her; they were ready to scatter themselves hither and thither without a thought of her, or her wishes. They even talked scoffingly of the kind of life that she had led forthem—forthem, she repeated bitterly.”
Hadria’s face had clouded.
“Truly parents must have a bad time of it!” she exclaimed, “but does it really console them that their children should have a bad time of it too?”
Algitha was trembling and very pale.
“Mother says I shall ruin my life by this fad. What real good am I going to do? She says it is absurd the way we talk of things we know nothing about.”
“But she won’t let us know about things; one must talk aboutsomething!” cried Hadria with a dispirited laugh.
“She says she has experience of life, and we are ignorant of it. I reminded her that our ignorance was not exactly our fault.”
“Ah! precisely. Parents throw their children’s ignorance in their teeth, having taken precious good care to prevent their knowing anything. I can’t understand parents; they must have been young themselves once. Yet they seem to have forgotten all about it. They keep us hoodwinked and infantile, and then launch us headlong into life, with all its problems to meet, and all momentous decisions made for us, past hope of undoing.” Hadria rose restlessly in her excitement. “Surely no creature was ever dealt with so insanely as the well-brought-up girl! Surely no well-wisher so sincere as the average parent ever ill-treated his charge so preposterously.”
Again there was a long silence, filled with painful thought. “One begins to understand a little, why women do things that one despises, and why the proudest of them so often submit to absolute indignity. You remember when Mrs. Arbuthnot and——”
“Ah, don’t!” cried Algitha, flushing. “Nothingought to induce a woman to endure that.”
“H’m——I suspect the world that we know nothing about, Algitha, has ways and means of applying the pressure such as you and I scarcely dream of.” Hadria spoke with half-closed eyes that seemed to see deep and far. “I have read and heard things that have almost taken my breath away! I feel as if I couldkillevery man who acquiesces in the present order of things. It is an insult to every woman alive!”
In Hadria’s room that night, Algitha finally decided to delay her going for another six months, hoping by that time that her mother would have grown used to the idea, and less opposed to it. Mr. Fullerton dismissed it, as obviously absurd. But this high-handed treatment roused all the determination that Algitha had inherited from her father. The six months had to be extended, in order to procure funds. Algitha had a small income of her own, left her by her godmother, Miss Fortescue. She put aside this, for her purpose. Further delay, through Mrs. Trevelyan, brought the season round again to autumn, before Algitha was able to make her final preparations for departure.
“Do try and reconcile them to the idea,” she said to her sister, as they stood on the platform of Ballochcoil station, very white and wretched-looking.
“It breaks my heart to see father look so fixed and angry, and mother so miserable. I am not going away for ever. Dear me, a day’s journey will bring me back, at any time.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Hadria, “here’s your train; what a clumsy instrument of fate it does look!”
There was not much time for farewells. In a few minutes the train was steaming out of the station. A solitary figure stood on the platform, watching the monster curving and diminishing along the line, with its white smoke soaring merrily into the air, in great rolling masses, that melted, as if by some incantation, from thick, snow-like whiteness to rapid annihilation.
AS Hadria drove over the winding upland road back to her home, her thoughts followed her sister into her new existence, and then turned wistfully backwards to the days that had been marked off into the past by Algitha’s departure. How bright and eager and hopeful they had all been, how full of enthusiasm and generous ambitions! Even as they talked of battle, they stretched forth their hands for the crown of victory.
At the last meeting of the Preposterous Society, Ernest had repeated a poem of his favourite Emerson, calledDays, and the poem, which was familiar to Hadria, sounded in her memory, as the pony trotted merrily along the well-known homeward way.
“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,Muffled and dumb, like barefoot Dervishes,And marching single in an endless file,Bring diadems and faggots in their hands.To each they offer gifts after his will,Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,Forgot my morning wishes, hastilyTook a few herbs and apples, and the DayTurned and departed silent. I, too late,Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”
“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,Muffled and dumb, like barefoot Dervishes,And marching single in an endless file,Bring diadems and faggots in their hands.To each they offer gifts after his will,Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,Forgot my morning wishes, hastilyTook a few herbs and apples, and the DayTurned and departed silent. I, too late,Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”
In spite of Hadria’s memorable lecture of a year ago, it was still the orthodox creed of the Society, that Circumstance is the handmaid of the Will; that one can demand of one’s days “bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky,” and that the Days will obediently produce the objects desired. If one has but the spirit that can soar high enough to really be resolved upon stars, or the ambition sufficiently vaulting to be determined on kingdoms, then—so ran the dogma—stars and kingdoms would be forthcoming, though obstacles were never so determined. No member except Hadria had ever dreamt of insinuating that one might have a very pronounced taste for stars and kingdoms—nay, a taste so dominant that life would be worthless unless they were achieved—yet might be forced, by the might of events, to forego them. Hadria’s own heresy had been of the head rather than of the heart. But to-day, feeling began to share the scepticism of the intellect.
What if one’s stars and kingdoms lay on the further side of a crime or a cruelty?
What then was left but to gather up one’s herbs and apples, and bear, as best one might, the scorn of the unjust Days?
Hadria cast about in her mind for a method of utilizing to the best advantage possible, the means at her disposal: to force circumstance to yield a harvest to her will. To be the family consolation meant no light task, for Mrs. Fullerton was exacting by nature: she had given much, and she expected much in return. Her logic was somewhat faulty, but that could not be gracefully pointed out to her by her daughter. Having allowed her own abilities to decay, Mrs. Fullerton had developed an extraordinary power of interfering with the employment of the abilities of others. Hadria had rather underrated than exaggerated this difficulty. Her mother would keep her for hours, discussing a trivial point of domestic business, giving elaborate directions about it, only to do it herself in the end. She spent her whole life in trifles of this kind, or over social matters. Everything was done cumbrously, with an incredible amount of toil and consideration, and without any noticeable results. Hadria, fighting against a multitude of harassing little difficulties, struggled to turn the long winter months to some use. But Mrs. Fullerton broke the good serviceable time into jagged fragments.
“I really can’t see,” said the mother, when the daughter proposed to set apart certain hours for household duties, and to have other portions of the day to herself, “I really can’t see why a girl’s little occupations should be treated with so much consideration. However, I have no wish for grudging assistance.”
Hadria’s temper was far indeed from perfect, and painful scenes often occurred. But as a rule, she would afterwards be seized with a fit of remorse, knowing that her mother was suffering bitterly from her keen disappointment about Algitha. The failure of a life-long hope must try the endurance of the bravest. Mrs. Fullerton, seeing that Hadria was more patient, quickly took advantage of the favourable moment, with a rapid instinct that had often done her good service in the management of a niggard destiny. The valuable mood must not be allowed to die fruitless. The elder girl’s defection thus became, to the mother, a sort of investment, bearing interest of docility in the younger. Because the heartless Algitha had left home, it seemed to Mrs. Fullerton that the very least that Hadria could do, was to carry out her mother’s lightest wish.
And so the weeks went by, in dreary, troublous fashion, cut into a hundred little barren segments. The mind had no space, or stretch, or solitude. It was incessantly harassed, and its impetus was perpetually checked. But Hadria hoped on. This could not last for ever. Some day, doubtless, if she sank not in spirit, the stars and the kingdoms would come.
Meanwhile, the position of affairs was decidedly ridiculous. She was here as the family consolation, and nobody seemed to be consoled! Her efforts had been sincere and even enthusiastic, but the boys only laughed at her, in this rôle, and nobody was apparently in the least gratified (except those imps of boys!).
For a long time, Mrs. Fullerton seemed to be oblivious of her daughter’s efforts, but one day, when they had been talking about Algitha, the mother said: “Your father and I now look to you, Hadria. I do think that you are beginning to feel a little what your duty is. Ifyoualso were to turn deserter in our old age, I think it would kill us.”
Hadria felt a thrill of horror. The network of Fate seemed to be fast closing round her. The temporary was to become fixed. She must act all her days according to the conviction of others, or her parents would die of grief!
When she went to the hills that afternoon, she felt as if she must walk on and on into the dreamy distance, away from all these toils and claims, away into the unknown world and never return. But, alas! the night descended and return she must. These wild impulses could never be followed.
The day had been peculiarly harassing and cut up; some neighbours had been to afternoon tea and tennis, and the sight of their faces and the sound of their talk had caused, in Hadria, an unutterable depression. The light, conventional phrases rang in her ears still, the expression of the faces haunted her, and into her heart crept a chill that benumbed every wish and hope and faith that she had ever cherished.
She sat up late into the night. Since freedom and solitude could not be had by day, the nights were often her sole opportunity. At such times she would work out her musical ideas, which in the dead silence of the house were brought forth plentifully. These, from her point of view, were the fruitful hours of the twenty-four. Thoughts would throng the darkness like swarms of living things.
Hadria’s mood found expression to-night in a singular and most melancholy composition. She called itFutility.
It was unlike anything that she had ever done before, and she felt that it shewed an access of musical power.
She dreamt an absurd dream: That she was herself one of those girls with the high pattering accents, playing tennis without ceasing and with apparent cheerfulness; talking just as they had talked, and about just the same things; and all the time, a vast circle of shadowy forms stood watching, beckoning, and exhorting and warning, and turning away, at last, in sorrowful contempt, because she preferred to spend her youth eternally in futilities. And then they all slowly drifted by with sad eyes fixed on her, and she was still left playing, playing. And it seemed as if whole weeks passed in that way, and she grew mortally tired, but some power prevented her from resting. The evil spell held her enthralled. Always cheerful, always polite and agreeable, she continued her task, finding herself growing accustomed to it at last, and duly resigned to the necessity, wearisome though it was. Then all hope that the game would ever cease went away, and she played on, mechanically, but always with that same polite cheerfulness, as of afternoon calls. She would not for the world admit that she was tired. But she was so tired that existence became a torture to her, and her heart seemed about to break with the intolerable strain—when she woke up with a start, and found herself lying in a constrained attitude, half-choked by the bed-clothes.
She did not see the comic side of the dream till next morning, when she told it at breakfast for the benefit of the family.
As Hadria was an ardent tennis-player, it struck her brethren as a particularly inappropriate form of nightmare.
Hadria, at this time, went frequently with her father on his farming walks, as he liked to have one or more of the family with him. She enjoyed these walks, for Mr. Fullerton would talk about philosophy and science, often of the most abstruse and entrancing kind. His children were devoted to him. During these expeditions, they always vied with one another to ferret out the most absurd story to tell him, he being held as conqueror who made their father laugh most heartily. Sometimes they all went in a body, armed with wild stories; and occasionally, across the open fields, a row of eccentric-looking figures might be seen, struggling in the grip of hilarious paroxysms; Mr. Fullerton doubled up in the middle of a turnip-field, perhaps, with his family in contortions round him. The air of the hills seemed to run to their heads, like wine. Roulades of laughter, hearty guffaws, might have been heard for surprising distances, much to the astonishment of the sober labourers bending over their toil.
Ernest had to go back to college; Fred and Austin to school. The house seemed very quiet and sad after the boys left, and Hadria missed her sister more and more, as time went on.
Algitha wrote most happily.
“With all its drawbacks, this existence of hard work (yet not too hard) suits me exactly. It uses up my energies; yet, in spite of the really busy life I lead, I literally have more leisure than I used to have at home, where all through the day, there was some little detail to be attended to, some call to make, some convention to offer incense to, some prejudice to respect. Here, once my day’s work is over, itisover, and I have good solid hours of leisure. I feel that I have earned those hours when they come; also that I have earned a right to my keep, as Wilfrid Burton, the socialist, puts it somewhat crudely. When I go to bed at night, I can say: ‘Because of me, this day, heavy hearts have been made a little lighter.’ I hear all sorts of opinions, and see all sorts of people. I never was so happy in my life.”
It was Hadria’s habit still to take solitary rambles over the country. A passionate lover of Nature, she found endless pleasure in its ever-changing aspects. Yet of late, a new feeling had begun to mutter angrily within her: a resentment against these familiar sights and sounds, because they were the boundaries of her horizon. She hated the line of the round breezy hills where the row of fir-trees stood against the sky, because that was the edge of her world, and she wanted to see what was beyond. She must and would see what was beyond, some day. Her hope was always vague; for if she dared to wonder how the curtain of life was to be lifted, she had to face the fact that there was no reasonable prospect of such a lifting. Still, the utter horror of living on always, in this fashion, seemed to prove it impossible.
On one dim afternoon, when the sun was descending, Hadria’s solitary figure was noticed by a white-haired lady, presumably a tourist, who had stopped to ask a question of some farm labourers, working in a field. She ceased to listen to the information, on the subject of Dunaghee, that was given to her in a broad Scottish dialect. The whole scene, which an instant before had impressed her as one of beauty and peace, suddenly focussed itself round the dark figure, and grew sinister in its aspect. At that moment, nothing would have persuaded the onlooker that the hastening figure was not hastening towards misfortune.
A woman of impulse, she set off in purposeless pursuit. Hadria’s pace was very rapid; she was trying to outrun thought. It was impossible to live without hope, yet hope, in this forlorn land, was growing faint and tired.
Her pursuer was a remarkable-looking woman, no longer young, with her prematurely white hair drawn up from her brow with a proud sweep that suited well her sharply defined features and her air of defiance. She was carelessly dressed after the prevailing fashion, and gave the impression of not having her life successfully in hand, but rather of being driven by it, as by a blustering wind, against her inclination.
The impression which had seized her, a moment ago, deepened as she went. Something in the scene and the hastening figure roused a sense of dread. With her, an impression was like a spark to gunpowder. Her imagination blazed up. Life, in its most tragic aspect, seemed before her in the lonely scene, with the lonely figure, moving, as if in pursuit of a lost hope, towards the setting sun.
If Hadria had not paused on the brow of the hill, it is unlikely that she would have been overtaken, but that pause decided the matter. The stranger seemed suddenly to hesitate, wondering, apparently, what she had done this eccentric thing for.
Hadria, feeling a presence behind her, turned nervously round and gave a slight start.
It was so rare to meet anybody on these lonely hills, that the apparition of a striking-looking woman with white hair, dark eyes, and a strange exalted sort of expression, gave a shock of surprise.
As the lady had stopped short, Hadria supposed that she had lost her way, and wished to make some enquiries.
“Can I direct you, or give you any assistance?” she asked, after a second’s pause.
“Oh, thank you, you are very kind. I have come over from Ballochcoil to explore the country. I have been trying to find out the history of the old houses of the district. Could you tell me, by the way, anything about that house with the square tower at the end; I have been loitering round it half the afternoon. And I would have given anything to know its history, and what it is like inside.”
“Well, I can help you there, for that old house is my home. If you have time to come with me now, I will show you all over it,” said Hadria, impulsively.
“That is too tempting an offer. And yet I really don’t like to intrude in this way. I am a perfect stranger to you and—your parents I suppose?”
“They will be delighted,” Hadria assured her new acquaintance, somewhat imprudently.
“Well, I can’t resist the temptation,” said the latter, and they walked on together.
Hadria related what she knew about the history of the house. Very scanty records had survived. It had obviously been one of the old Scottish strongholds, built in the lawless days when the country was plunged in feuds and chieftains lived on plunder. A few traditions lingered about it: among them that of a chief who had carried off, by force, the daughter of his bitterest enemy, in revenge for some deed of treachery. He had tortured her with insolent courtship, and then starved her to death in a garret in the tower, while her father and his followers assaulted its thick walls in vain.
“The tradition is, that on stormy nights one can still hear the sound of the attack, the shouts of the men and the father’s imprecations.”
“A horrible story!”
“When people say the world has not progressed, I always think of that story, and remember that such crimes were common in those days,” Hadria remarked.
“I doubt if we are really less ferocious to-day,” the other said; “our ferocity is directed against the weakest, now as then, but there are happily not so many weak, so we get the credit of being juster, without expense. As a matter of fact, our opportunities are less, and so we make a virtue of necessity—with a vengeance!”
Hadria looked at her companion with startled interest. “Will you tell me to whom I have the pleasure of speaking?” the lady asked.
“My name is Fullerton—Hadria Fullerton.”
“Thank you. And here is my card, at least I think it is. Oh, no, that is a friend’s card! How very tiresome! I am reduced to pronouncing my own name—Miss Du Prel, Valeria Du Prel; you may know it.”
Hadria came to a sudden standstill. She might know it! she might indeed. Valeria Du Prel had long been to her a name to swear by.
“Miss Du Prel! Is that—are you—may I ask, are you the writer of those wonderful books?”
Miss Du Prel gave a gratified smile. “I am glad they please you.”
“Ah! if you could guess how I have longed to know you. I simply can’t believe it.”
“And so my work has really given you pleasure?”
“Pleasure! It has given me hope, it has given me courage, it has given me faith in all that is worth living for. It was an epoch in my life when I first read yourParthenia.”
Miss Du Prel seemed so genuinely pleased by this enthusiasm that Hadria was surprised.
“I have plenty of compliments, but very seldom a word that makes me feel that I have spoken to the heart. I feel as if I had called in the darkness and had no response, or like one who has cried from the house-tops to a city of the dead.”
“And I so often thought of writing to you, but did not like to intrude,” cried Hadria.
“Ah! if you onlyhadwritten to me!” Miss Du Prel exclaimed.
Hadria gazed incredulously at the familiar scene, as they approached the back of the house, with its round tower and its confusion of picturesque, lichen-covered roofs. An irregular circle of stately trees stood as sentinels round the stronghold.
After all, something did happen, once in a while, in this remote corner of the universe, whose name, Hadria used to think, had been erased from the book of Destiny. She was perhaps vaguely disappointed to find that the author ofPartheniawore ordinary human serge, and a cape cut after the fashion of any other person’s cape. Still, she had no idea what supersensuous material she could reasonably have demanded of her heroine (unless it were the mythic “bombazine” that Ernest used to talk about, in his ignorant efforts to describe female apparel), or what transcendental form of cape would have satisfied her imagination.
“You have a lovely home,” said Valeria Du Prel, “you must be very happy here.”
“Would you be happy here?”
“Well, of course that would depend. I am, I fear, too roving by nature to care to stay long in one place. Still I envy girls their home-life in the country; it is so healthy and free.”
Hadria, without answering, led her companion round the flank of the tower, and up to the front door. It was situated in the angle of the wings, a sheltered nook, hospitably careful of the guest, whom the winds of the uplands were disposed to treat but roughly.
Hadria and her companion entered a little panelled hall, whence a flight of broad stairs with stout wooden balusters, of quaint design, led to the first floor.
The visitor was charmed with the quiet old rooms, especially with Hadria’s bedroom in the tower, whose windows were so deep-set that they had to be approached through a little tunnel cut out of the thickness of the wall. The windows looked on to the orchard at the back, and in front over the hills. Miss Du Prel was taken to see the scene of the tragedy, and the meeting-room of the Preposterous Society.
“You must see the drawing-room,” said Hadria.
She opened a door as she spoke, and ushered her visitor into a large, finely-proportioned room with three tall windows of stately form, divided into oblong panes, against which vagrant sprays of ivy were gently tapping.
This room was also panelled with painted wood; its character was quiet and stately and reposeful. Yet one felt that many human lives had been lived in it. It was full of the sentiment of the past, from the old prints and portraits on the walls, to the delicate outlines of the wooden mantel-piece, with its finely wrought urns and garlands.
Before this mantel-piece, with the firelight flickering in her face, sat Mrs. Fullerton, working at a large piece of embroidery.
For the first time, Hadria hesitated. “Mother,” she said, “this is Miss Du Prel. We met out on the hills this afternoon, and I have brought her home to see the house, which she admires very much.”
Mrs. Fullerton had looked up in astonishment, at this incursion into her very sanctuary, of a stranger met at haphazard on the hills. Hadria wheeled up an easy-chair for the visitor.
“I fear Miss Du Prel will not find much to see in the old house,” said Mrs. Fullerton, whose manner had grown rigid, partly because she was shy, partly because she was annoyed with Hadria for her impulsive conduct, and largely because she disliked the idea of a literary acquaintance for her daughter, who was quite extraordinary enough as it was.
“We have been all over the house,” said Hadria hastily, with an anxious glance at Miss Du Prel, whom she half expected to rise and walk out of the room. It must surely be the first time in her life that her presence had not been received as an honour!
“It is all very old and shabby,” said Mrs. Fullerton. “I hope you will take some tea; if you have walked far to-day, you must be cold and in need of something to eat.”
“Oh no, no, thank you,” returned the visitor; “I ought to be getting back to Ballochcoil to-night.”
“To Ballochcoil!” exclaimed mother and daughter in simultaneous dismay. “But it is nearly seven miles off, and the sun is down. You can’t get back to-night on foot.”
“Dear me, can I not? I suppose I forgot all about getting back, in the interest of the scenery.”
“What an extraordinary person!” thought Mrs. Fullerton.
Miss Du Prel glanced helplessly at Hadria; rising then and looking out of the window at the dusk, which had come on so rapidly. “Dear me, how dark it has grown! Still I think I can walk it, or perhaps I can get a fly at some inn on the way.”
“Can we offer you a carriage?” asked Mrs. Fullerton.
“Oh no, thank you; that is quite unnecessary. I have already intruded far too long; I shall wend my way back, or what might perhaps be better, I could get a lodging at the farmhouse down the road. I am told that they put travellers up sometimes.”
Miss Du Prel hurried off, evidently chilled by Mrs. Fullerton’s freezing courtesy. Hadria, disregarding her mother’s glance of admonition, accompanied the visitor to the farm of Craw Gill, having first given directions to old Maggie to put together a few things that Miss Du Prel would require for the night. Hadria’s popularity at the farm, secured her new friend a welcome. Mrs. McEwen was a fine example of the best type of Scottish character; warm of heart, honest of purpose, and full of a certain unconscious poetry, and a dignity that lingers still in districts where the railway whistle is not too often heard. Miss Du Prel seemed to nestle up to the good woman, as a child to its mother after some scaring adventure. Mrs. McEwen was recommending a hot water-bottle and gruel in case of a chill, when Hadria wended her way homeward to brave her mother’s wrath.
“ICANNOT make you realize that you are an ignorant girl who knows nothing of the world, and that it is necessary you should accept my experience, and condescend to be guided by my wishes. You put me in a most unpleasant position this afternoon, forcing me to receive a person whom I have never been introduced to, or heard of——”
“Valeria Du Prel has been heard of throughout the English-speaking world,” said Hadria rhetorically.
“So much the worse,” retorted Mrs. Fullerton. “No nicely brought up woman is ever heard of outside her own circle.”
Hadria recalled a similar sentiment among the ancient Greeks, and thought how hard an old idea dies.
“She might have been some awful person, some unprincipled adventuress, and that I believe is what she is. What was she prowling about the back of our house for, I should like to know?”
“I suspect she wanted to steal chickens or something,” Hadria was goaded into suggesting, and the interview ended painfully.
When Hadria went to Craw Gill, next morning, to enquire for Miss Du Prel, Mrs. McEwen said that the visitor had breakfasted in bed. The farmer’s wife also informed Miss Fullerton that the lady had decided to stay on at Craw Gill, for some time. She had been looking out for a retreat of the kind.
“She seems a nice-like body,” said Mrs. McEwen, “and I see no objection to the arrangement.”
Hadria’s heart beat faster. Could it be possible that Valeria du Prel was to be a near neighbour? It seemed too good to be true!
When Miss Du Prel came down in her walking garments, she greeted Hadria with a certain absence of mind, which smote chill upon the girl’s eagerness.
“I wanted to know if you were comfortable, if I could do anything for you.” Miss Du Prel woke up.
“Oh no, thank you; you are very kind. I am most comfortable—at least—it is very strange, but I have lost my keys and my umbrella and my handbag—I can’t think what I can have done with them. Oh, and my purse is gone too!”
Whereupon Mrs. McEwen in dismay, Mr. McEwen (who then appeared), the maid, and Hadria, hunted high and low for the missing properties, which were brought to light, one by one, in places where their owner had already “thoroughly searched,” and about which she had long since abandoned hope.
She received them with mingled joy and amazement, and having responded to Mrs. McEwen’s questions as to what she would like for dinner, she proposed to Hadria that they should take a walk together.
Hadria beamed. Miss Du Prel seemed both amused and gratified by her companion’s worship, and the talk ran on, in a light and pleasant vein, differing from the talk of the ordinary mortal, Hadria considered, as champagne differs from ditch-water.
In recording it for Algitha’s benefit that evening, Hadria found that she could not reproduce the exhilarating quality, or describe the influence of Miss Du Prel’s personality. It was as if, literally, a private and particular atmosphere had encompassed her. She was “alive all round,” as her disciple asserted.
Her love of Nature was intense. Hadria had never before realized that she had been without full sympathy in this direction. She awoke to a strange retrospective sense of solitude, feeling a new pity for the eager little child of years ago, who had wandered up to the garret, late at night, to watch the moonlight spread its white shroud over the hills.
With every moment spent in the society of Valeria Du Prel, new and clearer light seemed to Hadria, to be thrown upon all the problems of existence; not by any means only through what Miss Du Prel directly said, but by what she implied, by what she took for granted, by what she omitted to say.
“It seems like a home-coming from long exile,” Hadria wrote to her sister. “I have been looking through a sort of mist, or as one looks at one’s surroundings before quite waking. Now everything stands out sharp and cut, as objects do in the clear air of the South. Ah me, the South! Miss Du Prel has spent much of her life there, and my inborn smouldering passion for it, is set flaming by her descriptions! You remember that brief little fortnight that we spent with mother and father in Italy? I seem now to be again under the spell of the languorous airs, the cloudless blue, the white palaces, the grey olive groves, and the art, the art! Oh, Algitha, I must go to the South soon, soon, or I shall die of home sickness! Miss Du Prel says that this is only one side of me breaking out: that I am northern at heart. I think it is true, but meanwhile the thought of the South possesses me. I confess I think mother had some cause to be alarmed when she saw Miss Du Prel, if she wants to keep us in a chastened mood, at home. It seems as if all of me were in high carnival. Life is raised to a higher power. I feel nearly omnipotent. Epics and operas are child’s play to me! It is true I have produced comparatively few; but, oh, those that are to come! I feel fit for anything, from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter. I think of the two, I rather lean to the manslaughter. Oh, I don’t mean it in the facetious sense! that would be a terrible downfall from my present altitudes. To such devices the usual wretched girl, who has never drawn rebellious breath, or listened to the discourses of Valeria Du Prel, has to turn for a living, or to keepennuiat bay. ButI, no, the inimical sex may possess their souls in peace, as far as I am concerned. They might retort that they neverhadfelt nervous, but a letter has the same advantage as the pulpit: the adversary can never get up and contradict.
“That ridiculous adversary, Harold Wilkins, is staying again at Drumgarren, and I hear from Mrs. Gordon that he thinks it very strange that I should see so much of so extraordinary a person as Miss Du Prel! Opinions differ of course;Ithink it very strange that the Gordons should see so much of so ordinary a person as Mr. Wilkins. Everybody makes much of him here, and, alas! all the girls run after him, and even fall in love with him; why, I can’t conceive. For if driven by dire compulsion of fate, to bend one’s thoughts uponsomeprosaic example of that prosaic sex, why not choose one of the many far more attractive candidates available—the Gordons, the McKenzies, and so forth? When I go to tennis parties with mother—they are still playing upon the asphalte courts—and see the little dramas that go on, the jealousies and excitements, and general much-ado-about-nothing, I can scarcely believe that Miss Du Prel really belongs to the same planet as ours. But I don’t feel so contemptuous as I did; it is so pitiful. Out of my great wealth I can afford to be more generous.
“And when I see those wretched girls fluttering round Mr. Wilkins, I no longer turn up my ‘aughty nose’ (as old Mrs. Brooks used to say). I only think to myself, ‘Heavens and earth! what an aching, empty life those young women must lead, if they are actually reduced for interest and amusement to the utterances of Mr. Wilkins!’ They would have the pull of one though, if the utterances of Mr. Wilkins were the only utterances to be heard! Perish the thought of such beggary!”
The talks with Valeria Du Prel grew more intimate, and more deeply interesting to Hadria, every day.
Miss Du Prel used often to look at her companion in amazement. “Wheredidyou come from?” she exclaimed on one occasion. “One would suppose you had lived several lives; you seem toknowthings in such a subtle, intimate fashion!”
She used to ponder over the problem, wondering what Professor Fortescue would say to it. There appeared to be more here than mere heredity could account for. But science had never solved this problem; originality seemed always to enter upon its career, uncaused and unaccountable. It was ever a miraculous phenomenon. The Professor had always said so. Still the heritage was rich enough, in this case. Heredity might have some discoverable part in the apparent marvel. Each member of the Fullerton family had unusual ability of some kind. Their knowledge of science, and their familiarity with the problems of philosophy, had often astonished Miss Du Prel. Hadria’s accounts of the Preposterous Society made her laugh and exclaim at the same moment. She gave an envious sigh at the picture of the eager little group, with their warmth of affection for one another, and their vivid interests. Miss Du Prel, with all her sadness, was youthful in spirit. Hadria found her far younger than many girls of her own age. This set her thinking. She observed how rigid most people become in a few years, and how the personality grows wooden, in the daily repetition of the same actions and the same ideas. This stiffening process had been attributed to the malice of Time; but now Hadria began to believe that narrow and ungenerous thought lay at the root of the calamity. The entire life of the little world in which she had grown up, on all its sides, in all its ideals and sentiments, stood before her, as if some great painter had made a picture of it. She had never before been able to stand so completely apart from the surroundings of her childhood. And she was able to do so now, not because Miss Du Prel discoursed about it, but because Hadria’s point of view had shifted sympathetically to the point of view of her companion, through the instinctive desire to see how these familiar things would look to alien eyes. That which had seemed merely prosaic and dreary, became characteristic; the very things which she had taken most for granted were exactly those which turned out to be the significant and idiomatic facts.
These had made permanent inroads into the mind and character. It was with these that Hadria would have to reckon all her days, under whatever conditions she might hereafter be placed. Daily surroundings were not merely pleasant or unpleasant facts, otherwise of no importance; they were the very material and substance of character; the push and impetus, or the let and hindrance; the guardians or the assassins of the soul.
MISS DU PREL had promised to allow Hadria to drive her to Darachanarvan, a little town on the banks of the river, about seven miles across country.
Hadria was in high spirits, as they trundled along the white roads with the wind in their faces, the hills and the blue sky spread out before them, the pleasant sound of the wheels and the trotting of the pony setting their thoughts to rhythm.
The trees were all shedding their last yellow leaves, and the air was full of those faded memories of better days, whirling in wild companies across the road, rushing upward on the breast of some vagabond gust, drifting, spinning, shuddering along the roadside, to lie there at last, quiet, among a host of brothers, with little passing tremors, as if (said Valeria) they were silently sobbing because of their banishment from their kingdom of the air.
Miss Du Prel, though she enjoyed the beauty of the day and the scenery, seemed sad of mood. “This weather recalls so many autumns,” she said. “It reminds me too vividly of wonderful days, whose like I shall never see again, and friends, many of whom are dead, and many lost sight of in this inexorable coming and going of people and things, this inexorable change that goes on for ever. I feel as if I should go mad at times, because it will not stop, either in myself or others.”
“Ah, that is a dreadful thought!”
“It comes to me so insistently, perhaps, because of my roving life,” she said.
She paused for a moment, and then she fell into one of her exalted moods, when she seemed to lose consciousness of the ordinary conditions around her, or rather to pierce deeper into their significance and beauty. Her speech would, at such times, become rhythmic and picturesque; she evidently saw vivid images before her, in which her ideas embodied themselves.
“Most people who live always in one place see the changes creeping on so gradually that they scarcely feel them, but with me this universal flux displays itself pitilessly, I cannot escape. Go where I will, there is something to measure the changes by. A shoal of yellow leaves whispers to me of seasons long ago, and the old past days, with their own intimate character that nothing ever repeats, flash before me again with the vividness of yesterday; and a flight of birds—ah! if I could express what they recall! The dead years pass again in a great procession, a motley company—some like emperors, crowned and richly dowered, with the sound of trumpets and the tramping of many obsequious feet; and others like beggars, despoiled and hungry, trudging along a dusty high road, or like grey pilgrims bound, with bleeding feet, for a far-off shrine.”
They entered a little beech-wood, whose leaves made a light of their own, strange and mystical.
“Yours must have been a wonderful life!” said Hadria.
“Yes, I have seen and felt many things,” answered Miss Du Prel, stirred by the intoxication of the motion and the wind and the sunlight, “life has been to me a series of intense emotions, as it will be to you, I fear——”
“You fear?” said Hadria.
“Yes; for that means suffering. If you feel, you are at the mercy of all things. Every wind that blows uses you as an Æolian harp.”
“That must be charming, at least for those who live in your neighbourhood,” said Hadria.
“No; for often the harp rings false. Its strings get loosened; one hangs slack and jars, and where then is your harmony?”
“One would run the risk of many things rather than let one’s strings lie dumb,” said Hadria.
“What a dangerous temperament you have!” cried Valeria, looking round at the glowing face beside her.
“I must take my risks,” said Hadria.
“I doubt if you know what risks there are.”
“Then I must find out,” she answered.
“One plays with fire so recklessly before one has been burnt.”
Hadria was silent. The words sounded ominous.
“Will can do so much,” she said at length. “Do you believe in the power of the human will to break the back of circumstance?”
“Oh, yes; but the effort expended in breaking its back sometimes leaves one prone, with a victory that arrives ironically too late. However I don’t wish to discourage you. There is no doubt that human will has triumphed over everything—but death.”
Again the sound of the pony’s hoofs sounded through the silence, in a cheerful trot upon the white roads. They were traversing an open, breezy country, chequered with wooded hollows, where generally a village sought shelter from the winds. And these patches of foliage were golden and red in the meditative autumn sunshine, which seemed as if it were a little sad at the thought of parting with the old earth for the coming winter.
“I think the impossible lesson to learn would be renouncement,” said Hadria. “I cannot conceive how anyone could say to himself, while he had longings and life still in him, ‘I will give up this that I might have learnt; I will stop short here where I might press forward; I will allow this or that to curtail me and rob me of my possible experience.’”
“Well, I confess that has been my feeling too, though I admire the spirit that can renounce.”
“Admire? Oh, yes, perhaps; though I am not so sure that the submissive nature has not been too much glorified—in theory. Nobody pays much attention to it in practice, by the way.”
Miss Du Prel laughed. “What an observant young woman you are.”
“Renunciation is always preached to girls, you know,” said Hadria—“preached to them when as yet they have nothing more than a rattle and a rag-doll to renounce. And later, when they set about the business of their life, and resign their liberty, their talents, their health, their opportunity, their beauty (if they have it), then people gradually fall away from the despoiled and obedient being, and flock round the still unchastened creature who retains what the gods have given her, and asks for more.”
“I fear you are indeed a still unchastened creature!”
“Certainly; there is no encouragement to chasten oneself. People don’t stand by the docile members of Society. They commend their saints, but they drink to their sinners.”
Miss Du Prel smiled.
“It is true,” she admitted. “A woman must not renounce too much if she desires to retain her influence.”
“Pas trop de zèle,” Hadria quoted.
“There is something truly unmanageable about you, my dear!” cried Valeria, much amused. “Well, I too have had just that sort of instinct, just that imperious demand, just that impatience of restraint. I too regarded myself and my powers as mine to use as I would, responsible only to my own conscience. I decided to have freedom though the heavens should fall. I was unfitted by temperament to face the world, but I was equally unfitted to pay the price for protection—the blackmail that society levies on a woman: surrender of body and of soul. What could one expect, in such a case, but disaster? I often envy now the simple-minded woman who pays her price and has her reward—such as it is.”
“Ah! such as it is!” echoed Hadria.
“Who was it said, the other day, that she thought a wise woman always took things as they were, and made the best of them?”
“Some dull spirit.”
“And yet a practical spirit.”
“I am quite sure,” said Hadria, “that the stokers of hell are practical spirits.”
“Your mother must have had her work cut out for her when she undertook to bring you up,” exclaimed Miss Du Prel.
“So she always insinuates,” replied Hadria demurely.
They were spinning down hill now, into a warm bit of country watered by the river, and Hadria drew rein. The spot was so pleasant that they alighted, tied the pony to a tree, and wandered over the grass to the river’s edge. Hadria picked her way from stone to slippery stone, into the middle of the river, where there was comparatively safe standing room. Here she was suddenly inspired to execute the steps of a reel, while Valeria stood dismayed on the bank, expecting every moment, to see the dance end in the realms of the trout.
But Hadria kept her footing, and continued to step it with much solemnity. Meanwhile, two young men on horseback were coming down the road; but as a group of trees hid it from the river at this point, they were not noticed. The horsemen stopped suddenly when they cleared the group of trees. The figure of a young woman in mid-stream, dancing a reel with extreme energy and correctness, and without a smile, was sufficiently surprising to arrest them.
“As I thought,” exclaimed Hadria, “it is Harold Wilkins!”
“I shall be glad to see this conquering hero,” said Valeria.
Hadria, who had known the young man since her childhood, waited calmly as he turned his horse’s head towards the river, and advanced across the grass, raising his hat. “Good morning, Miss Fullerton.”
“Good morning,” Hadria returned, from her rock.
“You seem to be having rather an agreeable time of it.”
“Very. Are you fond of dancing?”
Mr. Wilkins was noted, far and wide, for his dancing, and the question was wounding.
He was tall and loosely built, with brown expressionless eyes, dark hair, a pink complexion, shelving forehead, and a weak yet obstinate mouth. His companion also was tall and dark, but his face was pale, his forehead broad and high, and a black moustache covered his upper lip. He had raised his hat gracefully on finding that the dancer in mid-stream was an acquaintance of his companion, and he shewed great self-possession in appearing to regard the dancing of reels in these circumstances, as an incident that might naturally be expected. Not a sign of surprise betrayed itself in the face, not even a glimmer of curiosity. Hadria was so tickled by this finished behaviour under difficulties, that she took her cue from it, and decided to treat the matter in the same polished spirit. She too would take it all decorously for granted.
Mr. Wilkins introduced his friend: Mr. Hubert Temperley. Hadria bowed gracefully in reply to Mr. Temperley’s salute.
“Don’t you feel a little cramped out there?” asked Mr. Wilkins.
“Dear me, no,” cried Hadria in mock surprise. “What could induce you to suppose I would come out here if I felt cramped?”
“Are you—are you thinking of coming on shore? Can I help you?”
“Thank you,” replied Hadria. “This is a merely temporary resting-place. We ought to be getting on; we have some miles yet to drive,” and she hurried her friend away. They were conducted to the pony-cart by the cavaliers, who raised their hats, as the ladies drove off at a merry pace, bowing their farewells.
“The eternal riddle!” Temperley exclaimed, as they turned the corner of the road.
“What is the eternal riddle?” Harold Wilkins enquired.
“Woman, woman!” Temperley replied, a little impatiently. He had not found young Wilkins quick to catch his meaning during the two hours’ ride, and it occurred to him that Miss Fullerton would have been a more interesting companion.
He made a good many enquiries about her and her family, on the way back to Drumgarren.
“We are invited to tennis at their house, for next Tuesday,” said Harold, “so you will have a chance of pursuing the acquaintance. For my part, I don’t admire that sort of girl.”
“Don’t you? I am attracted by originality. I like a woman to have something in her.”
“Depends on what it is. I hate a girl to have a lot of silly ideas.”
“Perhaps you prefer her to have but one,” said Temperley, “that one being that Mr. Harold Wilkins is a charming fellow.”
“Nothing of the kind,” cried Harold. “I can’t help it if girls run after me; it’s a great bore.”
Temperley laughed. “You, like Achilles, are pursued by ten thousand girls. I deeply sympathize, though it is not an inconvenience that has troubled me, even in my palmiest days.”
“Why, how old are you? Surely you are not going to talk as if those days were over?”
“Oh, I am moderately palmy still!” Temperley admitted. “Still, the hour approaches when the assaults of time will become more disastrous.”
“You and Hadria Fullerton ought to get on well together, for she is very musical,” said Harold Wilkins.
“Ah!” cried Temperley with new interest. “I could have almost told that from her face. Does she play well?”
“Well, I suppose so. She plays things without any tune that bore one to death, but I daresay you would admire it. She composes too, I am told.”
“Really? Dear me, I must make a point of having a talk with her, on the earliest opportunity.”
Meanwhile, the occupants of the pony-cart had arrived at Darachanarvan, where they were to put up the pony and have luncheon. It was a prosaic little Scottish town, with only a beautiful survival, here and there, from the past.
After luncheon, they wandered down to the banks of the river, and watched the trout and the running water. Hadria had long been wishing to find out what her oracle thought about certain burning questions on which the sisters held such strong, and such unpopular sentiments, but just because the feeling was so keen, it was difficult to broach the subject.
An opportunity came when Miss Du Prel spoke of her past. Hadria was able to read between the lines. When a mere girl, Miss Du Prel had been thrown on the world—brilliant, handsome, impulsive, generous—to pass through a fiery ordeal, and to emerge with aspirations as high as ever, but with her radiant hopes burnt out. But she did not dwell on this side of the picture; she emphasized rather, the possibility of holding on through storm and stress to the truth that is born in one; to belief in “the noblest and wildest hopes (if you like to call them so) that ever thrilled generous hearts.”
But she gave no encouragement to certain of her companion’s most vehement sentiments. She seemed to yearn for exactly that side of life from which the younger shrank with so much horror. She saw it under an entirely different aspect. Hadria felt thrown back on herself, lonely once more.
“You have seen Mrs. Gordon,” she said at length, “what do you think of her?”
“Nothing; she does not inspire thought.”
“Yet once she was a person, not a thing.”
“If a woman can’t keep her head above water in Mrs. Gordon’s position, she must be a feeble sort of person.”
“I should not dare to say that, until I had been put through the mill myself, and come out unpulverised.”
Miss Du Prel failed to see what there was so very dreadful in Mrs. Gordon’s lot. She had, perhaps, rather more children than was necessary, but otherwise——
“Oh, Miss Du Prel,” cried Hadria, “you might be a mere man! That is just what my brothers say.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Miss Du Prel. “Do explain.”
“Do you actually—youof all people—not recognize and hate the idea that lies so obviously at the root of all the life that is swarming round us——?”