“I could never be wretched if you were my wife,” he answered doggedly. “I've love enough for two.”
She shook her head.
“No, Tim. Don't let's spoil a good friendship by turning it into a one-sided love-affair.”
He smiled rather grimly.
“I'm afraid it's too late to prevent that,” he said drily. “But I won't worry you any more now, dear. Only—I'm not going to accept your answer as final.”
“I wish you would,” she urged.
He looked at her curiously. “No man who loves you, Sara, is going to give you up very easily,” he averred. Then, after a moment: “you'll let me write to you sometimes?”
She nodded soberly.
“Yes—but not love-letters, Tim.”
“No—not love-letters.”
He lifted her hands and kissed first one and then the other. Then, with his head well up and his shoulders squared, he went away.
But the sea-blue eyes that had been wont to look out on the world so gaily had suddenly lost their care-free bravery. They were the eyes of a man who has looked for the first time into the radiant, sorrowful face of Love, and read therein all the possibilities—the glory and the pain and the supreme happiness—which Love holds.
And Sara, standing alone and regretful that the friend had been lost in the lover, never guessed that Tim's love was a thread which was destined to cross and re-cross those other threads held by the fingers of Fate until it had tangled the whole fabric of her life.
“Oldhampton! Oldhampton! Change here for Motchley and Monkshaven!”
It was with a sigh of relief that Sara, in obedience to the warning raucously intoned by a hurrying porter, vacated her seat in the railway compartment in which she had travelled from Fallowdene. Her companions on the journey had been an elderly spinster and her maid, and as the former had insisted upon the exclusion of every breath of outside air, Sara felt half-suffocated by the time they ran into Oldhampton Junction. The Monkshaven train was already standing in the station, and, commissioning a porter to transfer her luggage, she sauntered leisurely along the platform, searching vainly for an empty compartment, where the regulation of the supply of oxygen would not depend upon the caprice of an old maid.
The train appeared to be very full, but at last she espied a first-class smoking carriage which boasted but a single occupant—a man in the far corner, half-hidden behind the newspaper he was holding—and, tipping her porter, she stepped into the compartment and busied herself bestowing her hand-baggage in the rack.
The man in the corner abruptly lowered his newspaper.
“This be a smoker,” he remarked significantly.
Sara turned at the sound of his voice. The unwelcoming tones made it abundantly clear that the remainder of his thought ran: “And you've no business to get into it.” A spark of amusement lit itself in her eyes.
“The railway company indicate as much on the window,” she replied placidly, with a glance towards theSmoking Carriagelabel pasted against the pane.
There came no response, unless an irritated crackling of newspaper could be regarded as such—and the next moment, to the accompaniment of much banging of doors and a final shout of: “Stand away there!” the train began to move slowly out of the station.
Sara sat down with a sigh of relief that she had escaped her former travelling companions, with their unpleasant predilection for a vitiated atmosphere, and her thoughts wandered idly to the consideration of the man in the corner, to whom she was obviously an equally unwelcome fellow-passenger.
He had retired once more behind his newspaper, and practically all that was offered for her contemplation consisted of a pair of knee-breeches and well-cut leather leggings and two strong-looking, sun-tanned hands. These latter intrigued Sara considerably—their long, sensitive fingers and short, well-kept nails according curiously with their sunburnt suggestion of great physical strength and an outdoor life. She wished their owner would see fit to lower his newspaper once more, since her momentary glimpse of his face had supplied her with but little idea of his personality. And the hands, so full of contradictory suggestion, aroused her interest.
As though in response to her thoughts, the newspaper suddenly crackled down on to its owner's knees.
“I have every intention of smoking,” he announced aggressively. “This is a smoking carriage.”
Sara, supported by the recollection of a dainty little gold and enamel affair in her hand-bag, filled with some very special Russian cigarettes, smiled amiably.
“I know it is,” she replied in unruffled tones. “That's why I got in. I, too, have every intention of smoking.”
He stared at her in silence for a moment, then, without further comment, produced a pipe and tobacco pouch from the depths of a pocket, and proceeded to fill the former, carefully pressing down the tobacco with the tip of one of those slender, capable-looking fingers.
Sara observed him quickly. As he lounged there indolently in his corner, she was aware of a subtle combination of strength and fine tempering in the long, supple lines of his limbs—something that suggested the quality of steel, hard, yet pliant. He had a lean, hard-bitten face, tanned by exposure to the sun and wind, and the clean-shaven lips met with a curious suggestion of bitter reticence in their firm closing. His hair was brown—“plain brown” as Sara mentally characterized it—but it had a redeeming kink in it and the crispness of splendid vitality. The eyes beneath the straight, rather frowning brows were hazel, and, even in the brief space of time occupied by the inimical colloquy of a few moments ago, Sara had been struck by the peculiar intensity of their regard—an odd depth and brilliance only occasionally to be met with, and then preferably in those eyes which are a somewhat light grey in colour and ringed round the outer edge of the iris with a deeper tint.
The flare of a match roused her from her half-idle, half-interested contemplation of her fellow-passenger, and, as he lit his pipe, she was sharply conscious that his oddly luminous eyes were regarding her with a glint of irony in their depths.
Instantly she recalled his hostile reception of her entrance into the compartment, and the defiantly given explanation she had tendered in return.
Very deliberately she extracted her cigarette-case from her bag and selected a cigarette, only to discover that she had not supplied herself with a matchbox. She hunted assiduously amongst the assortment of odds and ends the bag contained, but in vain, and finally, a little nettled that her companion made no attempt to supply the obvious deficiency, she looked up to find that he was once more, to all appearances, completely absorbed in his newspaper.
Sara regarded him with indignation; in her own mind she was perfectly convinced that he was aware of her quandary and had no mind to help her out of it. Evidently he had not forgiven her intrusion into his solitude.
“Boor!” she ejaculated mentally. Then, aloud, and with considerable acerbity:
“Could you oblige me with a match?”
With no show of alacrity, and with complete indifference of manner, he produced a matchbox and handed it to her, immediately reverting to his newspaper as though considerably bored by the interruption.
Sara flushed, and, having lit her cigarette, tendered him his matchbox with an icy little word of thanks.
Apparently, however, he was quite unashamed of his churlishness, for he accepted the box without troubling to raise his eyes from the page he was reading, and the remainder of the journey to Monkshaven was accomplished in an atmosphere that bristled with hostility.
As the train slowed up into the station, it became evident to Sara that Monkshaven was also the destination of her travelling companion, for he proceeded with great deliberation to fold up his newspaper and to hoist his suit-case down from the rack. It did not seem to occur to him to proffer his service to Sara, who was struggling with her own hand-luggage, and the instant the train came to a standstill he opened the door of the compartment, stopped out on to the platform, and marched away.
A gleam of amusement crossed her face.
“I wonder who he is?” she reflected, as she followed in the wake of a porter in search of her trunks. “He certainly needs a lesson in manners.”
Within herself she registered a vindictive vow that, should the circumstances of her residence in Monkshaven afford the opportunity, she would endeavour to give him one.
Monkshaven was but a tiny little station, and it was soon apparent that no conveyance of any kind had been sent to meet her.
“No, there would be none,” opined the porter of whom she inquired. “Dr. Selwyn keeps naught but a little pony-trap, and he's most times using it himself. But there's a 'bus from the Cliff Hotel meets all trains, miss, and”—with pride—“there's a station keb.”
In a few minutes Sara was the proud—and thankful—occupant of the “station keb,” and, after bumping over the cobbles with which the station yard was paved, she found herself being driven in leisurely fashion through the high street of the little town, whilst her driver, sitting sideways on his box, indicated the points of interest with his whip as they went along.
Presently the cab turned out of the town and began the ascent of a steep hill, and as they climbed the winding road, Sara found that she could glimpse the sea, rippling greyly beyond the town, and tufted with little bunches of spume whipped into being by the keen March wind. The town itself spread out before her, an assemblage of red and grey tiled roofs sloping downwards to the curve of the bay, while, on the right, a bold promontory thrust itself into the sea, grimly resisting the perpetual onslaught of the wave. Through the waning light of the winter's afternoon, Sara could discern the outline of a house limned against the dark background of woods that crowned it. Linked to the jutting headland, a long range of sea-washed cliffs stretched as far as the eyes could reach.
“That be Monk's Cliff,” vouchsafed the driver conversationally. “Bit of a lonesome place for folks to choose to live at, ain't it?”
“Who lives there?” asked Sara with interest.
“Gentleman of the name of Trent—queer kind of bloke he must be, too, if all's true they say of 'im. He's lived there a matter of ten years or more—lives by 'imself with just a man and his wife to do for 'im. Far End, they calls the 'ouse.”
“Far End,” repeated Sara. The name conveyed an odd sense of remoteness and inaccessibility. It seemed peculiarly appropriate to a house built thus on the very edge of the mainland.
Her eyes rested musingly on the bleak promontory. It would be a fit abode, she thought, for some recluse, determined to eschew the society of his fellow-men; here he could dwell, solitary and apart, surrounded on three sides by the grey, dividing sea, and protected on the fourth by the steep untempting climb that lay betwixt the town and the lonely house on the cliff.
“'Ere you are, miss. This is Dr. Selwyn's.”
The voice of her Jehu roused her from her reflections to find that the cab had stopped in front of a white-painted wooden gate bearing the legend, “Sunnyside,” painted in black letters across its topmost bar.
“I'll take the keb round to the stable-yard, miss; it'll be more convenient-like for the luggage,” added the man, with a mildly disapproving glance towards the narrow tiled path leading from the gate to the house-door.
Sara nodded, and, having paid him his fare, made her way through the white gateway and along the path.
There seemed a curious absence of life about the place. No sound of voices broke the silence, and, although the front door stood invitingly open, there was no sign of any one hovering in the background ready to receive her.
Vaguely chilled—since, of course, they must be expecting her—she rang the bell. It clanged noisily through the house but failed to produce any more important result than the dislodging of some dust from a ledge above which the bell-wire ran. Sara watched it fall and lie on the floor in a little patch of fine, greyish powder.
The hall, of which the open door gave view, though of considerable dimensions, was poorly furnished. The wide expanse of colour-washed wall was broken only by a hat-stand, on which hung a large assortment of masculine hats and coats, all of them looking considerably the worse for wear, and by two straight-backed chairs placed with praiseworthy exactitude at equal distances apart from the aforesaid rather overburdened piece of furniture. The floor was covered with linoleum of which the black and white chess-board pattern had long since retrogressed with usage into an uninspiring blur. A couple of threadbare rugs completed a somewhat depressing “interior.”
Sara rang the bell a second time, on this occasion with an irritable force that produced clangour enough, one would have thought, to awaken the dead. It served, at all events, to arouse the living, for presently heavy footsteps could be heard descending the stairs, and, finally, a middle-aged maidservant, whose cap had obviously been assumed in haste, appeared, confronting Sara with an air of suspicion that seemed rather to suggest that she might have come after the spoons.
“The doctor's out,” she announced somewhat truculently. Then, before Sara had time to formulate any reply, she added, a thought more graciously: “Maybe you're a stranger to these parts. Surgery hour's not till six o'clock.”
She was evidently fully prepared for Sara to accept this as a dismissal, and looked considerably astonished when the latter queried meekly:
“Then can I see Miss Selwyn, please? I understand Mrs. Selwyn is an invalid.”
“You're right there. The mistress isn't up for seeing visitors. And Miss Molly, she's not home—she's away to Oldhampton.”
“But—but——” stammered Sara. “They're expecting me, surely? I'm Miss Tennant,” she added by way of explanation.
“Miss Tennant! Sakes alive!” The woman threw up her hands, staring at Sara with an almost comic expression, halting midway between bewilderment and horror. “If that isn't just the way of them,” she went on indignantly, “never mentioning that 'twas to-day you were coming—and no sheets aired to your bed and all! The master, he never so much as named it to me, nor Miss Molly neither. But please to come in, miss—” her outraged sense of hospitality infusing a certain limited cordiality into her tones.
The woman led the way into a sitting-room that opened off the hall, standing aside for Sara to pass in, then, muttering half-inaudibly, “You'll be liking a cup of tea, I expect,” she disappeared into the back regions of the house, whence a distant clattering of china shortly gave indication that the proffered refreshment was in course of preparation.
Sara seated herself in a somewhat battered armchair and proceeded to take stock of the room in which she found herself. It tallied accurately with what the hall had led her to expect. Most of the furniture had been good of its kind at one time, but it was now all reduced to a drab level of shabbiness. There were a few genuine antiques amongst it—a couple of camel-backed Chippendale chairs, a grandfather's clock, and some fine old bits of silver—which Sara's eye, accustomed to the rare and beautiful furnishings of Barrow Court, singled out at once from the olla podrida of incongruous modern stuff. These alone had survived the general condition of disrepair; but, even so, the silver had a neglected appearance and stood badly in need of cleaning.
This latter criticism might have been leveled with equal justice at almost everything in the room, and Sara, mindful of her reception, reflected that in such an oddly conducted household, where the advent of an expected, and obviously much-needed, paying guest could be completely overlooked, it was hardly probable that smaller details of house-management would receive their meed of attention.
Instead of depressing her, however, the forlorn aspect of the room assisted to raise her spirits. It looked as though there might very well be a niche in such a household that she could fill. Mentally she proceeded to make a tour of the room, duster in hand, and she had just reached the point where, in imagination, she was about to place a great bowl of flowers in the middle desert of the table, when the elderly Abigail re-appeared and dumped a tea-tray down in front of her.
Sara made a wry face over the tea. It tasted flat, and she could well imagine the long-boiling kettle from which the water with which it had been made was poured.
“I'm sure that tea's beastly!”
A masculine voice sounded abruptly from the doorway, and, looking up, Sara beheld a tall, eager-faced man, wearing a loose shabby coat and carrying in one hand a professional-looking doctor's bag. The bag, however, was the only professional-looking thing about him. For the rest, he might have been taken to be either an impoverished country squire and sportsman, or a Roman Catholic dignitary, according to whether you assessed him by his broad, well-knit figure and weather-beaten complexion, puckered with wrinkles born of jolly laughter, or by the somewhat austere and controlled set of his mouth and by the ardent luminous grey eyes, with their touch of the visionary and fanatic.
Sara set down her cup hastily.
“And I'm sure you're Dr. Selwyn,” she said, a flicker of amusement at his unconventional greeting in her voice.
“Right!” he answered, shaking hands. “How are you, Miss Tennant? It was plucky of you to decide to risk us after all, and I hope—” with a slight grimace—“you won't find we are any worse than I depicted. I was very sorry I had to be out when you came,” he went on genially, “but I expect Molly has looked after you all right? By the way”—glancing round him in some perplexity—“whereisMolly?”
“I understood,” replied Sara tranquilly, “that she had gone in to Oldhampton.”
Dr. Selwyn's expression was not unlike that of a puppy caught in the unlawful possession of his master's slipper.
“What did I warn you?” he exclaimed with a rueful laugh. “We're quite a hopeless household, I'm afraid. And Molly's the most absent-minded of beings. I expect she has clean forgotten that you were coming to-day. She's by way of being an artist—art-student, rather”—correcting himself with a smile. “You know the kind of thing—black carpets and Futurist colour schemes in dress. So you must try and forgive her. She's only seventeen. But Jane—I hope Jane did the honours properly? She is our stand-by in all emergencies.”
Sara's eyes danced.
“I'm afraid I came upon Jane entirely in the light of an unpleasant surprise,” she responded mildly.
“What! Do you mean to say she wasn't prepared for you? Oh, but this is scandalous! What must you think of us all?” he strode across the room and pealed the bell, and, when Jane appeared in answer to the summons, demanded wrathfully why nothing was in readiness for Miss Tennant's arrival.
Jane surveyed him with the immovable calm of the old family servant, her arms akimbo.
“And how should it be?” she wanted to know. “Seeing that neither you nor Miss Molly named it to me that the young lady was coming to-day?”
“But I asked Miss Molly to make arrangements,” protested Selwyn feebly.
“And did you expect her to do so, sir, may I ask?” inquired Jane with withering scorn.
“Do you mean to tell me that Miss Molly gave you no orders about preparing a room?” countered the doctor, skillfully avoiding the point raised?
“No, sir, she didn't. And if I'm kep' here talking much longer, there won'tbeone prepared, neither! 'Tis no use crying over spilt milk. Let me get on with the airing of my sheets, and do you talk to the young lady whiles I see to it.”
And Jane departed forthwith about her business.
“Jane Crab,” observed Selwyn, twinkling, “has been with us five-and-twenty years. I had better do as she tells me.” He threw a doleful glance at the unappetizing tea in Sara's cup. “I positively dare not order you fresh tea—in the circumstances. Jane would probably retaliate with an ultimatum involving a rigid choice between tea and the preparation of your room, accompanied by a pithy summary of the capabilities of one pair of hands.”
“Wouldn't you like some tea yourself?” hazarded Sara.
“I should—very much. But I see no prospect of getting any while Jane maintains her present attitude of mind.”
“Then—if you will show me the kitchen—I'llmake some,” announced Sara valiantly.
Selwyn regarded her with a pitying smile.
“You don't know Jane,” he said. “Trespassers in the kitchen are not—welcomed.”
“And Jane doesn't knowme,” replied Sara firmly.
“On your own head be it, then,” retorted the doctor, and led the way to the sacrosanct domain presided over by Jane Crab.
How Sara managed it Selwyn never knew, but she contrived to invade Jane's kitchen and perform the office of tea-making without offending her in the very least. Nay, more, by some occult process known only to herself, she succeeded in winning Jane's capacious heart, and from that moment onwards, the autocrat of the kitchen became her devoted satellite; and later, when Sara started to make drastic changes in the slip-shod arrangements of the house, her most willing ally.
“Miss Tennant's the only body in the place as has got some sense in her head,” she was heard to observe on more than one occasion.
After tea, Selwyn escorted Sara upstairs and introduced her to his wife. Mrs. Selwyn was a slender, colourless woman, possessing the remnants of what must at one time have been an ineffective kind of prettiness. She was a determinedly chronic invalid, and rarely left the rooms which had been set aside for her use to join the other members of the family downstairs.
“The stairs try my heart, you see,” she told Sara, with the martyred air peculiar to the hypochondriac—the genuine sufferer rarely has it. “It is, of course, a great deprivation to me, and I don't think either Dick”—with an inimical glance at her husband—“or Molly come up to see me as often as they might. Stairs are no difficulty tothem.”
Selwyn, who invariably ran up to see his wife immediately on his return from no matter how long or how tiring a round of professional visits, bit his lip.
“I come as often as I can, Minnie,” he said patiently. “You must remember my time is not my own.”
“No, dear, of course not. And I expect that outside patients are much more interesting to visit than one's own wife,” with a disagreeable little laugh.
“They mean bread-and-butter, anyway,” said Selwyn bluntly.
“Of course they do.” She turned to Sara. “Dick always thinks in terms of bread-and-butter, Miss Tennant,” she said sneeringly. “But money means little enough to any one with my poor health. Beyond procuring me a few alleviations, there is nothing it can do for me.”
Sara was privately of the opinion that it had done a good deal for her. Looking round the luxuriously furnished room with its blazing fire, and then at Mrs. Selwyn herself, elegantly clad in a rest-gown of rich silk, she could better understand the poverty-stricken appearance of the rest of the house, Dick's shabby clothes, and his willingness to receive a paying guest whose contribution towards the housekeeping might augment his slender income.
Here, then, was where his hard-earned guineas went—to keep in luxury this petulant, complaining woman whose entire thoughts were centred about her own bodily comfort, and whom Patrick Lovell, with his lucid recognition of values, would have contemptuously described as “a parasite woman, m'dear—the kind of female I've no use for.”
“Oh, Dick”—Mrs. Selwyn had been turning over the pages of a price-list that was lying on her knee—“I see the World's Store have just brought out a new kind of adjustable reading-table. It's a much lighter make than the one I have. I think I should find it easier to use.”
Selwyn's face clouded.
“How much does it cost, dear?” he asked nervously. “These mechanical contrivances are very expensive, you know.”
“Oh, this one isn't. It's only five guineas.”
“Five guineas is rather a lot of money, Minnie,” he said gravely. “Couldn't you manage with the table you have for a bit longer?”
Mrs. Selwyn tossed the price-list pettishly on to the floor.
“Of, of course!” she declared. “That's always the way. 'Can't I manage with what I have? Can't I make do with this, that, and the other?' I believe you grudge every penny you spend on me!” she wound up acrimoniously.
A dull red crept into Selwyn's face.
“You know it's not that, Minnie,” he replied in a painfully controlled voice. “It's simply that Ican't affordthese things. I give you everything I can. If I were only a rich man, you should have everything you want.”
“Perhaps if you were to work a little more intelligently you'd make more money,” she retorted. “If only you'd keep your brains for the use of people who canpay—and pay well—I shouldn't be deprived of every little comfort I ask for! Instead of that, you've got half the poor of Monkshaven on your hands—and if you think they can't afford to pay, you simply don't send in a bill. Oh,Iknow!”—sitting up excitedly in her chair, a patch of angry scarlet staining each cheek—“I hear what goes on—even shut away from the world as I am. It's just to curry popularity—you get all the praise, and I suffer for it!Ihave to go without what I want—”
“Oh, hush! Hush!” Selwyn tried ineffectually to stem the torrent of complaint.
“No, I won't hush! It's 'Doctor Dick this,' and 'Doctor Dick that'—oh, yes, you see, I know their name for you, these slum patients of yours!—but it's Doctor Dick's wife who really foots the bills—by going without what she needs!”
“Minnie, be quiet!” Selwyn broke in sternly. “Remember Miss Tennant is present.”
But she had got beyond the stage when the presence of a third person, even that of an absolute stranger, could be depended upon to exercise any restraining effect.
“Well, since Miss Tenant's going to live here, the sooner she knows how things stand the better! She won't be here long without seeing how I'm treated”—her voice rising hysterically—“set on one side, and denied even the few small pleasures my health permits——”
She broke off in a storm of angry weeping, and Sara retreated hastily from the room, leaving husband and wife alone together.
She had barely regained the shabby sitting-room when the front door opened and closed with a bang, and a gay voice could be heard calling—
“Jane! Jane! Come here, my pretty Jane! I've brought home some shrimps for tea!”
“Hold your noise, Miss Molly, now do!”
Sara could hear Jane's admonitory whisper, and there followed a murmured colloquy, punctuated by exclamations and gusts of young laughter, calling forth renewed remonstrance from Jane, and then the door of the room was flung open, and Molly Selwyn sailed in and overwhelmed Sara with apologies for her reception, or rather, for the lack of it. She was quite charming in her penitence, waving dimpled, deprecating hands, and appealing to Sara with a pair of liquid, disarming, golden-brown eyes that earned her forgiveness on the spot.
She was a statuesque young creature, compact of large, soft, gracious curves and swaying movements—with her nimbus of pale golden hair, and curiously floating, undulating walk, rather reminding one of a stray goddess. Always untidy with hooks lacking at important junctures, and the trimmings of her hats usually pinned on with a casualness that occasionally resulted in their deserting the hat altogether, she could still never be other than delightful and irresistibly desirable to look upon.
Her red, curving mouth of a child, cleft chin, and dimpled, tapering hands all promised a certain yieldingness of disposition—a tendency to take always the line of least resistance—but it was a charming, appealing kind of frailty which most people—the sterner sex, certainly—would be very ready to condone.
It is a wonderful thing to be young. Molly poured herself out a cup of hideously stewed tea and drank it joyously to an accompaniment of shrimps and bread-and-butter, and when Sara uttered a mild protest, she only laughed and declared that it was a wholesome and digestible diet compared with some of the “studio teas” perpetrated by the artists' colony at Oldhampton, of which she was a member.
She chattered away gaily to Sara, giving her vivacious thumb-nail portraits of her future neighbours—the people Selwyn had described as being “much nicer than ourselves.”
“The Herricks and Audrey Maynard are our most intimate friends—I'm sure you'll adore them. Mrs. Maynard is a widow, and if she weren't so frightfully rich, Monkshaven would be perennially shocked at her. She is ultra-fashionable, and smokes whenever she chooses, and swears when ordinary language fails her—all of which things, of course, are anathema to the select circles of Monkshaven. But then she's a millionaire's widow, so instead of giving her the cold shoulder, every one gushes round her and declares 'Mrs. Maynard is such a thoroughlymoderntype, you know!'”—Molly mimicked the sugar-and-vinegar accents of the critics to perfection—“and privately Audrey shouts with laughter at them, while publicly she continues to shock them for the sheer joy of the thing.”
“And who are the Herricks?” asked Sara, smiling. “Married people?”
“No.” Molly shook her head. “Miles is a bachelor who lives with a maiden aunt—Miss Lavinia. Or, rather, she lives with him and housekeeps for him. 'The Lavender Lady,' I always call her, because she's one of those delightful old-fashioned people who remind one of dimity curtains, and pot-pourri, and little muslin bags of lavender. Miles is a perfect pet, but he's lame, poor dear.”
Sara waited with a curious eagerness for any description which might seem to fit her recent fellow-traveller, but none came, and at last she threw out a question in the hope of eliciting his name.
“He was horribly ungracious and rude,” she added, “and yet he didn't look in the least the sort of man who would be like that. There was no lack of breeding about him. He was just deliberately snubby—as though I had no right to exist on the same planet with him—anyway”—laughing—“not in the same railway compartment.”
Molly nodded sagely.
“I believe I know whom you mean. Was he a lean, brown, grim-looking individual, with the kind of eyes that almost make you jump when they look at you suddenly?”
“That certainly describes them,” admitted Sara, smiling faintly.
“Then it was the Hermit of Far End,” announced Molly.
“The Hermit of Far End?”
“Yes. He's a queer, silent man who lives all by himself at a house built almost on the edge of Monk's Cliff—you must have seen it as you drove up?”
“Oh!” exclaimed Sara, with sudden enlightenment. “Then his name is Trent. The cabman presented me with that information,” she added, in answer to Molly's look of surprise.
“Yes—Garth Trent. It's rather an odd name—sounds like a railway collision, doesn't it? But it suits him somehow”—reflectively.
“Have you met him?” prompted Sara. It was odd how definite an interest her brief encounter with him had aroused in her.
“Yes—once. He treated me”—giggling delightedly—“rather as if Iwasn't there! At least”—reminiscently—“he tried to.”
“It doesn't sound as though he had succeeded?” suggested Sara, amused.
Molly looked at her solemnly.
“He told some one afterwards—Miles Herrick, the only man he ever speaks to, I think, without compulsion—that I was 'the Delilah type of woman, and ought to have been strangled at birth.'”
“He must be a charming person,” commented Sara ironically.
“Oh, he's a woman-hater—in fact, I believe he has a grudge against the world in general, but woman in particular. I expect”—shrewdly—“he's been crossed in love.”
At this moment Selwyn re-entered the room, his grave face clearing a little as he caught sight of his daughter.
“Hullo, Molly mine! Got back, then?” he said, smiling. “Have you made your peace with Miss Tennant, you scatterbrained young woman?”
“It's a hereditary taint, Dad—don't blameme!” retorted Molly with lazy impudence, pulling his head down and kissing him on the top of his ruffled hair.
Selwyn grinned.
“I pass,” he submitted. “And who is it that's been crossed in love?”
“The Hermit of Far End.”
“Oh”—turning to Sara—“so you have been discussing our local enigma?”
“Yes. I fancy I must have travelled down with him from Oldhampton. He seemed rather a boorish individual.”
“He would be. He doesn't like women.”
“Monk's Cliff would appear to be an appropriate habitation for him, then,” commented Sara tartly.
They all laughed, and presently Selwyn suggested that his daughter should run up and see her mother.
“She'll be hurt if you don't go up, kiddy,” he said. “And try and be very nice to her—she's a little tired and upset to-day.”
When she had left the room he turned to Sara, a curious blending of proud reluctance and regret in his eyes.
“I'm so sorry, Miss Tennant,” he said simply, “that you should have seen our worst side so soon after your arrival. You—you must try and pardon it—”
“Oh, please, please don't apologize,” broke in Sara hastily. “I'm so sorry I happened to be there just then. It was horrible for you.”
He smiled at her wistfully.
“It's very kind of you to take it like that,” he said. “After all”—frankly—“you could not have remained with us very long without finding out our particular skeleton in the cupboard. My wife's state of health—or, rather, what she believes to be her state of health—is a great grief to me. I've tried in every way to convince her that she is not really so delicate as she imagines, but I've failed utterly.”
Now that the ice was broken, he seemed to find relief in pouring out the pitiful little tragedy of his home life.
“She is comparatively young, you know, Miss Tennant—only thirty-seven, and she willfully leads the life of a confirmed invalid. It has grown upon her gradually, this absorption in her health, and now, practically speaking, Molly has no mother and I no wife.”
“Oh, Doctor Dick”—the little nickname, that had its origin in his slum patients' simple affection for the man who tended them, came instinctively from her lips. It seemed, somehow, to fit itself to the big, kindly man with the sternly rugged face and eyes of a saint. “Oh, Doctor Dick, I'm so sorry—so very sorry!”
Perhaps something in the dainty, well-groomed air of the woman beside him helped to accentuate the neglected appearance of the room, for he looked round in an irritated kind of way, as though all at once conscious of its deficiencies.
“And this—this, too,” he muttered. “There's no one at the helm. . . . The truth is, I ought never to have let you come here.”
Sara shook her head.
“I've very glad I came,” she said simply. “I think I'm going to be very happy here.”
“You've got grit,” he replied quietly. “You'd make a success of your life anywhere. I wish”—thoughtfully—“Molly had a little of that same quality. Sometimes”—a worried frown gathered on his face—“I get afraid for Molly. She's such a child . . . and no mother to hold the reins.”
“Doctor Dick, would you consider it impertinent if—if I laid my hands on the reins—just now and then?”
He whirled round, his eyes shining with gratitude.
“Impertinent! I should be illimitably thankful! You can see how things are—I am compelled to be out all my time, my wife hardly ever leaves her own rooms, and Molly and the house affairs just get along as best they can.”
“Then,” said Sara, smiling, “I shall put my finger in the pie. I've—I've no one to look after now, since Uncle Patrick died,” she added. “I think, Doctor Dick, I've found my job.”
“It's absurd!” he exclaimed, regarding her with unfeigned delight. “Here you come along, prepared, no doubt, to be treated as a 'guest,' and the first thing I do is to shovel half my troubles on to your shoulders. It's absurd—disgraceful! . . . But it's amazingly good!” He held out his hand, and as Sara's slim fingers slid into his big palm, he muttered a trifle huskily: “God bless you for it, my dear!”
Sara stood on the great headland known as Monk's Cliff, watching with delight the white-topped billows hurling themselves against its mighty base, only to break in a baulked fury of thunder and upflung spray.
She had climbed the steep ascent thither on more than one day of storm and bluster, reveling in the buffeting of the gale and in the pungent tang of brine from the spray-drenched air. The cry of the wind, shrieking along the face of the sea-bitten cliff, reminded her of the scream of the hurricane as it tore through the pinewoods at Barrow—shaking their giant tops hither and thither as easily as a child's finger might shake a Canterbury bell.
Something wild and untamed within her responded to the savage movement of the scene, and she stood for a long time watching the expanse of restless, wind-tossed waters, before turning reluctantly in the direction of home. If for nothing else than for this gift of glorious sea and cliff, she felt she could be content to pitch her tent in Monkshaven indefinitely.
Her way led past Far End, the solitary house perched on the sloping side of the headland, and, as she approached, she became aware of a curious change of character in the sound of the wind. She was sheltered now from its fiercest onslaught, and it seemed to her that it rose and fell, moaning in strange, broken cadences, almost like the singing of a violin.
She paused a moment, thinking at first that this was due to the wind's whining through some narrow passage betwixt the outbuildings of the house, then, as the chromatic wailing broke suddenly into vibrating harmonies, she realized that some one actuallywasplaying the violin, and playing it remarkably well, too.
Instinctively she yielded to the fascination of it, and, drawing nearer to the house, leaned against a sheltered wall, all her senses subordinate to that of hearing.
Whoever the musician might be, he was a thorough master of his instrument, and Sara listened with delight, recognizing some of the haunting melodies of the wild Russian music which he was playing—music that even in its moments of delirious joy seemed to hold always an underlyingbourdonof tragedy and despair.
“Hi, there!”
She started violently. Entirely absorbed in the music, she had failed to observe a man, dressed in the style of an indoor servant, who had appeared in the doorway of one of the outbuildings and who now addressed her in peremptory tones.
“Hi, there! Don't you know you're trespassing?”
Jerked suddenly out of her dreamy enjoyment, Sara looked round vaguely.
“I didn't know that Monk's Cliff was private property,” she said after a pause.
“Nor is it, that I know of. But you're on the Far End estate now—this is a private road,” replied the man disagreeably. “You'll please to take yourself off.”
A faint flush of indignation crept up under the warm pallor of Sara's skin. Then, a sudden thought striking her, she asked—
“Who is that playing the violin?”
Mentally she envisioned a pair of sensitive, virile hands, lean and brown, with the short, well-kept nails that any violinist needs must have—the contradictory hands which had aroused her interest on the journey to Monkshaven.
“I don't hear no one playing,” replied the man stolidly. She felt certain he was lying, but he gave her no opportunity for further interrogation, for he continued briskly—
“Come now, miss, please to move off from here. Trespassers aren't allowed.”
Sara spoke with a quiet air of dignity.
“Certainly I'll go,” she said. “I'm sorry. I had no idea that I was trespassing.”
The man's truculent manner softened, as, with the intuition of his kind, he recognized in the composed little apology the utterance of one of his “betters.”
“Beggin' your pardon, miss,” he said, with a considerable accession of civility, “but it's as much as my place is worth to allow a trespasser here on Far End.”
Sara nodded.
“You're perfectly right to obey orders,” she said, and bending her steps towards the public road from which she had strayed to listen to the unseen musician, she made her way homewards.
“Your mysterious 'Hermit' is nothing if not thorough,” she told Doctor Dick and Molly on her return. “I trespassed on to the Far End property to-day, and was ignominiously ordered off by a rather aggressive person, who, I suppose, is Mr. Trent's servant.”
“That would be Judson,” nodded Selwyn. “I've attended him once or twice professionally. The fellow's all right, but he's under strict orders, I believe, to allow no trespassers.”
“So it seems,” returned Sara. “By the way, who is the violinist at Far End? Is it the 'Hermit' himself?”
“It's rumoured that he does play,” said Molly. “But no one has ever been privileged to hear him.”
“Their loss, then,” commented Sara shortly. “I should say he is a magnificent performer.”
Molly nodded, an expression of impish amusement in her eyes.
“On the sole occasion I met him, I asked him why no one was ever allowed to hear him play,” she said, chuckling. “I even suggested that he might contribute a solo to the charity concert we were getting up at the time!”
“And what did he say?” asked Sara, smiling.
“Told me that there was no need for a man to exhibit his soul to the public! So I asked him what he meant, and he said that if I understood anything about music I would know, and that if I didn't, it was a waste of his time trying to explain. Doyouknow what he meant?”
“Yes,” said Sara slowly, “I think I do.” And recalling the passionate appeal and sadness of the music she had heard that afternoon, she was conscious of a sudden quick sense of pity for the solitary hermit of Far End. He wasafraid—afraid to play to any one, lest he should reveal some inward bitterness of his soul to those who listened!
The following day, Molly carried Sara off to Rose Cottage to make the acquaintance of “the Lavender Lady” and her nephew.
Miss Herrick—or Miss Lavinia, as she was invariably addressed—looked exactly as though she had just stepped out of the early part of last century. She wore a gown of some soft, silky material, sprigged with heliotrope, and round her neck a fichu of cobwebby lace, fastened at the breast with a cameo brooch of old Italian workmanship. A coquettish little lace cap adorned the silver-grey hair, and the face beneath the cap was just what you would have expected to find it—soft and very gentle, its porcelain pink and white a little faded, the pretty old eyes a misty, lavender blue.
She was alone when the two girls arrived, and greeted Sara with a humorous little smile.
“How kind of you to come, Miss Tennant! We've been all agog to meet you, Miles and I. In a tiny place like Monkshaven, you see, every one knows every one else's business, so of course we have been hearing of you constantly.”
“Then you might have come to Sunnyside to investigate me personally,” replied Sara, smiling back.
Miss Lavinia's face sobered suddenly, a shadow falling across her kind old eyes.
“Miles is—rather difficult about calling,” she said hesitatingly. “You will understand—his lameness makes him a little self-conscious with strangers,” she explained.
Sara looked distressed.
“Oh! Perhaps it would have been better if I had not come?” she suggested hastily. “Shall I run away and leave Molly here?”
Miss Lavinia flushed rose-pink.
“My dear, I hope Miles knows how to welcome a guest in his own house as befits a Herrick,” she said, with a delicious little air of old-world dignity. “Indeed, it is an excellent thing for him to be dragged out of his shell. Only, please—will you remember?—treat him exactly as though he were not lame—never try to help him in any way. It is that which hurts him so badly—when people make allowances for his lameness. Just ignore it.”
Sara nodded. She could understand that instinctive man's pride which recoiled from any tolerant recognition of a physical handicap.
“Was his lameness caused by an accident?” she asked.
“It came through a very splendid deed.” Little Miss Lavinia's eyes glowed as she spoke. “He stopped a pair of runaway carriage-horses. They had taken fright at a motor-lorry, and, when they bolted, the coachman was thrown from the box, so that it looked as if nothing could save the occupants of the carriage. Miles flung himself at the horses' heads, and although, of course, he could not actually stop them single-handed, he so impeded their progress that a second man, who sprang forward to help, was able to bring them to a standstill.”
“How plucky of him!” exclaimed Sara warmly. “You must be very proud of your nephew, Miss Lavinia!”
“She is,” interpolated Molly affectionately. “Aren't you, dear Lavender Lady?”
Miss Lavinia smiled a trifle wistfully.
“Ah! My dear,” she said sadly, “splendid things are done at such a cost, and when they are over we are apt to forget the splendour and remember only the heavy price. . . . My poor Miles was horribly injured—he had been dragged for yards, clinging to the horses' bridles—and for weeks we were not even sure if he would live. He has lived—but he will walk lame to the end of his life.”
The little instinctive silence which followed was broken by the sound of voices in the hall outside, and, a minute later, Miles Herrick himself came into the room, escorting a very fashionably attired and distinctly attractive woman, whom Sara guessed at once to be Audrey Maynard.
She was not in the least pretty, but the narrowest of narrow skirts in vogue in the spring of 1914 made no secret of the fact that her figure was almost perfect. Her face was small and thin and inclined to be sallow, and beneath upward-slanting brows, to which art had undoubtedly added something, glimmered a pair of greenish-grey eyes, clear like rain. Nor was there any mistaking the fact that the rich copper-colour of the hair swathed beneath the smart little hat had come out of a bottle, and was in no way to be accredited to nature. It was small wonder that primitive Monkshaven stood aghast at such flagrant tampering with the obvious intentions of Providence.
But notwithstanding her up-to-date air of artificiality, there was something immensely likeable about Audrey Maynard. Behind it all, Sara sensed the real woman—clever, tactful, and generously warm-hearted.
Woman, when all is said and done, is frankly primitive in her instincts, and the desire to attract—with all its odd manifestations—is really but the outcome of her innate desire for home and a mate. It is this which lies at the root of most of her little vanities and weaknesses—and of all the big sacrifices of which she is capable as well. So she may be forgiven the former, and trusted to fall short but rarely of the latter when the crucial test comes.
“Miles and I have been—as usual—squabbling violently,” announced Mrs. Maynard. “Sugar, please—lots of it,” she added, as Herrick handed her her tea. “It was about the man who lives at Far End,” she continued in reply to the Lavender Lady's smiling query. “Miles has been very irritating, and tried to smash all my suggested theories to bits. He insists that the Hermit is quite a commonplace, harmless young man—”
“He must be at least forty,” interposed Herrick mildly.
Audrey frowned him into silence and continued—
“Now that's so dull, when half Monkshaven believes him to be a villain of the deepest dye, hiding from justice—or, possibly, a Bluebeard with an unhappy wife imprisoned somewhere in that weird old house of his.”
Sara listened with undignified interest. It was strange how the enigmatical personality of the owner of Far End kept cropping up across her path.
“And what is your own opinion, Mrs. Maynard?” she asked.
Audrey flashed her a keen glance from her rain-clear eyes.
“I think he's a—sphinx,” she said slowly.
“The Sphinx was a lady,” objected Herrick pertinently.
“Mr. Trent's a masculine re-incarnation of her, then,” retorted Mrs. Maynard, undefeated.
Herrick smiled tolerantly. He was a tall, slenderly built man, with whimsical brown eyes and the half-stern, half-sweet mouth of one who has been through the mill of physical pain.
“Homme incompris,” he suggested lightly. “Give the fellow his due—he at least supplies the feminine half of Monkshaven with a topic of perennial interest.”
Audrey took up the implied challenge with enthusiasm, and the two of them wrangled comfortably together till tea was over. Then she demanded a cigarette—and another cushion—and finally sent Miles in search of some snapshots they had taken together and which he had developed since last they had met. She treated him exactly as though he suffered no handicap, demanding from him all the little services she would have asked from a man who was physically perfect.
Sara herself, accustomed to anticipating every need of Patrick Lovell's, would have been inclined to feel somewhat compunctious over allowing a lame man to wait upon her, yet, as she watched the eager way in which Miles responded to the visitor's behests, she realized that in reality Audrey was behaving with supreme tact. She let Miles feel himself a man as other men, not a mere “lame duck” to whom indulgence must needs be granted.
And once, when her hair just brushed his cheek, as he stooped over her to indicate some special point in one of the recently developed photos, Sara surprised a sudden ardent light in his quiet brown eyes that set her wondering whether possibly, the incessant sparring between Herrick and the lively, impulsive woman who shocked half Monkshaven, did not conceal something deeper than mere friendship.