CHAPTER V
"FOR THE FIRST TIME, HE WAS GOING TO HAVE A GIRL FRIEND"
"Across the hills, and far awayBeyond their utmost purple rim,And deep into the dying dayThe happy princess followed him."—Tennyson.
"Across the hills, and far awayBeyond their utmost purple rim,And deep into the dying dayThe happy princess followed him."
"Across the hills, and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
And deep into the dying day
The happy princess followed him."
—Tennyson.
—Tennyson.
Lothian went back to his club in a taxi-cab, telling the man to drive at top speed. On the way he ordered a motor-car to go to Brighton and to call for him within twenty minutes.
He was in a state of great exhilaration. He had not had such an adventure as this for years—if ever before. A girl so lovely, so clever, so young—and particularly of his own social rank—he had never met, save for a short space of time and under the usual social conditions which forbade any real intimacy.
Even in the days before his marriage, flirtations, or indeed any companionship, with girls who were not of his class had not attracted him. He had never, unlike other men no less brilliant and gifted than himself, much cared for even the innocent side of Bohemian camaraderie with girls.
And to have a girl friend—and such a girl as Rita Wallace—was a delightful prospect. He saw himself responding to all sorts of simple feminine confidences, exploring reverently the unknown country of the Maiden mind, helping, protecting; unfolding new beauties for the young girl's delight. Yes! he would have a girl friend!
The thing should be ideal, pure and without a thought of harm. She understood him, she trusted herself to him at once and she should be repaid richly from the stores of his mind. None knew better than he what jewels he had to give to one who could recognise jewels when she saw them.
He changed his hat for a cap and had a coat brought down from his bedroom. Should he write a note to Mary at home? He had not sent her more than two telegrams of the "All going splendidly, too busy to write," kind, during the five days he had been in London. He decided that he would write a long letter to-morrow morning. Not to-night. To-night was to be one of pure, fresh pleasure. Every prospect pleased. Nothing whatever would jar. He was not in the mood to write home now—to compose details of his time in Town, to edit and alter the true record for the inspection of loving eyes.
"My darling!" he said to himself as he drank the second whiskey and soda which had been brought to him since he had come in, but there was an uncomfortable feeling in the back of his mind that the words did not ring true.
More than ever exhilarated, as excited as a boy, he jumped into the motor-car when it arrived, and glided swiftly westwards, congratulating himself a dozen times on the idle impulse which had sent him to Kensington. He began to wonder how it had come.
The impulse to bring the book himself had been with him all day. It had taken him till lunch time at least to put himself in any way right—toappearright even. With a sick and bitter mind he had gone through the complex physical ritual necessary after the night before—the champagne at eight, the Turkish bath, the hair-dresser's in Regent Street where fast men slunk with hot and shaking hands to have the marks of their vices ironed out of their faces with vibrating hammers worked by electricity.
All through the morning, the bitter, naked, grinning truth about himself had been horribly present—no new visitor, but the same leering ghost he knew so well.
Escape was impossible until the bestial sequence of his morning cure had run its course. Coming down the bedroom stairs into the club there was the disgusting and anxious consciousness that his movements were automatic and jerky, the real fear of meeting any one—the longing to bolt upstairs again and hide. Then a tremendous effort of will had forced him to go on. Facial control was—as ever—the most difficult thing. When he passed the waiters in the smoking room he must screw his face into the appearance of absorbed thought, freeze the twitching mouth and the flickering eyes into immobility. He had hummed a little tune as he had sat down at a table and ordered a brandy and soda, starting as if from a reverie when it was brought him, and making a remark about the weather in a voice of effusive geniality which embarrassed the well-trained servant.
By lunch time the convulsive glances in the mirror, the nervous straying of the hand to the hair, the see-saw of the voice had all gone. Black depression, fear, self-pity, had vanished. The events of the night before became like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope, far away, and as if they concerned some one quite other than himself.
He had not exactly forgotten the shame of his behaviour at the Amberleys' house. But, as he always did after events of this sort, and they were becoming far more general than he realised, he had pushed the thought away in some attic of the brain and closed the door. He would have these memories out some day—soon. It would not be pleasant, but it must of course be done. Then he would put everything right with himself, destroy all these corpses, and emerge into the free sunlight for ever more.
But not to-day. He must put himselfquiteright to-day. When hewasright then he wouldn't have another drink all day. Yes! then by to-morrow, after a quiet, pensive night, he would throw off all his habits as if he were throwing an old pair of gloves over a wall. He knew well what he could do! He knew himself better than any one else knew him.
But not to-day. "Inshallah Bukra!"—"Please God, to-morrow!"
It had all seemed perfectly natural, though it happened over and over again, and to-morrow never came.
He did not know that this was but one more definite symptom of his poisoned state, as definite as the shaking hand, the maudlin midnight invocations of God, the frequent physical nausea of the morning, even.
And if the man is to be understood and his history to become real in all its phases, then these things must be set down truly and without a veil.
It was a joy to watch her pleasure as they swung out of London in the twenty-horse power Ford he had hired.
She did not say much but leant back on the luxurious cushions by his side. There was a dream of happiness upon her face, and Lothian also felt that he was living in a dream, that it was all part of the painted scenes of sleep.
The early evening was still and quiet. The Western sky, a faint copper-green with friths and locks of purple, was as yet unfired. In the long lights the landscape still retained its colour unaltered by the dying splendours of sunset. The engines of the car were running sweetly in a monotonous and drowsy hum, the driver sat motionless in front as they droned through the quiet villages and up and down the long white ribands of the road. It was an hour of unutterable content.
Once they stopped in a village and drew up before the inn. It was a lovely place. A bell was tolling for evensong in the grey church and they saw the vicar pass under the lych-gate with slow footsteps. One of the long, painted windows was caught by the sun and gleamed like a red diamond. The road fell to a pond where green water-flags were growing and waxen-white water-lilies floated. Beyond it was a willow wood.
The driver sat on a bench before the inn and drank his beer, but Gilbert and Rita passed through it into a garden that there was. The flowers were just beginning to cense the still air and the faint sound of a water-wheel down the river came to them—tic, tac, lorelei!
She would have milk, "Milk that one cannot get in London," and even he asked for no poison in this tranquil garden.
Clematis hung the gables like tapestry of Tyrian purple. There were beds of red crocketed hollyhock and a hedge of honeysuckle with a hundred yellow trumpet mouths. At their feet were the flowers of belamour.
"Men have died, trying to find this place which we have found," he said.
A red-admiral floated by upon its fans of vermilion and black as Gilbert quoted, and a faint echo from the water-mill answered him.Tic—tac—lorelei!
"Magician! half an hour ago we were in London!"
"You are happy?"
"I can't find anything to say—yet. It is perfect."
She leant back with a deep sigh and closed her eyes, and he was well content to say nothing, for in all the garden she seemed to him the most perfect thing, rosa-amorosa, the queen of all the roses!
It was as a flower he looked at her, no more. It was all a dream, of course. It had come in dream-fashion, it would go in the fashion of a dream. At that moment she was not a warm human girl with a lovely face. She was not the clever, lonely, subtle-simple maiden in the house of books. She was a flower he had met.
His mind began to weave words, the shuttle to glide in the loom of the poet, but words came to him that were not his own.
"Come hither, Child! and rest;This is the end of day,Behold the weary West!"Now are the flowers confestOf slumber; sleep as they!Come hither, Child! and rest."
"Come hither, Child! and rest;This is the end of day,Behold the weary West!
"Come hither, Child! and rest;
This is the end of day,
Behold the weary West!
"Now are the flowers confestOf slumber; sleep as they!Come hither, Child! and rest."
"Now are the flowers confest
Of slumber; sleep as they!
Come hither, Child! and rest."
And then he sighed, for he thought of the other poet who had written those lines and of what had brought him to his dreadful death.
Why did thoughts like these come into the flower garden?
How true—even here—were the words he had put upon the title-page of the book which had made him famous—
"Say, brother, have you not full oftFound, even as the Roman did,That in Life's most delicious cupSurgit Amari Aliquid!"
"Say, brother, have you not full oftFound, even as the Roman did,That in Life's most delicious cupSurgit Amari Aliquid!"
"Say, brother, have you not full oft
Found, even as the Roman did,
That in Life's most delicious cup
Surgit Amari Aliquid!"
The girl heard him sigh and turned quickly. She saw that her friend's face was overcast.
It was so much to her, this moment, she was so happy since she had stepped from the hot streets of the city into fairyland with the Magician, that there must be no single shadow.
"Come!" she said gaily, "this is perfect but there are other perfect things waiting. Wave your wand again, Prospero, and change the magic scene."
Lothian jumped up from his seat.
"Yes! on into the sunset. You are right. We must go before we are satisfied. That's the whole art of living—Miranda!"
Her eyes twinkled with mischief.
"How old you have grown all of a sudden," she said, but as they passed through the inn once more he thought with wonder that if six years were added to his age he might have been her father in very fact. Many a man of forty-one or two had girls as old as she.
He sent her to the motor, on pretence of stopping to pay for the milk, but in the little bar-parlour he hurriedly ordered whiskey—"a large one, yes, only half the soda."
The landlord poured it out with great speed, understanding immediately. He must have been used to this furtive taking in of the fuel, here was another accustomed acolyte of alcohol.
"Next stop Brighton, sir," he said with a genial wink.
Lothian's melancholy passed away like a stone falling through water as the car started once more. He said something wildly foolish and discovered, with a throb of amazement and recognition, that she could play! He had never met a girl before who could play, as he liked to play.
There was a strain of impish, freakish humour in Lothian which few people understood, which fewsensiblepeople ever can understand. It is hardly to be defined, it seems incredibly childish and mad to the majority of folk, but it sweetens life to those who have it. And such people are very rare, so that when one meets another there is a surprised and delighted welcome, a freemason's greeting, a shout of joy in Laughter Land!
"Good heavens!" he said, "and you can play then!"
There was no need to mention the name of the game—it has none indeed—but Rita understood. Her sweet face wrinkled into impish mischief and she nodded.
"Didn't you know?"
"How could I possibly?"
"No, you couldn't of course, but I never thought it ofyou."
"Nor I of you," he answered. "I'll test you. 'The cow is in the garden.'"
"'The cat is in the lake,'" she answered instantly.
"'The pig is in the hammock?'"
"'What differencedoesit make?'" she shouted triumphantly.
For the rest of the drive to Brighton their laughter never stopped. Nothing draws a man and a woman together as laughter does—when it is intimate to themselves, a mutual language not to be understood of others. They became extraordinary friends, as if they had known each other from childhood, and the sunset fires in all their glory passed unheeded.
Although he could hear nothing of what they said, there was a sympathetic grin upon the chauffeur's face at the ringing mirth behind him.
"It's your turn to suppose now, Mr. Lothian."
"Well—wait a minute—oh, let's suppose that Mr. Podley once wrote a moral poem—you to play!"
Rita thought for a minute or two, her lips rippling with merriment, her young eyes shining.
A little chuckle escaped her, her shoulders began to shake and then she shrieked with joy.
"I've got it, splendid! Listen! It's to inculcate kindness to animals.
"I am only a whelk, Sir,Though if you but knew,Although I'm a whelk, Sir,The Lord made me too!"
"I am only a whelk, Sir,Though if you but knew,Although I'm a whelk, Sir,The Lord made me too!"
"I am only a whelk, Sir,
Though if you but knew,
Although I'm a whelk, Sir,
The Lord made me too!"
"Magnificent!—your turn."
"Well, what will the title of the Toftrees' next novel be?"
"'Cats' meat!'—I say, do you know that I have invented the onequiteperfect opening for a short story. You'll realise when you hear it that it stands alone. It's perfect, like Giotto's Campanile or 'The Hound of Heaven.'"
"Tell me quickly!"
"Mr. Florimond awoke from a deep sleep. There was nobody there but the Dog Trust."
"You are wonderful. I see it, of course. It's style itself! And how would you end the story? Have you studied the end yet?"
"Yes. I worked at it all the time I was in Italy last year. You shall hear that too. Mr. Florimond sank into a deep sleep. There was nobody there but the Dog Trust."
. . .He told her of his younger days in London when he shared a flat with a brother journalist named Passhe.
"We lived the most delightful freakish lives you can imagine," he said. "When we came into breakfast from our respective bedrooms we had a ritual which never varied. We neither looked at each other nor spoke, but sat down opposite at the table. We each had our newspaper put in our place by the man who looked after us. We opened the papers and pretended to read for a moment. Then Basil looked over the top of his at me, very gravely. 'We live in stirring times, Mr. Lothian!' he would say, and I used to answer, 'Indeed, Mr. Passhe, we do!' Then we became as usual."
"How perfectly sweet! I must do that with Ethel—that's the girl I live with, you know—only we don't have the papers. It runs up so!" she concluded, with a wise little air that sent a momentary throb of pain through a man who had never understood (even in his poorest days) what money meant; and probably never would understand.
Poor, dear little girl! Why couldn't he give her—
"We're here, Mr. Lothian! Look at the lights! Brighton at last!"
Rita had been whisked away by a chambermaid and he was waiting for her in the great hall of the Metropole. He had washed, reserved a table, and swallowed a gin and bitters. He felt rather tired physically, and a little depressed also. His limbs had suddenly felt cramped as he left the motor car, the wild exhilaration of their fun had made him tired and nervous now. His bad state of health asserted itself unpleasantly, his forehead was clammy and the palms of his hands wet.
No champagne for him! Rita should have champagne if she liked, but whiskey, whiskey! that was the only thing. "I can soon pull myself together," he thought. "She won't know. I'll tell the fellow to bring it in a decanter."
Presently she came to him among the people who moved or sat about under the lights of the big, luxurious vestibule. She was a little shy and nervous, slightly flushed and anxious, for she had never been in such a splendid public place before.
He gathered that from her whispered remarks, as with a curious and pleasant air of proprietorship he took her to the dining rooms.
There was a bunch of amber-coloured roses upon her plate as she sat down at their table, which he had sent there a few minutes before. She pressed them to her face with a shy look of pleasure as he conferred with the head waiter, who himself came hurrying up to them.
Lothian was not known at the hotel, but it was always the same wherever he went. His wife often chaffed him about it. She said that he had a "tipping face." Whether that was so or not, the result was the same, he received immediate and marked attention. Rita noticed it with pride.
He had been, from the first moment he entered the Library in his simple flannel suit, just a charming and deferential companion. There had been no preliminaries. The thing had just happened, that was all. In all her life she had never met any one so delightful, and in her excitement and pleasure she had quite forgotten that he was Gilbert Lothian.
But it came back to her very vividly now.
How calmly he ordered the dinner and conferred with the wine-man, who had a great silver chain hanging on his shirt front! What an accustomed man-of-the-world air there was about him, how they all ran to serve him. She blushed mentally as she thought of her simple confidences and girlish chatter—and yet he hadn't seemed to mind.
She looked round her. "It is difficult to realise," she said, as much to herself as to her host, "that there are people who dine in places like this every day."
Lothian looked round him. "Yes," he said a trifle bitterly, as his eye fell upon a party of Jews who had motored down from London,—"people who rule over three-quarters of the world—and an entire eclipse of the intellect! You can see it here, unimportant as it is, compared to the great places in London and Paris—'the feasting and the folly and the fun, the lying and the lusting and the drink'!"
Rita looked at him wonderingly, following the direction of his eyes.
"Those people seem happy," she said, not understanding his sudden mood, "they are all laughing and they all seem amused."
"Yes, but people don't always laugh because they are amused. Slow-witted, obese brained people—like those Israelites there—laugh very often on the chance that there is something funny which eludes them. They don't want to betray themselves. When I see people like that I feel as if my mind ought to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid."
As a matter of fact, the party at the other table with their handsome Oriental faces and alert, vivacious manner did not seem in the least slow-witted, nor were they. One of them was a peer and great newspaper proprietor, another a musician of world celebrity. Lothian's cynicism jarred on the pleasure of the moment. For the first time the girl did not feel quiteen rapport, and was a little uneasy. He struck too harsh a note.
But at that moment waiters bustled up with soup, champagne in an ice pail, and a decanter of some bright amber liquid for Lothian. He poured and drank quickly, with an involuntary sigh of satisfaction.
"How I wanted that!" he said with a frank smile. "I was talking nonsense, Miranda, but I was tired. And I'm afraid that when I get tired I'm cross. I've been working very hard lately and am a little run down," he added, anxious that she should not think that their talk had tired him, and feeling the necessity of some explanation.
It satisfied her immediately. His change of voice and face reassured her, the little shadow passed.
"Oh, Iamenjoying myself!" she said with a sigh of pleasure, "but what's this? How strange! The soup iscold!"
"Yes, didn't you know? It's iced consommé, awfully good in hot weather."
She shook her head. "No, I didn't," she said. "I've never been anywhere or seen anything, you know. When Ethel and I feel frightfully rich, we have dinner at Lyons, but I've never been to a swagger restaurant before."
"And you like it?"
"It's heavenly! How good this soup is. But what a waste it seems to put all that ice round the champagne. Ice is so dreadfully expensive. You get hardly any for fourpence at our fishmongers."
But it was the mayonnaise with its elaborate decoration that intrigued her most.
Words failed at the luscious sight and it was a sheer joy to watch her.
"Oh, what a pig I am!" she said, after her second helping, with her flashing, radiant smile, "but it was too perfectly sweet for anything."
The champagne and excitement had tinted her cheeks exquisitely, it was as though a few drops of red wine had been poured into a glass of clear crystal water. With little appetite himself, Lothian watched her eat with intense pleasure in her youth and health. His depression had gone, he seemed to draw vitality from her, to be informed with something of her own pulsing youth. He became quite at his best, and how good that was, not very many people knew.
It was his hour, his moment, every sense was flattered and satisfied. He was dining with the prettiest girl in the room, people turned to look at her. She hung on his words and was instantly appreciative. A full flask of poison was by his side, he could help himself without let or hindrance. Her innocence of what he was doing—of what it was necessary for him to do to remain at concert-pitch—was supreme. No one else knew or would have cared twopence if they did.
He was witty, in a high courtly way. The hour of freakish fun was over, and his shrewd insight into life, his poetic and illuminating method of statement, the grace and kindliness of it all held the girl spellbound.
And well it might. His nerves, cleared and tempered, telegraphed each message to his brilliant, lambent brain with absolute precision.
There was an entire co-ordination of all the reflexes.
And Rita knew well that she was hearing what many people would have given much to hear, knew that Lothian was exerting himself to a manifestation of the highest power of his brain—for her.
For her! It was an incredible triumph, wonderfully sweet. The dominant sex-instinct awoke. Unconsciously she was now responding to him as woman to man. Her eyes, her lips showed it, everything was quite different from what it had been before.
In all that happened afterwards, neither of them ever forgot that night. For the girl it was Illumination.
. . .She had mentioned a writer of beautiful prose whom she had recently discovered in the library and who had come as a revelation to her.
"Nothing else I have ever read produces the same impression," she said.
"There are very few writers in prose that can."
"It is magic."
"But to be understood. You see, some of his chapters—the passages on Leonardo da Vinci for instance, are intended to be musical compositions as it were, in which words have to take the place and perform the functions of notes. It has been pointed out that they are impassioned, not so much in the sense of expressing any very definite sentiment, but because, from the combination and structure of the sentences, they harmonise with certain phases of emotion."
She understood. The whole mechanism and intention of the writer were revealed to her in those lucent words.
And then a statement of his philosophy.
"In telling me of your reading just now, you spoke of that progress of the soul that each new horizon in literature seems to stimulate and ensure for you. And you quoted some hackneyed and beautiful lines of Longfellow. Cling always to that idea of progress, but remember that we don't really rise to higher things upon the stepping stones of our dead selves so much as on the stepping stones of our dead opinions. That is Progress.Progress means the capability of seeing new forms of beauty."
"But there are places where one wants to linger."
"I know, but it's dangerous. You were splendidly right when you bade me move from that garden just now. The road was waiting. It is so with states of the soul. The limpet is the lowest of organisms. Movement is everything. One life may seem to be like sunlight moving over sombre ground and another like the shadow of a cloud traversing a sunlit space. But both have meaning and value. Never strike an average and imagine you have found content. The average life is nothing but a pudding in a fog!"
Lothian had been talking very earnestly, his eyes full of light, fixed on her eyes. And now, in a moment, he saw what had been there for many minutes, he saw what he had roused.
He was startled.
During this delightful evening that side of their intercourse had not been very present in his mind. She was a delightful flower, a flower with a mind. It is summed up very simply.He had never once wanted to touch her.
His face changed and grew troubled. A new presence was there, a problem rose where there had been none before. The realisation of her physical loveliness and desirability came to him in a flood of new sensation. The strong male impulse was alive and burning for the first time that night.
A waiter had brought a silver dish of big peaches, and as she ate the fruit there was that in her eyes which he recognised, though he knew her mind was unconscious of it.
In the sudden stir and tumult of his thoughts, one became dominant.
It was an evil thought, perhaps the most subtle and the most evil that can come to a man. The pride of intellect in its most gross and devilish manifestation awoke.
He was not a vain man. He did not usually think much about his personal appearance and charm. But he knew how changed in outward aspect he was becoming. His glass told him that every morning at shaving time. His vice was marking him. He was not what he was, not what he should and might be, in a physical regard. And girls, he knew, were generally attracted by physical good-looks in a man. Young Dickson Ingworth, for instance, seemed able to pick and choose. Lothian had often laughed at the boyish and conceited narratives of his prowess. And now, to the older man came the realisation that his age, his growing corpulence, need mean nothing at all—if he willed it so. A girl like this, a pearl among maidens, could be dominated by his intellect. He knew that he was not mistaken. Over a fool, however lovely and attractive by reason of her sex, he would have no power. But here. . .
An allurement more dazzling than he had thought life held was suddenly shown him.
There was an honest horror, a shudder and recoil of all the good in him from this monstrous revelation, so sudden, so unexpected.
He shuddered and then found an instant compromise.
It could not concernhimself, it never should. But it might be regarded—just for a few brief moments!—from a detached point of view, as if it had to do with some one else, some creation of a fiction or a poem.
And even that was unutterably sweet.
It should be so, only for this night. There would be no harm done. And it was for the sake of his Art, the psychological experience to be gathered. . . .
There is no time in thought. The second hand of his watch had hardly moved when he leant towards her a little and spoke.
"Cupid!" he said. "I think I know why they used to call you Cupid at your school!"
Just as she had been a dear, clever and deferential school-girl in the Library, a girl-poet in the garden, a freakish companion-wit after that, so now she became a woman.
He had fallen. She knew and tasted consciousness of power.
Another side of the girl's complex personality appeared. She led him on and tried to draw back. She became provocative at moments when he did not respond at once. She flirted with a finished art.
As he lit a cigarette for her, she tested the "power of the hour" to its limit, showing without possibility of mistake how aware she was.
"What would Mrs. Lothian think of your bringing me here to dinner?" she said very suddenly.
For a moment he did not know what to answer, the attack was so direct, the little feline thrust revealing so surely where he stood.
"She would be delighted that I was having such a jolly evening," he answered, but neither his smile nor his voice was quite true.
She smiled at him in girlish mockery, rejoicing!
"You little devil!" he thought with an embarrassed mental grin. "How dare you." She should pay for that.
"Would you mind if my wife did care," he asked, looking her straight in the eyes.
"I ought to, but—I shouldn't!" she answered recklessly, and all his blood became fired.
Yet at that, he leant back in his chair and laughed a frank laugh of amusement. The tension was over, the dangerous moment passed, and soon afterwards they wandered out into the night, to go upon the pier "just for half an hour" before starting for London.
And neither of them saw that upon one of the lounges in the great hall, sipping coffee and talking to the newspaper-peer Herbert Toftrees was sitting.
He saw them at once and started, while an ugly look came into his eyes. "Look," he said. "There's Gilbert Lothian, the Christian Poet!"
"So that's the man!" said Lord Morston, "deuced pretty wife he's got. And very fine work he does too, by the way."
"Oh, that's not his wife," Toftrees answered with contempt. "I know who that is quite well. Lothian keeps his wife somewhere down in the country and no one ever sees her." And he proceeded to pour the history of the Amberleys' dinner-party into a quietly amused and cynical ear.
The swift rush back to London under the stars was quiet and dreamy. Repose fell over Gilbert and Rita as they sat side by side, repose "from the cool cisterns of the midnight air."
They felt much drawn to each other. Laughter and all feverish thoughts were swept away by the breezes of their passage through the night. They were old friends now! An affection had sprung up between them which was to be a real and enduring thing. They were to be dear friends always, and that would be "perfectly sweet."
Rita had been so lonely. She had wanted a friend so.
He was going home on the morrow. He had been too long away.
But he would be up in town again quite soon, and meanwhile they would correspond.
"Dear little Rita," he said, as he held her hand outside the door of the block of flats in Kensington. "Dear child, I'm so glad."
It was a clear night and the clocks were striking twelve.
"And I'm glad, too," she answered,—"Gilbert!"
He was soon at his club, had paid the chauffeur and dismissed him. There was no one he wanted to talk to in either of the smoking rooms, and so, after a final peg he went upstairs to bed. He was quite peaceful and calm in mind, very placidly happy and pleased.
To-morrow he would go home to Mary.
He said his prayers, begging God to make this strange and sweet friendship that had come into his life of value to him and to his little friend, might it always be fine and pure!
So he got into bed and a pleasant drowsiness stole over him; he had a sense of great virtue and peace. All was well with his soul.
"Dear little Rita," were the words he murmured as he fell asleep and lay tranquil in yet another phase of his poisoned life.
No dreams disturbed his sleep. No premonition came to tell him whither he had set his steps or whither they would lead him.
A mile or two away there was a nameless grave of shame, within a citadel where "pale Anguish keeps the gate and the Warder is Despair."
But no spectre rose from that grave to warn him.
END OF THE FIRST BOOK
BOOK TWO
LOTHIAN IN NORFOLK
"Not with fine gold for a payment,But with coin of sighs,But with rending of raimentAnd with weeping of eyes,But with shame of stricken facesAnd with strewing of dust,For the sin of stately placesAnd lordship of lust."
"Not with fine gold for a payment,But with coin of sighs,But with rending of raimentAnd with weeping of eyes,But with shame of stricken facesAnd with strewing of dust,For the sin of stately placesAnd lordship of lust."
"Not with fine gold for a payment,
But with coin of sighs,
But with rending of raiment
And with weeping of eyes,
But with shame of stricken faces
And with strewing of dust,
For the sin of stately places
And lordship of lust."
CHAPTER I
VIGNETTE OF EARLY MORNING. "GILBERT IS COMING HOME!"
"Elle se repand dans ma vieComme un air imprégné de sel,Et dans mon âme inassouvieVerse le goût de l'éternel."—Baudelaire.
"Elle se repand dans ma vieComme un air imprégné de sel,Et dans mon âme inassouvieVerse le goût de l'éternel."
"Elle se repand dans ma vie
Comme un air imprégné de sel,
Et dans mon âme inassouvie
Verse le goût de l'éternel."
—Baudelaire.
—Baudelaire.
The white magic of morning was at work over the village of Mortland Royal. From a distant steading came the thin brazen cry of a cock, thin as a bugle, and round the Lothians' sleeping house the bubble of bird-song began.
In the orchard before the house, which ran down to the trout stream, Trust, the brown spaniel dog, came out of a barrel in his little fenced enclosure, sniffed the morning air, yawned, and went back again into his barrel. White mist was rising from the water-meadows, billowed into delicate eddies and spirals by the first breeze of day, and already touched by the rosy fingers of dawn.
In the wood beyond the meadows an old cock-pheasant made a sound like high hysteric laughter.
The house, with its gravel-sweep giving directly on to the unfenced orchard, was long and low. The stones were mellowed by time, and orange, olive, and ash-coloured lichens clung to them. The roof was of tiles, warm red and green with age, the windows mullioned, the chimney-stack, which cut deep into the roof, high and with the grace of Tudor times.
The place was called the "Old House" in the village and was a veritable sixteenth century cottage, rather spoilt by repairs and minor extensions, but still, in the silent summer morning, with something of the grace and fragrance of an Elizabethan song. It was quite small, really, a large cottage and nothing more, but it had a personality of its own and it was always very tranquil.
On such a summer dawn as this with the rabbits frisking in the pearl-hung grass, on autumn days of brown and purple, or keen spring mornings when the wind fifed a tune among the bare branches of the apple-trees; on dead winter days when sea-birds from the marshes flitted against the grey sky like sudden drifts of snow, a deep peace ever brooded over the house.
The air began to grow fresher and the mists to disperse as the breeze came over the great marshes a mile beyond the village. Out on the mud-flats with their sullen tidal creeks the sun was rising like a red Host from the far sea which tolled like a Mass bell. The curlews with their melancholy voices were beginning to fly inland from the marshes, high up in the still sky. The plovers were calling, the red-shanks piping in the marrum grass, and a sedge of herons shouted their hoarse "frank, frank" as they clanged away over the saltings.
Only the birds were awake in this remote Norfolk village, the cows in the meadows had but just turned in their sleep, and not even the bees were yet a-wing. Peace, profound and brooding, lay over the Poet's house.
Dawn blossomed into perfect morning, all gold and blue. It began, early as it was, to grow hot. Trust came out of his barrel and began to pad round his little yard with bright brown eyes.
There was a sound of some one stirring in the silent house, and presently the back door, in the recess near the entrance gates, was flung wide open and a housemaid with untidy hair and eyes still heavy with sleep, stood yawning upon the step. There was a rattle of cinders and the cracking of sticks as the fire was lit in the kitchen beyond. Trust, in the orchard, heard the sound. He could smell the wood-smoke from the chimney. Presently one of the Great Ones, the Beloved Ones, would let him out for a scamper in the dew. Then there would be biscuits for the dog Trust.
And now brisk footsteps were heard upon the road outside the entrance gates. In a moment more these were pushed open with a rattle, and Tumpany swung in humming a little tune.
Tumpany was a shortish thick-set man of fifty, with a red clean-shaven face. He walked with his body bent forward, his arms hanging at his sides, and always seemed about to break into a short run. It was five years since he had retired even from the coast-guard, but Royal Navy was written large all over him, and would be until he tossed off his last pint of beer and sailed away to Fidler's Green—"Nine miles to windward of Hell," as he loved to explain to the housemaid and the cook.
Tumpany's wife kept a small shop in the village, and he himself did the boots and knives, cleaned Gilbert's guns and went wild-fowling with him in the winter, was the more immediate Providence of the Dog Trust, and generally a most important and trusted person in the little household of the Poet.
There was an almost exaggerated briskness in Tumpany's walk and manner as he turned into the kitchen. Blanche, the housemaid, was now "doing" the dining-room, in the interior of the house, but Phoebe, the cook—a stalwart lass of three and twenty—had just got the fire to her liking and was giving a finishing touch of polish to the range.
"Morning, my girl!" said Tumpany in a bluff, cheery voice.
Phoebe did not answer, but went on polishing the handle of the oven door.
He repeated the salutation, a shade less confidently.
The girl gave a final leisurely twist of the leather, surveyed her work critically for a moment, and then rose to her feet.
"There are them knives," she said shortly, pointing to a basket upon the table, "and the boots is in the back kitchen."
"You needn't be so short with a man, Phoebe."
"You needn't have been so beastly drunk last night. Then them knives wouldn't want doing this morning. If it hadn't been for me the dog wouldn't have had no food. If the mistress knew she would have given you what for, as I expect your missis have already if the truth were known."
"Damn the mistress!" said Tumpany. He adored Mary Lothian, as Phoebe very well knew, but his head burned and he was in the uncertain temper of the "morning after." The need of self-assertion was paramount.
"Now, no beastly language in my kitchen," said the girl. "You go and do your damning—and them knives—in the outhouse. I wonder you've the face to come here at all, Master being away too. Get out, do!"
With a very red and sulky face, Tumpany gathered up the knives and shambled away to his own particular sanctum.
The ex-sailor was confused in his mind. There was a buzzing in his head like that of bees in a hive. He had a faint recollection of being turned out of the Mortland Arms just before ten o'clock the night before. His muddy memories showed him the stern judicial face of the rather grim old lady who kept the Inn. He seemed to feel her firm hands upon his shoulders yet.
But had he come back to the Old House? He was burning to ask the cook. One thing was satisfactory. His mistress had not seen him or else Phoebe's threat would have meant nothing. Yet what had happened in his own house? He had woke up in the little parlour behind the shop. Some one had covered him with an overcoat. He had not dared to go upstairs to his wife. He hoped—here he began to rub a knife up and down the board with great vigour—he did hope that he hadn't set about her. There was a sick fear in the man's heart as he polished his knives.
In many ways a better fellow never breathed. He was extremely popular in the village, Gilbert Lothian swore by him, Mary Lothian liked him very well. He was a person of some consequence in the village community where labourers worked early and late for a wage of thirteen shillings a week. His pension was a good one, the little shop kept by his wife was not unprosperous, Lothian was generous. He only got drunk now and then—generally at the time when he drew his pension—but when he did his wife suffered. He would strike her, not knowing what he did. The dreadful marks would be on her face in the morning and he would suffer an agony of dull and inarticulate remorse.
So, even in the pretty cottage of this prosperous and popular man—so envied by his poorer neighbours—surgit amari aliquid!
. . .If only things had been all right last night!
Tumpany put down his knife with a bang. He slipped from his little outhouse, and slunk across the orchard. Then he opened the iron gate of the dog's kennel.
The dog Trust exploded over Tumpany like a shell of brown fur. He leapt at him in an ecstasy of love and greeting and then, unable to express his feelings in any other way, rolled over on his back with his long pink tongue hanging out, and his eyes blinking in the sun.
"Goodorg," said Tumpany, a little comforted, and then both he and Trust slunk back to the outhouse. There was a sympathetic furtiveness in the animal also. It was as though the Dog Trust quite understood.
Tumpany resumed his work. Two rabbits which he had shot the day before were hanging from the roof, and Trust looked up at them with eager eyes. A rabbit represented the unattainable to Trust. He was a hard-working and highly-trained sporting dog, a wild-fowling dog especially, and he was never allowed to retrieve a rabbit for fear of spoiling the tenderness of his mouth. When one of the delicious little creatures bolted under his very nose, he must take no notice of it at all. Trust held the (wholly erroneous) belief that if only he had the chance he could run down a rabbit in the open field. He did not realise that a dog who will swim over a creek with a snipe or tiny ring-plover in his mouth and drop it without a bone being broken must never touch fur. His own greatness forbade these baser joys, but like the Prince in the story who wanted to make mud pies with the beggar children, he was unconscious of his position, and for him too—on this sweet morning—surgit amari aliquid.
But life has many compensations. The open door of the brick shed was darkened suddenly. Phoebe, who in reality had a deep admiration for Mr. Tumpany, had relented, and in her hand was a mug of beer.
"There!" she said with a grin, "and take care it don't hiss as it goes down. Pipes red hot I expect! Lord what fools men are!"
Tumpany said nothing, but the deep "gluck gluck" of satisfaction as he drank was far more eloquent than words.
Phoebe watched him with a pitying and almost maternal wonder in her simple mind.
"A good thing you've come early, and Mistress ain't up yet," she said. "I went into the cellar as quiet as a cat, and I held a dish-cloth over the spigot when I knocked it in again so as to deaden the sound. You can hear the knock all over the house else!"
"Thank ye, Phoebe, my dear. That there beer's in lovely condition; and I don't mind saying I wanted it bad."
"Well, take care, as you don't want it another day so early. I see your wife last night!"
She paused, maliciously enjoying the anxiety which immediately clouded the man's round, red face.
"It's all right," she said at length. "She was out when you come home from the public, and she found you snoring in the parlour. There was no words passed. I must get to work."
She hurried back to her kitchen. Tumpany began to whistle.
The growing warmth of the morning had melted the congealed blood which hung from the noses of the rabbits. One or two drops fell upon the flags of the floor and the Dog Trust licked them up with immense relish.
Thus day began for the humbler members of the Poet's household.