“After that the Deluge!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel. “You describe the features of a great revolution.”
“So much the better,” said Hadria; “and when the waters sink again, a nice fresh clean world!”
ON the lawn of the Red House, a little group was collected under the big walnut tree. The sunlight fell through the leaves on the singing tea-kettle and the cups and saucers, and made bright patches on the figures and the faces assembled round the tea-table.
Hubert Temperley had again brought his friend Joseph Fleming, in the forlorn hope, he said, of being able to give him something to eat and drink. Ernest and Algitha and Fred were of the party. They had come down from Saturday till Monday. Ernest was studying for the Bar. Fred had entered a merchant’s office in the city, and hated his work cordially. Miss Du Prel was still at the Red House.
Lady Engleton had called by chance this afternoon, and Mrs. Walker, the vicar’s wife, with two of her countless daughters, had come by invitation. Mrs. Walker was a middle-aged, careworn, rather prim-looking woman. Lady Engleton was handsome. Bright auburn hair waved back in picturesque fashion from a piquant face, and constituted more than half her claim to beauty. The brown eyes were bright and vivacious. The mouth was seldom quite shut. It scarcely seemed worth while, the loquacious lady had confessed. She showed a delicate taste in dress. Shades of brown and russet made a fine harmony with her auburn hair, and the ivory white and fresh red of her skin.
She and Temperley always enjoyed a sprightly interchange of epigrams. Lady Engleton had the qualities that Hubert had admired in Hadria before their marriage, and she was entirely free from the other characteristics that had exasperated him so desperately since that hideous mistake that he had made. Lady Engleton had originality and brilliancy, but she knew how to combine these qualities with perfect obedience to the necessary conventions of life. She had the sparkle of champagne, without the troublesome tendency of that delicate beverage to break bounds, and brim over in iridescent, swelling, joyous foam, the discreet edges of such goblets as custom might decree for the sunny vintage. Lady Engleton sparkled, glowed, nipped even at times, was of excellent dry quality, but she never frothed over. She always knew where to stop; she had the genius of moderation. She stood to Hadria as a correct rendering of a cherished idea stands to a faulty one. She made Hubert acutely feel his misfortune, and shewed him his lost hope, his shattered ideal.
“Is the picture finished?” he enquired, as he handed Lady Engleton her tea.
“What, the view from your field? Not quite. I was working at it when Claude Moreton and Mrs. Jordan and Marion arrived, and I have been rather interrupted. That’s the worst of visitors. One’s little immortal works do get put aside, poor things.”
Lady Engleton broke into the light laugh that had become almost mechanical with her.
“Your friends grudge the hours you spend in your studio,” said Temperley.
“Oh, they don’t mind, so long as I give them as much time as they want,” she said. “I have to apologise and compromise, don’t you know, but, with a little management, one can get on. Of course, society does ask a good deal of attention, doesn’t it? and one has to be so careful.”
“Just a little tact and thought,” said Temperley with a sigh.
Lady Engleton admired Algitha, who was standing with Ernest a little apart from the group.
“She is like your wife, and yet there is a singular difference in the expression.”
Lady Engleton was too discreet to say that Mrs. Temperley lacked the look of contentment and serenity that was so marked in her sister’s face.
“Algitha is a thoroughly sensible girl,” said the brother-in-law.
“I hear you have not long returned from a visit to Mr. Fullerton’s place in Scotland, Mr. Temperley,” observed the vicar’s wife when her host turned to address her.
“Yes,” he said, “we have been there half the summer. The boys thoroughly enjoyed the freedom and the novelty. The river, of course, was a source of great joy to them, and of hideous anxiety to the rest of us.”
“Of course, of course,” assented Mrs. Walker. “Ah, there are the dear little boys. Won’t you come and give me a kiss, darling?”
“Darling” did what was required in a business-like manner, and stood by, while the lady discovered in him a speaking likeness to his parents, to his Aunt Algitha and his Uncle Fred, not to mention the portrait of his great-grandfather, the Solicitor-General, that hung in the dining-room. The child seemed thoroughly accustomed to be thought the living image of various relations, and he waited indifferently till the list was ended.
“Do you know, we are half hoping that Professor Fortescue may be able to come to us for a week or ten days?” said Lady Engleton. “We are so looking forward to it.”
“Professor Fortescue is always a favourite,” remarked Mrs. Walker. “It is such a pity he does not return to the Priory, is it not?—a great house like that standing empty. Of course it is very natural after the dreadful event that happened there”—Mrs. Walker lowered her voice discreetly—“but it seems a sin to leave the place untenanted.”
Lady Engleton explained that there was some prospect of the house being let at last to a friend and colleague of the Professor. Mrs. Walker doubtless would remember Professor Theobald, who used to come and stay at Craddock Place rather frequently some years ago, a big man with beard and moustache, very learned and very amusing.
Mrs. Walker remembered him perfectly. Her husband had been so much interested in his descriptions of a tour in Palestine, all through the scenes of the New Testament. He was a great archæologist. Was he really coming to the Priory? How very delightful. John would be so glad to hear it.
“Oh, it is not settled yet, but the two Professors are coming to us some time soon, I believe, and Professor Theobald will look over the house and see if he thinks it would be too unmanageably big for himself and his old mother and sister. I hope he will take the place. He would bring a new and interesting element into the village. What do you think of it, Mrs. Temperley?”
“Oh, I hope the learned and amusing Professor will come,” she said. “The worst of it is, from my point of view, that I shall have to give up my practices there. Professor Fortescue allows me to wake the old piano from its long slumbers in the drawing-room.”
“Oh, of course. Marion Jordan was telling me that she was quite startled the other day, in crossing the Priory garden, to hear music stealing out of the apparently deserted house. She had heard the country people say that the ghost of poor Mrs. Fortescue walks along the terrace in the twilight, and Marion looked quite scared when she came in, for the music seemed to come from the drawing-room, where its mistress used to play so much after she was first married. I almost wonder you can sit alone there in the dusk, considering the dreadful associations of the place.”
“I am used to it now,” Mrs. Temperley replied, “and it is so nice and quiet in the empty house. One knows one can’t be interrupted—unless by ghosts.”
“Well, that is certainly a blessing,” cried Lady Engleton. “I think I shall ask Professor Fortescue to allow me also to go to the Priory to pursue my art in peace and quietness; a truly hyperborean state, beyond the region of visitors!”
“There would be plenty of room for a dozen unsociable monomaniacs like ourselves,” said Mrs. Temperley.
“I imagine you are a God-send to poor Mrs. Williams, the caretaker,” said Joseph Fleming. “She is my gamekeeper’s sister, and I hear that she finds the solitude in that vast house almost more than she can stand.”
“Poor woman!” said Lady Engleton. “Well, Mr. Fleming, what are the sporting prospects this autumn?”
He pulled himself together, and his face lighted up. On that subject he could speak for hours.
Of Joseph Fleming his friends all said: The best fellow in the world. A kinder heart had no man. He lived on his little property from year’s end to year’s end, for the sole and single end of depriving the pheasants and partridges which he bred upon the estate, of their existence. He was a confirmed bachelor, living quietly, and taking the world as he found it (seeing that there was a sufficiency of partridges in good seasons); trusting that there was a God above who would not let the supply run short, if one honestly tried to do one’s duty and lived an upright life, harming no man, and women only so much as was strictly honourable and necessary. He spoke ill of no one. He was diffident of his own powers, except about sport, wherein he knew himself princely, and cherished that sort of respect for woman, thoroughly sincere, which assigns to her a pedestal in a sheltered niche, and offers her homage on condition of her staying where she is put, even though she starve there, solitary and esteemed.
“Do tell me, Mr. Fleming, if you know, who is that very handsome woman with the white hair?” said Lady Engleton. “She is talking to Mrs. Walker. I seem to know the face.”
“Oh, that is Miss Valeria Du Prel, the authoress of those books that Mrs. Walker is so shocked at.”
“Oh, of course; how stupid of me. I should like to have some conversation with her.”
“That’s easily managed. I don’t think she and Mrs. Walker quite appreciate each other.”
Lady Engleton laughed.
Mrs. Walker was anxiously watching her daughters, and endeavouring to keep them at a distance from Miss Du Prel, who looked tragically bored.
Joseph Fleming found means to release her, and Lady Engleton’s desire was gratified. “I admire your books so much, Miss Du Prel, and I have so often wished to see more of you; but you have been abroad for the last two years, I hear.”
Lady Engleton, after asking the authoress to explain exactly what she meant by her last book, enquired if she had the latest news of Professor Fortescue. Lady Engleton had heard, with regret, that he had been greatly worried about that troublesome nephew whom he had educated and sent to Oxford.
“The young fellow had been behaving very badly,” Miss Du Prel said.
“Ungrateful creature,” cried Lady Engleton. “Running into debt I suppose.”
Miss Du Prel feared that the Professor was suffering in health. He had been working very hard.
“Oh, yes; what was that about some method of killing animals instantaneously to avoid the horrors of the slaughter-house? Professor Theobald has been saying what a pity it is that a man so able should waste his time over these fads. It would never bring him fame or profit, only ridicule. Every man had his little weakness, but this idea of saving pain to animals, Professor Theobald said, was becoming a sort of mania with poor Fortescue, and one feared that it might injure his career. He was greatly looked up to in the scientific world, but this sort of thing of course——
“Though it is nice of him in a way,” added Lady Engleton.
“His weaknesses are nobler than most people’s virtues,” said Miss Du Prel.
“Then you number this among his weaknesses?”
Algitha, who had joined the group, put this question.
“I would rather see him working in the cause of humanity,” Miss Du Prel answered.
Ernest surprised everyone by suggesting that possibly humanity was well served, in the long run, by reminding it of the responsibility that goes with power, and by giving it an object lesson in the decent treatment of those who can’t defend themselves.
“You must have sat at the Professor’s feet,” cried Miss Du Prel, raising her eyebrows.
“I have,” said Ernest, with a little gesture of pride.
Lady Engleton shook her head. “I fear he flies too high for ordinary mortals,” she said; “and I doubt if even he can be quite consistent at that altitude.”
“Better perhaps fly fairly high, and come down now and again to rest, if one must, than grovel consistently and always,” observed Ernest.
Lady Engleton gave a little scream. “Mrs. Temperley, come to the rescue. Your brother is calling us names. He says we grovel consistently and always.”
Ernest laughed, and protested. Lady Engleton pretended to be mortally offended. Mrs. Temperley was sorry she could give no redress. She had suffered from Ernest’s painful frankness from her youth upwards.
The conversation grew discursive. Lady Engleton enjoyed the pastime of lightly touching the edges of what she called “advanced” thought. She sought the society of people like the two Professors and Miss Du Prel in order to hear what dreadful and delightful things they really would say. She read all the new books, and went to the courageous plays that Mrs. Walker wouldn’t mention.
“Your last book,Caterina, is a mine of suggestion, Miss Du Prel,” she said. “It raises one most interesting point that has puzzled me greatly. I don’t know if you have all read the book? The heroine finds herself differing in her view of life from everyone round her. She is married, but she has made no secret of her scorn for the old ideals, and has announced that she has no intention of being bound by them.”
Mrs. Temperley glanced uneasily at Miss Du Prel.
“Accordingly she does even as she had said,” continued Lady Engleton. “She will not brook that interference with her liberty which marriage among us old-fashioned people generally implies. She refuses to submit to the attempt that is of course made (in spite of a pre-nuptial understanding) to bring her under the yoke, and so off she goes and lives independently, leaving husband and relatives lamenting.”
The vicar’s wife said she thought she must be going home. Her husband would be expecting her.
“Oh, won’t you wait a little, Mrs. Walker? Your daughters would perhaps like a game of tennis with my brothers presently.”
Mrs. Walker yielded uneasily.
“But beforeCaterinatakes the law into her own hands, in this way,” Lady Engleton continued, “she is troubled with doubts. She sometimes wonders whether she ought not, after all, to respect the popular standards (notwithstanding the compact), instead of disturbing everybody by clinging to her own. Now was it strength of character or obstinate egotism that induced her to stick to her original colours, come what might? That is the question which the book has stated but left unanswered.”
Miss Du Prel said that the book showed, if it showed anything, that one must be true to one’s own standard, and not attempt to respect an ideal in practice that one despises in theory. We are bound, she asserted, to produce that which is most individual within us; to be ourselves, and not a poor imitation of someone else; to dare even apparent wrong-doing, rather than submit to live a life of devotion to that which we cannot believe.
Mrs. Walker suggested to her daughters that they might go and have a look at the rose-garden, but the daughters preferred to listen to the conversation.
“In real life,” said the practical Algitha, “Caterinawould not have been able to follow her idea so simply. Supposing she had had children and complicated circumstances, what could she have done?”
Miss Du Prel thought that a compromise might have been made.
“A compromise by which she could act according to two opposite standards?”
Valeria was impatient of difficulties. It was not necessary that a woman should leave her home in order to be true to her conscience. It was the best method inCaterina’scase, but not in all.
Miss Du Prel did not explain very clearly what she meant. Women made too much of difficulties, she thought. Somehow peoplehadmanaged to overcome obstacles. Look at—and then followed a list of shining examples.
“I believe you would blame a modern woman who imitated them,” said Mrs. Temperley. “These women have the inestimable advantage of being dead.”
“Ah, yes,” Lady Engleton agreed, with a laugh, “we women may be anything we like—in the last century.”
“The tides of a hundred years or so sweeping over one’s audacious deed, soften the raw edges. Then it is tolerated in the landscape; indeed, it grows mossy and picturesque.” Mrs. Temperley made this comparison.
“And then think how useful it becomes to prove that a daring deedcanbe done, given only the necessary stuff in brain and heart.”
Mrs. Walker looked at Algitha in dismay.
“One can throw it in the teeth of one’s contemporaries,” added Algitha, “if they fail to produce a dramatic climax of the same kind.”
“Only,” said Mrs. Temperley, “if theydoventure upon their own dreadful deed—the deed demanded by their particular modern predicament—then we all shriek vigorously.”
“Oh, we shriek less than we used to,” said Lady Engleton. “It is quite a relief to be able to retain one’s respectability on easier terms.”
“In such a case as Miss Du Prel depicts? I doubt it.Caterina, in real life, would have a lively story to tell. How selfish we should think her! How we should point to the festoons of bleeding hearts that she had wounded—a dripping cordon round the deserted home! No; I believe Miss Du Prel herself would be horrified at her ownCaterinaif she came upon her unexpectedly in somebody’s drawing-room.”
There was a laugh.
“Of course, a great deal is to be said for the popular way of looking at the matter,” Lady Engleton observed. “This fascinating heroine must have caused a great deal of real sorrow, or at least shewouldhave caused it, were it not that her creator had considerably removed all relatives, except a devoted couple of unorthodox parents, who are charmed at her decision to scandalize society, and wonder why she doesn’t do it sooner. Parents like that don’t grow on every bush.”
Mrs. Walker glanced nervously at her astonished girls.
Lady Engleton pointed out that hadCaterinabeen situated in a more ordinary manner, she would have certainly broken her parents’ hearts and embittered their last years, to say nothing of the husband and perhaps the children, who would have suffered for want of a mother’s care.
“But why should the husband suffer?” asked Algitha. “Caterina’shusband cordially detested her.”
“It is customary to regard the occasion as one proper for suffering,” said Mrs. Temperley, “and every well-regulated husband would suffer accordingly.”
“Clearly,” assented Lady Engleton. “When the world congratulates us we rejoice, when it condoles with us we weep.”
“That at least, would not affect the children,” said Algitha. “I don’t see why of necessitytheyshould suffer.”
“Their share of the woe would be least of all, I think,” Mrs. Temperley observed. “What ogre is going to ill-treat them? And since few of us know how to bring up so much as an earth-worm reasonably, I can’t see that it matters so very much which particular woman looks after the children. Any average fool would do.”
Mrs. Walker was stiffening in every limb.
“The children would have the usual chances of their class; neither more nor less, as it seems to me, for lack of a maternal burnt-offering.”
Mrs. Walker rose, gathered her daughters about her, and came forward to say good-bye. She was sure her husband would be annoyed if she did not return. She retired with nervous precipitation.
“Really you will depopulate this village, Mrs. Temperley,” cried Lady Engleton with a laugh; “it is quite dangerous to bring up a family within your reach. There will be a general exodus. I must be going myself, or I shan’t have an orthodox sentiment left.”
HENRIETTE had secured Mrs. Fullerton for an ally, from the beginning. When Hadria’s parents visited the Red House, Miss Temperley was asked to meet them, by special request. Henriette employed tact on a grand scale, and achieved results in proportion. She was sorry that dear Hadria did not more quickly recover her strength. Her health was not what it ought to be. Mrs. Fullerton sighed. She was ready to play into Miss Temperley’s hands on every occasion.
The latter had less success in her dealings with Miss Du Prel. She tried to discover Hadria’s more intimate feelings by talking her over with Valeria, ignoring the snubs that were copiously administered by that indignant lady. Valeria spoke with sublime scorn of this attempt.
“To try and pump information out of a friend! Why not listen at the key-hole, and be done with it!”
Henriette’s neat hair would have stood on end, had she heard Miss Du Prel fit adjectives to her conduct.
“I have learnt not to expect a nice sense of honour from superior persons with unimpeachable sentiments,” said Hadria.
“You are certainly a good hater!” cried Valeria, with a laugh.
“Oh, I don’t hate Henriette; I only hate unimpeachable sentiments.”
The sentiments that Henriette represented had become, to Hadria, as the walls of a prison from which she could see no means of escape.
She had found that life took no heed either of her ambitions or of her revolts. “And so I growl,” she said. She might hate and chafe in secret to her heart’s content; external conformity was the one thing needful.
“Hadria will be so different when she has children,” everyone had said. And so she was; but the difference was alarmingly in the wrong direction. Throughout history, she reflected, children had been the unfailing means of bringing women into line with tradition. Who could stand against them? They had been able to force the most rebellious to their knees. An appeal to the maternal instinct had quenched the hardiest spirit of revolt. No wonder the instinct had been so trumpeted and exalted! Women might harbour dreams and plan insurrections; but their children—little ambassadors of the established and expected—were argument enough to convince the most hardened sceptics. Their helplessness was more powerful to suppress revolt than regiments of armed soldiers.
Such were the thoughts that wandered through Hadria’s mind as she bent her steps towards the cottage near Craddock Church, where, according to the gravedigger’s account, the baby of the unhappy schoolmistress was being looked after by Mrs. Gullick.
It would have puzzled the keenest observer to detect the unorthodox nature of Mrs. Temperley’s reflections, as she leant over the child, and made enquiries as to its health and temperament.
Mrs. Gullick seemed more disposed to indulge in remarks on its mother’s conduct than to give the desired information; but she finally admitted that Ellen Jervis had an aunt at Southampton who was sending a little money for the support of the child. Ellen Jervis had stayed with the aunt during the summer holidays. Mrs. Gullick did not know what was to be done. She had a large family of her own, and the cottage was small.
Mrs. Temperley asked for the address of the aunt.
“I suppose no one knows who the father is? He has not acknowledged the child!”
No; that was a mystery still.
About a week later, Craddock Dene was amazed by the news that Mrs. Temperley had taken the child of Ellen Jervis under her protection. A cottage had been secured on the road to Craddock, a trustworthy nurse engaged, and here the babe was established, with the consent and blessing of the aunt.
“You are the most inconsistent woman I ever met!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel.
“Why inconsistent?”
“You say that children have been the means, from time immemorial, of enslaving women, and here you go and adopt one of your enslavers!”
“But this child is not legitimate.”
Valeria stared.
“Whatever the wrongs of Ellen Jervis, at least there were no laws written, and unwritten, which demanded of her as a duty that she should become the mother of this child. In that respect she escapes the ignominy reserved for the married mother who produces children that are not even hers.”
“You do manage to ferret out the unpleasant aspects of our position!” Miss Du Prel exclaimed. “But I want to know why you do this, Hadria. It is good of you, but totally unlike you.”
“You are very polite!” cried Hadria. “Why should I not lay up store for myself in heaven, as well as Mrs. Walker and the rest?”
“You were not thinking of heaven when you did this deed, Hadria.”
“No; I was thinking of the other place.”
“And do you hope to get any satisfaction out of yourprotégée?”
Hadria shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know. The child is the result of great sorrow and suffering; it is the price of a woman’s life; a woman who offended the world, having lived for nearly forty weary obedient years, in circumstances dreary enough to have turned twenty saints into as many sinners. No; I am no Lady Bountiful. I feel in defending this child—a sorry defence I know—that I am, in so far, opposing the world and the system of things that I hate——. Ah!howI hate it!”
“Is it then hatred that prompts the deed?”
Hadria looked thoughtfully towards the church tower, in whose shadow the mother of the babe lay sleeping.
“Can you ever quite unravel your own motives, Valeria? Hatred? Yes; there is a large ingredient of hatred. Without it, probably this poor infant would have been left to struggle through life alone, with a mill-stone round its neck, and a miserable constitution into the bargain. I hope to rescue its constitution. But that poor woman’s story touched me closely. It is so hard, so outrageous! The emptiness of her existence; the lack of outlet for her affections; the endless monotony; and then the sudden new interest and food for the starved emotions; the hero-worship that is latent in us all; and then—good heavens!—for a touch of poetry, of romance in her life, she would have been ready to believe in the professions of the devil himself—and this man was a very good understudy for the devil! Ah! If ever I should meet him!”
“What would you do?” Valeria asked curiously.
“Avenge her,” said Hadria with set lips.
“Easier said than done, my dear!”
Gossip asserted that the father of the child was a man of some standing, the bolder spirits even accusing Lord Engleton himself. But this was conjecture run wild, and nobody seriously listened to it.
Mrs. Walker was particularly scandalized with Mrs. Temperley’s ill-advised charity. Hadria had the habit of regarding the clergyman’s wife as another of society’s victims. She placed side by side the schoolmistress in her sorrow and disgrace, and the careworn woman at the Vicarage, with her eleven children, and her shrivelled nature, poor and dead as an autumn leaf that shivers before the wind. They had both suffered—so Mrs. Temperley dared to assert—in the same cause. They were both victims of the same creed. It was a terrible cultus, a savage idol that had devoured them both, as cruel and insatiable as the brazen god of old, with his internal fires, which the faithful fed devoutly, with shrinking girls and screaming children.
“I still fail to understand why you adopt this child,” said Valeria. “MyCaterinawould never have done it.”
“The little creature interests me,” said Hadria. “It is a tiny field for the exercise of the creative forces. Every one has some form of active amusement. Some like golf, others flirtation. I prefer this sort of diversion.”
“But you have your own children to interest you, surely far more than this one.”
Hadria’s face grew set and defiant.
“They represent to me the insult of society—my own private and particular insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood. It is through them that I am to be subdued and humbled. Just once in a way, however, the thing does not quite ‘come off.’”
“What has set you on edge so, I wonder.”
“People, traditions, unimpeachable sentiments.”
“Yoursare not unimpeachable at any rate!” Valeria cried laughing. “Caterinais an angel compared with you, and yet my publisher has his doubts about her.”
“Caterinawould do as I do, I know,” said Hadria. “Those who are looked at askance by the world appeal to my instincts. I shall be able to teach this child, perhaps, to strike a blow at the system which sent her mother to a dishonoured grave, while it leaves the man for whose sake she risked all this, in peace and the odour of sanctity.”
Time seemed to be marked, in the sleepy village, by the baby’s growth. Valeria, who thought she was fond of babies, used to accompany Hadria on her visits to the cottage, but she treated the infant so much as if it had been a guinea-pig or a rabbit that the nurse was indignant.
The weeks passed in rapid monotony, filled with detail and leaving no mark behind them, no sign of movement or progress. The cares of the house, the children, left only limited time for walking, reading, correspondence, and such music as could be wrung out of a crowded day. An effort on Hadria’s part, to make serious use of her musical talent had been frustrated. But a pathetic, unquenchable hope always survived that presently, when this or that corner had been turned, this or that difficulty overcome, conditions would be conquered and opportunity arrive. Not yet had she resigned her belief that the most harassing and wearying and unceasing business that a human being can undertake, is compatible with the stupendous labour and the unbounded claims of an artist’s career. The details of practical life and petty duties sprouted up at every step. If they were put aside, even for a moment, the wheels of daily existence became clogged and then all opportunity was over. Hope had begun to alternate with a fear lest that evasive corner should never be turned, that little crop of interruptions never cease to turn up. And yet it was so foolish. Each obstacle in itself was paltry. It was their number that overcame one, as the tiny arrows of the Lilliputs overcame Gulliver.
One of Hadria’s best friends in Craddock Dene was Joseph Fleming, who had become very intimate at the Red House during the last year or two. Hadria used to tire of the necessity to be apparently rational (such was her own version), and found it a relief to talk nonsense, just as she pleased, to Joseph Fleming, who never objected or took offence, if he occasionally looked surprised. Other men might have thought she was laughing at them, but Joseph made no such mistake when Mrs. Temperley broke out, as she did now and then, in fantastic fashion.
She was standing, one morning, on the little bridge over the stream that ran at a distance of a few hundred yards from the Red House. The two boys were bespattering themselves in the meadow below, by the water’s verge. They called up at intervals to their mother the announcement of some new discovery of flower or insect.
Watching the stream sweeping through the bridge, she seemed the centre of a charming domestic scene to Joseph Fleming, who chanced to pass by with his dogs. He addressed himself to her maternal feelings by remarking what handsome and clever boys they were.
“Handsome and clever?” she repeated. “Isthatall you can say, Mr. Fleming? When you set about it, I think you might provide a little better food for one’s parental sentiment. I suppose you will go and tell Mrs. Walker thatherdozen and a half are all handsome and clever too!”
“Not so handsome and clever as yours,” replied Mr. Fleming, a little aghast at this ravenous maternal vanity.
“What wretched poverty of expression!” Hadria complained. “I ask for bread, and truly you give me a stone.”
Joseph Fleming eyed his companion askance. “I—I admire your boys immensely, as you know,” he said.
“Not enough, not enough.”
“What can I say more?”
“A mother has to find in her children all that she can hope to find in life, and she naturally desires to make the most of them, don’t you see?”
“Ah! yes, quite so,” said Joseph dubiously.
“Nobody, I suppose, likes to be commonplace all round; one must have some poetry somewhere—so most women idealize their children, and if other people won’t help them in the effort, don’t you see? it is most discouraging.”
“Are you chaffing, or what?” Joseph enquired.
“No, indeed; I am perilously serious.”
“I can well understand how a mother must get absorbed in her children,” said Joseph. “I suppose it’s a sort of natural provision.”
“Think of Mrs. Allan with her outrageous eight—all making mud-pies!” cried Hadria; “a magnificent ‘natural provision!’ A small income, a small house, with those pervasive eight. You know the stampede when one goes to call; the aroma of bread and butter (there are few things more inspiring); the cook always about to leave; Mrs. Allan with a racking headache. It is indeed not difficult to understand how a mother would get absorbed in her children. Why, their pinafores alone would become absorbing.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Fleming. Then a little anxious to change the subject: “Oh, by the way, have you heard that the Priory is really to be inhabited at last? Professor Theobald has almost decided to take it.”
“Really? that will be exciting for Craddock Dene. We shall have another household to dissect and denounce. Providence watches over us all, I verily believe.”
“I hope so,” Joseph replied gravely.
“Truly I hope so too,” Hadria said, no less seriously, “for indeed we need it.”
Joseph was too simple to be greatly surprised at anything that Mrs. Temperley might say. He had decided that she was a little eccentric, and that explained everything; just as he explained instances of extraordinary reasoning power in a dog by calling it “instinct.” Whatever Mrs. Temperley might do was slightly eccentric, and had she suddenly taken it into her head to dance a fandango on the public road, it would have merely put a little extra strain on that word.
By dint of not understanding her, Joseph Fleming had grown to feel towards Mrs. Temperley a genuine liking, conscious, in his vague way, that she was kind at heart, however bitter or strange she might sometimes be in her speech. Moreover, she was not always eccentric or unexpected. There would come periods when she would say and do very much as her neighbours said and did; looking then pale and lifeless, but absolutely beyond the reach of hostile criticism, as her champion would suggest to carping neighbours.
Not the most respected of the ladies who turned up their disapproving noses, was more dull or more depressing than Hadria could be, on occasion, as she had herself pointed out; and would notthissoften stony hearts?
When she discovered that her kindly neighbour had been fighting her battles for her, she was touched; but she asked him not to expend his strength on her behalf. She tried in vain to convince him that she did not care to be invited too often to submit to the devitalizing processes of social intercourse, to which the families of the district shrank not from subjecting themselves. If Joseph Fleming chanced to call at the Red House after her return from one of these entertainments, he was sure to find Mrs. Temperley in one of her least comprehensible moods. But whatever she might say, he stood up for her among the neighbours with persistent loyalty. He decked her with virtues that she did not possess, and represented her to the sceptical district, radiant in domestic glory. Hadria thus found herself in an awkwardly uncertain position; either she was looked at askance, as eccentric, or she found herself called upon to make good expectations of saintliness, such as never were on land or sea.
Saintly? Hadria shook her head. She could imagine no one further from such a condition than she was at present, and she felt it in her, to swing down and down to the very opposite pole from that serene altitude. She admitted that, from a utilitarian point of view, she was making a vast mistake. As things were, Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Allan, laboriously spinning their ponderous families on their own axes, in a reverent spirit, had chosen the better part. But Hadria did not care. She wouldnotsettle down to make the best of things, as even Algitha now recommended, “since there she was, and there was no helping it.”
“I willnevermake the best of things,” she said. “I know nothing that gives such opportunities to the Devil.”
Hadria had characteristically left the paradox unjustified.
“What do you mean?” asked Algitha. “Surely the enemy of good has most hold over the discontented spirit.”
Hadria likened the contented to stagnant pools, wherein corruptions grow apace. “It is only the discontented ocean that remains, for all its storms, fresh and sane to the end.”
But though she said this, for opposition’s sake perhaps, she had her doubts about her own theory. Discontent was certainly the initiator of all movement; but there was a kind of sullen discontent that stagnated and ate inwards, like a disease. Better a cheerful sin or two than allowthatto take hold!
“But then there is this sickly feminine conscience to deal with!” she exclaimed. “It clings to the worst of us still, and prevents the wholesome big catastrophes that might bring salvation.”
ANOTHER year had blundered itself away, leaving little trace behind it, in Craddock Dene. The schoolmistress’s grave was greener and her child rosier than of yore. Little Martha had now begun to talk, and promised to be pretty and fair-haired like her mother.
The boys and Algitha had come to spend Saturday and Sunday at the Red House. Hadria hunted out a stupendous card-case (a wedding gift from Mrs. Gordon), erected on her head a majestic bonnet, and announced to the company that she was going for a round of visits.
There was a yell of laughter. Hadria advanced across the lawn with quiet dignity, bearing her card-case as one who takes part in a solemn ceremony.
“Where did you fall in with that casket?” enquired Fred.
“And who was the architect of the cathedral?” asked Ernest.
“This casket, as you call it, was presented to me by Mrs. Gordon. The cathedral I designed myself.”
They all crowded round to examine the structure. There were many derisive comments.
“Gothic,” said Ernest, “pure Gothic.”
“I should have described it as ‘Early Perpendicular,’” objected Fred.
“Don’t display your neglected education; it’s beyond all question Gothic. Look at the steeple and the gargoyles and the handsome vegetation. Ruskin would revel in it!”
“Are you really going about in that thing?” asked Algitha.
Hadria wished to know what was the use of designing a Gothic cathedral if one couldn’t go about in it.
The bonnet was, in truth, a daring caricature of the prevailing fashion, just sufficiently serious in expression to be wearable.
“Well, I never before met a woman who would deliberately flout her neighbours by wearing preposterous millinery!” Ernest exclaimed.
Hadria went her round of calls, and all eyes fixed themselves on her bonnet. Mrs. Allan, who had small opportunity of seeing the fashions, seemed impressed if slightly puzzled by it. Mrs. Jordan evidently thought it “loud.” Mrs. Walker supposed it fashionable, but regretted that this sort of thing was going to be worn this season. She hoped the girls would modify the style in adopting it.
Mrs. Walker had heard that the two Professors had arrived at Craddock Place yesterday afternoon, and the Engletons expected them to make a visit of some weeks. Hadria’s face brightened.
“And so at last we may hope that the Priory will be inhabited,” said the vicar’s wife.
“Of course you know,” she added in the pained voice that she always reserved for anecdotes of local ill-doing, “that Mrs. Fortescue committed suicide there.”
Madame Bertaux, the English wife of a French official, had chanced to call, and Mrs. Walker gave the details of the story for the benefit of the new-comer.
Madame Bertaux was a brisk, clever, good-looking woman, with a profound knowledge of the world and a corresponding contempt for it.
It appeared that the Professor’s wife, whom Madame Bertaux had happened to meet in Paris, was a young, beautiful, and self-willed girl, passionately devoted to her husband. She was piqued at his lack of jealousy, and doubted or pretended to doubt his love for her. In order to put him to the test, she determined to rouse his jealousy by violent and systematic flirtation. This led to an entanglement, and finally, in a fit of reckless anger, to an elopement with a Captain Bolton who was staying at the Priory at the time. Seized with remorse, she had returned home to kill herself. This was the tragedy that had kept the old house for so many years tenantless. Hadria’s music was the only sound that had disturbed its silence, since the day when the dead body of its mistress was found in the drawing-room, which she was supposed to have entered unknown to anyone, by the window that gave on to the terrace.
Valeria Du Prel was able to throw more light on the strange story. She had difficulty in speaking without rancour of the woman who had thrown away the love of such a man. She admitted that the girl was extremely fascinating, and had seemed to Valeria to have the faults of an impetuous rather than of a bad nature. She cherished that singular desire of many strong-willed women, to be ruled and mastered by the man she loved, and she had entirely failed to understand her husband’s attitude towards her. She resented it as a sign of indifference. She was like the Chinese wives, who complain bitterly of a husband’s neglect when he omits to beat them. She taunted the Professor for failing to assert his “rights.”
“Morally, I have no rights, except such as you choose to give me of your own free will,” he replied. “I am not your gaoler.”
“And even that did not penetrate to her better nature till it was too late,” Valeria continued. “But after the mischief was done, that phrase seems to have stung her to torment. Her training had blinded her, as one is blinded in coming out of darkness into a bright light. She was used to narrower hearts and smaller brains. Her last letter—a terrible record of the miseries of remorse—shews that she recognized at last what sort of a man he was whose heart she had broken. But even in her repentance, she was unable to conquer her egotism. She could not face the horrors of self-accusation; she preferred to kill herself.”
“What a shocking story!” cried Hadria.
“And all the more so because the Professor clings to her memory so faithfully. He blames himself for everything. He ought, he says, to have realized better the influence of her training; he ought to have made her understand that he could not assert what she called his ‘rights’ without insulting her and himself.”
“Whenever one hears anything new about the Professor, it is always something that makes one admire and love him more than ever!” cried Hadria.
Her first meeting with him was in the old Yew Avenue in the Priory garden. He was on his way to call at the Red House. She stood on a patch of grass by a rustic seat commanding the vista of yews, and above them, a wilderness of lilacs and laburnums, in full flower. It looked to her like a pathway that led to some exquisite fairy palace of one’s childhood.
Almost with the first word that the Professor uttered, Hadria felt a sense of relief and hope. The very air seemed to grow lighter, the scent of the swaying flowers sweeter. She always afterwards associated this moment of meeting with the image of that avenue of mourning yews, crowned with the sunlit magnificence of an upper world of blossom.
What had she been thinking of to run so close to despair during these years? A word, a smile, and the dead weight swerved, swung into balance, and life lifted up its head once more. She remembered now, not her limitations, but the good things of her lot; the cruelties that Fate had spared her, the miseries that the ruthless goddess had apportioned to others. But the Professor’s presence did not banish, but rather emphasized, the craving to take part in the enriching of that general life which was so poor and sad. He strengthened her disposition to revolt against the further impoverishment of it, through the starving of her own nature. He would not blame her simply on account of difference from others. She felt sure of that. He would not be shocked if she had not answered to the stimulus of surroundings as faithfully as most women seemed to answer to them. Circumstance had done its usual utmost to excite her instinct to beat down the claims of her other self, but for once, circumstance had failed. It was a solitary failure among a creditable multitude of victories. But if instinct had not responded to the imperious summons, the other self had been suffering the terrors of a siege, and the garrison had grown starved and weakly. What would be the end of it? And the little cynical imp that peeped among her thoughts, as a monkey among forest boughs, gibbered his customary “What matters it? One woman’s destiny is but a small affair. If I were you I would make less fuss about it.” The Professor would understand that she did not wish to make a fuss. He would not be hard upon any human being. He knew that existence was not such an easy affair to manage. She wished that she could tell him everything in her life—its struggle, its desperate longing and ambition, its hatred, its love: onlyhewould understand all the contradictions and all the pain. She would not mind his blame, because he would understand, and the blame would be just.
They walked together down the avenue towards the beautiful old Tudor house, which stood on the further side of a broad lawn.
The Professor looked worn and thin. He owned to being very tired of the hurry and struggle of town. He was sick of the conflict of jealousies and ambitions. It seemed so little worth while, this din of voices that would so soon be silenced.
“I starve for the sight of a true and simple face, for the grasp of a brotherly hand.”
“You?” exclaimed Hadria.
“There are so few, so very few, where the throng is thick and the battle fierce. It saddens me to see good fellows trampling one another down, growing hard and ungenerous. And then the vulgarity, the irreverence: they are almost identical, I think. One grows very sick and sorry at times amidst the cruelty and the baseness that threaten to destroy one’s courage and one’s hope. I know that human nature has in it a germ of nobility that will save it, in the long run, but meanwhile things seem sadly out of joint.”
“Is that the order of the universe?” asked Hadria.
“No, I think it is rather the disorder of man’s nature,” he replied.
Hadria asked if he would return to tea at the Red House. The Professor said he would like to call and see Hubert, but proposed a rest on the terrace, as it was still early in the afternoon.
“I used to avoid the place,” he said, “but I made a mistake. I have resolved to face the memories: it is better.”
It was the first time that he had ever referred, in Hadria’s presence, to the tragedy of the Priory.
“I have often wished to speak to you about my wife,” he said slowly, as they sat down on the old seat, on the terrace. “I have felt that you would understand the whole sad story, and I hoped that some day you would know it.” He paused and then added, “It has often been a comfort to me to remember that you were in the world, for it made me feel less lonely. I felt in you some new—what can I call it? instinct, impulse, inspiration, which ran you straight against all the hardest stone walls that intersect the pathways of this ridiculous old world. And, strange to say, it is the very element in you that sets you at loggerheads with others, that enabled me to understand you.”
Hadria looked bewildered.
“To tell you the truth, I have always wondered why women have never felt as I am sure you feel towards life. You remember that day at Dunaghee when you were so annoyed at my guessing your thoughts. They were unmistakeable to one who shared them. Your sex has always been a riddle to me; there seemed to be something abject in their nature, even among the noblest of them. But you are no riddle. While I think you are the least simple woman I ever met, you are to me the easiest to understand.”
“And yet I remember your telling me the exact contrary,” said Hadria.
“That was before I had caught the connecting thread. Had I been a woman, I believe that life and my place in it would have affected me exactly as it affects you.”
Hadria coloured over cheek and brow. It was so strange, so startling, so delicious to find, for the first time in her life, this intimate sympathy.
“I wish my wife had possessed your friendship,” he said. “I believe you would have saved us.” He passed his hands over his brow, looking round at the closed windows of the drawing-room. “I almost feel as if she were near us now on this old terrace that she loved so. She planted these roses herself—how they have grown!” They were white cluster roses and yellow banksias, which had strayed far along the balustrade, clambering among the stone pillars.
“You doubtless know the bare facts of her life, but nothing is so misleading as bare fact. My wife was one of the positive natures, capable of great nobility, but liable to glaring error and sin! She held ideas passionately. She had the old barbaric notion that a husband was a sort of master, and must assert his authority and rights. It was the result of her training. I saw that a great development was before her. I pleased myself with the thought of watching and helping it. She was built on a grand scale. To set her free from prejudice, from her injustice to herself, from her dependence on me; to teach her to breathe deep with those big lungs of hers and think bravely with that capacious brain: that was my dream. I hoped to hear her say to me some day, what I fear no woman has yet been able to say to her husband, ‘The day of our marriage was the birthday of my freedom.’”
Hadria drew a long breath. It seemed to overwhelm her that a man, even the Professor, could utter such a sentiment. All the old hereditary instincts of conquest and ownership appeared to be utterly dead in him.
No wonder he had found life a lonely pilgrimage! He lived before his time. His wife had taunted him because he would not treat her as his legal property, or rule her through the claims and opportunities that popular sentiment assigned to him.
When a woman as generous as himself, as just, as gentle-hearted, had appeared on the horizon of the world, the advent of a nobler social order might be hoped for. The two were necessary for the new era.
Then, not only imagination, but cold reason herself grew eloquent with promises.
“It was in there, in the old drawing-room, where we had sat together evening after evening, that they found her dead, the very type of all that is brilliant and exquisite and living. To me she was everything. All my personal happiness was centred in her. I cared for nothing so long as she was in the same world as myself, and I might love her. In the darkness that followed, I was brought face to face with the most terrible problems of human fate. I had troubled myself but little about the question of the survival of the personality after death; I had been pre-occupied with life. Now I realized out of what human longings and what human desperation our religions are built. For one gleam of hope that we should meet again—what would I not have given? But it never came. The trend of my thought made all such hopes impossible. I have grown charier of the word ‘impossible’ now. We know so infinitesimally little. I had to learn to live on comfortless. All that was strongly personal in me died. All care about myself went out suddenly, as in other cases I think it goes out slowly, beaten down by the continued buffetings of life. I gave myself to my work, and then a curious decentralizing process took place. I ceased to be the point round which the world revolved, in my own consciousness. We all start our career as pivots, if I am not mistaken. The world span, and I, in my capacity of atomic part, span with it. I mean that this was a continuous, not an occasional state of consciousness. After that came an unexpected peace.”
“You have travelled a long and hard road to find it!” cried Hadria.
“Not a unique fate,” he said with a smile.
“It must be a terrible process that quite kills the personal in one, it is so strong. With me the element is clamorous.”
“It has its part to play.”
“Surely the gods must be jealous of human beings. Why did they destroy the germ of such happiness as you might have had?”
“The stern old law holds for ever; wrong and error have to be expiated.”
The Professor traced the history of his wife’s family, shewing the gradual gathering of Fate to its culmination in the tragedy of her short life. Her father and grandfather had both been men of violent and tyrannical temper, and tradition gave the same character to their forefathers. Eleanor’s mother was one of the meek and saintly women who almost invariably fall to the lot of overbearing men. She had made a virtue of submitting to tyranny, and even to downright cruelty, thus almost repeating the story of her equally meek predecessor, of whose ill-treatment stories were still current in the district.
“When death put an end to their wretchedness, one would suppose that the evil of their lives was worked out and over, but it was not so. The Erinnys were still unsatisfied. My poor wife became the victim of their fury. And every new light that science throws upon human life shews that thismustbe so. The old Greeks saw that unconscious evil-doing is punished as well as that which is conscious. These poor unselfish women, piling up their own supposed merit, at the expense of the character of their tyrants, laid up a store of misery for their descendant, my unhappy wife. Imagine the sort of training and tradition that she had to contend with; her mother ignorant and supine, her father violent, bigoted, almost brutal. Eleanor’s nature was obscured and distorted by it. Having inherited the finer and stronger qualities of her father’s race, with much of its violence, she was going through a struggle at the time of our marriage: training, native vigour and nobility all embroiled in a desperate civil war. It was too much. There is no doubt as to the ultimate issue, but the struggle killed her. It is a common story: a character militant which meets destruction in the struggle for life. The past evil pursues and throttles the present good.”
“This takes away the last consolation from women who have been forced to submit to evil conditions,” said Hadria.
“It is the truth,” said the Professor. “The Erinnys are no mere fancy of the Greek mind. They are symbols of an awful fact of life that no one can afford to ignore.”
“What insensate fools we all are!” Hadria exclaimed. “I mean women.”
The Professor made no polite objection to the statement.
As they were wending their way towards the Red House, the Professor reminded his companion of the old friendship that had existed between them, ever since Hadria was a little girl. He had always cherished towards her that sentiment of affectionate good-fellowship. She must check him if he seemed to presume upon it, in seeking sympathy or offering it. He watched her career with the deepest interest and anxiety. He always believed that she would give some good gift to the world. And he still believed it. Like the rest of us, she needed sympathy at the right moment.
“We need to feel that there is someone who believes in us, in our good faith, in our good will, one who will not judge according to outward success or failure. Remember,” he said, “that I have that unbounded faith in you. Nothing can move it. Whatever happens and wherever you may be led by the strange chances of life, don’t forget the existence of one old friend, or imagine that anything can shake his friendship or his desire to be of service.”
“THE worst thing about the life of you married people,” said Valeria, “is its ridiculous rigidity. It takes more energy to get the dinner delayed for a quarter of an hour in most well-regulated houses, or some slight change in routine, than to alter a frontier, or pass an Act of Parliament.”
Hadria laughed. “Until you discovered this by personal inconvenience, you always scolded me for my disposition to jeer at the domestic scheme.”
“Itisa little geometrical,” Valeria admitted.
“Geometrical! It is like a gigantic ordnance map palmed off on one instead of a real landscape.”
“Come now, to be just, say an Italian garden.”
“That flatters it, but the simile will do. The eye sees to the end of every path, and knows that it leads to nothing.”
“Ah! dear Hadria, but all the pathways of the world have that very same goal.”
“At least some of them have the good taste to wind a little, and thus disguise the fact. And think of the wild flowers one may gather by the wayside in some forest track, or among the mountain passes; but in these prim alleys what natural thing can one know? Brain and heart grow tame and clipped to match the hedges, or take on grotesque shapes——”
“That one must guard against.”
“Oh, I am sick of guarding against things. To be always warding off evil, is an evil in itself. Better let it come.”
Valeria looked at her companion anxiously.
“One knows how twirling round in a circle makes one giddy, or following the same path stupefies. How does the polar bear feel, I wonder, after he has walked up and down in his cage for years and years?”
“Used to it, I imagine,” said Valeria.
“But before he gets used to it, that is the bad time. And then it is all so confusing——”
Hadria sat on the low parapet of the terrace at the Priory. Valeria had a place on the topmost step, where the sun had been beating all the morning. Hadria had taken off her hat to enjoy the warmth. The long sprays of the roses were blown across her now and then. Once, a thorn had left a mark of blood upon her hand.
Valeria gathered a spray, and nodded slowly.
“I don’t want to allow emotion to get the better of me, Valeria. I don’t want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I dread the accumulation of emotion—emotion that has never had a good explosive utterance. One has to be so discreet in these Italian gardens; no one shouts or says ‘damn.’”
“Ah! you naturally feel out of your element.”
Hadria laughed. “It’s all very well to take that superior tone.Youdon’t reside on an ordnance map.”
There was a pause. Miss Du Prel seemed lost in thought.
“It is this dead silence that oppresses one, this hushed endurance of the travail of life. How do these women stand it?”
Valeria presently woke up, and admitted that to live in an English village would drive her out of her mind in a week. “And yet, Valeria, you have often professed to envy me, because I had what you called a place in life—as if a place in Craddock Dene were the same thing!”
“It is well that you do not mean all you say.”
“Or say all I mean.”
Valeria laid her hand on Hadria’s with wistful tenderness.
“I don’t think anyone will ever quite understand you, Hadria.”
“Including perhaps myself. I sometimes fancy that when it became necessary to provide me with a disposition, the material had run out, for the moment, nothing being left but a few remnants of other people’s characters; so a living handful of these was taken up, roughly welded together, and then the mixture was sent whirling into space, to boil and sputter itself out as best it might.”
Miss Du Prel turned to her companion.
“I see that you are incongruously situated, but don’t you think that you may be wrong yourself? Don’t you think you may be making a mistake?”
Hadria was emphatic in assent.
“Not only do I think I may be wrong, but I don’t see how—unless by pure chance—I can be anything else. For I can’t discover what is right. I see women all round me actuated by this frenzied sense of duty; I see them toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling their nurseries; losing their youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining their husbands, and clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know that such conduct is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can’t see it. It impresses me simply as stupid and degrading. And from my narrow little point of observation, the more I see of life, the more hopelessly involved become all questions of right and wrong where our confounded sex is concerned.”
“Why? Because the standards are changing,” asserted Miss Du Prel.
“Because—look, Valeria, our present relation to life isin itselfan injury, an insult—you have never seriously denied that—and how can one make for oneself a moral code that has to lay its foundation-stone in that very injury? And if one lays one’s foundation-stone in open ground beyond, then one’s code is out of touch with present fact, and one’s morality consists in sheer revolt all along the line. The whole matter is in confusion. You have to accept Mrs. Walker’s and Mrs. Gordon’s view of the case, plainly and simply, or you get off into a sort of morass and blunder into quicksands.”
“Then what happens?”
“That’s just what I don’t know. That’s just why I say that I am probably wrong, because, in this transition period, there seems to be no clear right.”
“To cease to believe in right and wrong would be to founder morally, altogether,” Valeria warned.
“I know, and yet I begin to realize how true it is that there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong. It is related to the case and the moment.”
“This leads up to some desperate deed or other, Hadria,” cried her friend, “I have feared it, or hoped it, I scarcely know which, for some time. But you alarm me to-day.”
“If I believed in the efficacy of a desperate deed, Valeria, I should not chafe as I do, against the conditions of the present scheme of things. If individuals could find a remedy for themselves, with a little courage and will, there would be less occasion to growl.”
“But can they not?”
“Can they?” asked Hadria. “A woman without means of livelihood, breaks away from her moorings—well, it is as if a child were to fall into the midst of some gigantic machinery that is going at full speed. Let her try the feat, and the cracking of her bones by the big wheels will attest its hopelessness. And yet I long to try!” Hadria added beneath her breath.
Miss Du Prel admitted that success was rare in the present delirious state of competition. Individuals here and there pulled through.
“I told you years ago that Nature had chosen our sex for ill-usage. Try what we may, defeat and suffering await us, in one form or another. You are dissatisfied with your form of suffering, I with mine. A creature in pain always thinks it would be more bearable if only it were on the other side.”
“Ah, I know you won’t admit it,” said Hadria, “but some day we shall all see that this is the result of human cruelty and ignorance, and that it is no more ‘intended’ or inherently necessary than that children should be born with curvature of the spine, or rickets. Some day it will be as clear as noon, that heartless ‘some day’ which can never help you or me, or any of us who live now. It is we, I suppose, who are required to help the ‘some day.’ Only how, when we are ourselvesin extremis?”
“The poor are helpers of the poor,” said Valeria.
“But if they grow too poor, to starvation point, then they can help no more; they can only perish slowly.”
“I hoped,” said Valeria, “that Professor Fortescue would have poured oil upon the troubled waters.”
“He does in one sense. But in another, he makes me feel more than ever what I am missing.”
Miss Du Prel’s impulsive instincts could be kept at bay no longer.
“There is really nothing for it, but some deed of daring,” she cried. “I believe, if only your husband could get over his horror of the scandal and talk, that a separation would be best for you both. It is not as if he cared for you. One can see he does not. You are such a strange, inconsequent being, Hadria, that I believe you would feel the parting far more than he would (conventions apart).”
“No question of it,” said Hadria. “Our disharmony, radical and hopeless as it is, does not prevent my having a strong regard for Hubert. I can’t help seeing the admirable sides of his character. He is too irritated and aggrieved to feel anything but rancour against me. It is natural. I understand.”
“Ah, it will only end in some disaster, if you try to reconcile the irreconcilable. Of course I think it is a great pity that you have not more of the instincts on which homes are founded, but since you have not——”
Hadria turned sharply round. “Do you really regret that just for once the old, old game has been played unsuccessfully? Therein I can’t agree with you, though I am the loser by it.” Hadria grasped a swaying spray that the wind blew towards her, and clasped it hard in her hand, regardless of the thorns. “It gives me a keen, fierce pleasure to know that for all their training and constraining and incitement and starvation, I havenotdeveloped masses of treacly instinct in which mind and will and every human faculty struggle, in vain, to move leg or wing, like some poor fly doomed to a sweet and sticky death. At least the powers of the world shall not prevail with me bythatold device. Mind and will and every human faculty may die, but they shall not drown, in the usual applauded fashion, in seas of tepid, bubbling, up-swelling instinct. I will dare anything rather than endure that. They must take the trouble to provide instruments of death from without; they must lay siege and starve me; they must attack in soldierly fashion; I will not save them the exertion by developing the means of destruction from within. There I stand at bay. They shall knock down the citadel of my mind and will, stone by stone.”
“That is a terrible challenge!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel.
A light laugh sounded across the lawn.
The afternoon sunshine threw four long shadows over the grass: of a slightly-built woman, of a very tall man, and of two smaller men.
The figures themselves were hidden by a group of shrubs, and only the shadows were visible. They paused, for a moment, as if in consultation; the lady standing, with her weight half leaning on her parasol. The tall man seemed to be talking to her vivaciously. His long, shadow-arms shot across the grass, his head wagged.
“The shadows of Fate!” cried Valeria fantastically.
Then they moved into sight, advancing towards the terrace.
“Who are they I wonder? Oh, Professor Fortescue, for one!”
“Lady Engleton and Joseph Fleming. The other I don’t know.”
He was very broad and tall, having a slight stoop, and a curious way of carrying his head, craned forward. The attitude suggested a keen observer. He was attired in knickerbockers and rough tweed Norfolk jacket, and he looked robust and powerful, almost to excess. The chin and mouth were concealed by the thick growth of dark hair, but one suspected unpleasant things of the latter. As far as one could judge his age, he seemed a man of about five-and-thirty, with vigour enough to last for another fifty years.