“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thouBeside me, singing in the Wilderness,Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thouBeside me, singing in the Wilderness,Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thouBeside me, singing in the Wilderness,Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
But when the maid had cleared the table, in her own primitive, knock-me-down fashion, and replaced the white cloth by the hideous tapestry one, covered with its pattern of pink roses, faded and dulled, moreover, by the constant splashing of the painter’s brush in the tumbler full of water which she, as regularly as clockwork, placed on the middle patch of flowers every evening, Mrs. Elles was suddenly overcome by an unusual sense of shyness. This man made her shy as no man before had ever done. He was so polite and yet so distant. His want of self-consciousness seemed a reproof to her imperious and pampered personality.
To cover it, she rose and shyly looked round the room that the artist had occupied year after year, and on which he had presumably impressed himself, his tastes, his prevailing habit of mind.
That habit, to judge by its chosen surroundings, was a very ascetic one; as different from her own as possibly could be imagined. This was a workroom pure and simple. Not an attempt had been made, it would seem, to redeem its humble, commonplace ugliness. Abraham, in coloured worsteds, complacently sacrificed Isaac, over the mantelpiece; Mrs. Elles would have covered the pair with an art rug of some sort. The frosted-sugar top of Mrs. Watson’s wedding cake stood on the console; Mrs. Elles would, regardless of offence to the poor old lady, have requested her to remove it. Every other available table and cornice was heaped and piled with sketch books; easels and bulging umbrellas filled up all the four corners. There was a little stack of books on the mantelshelf, but not a single work of fiction was to be discerned among them. There was Shelley—just the watery, bloodless, spiritually intense poet that she would expect Rivers to appreciate. There were some flowers in a little china dog on the side table, garden flowers, phloxes and stocks, but these Mrs. Elles rightly attributed to the solicitude of the landlady’s niece. The whole room was intensely significant to her of those qualities, which, with her trick of hasty generalization, she now chose to attribute to this man,—modesty, endurance, and self-abnegation, and a whole-souled devotion to his art and the purposes of his art.
There was the old-fashioned, silk-fluted piano on one side of the room, to which he had alluded, and she paused, with her hand on the curved lid.
“Oh, that has stood there ever since I first came here,” the artist said; “I have never dared to open it. Jane Anne plays on it in the winter, I believe. This house, from its neighbourhood to the park, is so damp that I am sure that no piano could endure itand live. That is the worst of all embowering trees! Have you noticed that one’s notepaper becomes like blotting paper?”
How should she notice, who had no notepaper of her own, and wrote no letters? She opened the instrument and played a bar or two.
“Quite tolerable!” she pronounced.
He quietly put a chair in front of it, without saying anything, and she sat down and played a bit of her favourite Chopin.
He thanked her, not very warmly.
“Don’t you like Chopin?”
“He does me no good. Too restless! What is the use of setting all one’s nerves in an uproar, as he does, and giving one no solution? I confess that I like music that resolves me. Beethoven, for instance.”
“Oh, Beethoven resolves you, does he?” She hardly knew what Rivers meant, but she knew that she did not care for Beethoven. “What a pity I don’t know any of him! Is he—” she hesitated; she was becoming shy of airing her tentative little theories to this man whose culture, as she apprehended, had its roots in tradition, in a knowledge far deeper than she could claim for her own, mere “self-made” woman that she was—“is he the landscape painter’s musician, as Shelley is his poet?”
“I should say that Wordsworth was that, more properly.”
“I hate Wordsworth!” she answered, with vigourand truth, “and as for Shelley, I should call him the poet of physical geography!”
He laughed. “You don’t care for atmospheric effects in poetry, I see. You prefer Keats.”
“Yes, I do. And as for putting on his tombstone that his name was to be writ in water, I think that would have suited Shelley far better. Keats’ name should have been written in blood—he was passionate.... Shall I try to sing something to you.” Her singing was nothing wonderful, but sweet and sympathetic and never out of tune. All her gifts were natural, she had always been too restless to apply herself to any but that of pose, which she had brought to so high a pitch of perfection.
But the songs which she sang were the kind of songs that Rivers seemed to like, for his brown eyes grew soft and limpid and his face looked less set and more open as he listened.
For this parity in their likings she had to thank her husband, who, in the days when she had cared to please him, had insisted on her cultivating an acquaintance with the simple national airs of all countries that he could join in. She felt, somehow, that a little French repertory she had would not be appropriate just now and refrained from producing it.
She sang on until the sound of shutters closing and the tramp of heavy-booted men—the landlady’s two stalwart sons—trooping up to their beds in the attics, warned them of the lateness of the hour according to country canons.
“If you do care at all for my songs,” she asked, deprecatingly, as he lit her candle for her at the foot of the stairs, “may I come and play for you again another evening?”
Her glance—both their glances, as she spoke, were irresistibly directed to that scene of havoc and disaster, the meeting-room, whose open door confronted them. It was swept and cleared now of the litter of the tea, and freshly sanded, but still as dreary and comfortless an abiding place as could well be imagined.
“You had better use my sitting-room in future—that is, if you will. That barrack of a room is not fit for anyone to inhabit. But you will not mind my working as usual, and then, I am afraid I get so absorbed that I cannot talk, or even be ordinarily civil!”
“Oh, may I really?” she cried. “I assure you I shall be quite happy sitting—beside you,” she was going to say, but corrected it into “with my book!” Though where the literature was to come from that was to keep her quiet was more than she knew. Excepting the Shelley, Taine’s “Historie de l’Esthétique Anglaise” was quite the lightest work on Rivers’ mantelpiece, and she had had, of course, no books among her luggage.
“Very well, then, we will look upon that as settled,” he said, shortly, and held out his hand again to say good-night.
“I will come in in the evenings, if you will let me,when it really is melancholy in that big meeting-room, but during the day——”
“During the day I am generally out, so you will be able to have the room entirely to yourself,” he rejoined, in his own disconcerting manner, and the candle he was holding seemed to her to light up a little flicker of something like amusement in his eyes.
“Yes, I know,” she said, desperately, “at that place in the woods where I first met you. Has the foxglove grown again? I wanted to ask you. I shall come and see for myself some day.”
She spoke with an assumed archness, with all the while a fearful stricture about the heart, lest she was alienating him by her boldness as of the schoolgirl she believed him to believe her to be. Her candlestick, which she had now taken from his hand, trembled in her own.
“Do!” he replied, civilly, in a tone absolutely devoid of all enthusiasm. Jane Anne crossed the hall as they loosed their hands. “And now, good-night!”
Mrs. Elles waited a whole day before she profited by the artist’s invitation to visit him at the place where he worked. She was rewarded for her discretion, for, at dinner that very evening, he asked her coolly why she had not been? So, the day after, she walked over to Brignal and stayed full fifteen minutes at his side. She managed to be so little of a nuisance that, next day, she was emboldened to take over her drawing materials at the artist’s own suggestion, and began a series of minute and painstaking sketches of the vegetation of the immediate foreground, to be used by him afterwards as memoranda. He had admitted that it would be useful to him.
Then it became a settled thing that she should walk over every day after twelve o’clock, and take him his letters and the papers which were left at the “Heather Bell” by the postman from Barnard Castle quite an hour after his departure. Thus the compromising fact of her own total dearth of correspondence escaped his attention, if, indeed, he should take cognizance of such a detail.
She marvelled at his extraordinary power of detachment. Did matters merely mundane ever impress him? Did anything, humanly speaking, ever put him out, except in so far as it interfered with his work? Was he literally, as he used to say himself, only a registering machine of effects and views, pledged to render an actual transcript of Nature, seen, as is the condition of all art, through a temperament, but a temperament merely receptive, limpid, clear, and untroubled by the waves of passionate human yearnings and desires? There was actually something of what Browning calls the “terrible composure” of Nature about him, she thought, a patient, broad-minded, magnificent way of regarding things entailed by a continual contemplation of her vastness, her implacabilities, her unconscious cruelties and brutalities. She never could forget Rivers’ behaviour in a thunderstorm that overtook them oneSunday afternoon by Scargill Tower. Out came the sketch book, quick as the lightning that seemed to flicker in its horribly malicious way down by the stone wall that edged the road they were walking along.
“I must have that!” he murmured. “By Jove!”
He actually stopped, and stood still on the white road among the falling thunderbolts, as it seemed to her. She stopped too and opened her puny umbrella, trying to ward off some of the heavy rain-drops from the leaves of the sketch book. It never even seemed to occur to the artist that she might be afraid, or wet. She was not afraid, such was the contagion of his courage, but she was wet through. The rain splashed on his paper in spite of her efforts, and blended together colours that the artist hastily cast on, into shapes unexpected by him, but still a memorandum of the breathing light and steam of mist over there by Cotherstone, where the storm that oppressed them now was passing off, had been secured. It was quite worth her while; she had the satisfaction of knowing that Rivers could not think her a coward. He did not tell her so, but took her pluck and superiority to feminine weakness as a matter of course.
She was driven to try and please him by the achievement of new virtues, entirely foreign to her nature. She laughed, sometimes, when she thought of herself, the leader of what there was of advanced literary thought in Newcastle—the lady who could discuss the higher ethics, and expound the morbidities of Amiel and Meredith to a select cultured circle,—being forced to recommend herself to the man she loved by a display of mere physical courage, and even manual dexterity. Yes, she found she could really please Rivers best by attending to his bridge for him.
This was a rough arrangement of stepping stones, which the painter had made for himself before he came there, by manipulating the loose boulders of the river bed a little. It constituted a short cut from the inn to his sketching place, and saved him a mile’s walk at least. He had taken good care to give the stream play between the rough piers of his bridge as it were, leaving enormous gaps and chasms, but still the river resented being interfered with, and altered the position of the stones and washed them away sometimes in the night, of malice prepense, as Mrs. Elles declared. She found plenty to do every day in replacing the stones that had been dislodged and adding new ones, and worked away merrily, thinking of Cincinnatus and his plough, and of the picture Dante began to paint for Beatrice, in this connection.
“The very first time the river comes down,” Rivers prophesied, “all our work will have to be done over again. There will be no bridge left!”
She could, of course, have shown herself a great deal more agile without her spectacles, which hampered her continually, but she had made a point of never removing them in sight of her fellow creatures, and only ventured to push them up over her browswhen she was alone with only cows and squirrels for witnesses. She clung to them, as a saint might hug his cross or an anchorite his hair-shirt. They symbolized the purity of her intentions, they were her armour of honourable woman and loyal wife to Mortimer; her ticket-of-leave indeed, when she thought of him and all that he implied. She put the odious and tiresome things on every morning, as a knight endures his panoply or buckles on his shield of proof, and honourably continued to wander about in a cold, blue, local atmosphere of her own, aware only through her other senses of the glow of yellow light and hope that lay outside, besieging the frigid unreceptive discs of her self-imposed barrier in vain.
“It is hateful, but it just saves the situation,” she would say to herself. “And it makes me free. I can say what I like and do what I like, so long as I don’t look what I like!” But, indeed, there were times when that last item of forbearance seemed the hardest item of all.
Yes, the odd and distressing thing was that, in consequence of her wearing them, she had never really seen Rivers’ face, and, worse than that even, he had never seen hers. He betrayed no curiosity, no desire at all to see it, and his indifference affronted her vanity not a little. There must be something left out of a man, she argued, who could take pleasure in the society of such an example of unsexed, negative womanhood as she presented. For she was sure that he did take pleasure in her society, now, in an odd,misogynistical way—that he was glad when he saw her come stumbling and tottering across the bridge of slippery stones to him of a morning, sometimes even staying herself by one hand on the moist slabs of moss-grown rock that lay in her passage, the other holding high and dry her budget of letters and news. His voice, as he bade her good morning, sometimes even without looking up—he was so occupied—testified to a certain pleasurable anticipation of her company, or at least she thought so.
“Oh, only your bridge-maker!” she used to say to him as she came up, frankly accepting the position. “I have put three new stones in to-day.”
“He doesn’t treat me as if I were a woman at all!” she said to herself bitterly, “and I believe I am less of a woman than I was. I am more manly; I think less of my looks and more of my muscles. I never even knew I had any, till I came here!” She sighed. “Yes, I see I must cultivate this aspect of me, and keep the eternal feminine relentlessly down. It would frighten him, or at any rate disturb him. Would it? Ah, I dare not try. I must stay as I am, absolutely non-committal!”
She sighed again.
Mrs. Elles had arrived at Rokeby on a Monday. When Sunday came round, she had been prepared for the usual flying in the face of Philistine custom and observance that prevailed in her own circle and imagined that the artist would go out to paint as usual or perhaps as a concession to popular prejudice stay and work indoors. But to her intense surprise and amusement, eleven o’clock on Sunday morning found her murmuring the Litany by the side of the artist in the parish church, among the placid farmers and their complacent, Sunday-bedizened wives. Mr. Rivers, it seemed, was in the habit of going to church every Sunday, and, when she discovered this, it had seemed quite natural to go with him, though it was the first time she had been inside the walls of a church since her marriage. The service, to her mind unblunted by custom, seemed very picturesque; so was the church, a beautiful specimen of pure early Gothic, and the figure of this grave, handsome man, standing by her side, with his dark head relieved against the white plaster background, most natural of all.
“If anyone had told me, a month ago,” shethought, “that I should be doing this, I believe I should have laughed in his face.”
She felt happy, but a little out of place, and looked it, perhaps, for the vicar, a stolid, white-bearded, dignified man, stared at her over the pulpit cushion, discreetly, while a thin, little, sharp-nosed lady, presumably of some authority in the congregation, did so, too, indiscreetly. Jane Anne, who played the harmonium, was discretion itself and never even glanced her way, but Mrs. Elles thought she read excommunication and condemnation in every turn of her not too supple wrist.
“So you go to church every Sunday?” Mrs. Elles said to Rivers, as they walked down the path and away together. “Somehow I thought artists——”
“Never went to church?” He finished her sentence for her. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t do it as a religious observance, exactly, I am afraid. I do it because I like it, here in the country. Besides,” he added, “it is a beautiful church!”
Mrs. Elles, who considered herself an agnostic, was satisfied, by this speech, that Rivers’ church-going was the result of his indulgence of æsthetic needs rather than spiritual ones; though, indeed, she would have been quite ready to embrace any faith to which he should pronounce his adhesion.
“How picturesque the Vicar’s white hair is!” she remarked, aloud. “Do you know him?”
“Oh, yes; Mr. Popham. He will come now to call on you, since you have been to call on him.”
“Good heavens! Does he go to see you?” she cried, with what would appear to be uncalled-for emphasis.
“Yes; he comes now and again, but I am always out. We generally meet somewhere about the place, and then we get on very well. He had a tiresome habit of coming and looking over my shoulder at Brignal, but I have trained him not to stay very long.”
“Is he married?” she enquired, eagerly.
“Yes; that was his wife in the pew to the right.”
“Does she come and look over your shoulder, too?”
“She takes a tender interest in my work,” Rivers said, laughing. “She is by way of being an artist herself, you see.”
“That little, starved, angular, high-cheek-boned woman, without a touch of artistic feeling about her, and bonnet strings of the wrong colour!”
“You must not go by bonnet strings entirely. They are a matter of convention. Mrs. Popham has a very good eye for colour, let me tell you, only she is dreadfully shy of publicity, and would think it quite improper to exhibit. One never knows into what vessels the spirit will be poured. I go in in the evening sometimes and look over her sketches; she is very good to me. She walked all the way to Brignal once, with a cork mat for me to put my feet on!”
“And did you use it? I never see you!”
“It bores me—that sort of thing bores me. You will find it in my sketching bag, though.”
“What is the good of carrying it there and back every day, if you don’t use it?”
“Ah, but in case she were to come, I would hastily adjust it under my feet, so as not to hurt her feelings. But she is not likely to walk so far.”
“I suppose she is perfectly devoted to you, like everybody else?”
He did not take any notice of her remark.
“So is Jane Anne!” she next observed.
“Jane Anne is a very clever girl,” replied Rivers, too single-minded and too busy to see the construction that might be put on the turn of his phrase.
“She may be a mute inglorious Milton!” remarked Mrs. Elles, “but I am sure she is not a nice nature. She looks a potential murderess with those lowering brows. As for Mrs. Popham, I don’t know her.”
“Ah, but you will!”
“I hope sincerely I shall not,” Mrs. Elles muttered, under her breath. Mrs. Popham might be a noble soul, and a very fair water-colour artist, but still a woman with surely an enquiring mind and a scent for irregular situations.
She began to dread the Pophams and Jane Anne, and to regard them as natural enemies. Jane Anne she could not avoid meeting about the house, and the girl was so antipathetic to her that she made a point of not encountering her eyes, and did this so obviously as to provoke an enmity which, possibly, had so far only existed in her own imagination.
The vicar and his wife, whether by accident ordesign, never crossed her path. One day, when she made her accustomed pilgrimage to Brignal, she saw that Rivers was not alone, and, at first, thought it was the sacerdotal back that blotted the fair landscape. But it was not Mr. Popham’s; it was that of the opulent farmer on whose land Rivers had taken up his position, and with whom the dispute of the pig’s unlawful consumption of Naples yellow had long been arranged amicably. Farmer Ward was standing by the side of the artist, passing his felt wide-awake from one hand to the other and staring up into the sky as if he expected the first rain-drop of the autumn to fall on his expectant features from moment to moment.
“No, it won’t rain to-day,” Rivers was saying, decidedly, “but you had better make the most of the opportunity, for I won’t vouch for this spell of weather lasting.”
“Aal reet, Measter, I’ll take yer word for’t.... Ye see, Miss,” he turned to the young woman who now approached, “artisses and sech like, they seem to know the meanin’ of it all!—” he waved his hand comprehensively round the horizon,—“a deal better nor we do.”
“We are bound to notice it,” said Rivers, indulgently. “You see, the weather affects our crops, too!” He pointed to his canvas.
“Ha! Ha! Measter, I takes ye! And if I might be so bold as to ask, what might ye happen to get for that little pectewer there? A matter o’ fifteen shillin’—or saxteen, maybe.”
“My good man, how do you think I could possibly live at that rate? I have been at this thing a month already!”
“Ay, ay, Measter, but then, some folks is pertickler slow!”
“There’s a snub for me!” whispered Rivers to Mrs. Elles.
“But it’s a grand pectewer, all the same,” continued the honest farmer, “though I’d like it better a deal, I must say, if there was a bit o’ life in it, just a hen and chicken preening about maybe, or a bit doggie, ye knaw, or even the young leddie here!... Well, I’ll just be going now, I’m thinkin’!”
He touched his cap and withdrew, tactfully, conscious that the “gentry” might perhaps be getting a little tired of him.
“Why do you never put people into your pictures?” Mrs. Elles enquired. “I confess I am like Farmer Ward; I should like it better, too!”
“Somehow, I never care much for the human interest in landscape.”
“Or in life either?” Mrs. Elles hazarded. It was the same remark she had made to Egidia.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he replied, distantly, “but I think the introduction of figures is always somewhat of an insult to landscape. One ought to be able to make a transcript of nature interesting without the adventitious aid of figures, it seems to me, though certainly Turner had no such theory. There is generally a boy and a kite, or aman and a dog in the foreground of his pictures. There is often a suggestion of cruelty, of torture of animals that I could wish away, for instance——”
“Yes, you do hate people!” Mrs. Elles insisted, unconsciously cutting short his little dissertation on his idol, Turner, far too impersonal in its application to interest her. “You have all the instincts of a recluse, although you force yourself to be civil to bores when they come your way. Tell me, didn’t you hate me when I first came?”
“You took me by storm rather,” he admitted. “You were so rapid in your tactics that you didn’t even give me time to harden my heart against you. Of course I am speaking of you as a mere tourist, as I thought you were the first time I saw you. And I was rather rude to you at first?”
“Very,” she said. “You did your best to put me off the inn, but you are not sorry now that you failed, are you?”
“Of course I am not!” he replied, cordially, and it was quite the nicest and most encouraging thing he had ever said to her.
“It seems to me that I have frightened away your other bore—the Vicar,” she said, carelessly. “He never comes here, and she has never called on me, as you said she would. Not that I think you mind not seeing anyone! Yes, you are an arrant hermit at heart—Shelley must have meant you when he wrote Alastor—the Spirit of Solitude. I was reading thatthe other day in your Shelley; I am studying Shelley, now.”
“I admit that my instincts are unsociable,” he said, with his brush between his teeth. “I don’t see how I am to help it. The conditions of a landscape painter’s life make it necessarily a very solitary and inhuman one. You see I am in the country for the greater part of the year, and I never tell anyone where I go. I call my pictures by fanciful titles, so as not to have to put the name of the place in the catalogues. It is absurd, but then it happens to be the only way I can work. I generally don’t open my lips from June to November, at least not to talk to persons of culture! The other sort doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t you care to study people?” she said.
“It is my business to study the physiognomy of clouds, the character of tree trunks, not faces!”
“Don’t speak so ferociously!” she said laughingly. “You mean that your only books are—not women’s looks. It is Nature who is—your mistress——”
“Yes, and a nice capricious mistress she is, and very hard her service!”
“But she never did betray the heart that loved her—we have that on good authority!”
“Betray—no, but she does lead him a dance!” the artist exclaimed passionately. “She rains her tears on him, she blows hurricanes on him, she plagues him with flies, and, what is worse, wasps—she lets him break his back, and contract his chest with stooping, the better to deal with her. She is never the samefor two minutes together. She is exacting and exclusive. ‘Thou shalt have no other mistress but me!’ she says. ‘You shall dance attendance on all my moods, and submit to all my caprices, and you shall go on trying to paint the unpaintable all your life, and die before you have succeeded in doing it!’”
The painter, having grown a little serious and excited over his own tirade, ended it with a little laugh at himself, and she murmured with apparent inconsequence, “Oh, I think it such a pity—such a waste!”
“What do you mean?” he asked her, negligently, and stayed not for an answer—it was a little way he had. She would have been ashamed to admit to him what her meaning had been; that he was still young, that he was handsome, that, in her opinion, such a man was thrown away on the service of Nature. She changed the conversation by offering to read him some passages from the Newcastle paper.
He nodded in assent. She first gathered and fastened two large fern fronds behind each ear, as a clerk his pen, to keep away the flies which Rivers’ mistress Nature continued to send him. She felt herself already so hideously travestied, that an added touch of grotesqueness or so did not matter. Then she began to read aloud in her quick, impulsive way. She had not read more than a few sentences, when she stopped suddenly. The painter might, or might not, have been attending to her, but the sudden cessation of her voice inevitably excited his attention.
“Well?” he asked her sharply.
“I stopped. It was getting so dull in that part of the paper,” she said, confusedly, bent on herself getting the gist of a certain paragraph that had caught her eye.
It was an account of an archæological meeting that had recently been held in Newcastle, where Mr. Mortimer Elles had seconded the motion of somebody or other, and had “given an exceedingly humorous turn” to the debate.
She pored over it with a certain sense of bitterness, mingled with relief.
“So he is cheerful enough to make bad jokes! He is getting on all right. I need not have troubled to be anxious! He will have told all my friends and his that his gadding fool of a wife is away amusing herself on a visit. He is quite clever enough to invent some excuse like that! Men don’t care to admit that they have been run away from!”
Mr. Rivers had meanwhile idly taken up the few letters she had brought and laid down beside him as usual, ready to his hand. He was quite capable of leaving them for hours unopened, to her continual surprise and somewhat to her annoyance. She could not understand dilatoriness in such matters. But he was reading one now, of which the immense signature inevitably caught her eye. It was Egidia’s real name—Alice Giles—which she happened to know.
“I—had a few letters this morning,” she remarked, pointedly, “but they were all very dull.”
“This one of mine is rather amusing,” returned the guileless artist. “It is from my cousin—I daresay you know her by the name she writes under—‘Egidia.’”
“Why, I told you I did when I first came here!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you remember? It is through Egidia that we know each other. And is that from her? Oh, do, if you can, read me some of it.”
Rivers tossed the letter into her lap.
“Read it all, if you like. It is a lively account of her Northern experiences. There seem to be some odd types in Newcastle, to judge by what she says!”
Thus empowered, Phœbe Elles devoured the letter. A great many of her friends were mentioned in it—the poet, Miss Drummond, and Mrs. Poynder, while there was a whole page entirely devoted to the muse of Newcastle.
“I met her at a lecture I was giving. Somebody or other on the platform introduced us. I had noticed her big eyes fixed on me, and her lips parted, following every word I said. It was flattering. She implored me to call. It was because I wrote books. I went because I liked her. She was an audience in herself! And her home! She has, I could see, a hard fight of it, poor little thing, to cultivate culture there. It was quite pathetic to see her straining every nerve to be modern and morbid and blasée, as she thinks we are in London. But give me the provinces for morbidity and unconscious Ibsenism! In spite of her amusing little affectations and preciousnesses, she is a dear little woman, and I think I shall ask her to come and stay with me in town—there is no one who would enjoy it more. If I do, you must come and meet her, you would like her. Pretty, too, though I don’t think you care much about that. But so intensely interested in everything, so eager, too nervous, perhaps, to be soothing, a woman with more brain than temperament, and perhaps not so very much of that. Incapable, I should think, of a grande passion, but so anxious to have one! She is really to be pitied, I think, for the milieu she lives in is naturally abhorrent to one of her way of thinking. It is unfortunately that of nine-tenths of her class, the provincial women whose wits outrun their opportunities, and their aspirations their social possibilities. The type is so sadly common. English Madame Bovarys!
“She has a husband, but I did not see him. I was going to dine there to meet him, but she put me off. Perhaps he explains her. At any rate, from what she told me, and allowing for her very strong bias, he furnishes a very good excuse for any vagaries she may choose to commit. I believe he drinks, though she did not say so, and I respected her for not giving him away. An ordinary, middle-class brute, my dear Edmund, incapable of making even a goose happy, far less a woman who has educated herself into some of the subtleties of refinement.
“I don’t know why I write all this about a perhaps not specially interesting person, but—her eyes—whenshe looked at me, and was not posing!—were the eyes of a prisoner. I see them now!”
Interesting as this document was to the subject of it, there were things about it that she did not quite like. She was silent for a little time, quite ten minutes. Then an irresistible impulse prompted her to say, “I happen to know that woman Egidia writes of, very well.”
“Do you really? Then perhaps I ought not to have shown you the letter. One never knows.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Phœbe Elles is one of my greatest friends—poor thing!”
“Why poor thing?”
“Oh, don’t you know—she is one of the unhappy ones. She made the usual mistake, ten years ago, and has been repenting it ever since.”
“What was that?”
“She married, that’s all. They all do it. But Phœbe—my friend—complicated matters by marrying a man who was unworthy of her, though I am bound to say she was in love with him at the time she married him—or thought she was.”
“If she thought so, she probably was,” came from behind the easel.
“You think that proves it? Well, ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ as Hamlet says. However, poor Phœbe Elles never knew what it was to be happy with the man she had chosen, though she had a vague idea that there was happiness somewhere in the world for her, as all we poor deludedfools of women have. There was nothing to make her happy, her life was starved, maimed, stunted—no colour in it at all. He had been married before, and the house was full of—what shall I call them?—obstacles to sentiment, in the shape of stepsons, and awful aunts——”
“How many aunts?”
“Only one, perhaps, but a horror, a perfectly awful woman! I shall never forget what I——”
She recovered herself and went on. “He—her husband was not unkind to her—not cruel, oh no, he took good care of that! but he contrived to make himself generally odious to her, and was antagonistic in every possible way——”
“Poor man!” ejaculated Rivers, in rather an incomprehensible manner.
“Then,” Mrs. Elles went on, complacently, warming to her subject, “there came a final scene—such a sordid affair too, but it brought matters to a head. He sent away all her servants at an hour’s notice, on the very flimsiest of pretexts, and when she ventured, very naturally, to expostulate, he turned round on her and insulted her grossly. He told her that he had never loved her, but had only married her out of pity, because she had so obviously set her affections on him; and that now, when she had entirely lost her looks and her youth——”
“The man must have been an utter cad.”
“Yes, wasn’t he!” exclaimed, Mrs. Elles, delighted with his concurrence. “I was sure you would sayso. And then he abused her and called her names—I am sure you could never bring yourself to use such words as he used to Phœbe, to your wife!” She snatched a fearful joy in the use of this phrase.
“No, I suppose not,” said Rivers, who, for some reason or other, did not seem inclined to treat this story very seriously. “No, I suppose not, unless she aggravated me beyond endurance. Then there is no knowing what I might not say.”
“Oh, yes, I quite understand, if she was a nagging woman—but poor Phœbe—I know her so well—is incapable of anything of the sort. She is too gentle ever to make a fuss—and too dignified, besides. She behaved simply like an angel all through—a perfect martyr—she hardly said a word, but——”
“But what?”
“She did the only thing that was left her to do. She left him.”
“I call that rather a strong measure!”
“Oh, but alone! She did not leave him to go to another man!”
Here the narrator of Phœbe Elles’ fortunes stopped and hesitated, a little overcome by a reflection that necessarily occurred to her. Presently she resumed. “Tell me, do you disapprove of poor Phœbe?”
“I can hardly form an opinion, can I, without knowing the rights and wrongs of the case. But as a general thing—Was he unfaithful to her?”
“No indeed, she only wishes he were!” Mrs. Elles broke out, in an uncontrollable burst of candour.“Now, I’ve shocked you,” she said, looking up into his face and bitterly repenting her flippant outspokenness.
She went on, nervously, “You think she ought to have stuck to her post—ought not to have thrown up her cards like that.”
She was translating the thoughts that she thought she could read on his face, and expostulating with them. “But still, you know, I had—a woman has surely a right to live her own life?”
“Only another phrase for selfishness,” he retorted vehemently. “I hate it. Nobody has a right. Our lives are far too inextricably bound up with other lives for us to be able to assume complete freedom. We can’t live our own lives—anything like it—for the very sufficient reason that it isn’t to be done without spoiling other people’s.”
“But you seem to be able to manage to do it—live your own life—in the way I mean?” Mrs. Elles retorted, in the heat of argument, carrying the war into the enemy’s country.
“I am a selfish beggar, I daresay, and don’t practice what I preach.”
He spoke sharply, bending down over his drawing, and she felt that she had been tactless to force the personal application.
She fancied that it was a touch of remorse at his curtness that made him say presently, in a benignant manner, “And what is your friend doing now?”
“Oh, Phœbe is all right for the present. She iscomparatively free; she does not have to sit opposite that man at breakfast every morning and listen to his coarse jokes and shiver at his impossible manners all day long. Now, she is in the society of—persons—congenial to her, at least.... I really must write to Phœbe.”
“Don’t bring her here, for heaven’s sake!” exclaimed Rivers, in real or affected alarm. “I should have to pack up my traps and bolt at once.”
“Oh, don’t be afraid of poor Phœbe!” pleaded Mrs. Elles, not without some appreciation of the humour of the situation.
“You really wouldn’t mind her if you knew her, I do assure you. Anyhow she wouldn’t be any worse than I.”
“Oh, by Jove, though, but she would! A woman with a grievance is worse than anything else in the world.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Elles replied, with some dignity—she did not like being snubbed, even in the person of her pseudo-self,—“I am not thinking of asking Phœbe here. I shall not even put an address when I write. I will send the letter to a friend to forward. You know I have my own reasons for not wishing the world to know where I am—at present.”
She made this statement for about the hundredth time, and the artist, as usual, completely ignored the allusion to her ambiguous position at Greta Bridge. And yet—he was obviously Bohemian, but of the world where such social rules are used to be enforced.Another instance of the anomalousness of the artist nature!
She was not without tact, though she was so impulsive, and she now fancied, with the morbid and strained apprehension of one whose feelings are deeply engaged, that he was colder to her as they walked home together. She felt, in some indefinable way, that she had lost ground with him, and that her relation of and flippant comments on the story of Phœbe Elles had been the cause of it.
Her brain was working furiously as she walked on, treading rough and smooth at his side, her head bowed, and her eyes fixed on the enormous dried-up hoof marks that the cows had made on their way down the bank to drink at the ford, and into which she sedulously and mechanically made a point of fitting her little foot. Higher up, in the upland field, the footpath was so narrow that she was obliged to walk, not beside, but in front of Rivers, who was universally beloved of farmers because of his fixed principle never heedlessly to widen a footpath, though he would fight tooth and nail for the right of way. He and she were thus perforce more or less silent, but nothing would have surprised the modest artist more than to think that he himself was the subject of the cogitations that were agitating the brain behind the little knot of brown curls which was presented to his gaze, as they walked along about a yard apart from each other.
“I have vexed him—I have shocked him! He is agentleman, and he isn’t modern, thank God!—and I have talked flippantly of things that a gentleman—and an old-fashioned gentleman—takes seriously. He has a higher moral standard than I have, and I have been fool enough to let him see that mine is lower. How tiresome!”
Then she consoled herself a little. “He is sweet, but he is not quite human. It is very easy to talk about duties and self-effacement and all that, but what can a bachelor—he is not married, I am sure—what can a hermit, a recluse, know of the stress of life? How can a bachelor possibly enter into the agonies of the married? How can Alastor sympathize with the miseries of Incompatibles?”
“You must think me a very odd kind of woman,” she said to him that night, adding hastily: “That is, if you think about me at all.”
It was a habit of hers to put leading questions of this kind to the artist, but generally, like Pilate, she stayed not for an answer, and nervously hastened to fill up the pause by a further remark of her own. The result was a somewhat one-sided conversation.
“Yes, I am mysterious, I suppose,” she went on, leaning her elbows on the table in front of her and looking fixedly at him through her glasses. She had drunk nothing but water at dinner, yet her cheeks burned with an unaccountable flush, and her eyes were bright with excitement.
“How strange it is!” she went on. “You cannot have the remotest idea of what I am really like—as ifit mattered!” She laughed apologetically. “It is strange, though, to think that though we are such friends, you have never seen my face.”
“You mean because you wear those glasses?” he replied, in the blunt, matter-of-fact way in which he generally did receive her personal allusions, and which disconcerted her and drove her to utter desperation sometimes. “I suppose you have some good reason for wearing them?”
“I have a reason, but I don’t know if it is a good one,” she replied in tones sharp from nervousness.
“You wear them under advice, I imagine?”
“No, really my own idea,” she said, airily. “Shall I take them off? Tell me to, and I will!”
Her voice was trembling, her hands were twitching with the overmastering desire to do away, once for all, with this absurd barrier between them. A woman, shorn of her powers, mulcted of her charm, handicapped, at the very moment when she needed the full arsenal of her feminine armoury! That was what she was, and his imperturbability irritated her vanity, and made it, for the moment, paramount.
She realized the full gravity of the situation, she felt it a turning point, she had attached an almost fetish-like importance to the insignia of her virtuous resolutions, but in the wild desire to assert her womanhood that mastered her now, she was prepared to abandon anything and everything that stood in the way of its accomplishment.
“Shall I take them off? Shall I?” was her irresponsible cry. “You have advised me to. Remember that.”
There was a pause—a century of vital emotion for her, the mere opportunity for an added touch of the brush on to a ticklish corner of his foreground for the painter.
“Did I?” he asked, carelessly, as she deliberately laid aside the spectacles, and looked him full in the face.
But the heavens did not fall or the solid earth fail, and with the single unconcerned remark: “I should not have said that your eyes were at all weak!” the painter continued tranquilly to deposit brushes full of diluted sepia and water on to his drawing. There were tears in her eyes next time she raised them.
Mrs. Elles never put the spectacles on again. They had made no difference—except to herself. And further intimacy with Rivers convinced her that any such artificial safeguards against flirtation were quite unnecessary.
She realized his want of sympathy and humanity, his elaborate attitude of standing aside from the problems of life in favour of a closer contemplation of those of Nature. It was Nature he loved, and Nature only, with his full heart. The human interest was a purely secondary consideration with him. Not “in many mortal forms” did he seek “the shadow of that idol.” He was Alastor and she was the Lady. She must remember that. Alastor could doubtless have done quite well without the Lady. She represented the ever-restless Spirit of Humanity which Alastor had come into the wilderness to avoid. And, for his sake, for the sake of her valued privileges, she must learn to keep it in abeyance and suppress it as far as she could. She must love Nature too. It was difficult, for though, in her quality of romanticist, she had always talked a good deal about it. Nature, to her, was merely a background for people, just as flowers were an adornment for her bodice or her parlour.
But the very conditions of her tenure here demanded that she should accommodate herself to the mood of her companion. Since, by happy chance, she was admitted to be an inmate with him of the terrestrial Paradise of which he was the tutelary God, she must contrive, as animals do, to adapt herself to her new habitat. She thought of herself as a tremulous, storm-tossed soul, newly entered into bliss, and afraid to compromise her precarious happiness by any assumption of right or too marked a signalizing of her presence there.
With this end in view, she began to cultivate a capacity for silence, an art of self-effacement, a spirit-like vagueness of outline. Her wish was to dissimulate her personality as far as was possible, and merely to form, as it were, part of the silent, unobtrusive world of Nature that he loved. It was a stiff novitiate to a complete education.
Her plan was successful, on the whole. The painter began to take her as a matter of course, to treat her as if she had always been there, as a busy man might treat a sister, or a college companion, without ceremony, but with much protective kindness and camaraderie. She was sure that the notion of her being in any way compromised by her stay with him in this lonely inn never so much as entered his mind. It was not that he was ignorant of conventions; he was simply too preoccupied to think of them.
But, indeed, the new brightness of her eyes, bred of her happiness, the lovely, natural colour in hercheeks, the conscious curve of her red lips, inevitably suggested the world’s cry for a chaperon. She had been an interesting woman when she came to Rokeby; she was now almost a beautiful one. The little hollows in her cheeks had filled up; her figure had improved; she was like a blue serge wood nymph darting about the broken pathways and shelving banks of this embowered painter’s paradise.
She knew, with a woman’s intuition, that he was not entirely blind to her beauty. His eye rested on her with the same searching and affectionate gaze with which it might linger on a “beautiful bit,” as the technical phrase runs; and the light in her eyes and the changes in her expression, as the varying moods flitted over her face, were to him as the cloud shadows chasing each other over Barningham Moor, or the sunlight glinting in the brown pools of the Greta where it was deepest. It was something, but not enough. A woman does not care to be looked at as if she were a landscape by the man whom she passionately loves. She longed to draw from him some personal expression of admiration; but, beyond an occasional “Well done!” upon the performance of some unusually agile feat of climbing, she was always disappointed.
Others noticed the improvement in her looks and health and told her of it.
“On my word, Miss,” remarked the landlady of the “Heather Bell” to her, one afternoon, when she was “learning her,” by a course of practical demonstration, to make the cake of the country, “ye’re fair credit to the ‘Heather Bell!’ Ye look twice the woman ye did when ye first comed here, not near so peaked and piny like! I’ll be bound the gentleman thinks so, too! Eh, we shall see what we shall see!”
“What shall we see, Mrs. Watson?” asked Mrs. Elles, complaisantly, leaning her elbows on the floury table. She was always most susceptible to any kind of compliment, and to do her justice, she had no idea of the woman’s meaning.
“You and he will be setting up together, one of these fine days! Eh, I see what I see! I’m none blind, honey.”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Watson!”
“Nae nonsense at all! He tak’s a good deal o’ notish on ye, I consider. I was just a-saying sae to oor Jane Anne later than yesterday. Sorrow befaa’ my tongue—she’s fair upset aboot it, I can tell ye!”
“Jane Anne! Upset?”
“Ay, sure, who but Jane Anne Cawthorne? She’s got a bit fancy for Mr. Rivers hersel’, ye mun knaw. She sends a’ the ither lads away on his account, he that’s never thinkin’ of her! I whiles say to her, ‘Hout, lass, he’ll never tak’ that much notice on ye, beyond lending ye some beuk ye’s a deal better without.’ I don’t hold wi’ readin’, mysel’, he knaw. But the fond lass shakes her head and says nowt, and throws away the bonny flowers ye put in his glass, and sets some on her own pickin’ there.”
“Yes, I have noticed that,” said Mrs. Elles sharply.
“And I’ll wager he’s niver so much as gien her a chuck on the chin, for all she’s walk barefoot to Barney Cassel and back for him. Eh, it’s you that’s got him. Mistress Popham was axing me, only the other day, when ye was going to get the vicar to call ye?”
“Call us! What’s that?”
“Ask ye; call the banns in church. Eh, that’ll be a grand day for us all. Noo, there’s a bonny cake,” she ended, clapping it on to the “girdle,” “and you and he can have it cold to your teas.”
“Did you ever lend or give Jane Anne books?” she asked Rivers, at dinner, that night.
“I ordered her a set of George Eliot’s novels once,” he said, “and all Scott’s. She’s clever enough to get something out of them. I see that from what she says to me about them. She is quite a superior girl.”
“I don’t like her, and she doesn’t like me. And novels—that she only half understands—put things into her head that are better out of it. Now, suppose this girl, Jane Anne, were to write to my people and betray me,” she said, with a slightly simulated expression of apprehension.
“Why should she betray you?” he said, showing by his slight accent on the betray that he thought it somewhat too forcible. “She would have no object.”
“Oh no!” said Mrs. Elles. “I am not a criminal. And besides, there is no one for her to betray me to. I owe nobody any allegiance. I am perfectly independent. There is not a soul in the world who cares what becomes of me!”
She sighed appropriately as she uttered this fiction, but if she had expected Mr. Rivers to openly commiserate her, she was disappointed. It was by no means the first time. Alastor always refused to take any interest in the fortunes of the Lady before she came to him.
She wondered if he even took in the idea of the lonely and friendless condition. Did he really swallow the legend of herself that she had been at such pains to concoct and serve up to him when she first came?
The lies she had told him, in the light of the new morality that her intercourse with his blameless rectitude had flashed upon her, began to weigh heavily upon her regenerate soul. He was so straight, so sincere, so guileless, so simple, she might tell him what she chose and he would credit her story as that of one holding the same rigid code of honour as himself. She was beginning to realize, as she had never realized before, what that code of honour—what every gentleman’s code of honour—was.
It was not so much that it was wrong to lie, but it was a mark of ill-breeding, and her cheeks burned at the recollection of the imposition she had practised—was still practising—on this gentleman.
He had asked her no questions, and she had told him lies!
The only little point of comfort which she could wrest for herself from circumstances was the possibility that he had not chosen to burden his mind—fullof tree and cloud forms, and such artistic lumber—with her story as she had related it to him. Was it likely that a man, with his strange and disconcerting capacity for the ignoring of details and all the minor facts of life, should have permitted anything so human and unimportant to make an impression on his mind? No, it had probably glided off him, while every mutation of the sunset they had watched together yesterday was indelibly fixed in his memory. Of what consequence were she and her trifling affairs in comparison? So she thought and hoped, in the new humility which her love for him had engendered in her.
Still, in spite of these halcyon days, it was impossible that she could entirely shut out the thought of the future. Things could not stay as they were. The stack of canvas umbrella covers, and packing cases, piled out of the way in all the four corners of the sitting-room, reminded the poor young woman only too painfully of the dies iræ, dies illa—when the autumn tints, beloved of amateurs, would begin to show and bear their indubitable message. The leaves would turn brown and fall, and the lover of Nature would pack up his colour box, and strap his easels together, and look out a train in Bradshaw, and order the trap over-night to take him to the station at Barnard Castle.
What should she say then? What should she do? He was everything to her, and she was nothing to him. She was the wife of Mortimer Elles, and her home was in Newcastle!
But it was borne in upon her that, come what might, she could never go back to Mortimer. The mere contemplation of a renewed term of life with him was terrible and impossible to her, now that she had known the greatest good, the highest development of which human nature was capable, in the person of this man in whose intimacy she was living.
There were times when she could not bear her own thoughts, when she would jump up and leave the room where Rivers sat composedly working, and, hatless and cloakless, run out into the moonlit road and even into the Park itself. The painter, in his absorption, would never even look up or seem to hear the panting breaths that betrayed her emotion.
Bitterly did she con this and other signs of his indifference, as she wandered deviously about the glades and alleys of the great demesne, now under the staring moonlight, now where the over-arching trees shut it hopelessly out and made walking a mere matter of outstretched hands and groping steps. Even the darksome yew grove—the haunt of the Lady of Mortham—had no terrors for her now. Love casts out fear; a woman in her state of mind has no horror of the supernatural.
One night, the most beautiful moonlight night of the whole year, she wandered far into the Park and along to the banks of the Greta, where it runs under the shadow of the cliffs crowned with fir trees, and the desolate tower of Mortham stands out against the sky behind them. She scrambled down the bank,on the hither side, to one of the little stretches of pebbly shore that line the stream here and there and stood wistfully gazing into its flow, her hands crossed at the back of her neck, a white lady, “mystic, wonderful.”
The further shore lay all in mysterious shadow, but at her feet was a sheet of rippling silver, with dark oily rocks, like islands or sleeping seals, breaking through its course here and there. She saw, in imagination, a drowned woman lying there in mid-stream, face upwards, caught among the snags and snares that clogged the shallows, and irradiated by the same moon rays that turned the brown water white.
“Look there!” she said, wildly, turning sharply round to Rivers, who was standing behind her. “Look! I see myself there!”
She was so wrought up that she felt and showed no surprise at his presence. It was so picturesquely natural that she should be standing there in the moonlight, on the bank of the most romantic river in the whole world, with the only man she had ever loved. Time and chance had combined to bring about this hour. Rivers had never thought of following her before.
But he completely ignored her morbid speech. She was hurt, though, indeed, it was what she might have expected. She said no more, but stood looking tragically down into the flood.
“By Jove, but it is fine!” the artist presently murmured to himself, in tones of deep conviction.
Nature—mere non-sentient, abstract Nature again—and a woman, eager, passionate and romantic, standing by him!
“Don’t you wish you had your sketch book here?” that woman asked him, bitterly.
“Oh, I can remember it!” he replied, simply. “But I am very glad I came out. How did you happen to know there was a moon, and that she would be shining over this reach of the river?”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I just came out—I don’t know why—I suppose, because I was restless.”
She sighed, and fingered her sash, and sighed again.
“How did you know where I had gone? I have been”—reproachfully—“an hour away, and you never even looked up when I left the room!”
“I missed you, though,” he said. “I feel things, sometimes, when I am very busy, without seeing them.”
“Perhaps, then, it occurred to you that I might have got into mischief,” she went on lightly. “You didn’t know that I come here nearly every night?”
“Why not?”
“And yet this is the first time you have followed me!” she said, regretfully. “Yes, I come here, night after night, and I look down into this pool, and I imagine myself lying in it with my face turned up to the moon, drowned and dead, and at an end of all my troubles, and you hearing of it, and being a little—a very little—sorry for me!”
“But you are surely not thinking of committingsuicide, are you?” he asked her, quite calmly, “for, really, no one would have the slightest excuse for falling in off this miniature beach?”
She made a gesture of impatience—then she laughed, in tragic impotence.
“One can drown oneself in a teacup, if one has a mind. But I think I will go up the bank, now, and put myself out of the reach of temptation.”
“Do you want to go indoors? If not, let us walk a little way to the Junction, if you don’t mind? I want to see the Greta meet the Tees under this strong moonlight. It must be magnificent. It is a shame to stay in the house when the moon is out like this. Browning speaks of her ‘unhandsome thrift of silver.’ There’s plenty of her now, isn’t there? Glorious! It is a night of nights!”
Mrs. Elles agreed with him—but from a different point of view.
“Are you frightened?” he asked her, as they left the river bank and began gropingly to follow a track between two darknesses of tangled brushwood.
“Not with you!” she said, manfully; and he did not offer his arm.
She walked along, a little in front of him, in the narrow path they had chosen, a short cut to the place where the two rivers meet. She was wearing her thin, clinging white gown, and, without the unromantic adjuncts of hat, parasol, or gloves, she looked as ghostly, as unreal, as far removed from the commonplace, as even she herself could have wished.
They reached the Junction, just outside the Park confines, where the brown moorland flood of the Greta, hasty, capricious, passionate, like herself, merged into the broad, calm flood of the Tees—flowing quietly, in its great volume and depth, over its granite-bouldered bed under Wycliffe. Rivers, for some reason or other, took off his hat, stood—his hair looking quite white in the moonshine—silent, his artist soul, presumably, stirred to the very depths by the mysterious harmonies of tone and magnificent lines of composition which the sight afforded him.
“How well that comes!” he murmured, passionately, while the woman beside him stood breathless, affected, too, by the vision, but in her own way; weaving her fanciful, personal allegories of him, and her, and the two rivers, and longing for some signs in him of the more human enthusiasm that she could have shared.
She shivered, but not from cold. “We must go back!” he said, in response to her unspoken complaint.
They turned and walked up the glen—the moon had gone behind a cloud, and the Greta lay dull and sullen under the hanging terraces of trees. But in the yew grove was darkness unspeakable.
“Oh, I can’t see you,” she murmured, involuntarily; “I shall lose you!”
He silently held out his hand to her, and she took it.
When they came out into the Broad Walk where itwas lighter, she dutifully made a little movement to withdraw her hand—a very slight movement—but he did not accept it.
He had forgotten! Was there another man in the world who could thus hold and retain a woman’s hand without knowing it?
In all her life, such pure, unalloyed happiness had not been hers, as they walked up to the gates of the Park together. It was just ten o’clock.
In the hall of the inn, he lit her candle, as usual, and gave it to her. She held it just under her chin, and it lighted up her face, blanched and spiritualized by the emotions she had gone through. He looked at her, for once, very closely.
“You look, to-night,” he said, in the dreamy voice he only used sometimes, “like the Spirit of the Greta that peered through the window at me the other night. I told you about it at the time, did I not? It was a strange hallucination! Quite white and pale, and its eyes fixed meaningly on me. The lines of the face, as I remember it now, were curiously like yours, or is it that you have identified yourself with that spirit in my thoughts? I have never got it quite out of my head, do you know!”
“Why should you try?” was all that Phœbe Elles could find to say. A mist seemed to have come over her eyes, and she bade him “good-night,” and stumbled helplessly over her gown as she went upstairs.
She lay awake all night. She cried quietly to herself. This was what she had wanted. This was life. She was very happy and yet most miserable.
Did this man care for her? Yes? No? A little? There was no knowing. His ways were not as the ways of other men—at least, not the men she had known—and the ordinary canons of flirtation, as she knew them, had no correspondence with his conduct towards her.
She thought he liked her; she knew she loved him; that was what it all came to.
She was an honourable woman, with a newly super-added canon of honour, and she did not dream of being false to her husband. If Rivers loved her as she loved him, she ought to go away. That was her clear duty to herself, to him and to Mortimer.
Mortimer would take her back—of that she had not the slightest doubt. There was no reason why he should ever hear of this, her vagary, among the green shades of Brignal. She might take the train back to Newcastle, refuse to give any further account of herself than that she had been away for a holiday or any reason for that holiday except the usual “nerves” of society, and resume her end of the matrimonial chain without let or hindrance.
But since she was uncertain as to Rivers’ feelings with regard to her, hardly that, indeed, since he gave her, literally, no reason to suppose that he looked upon her in any other light than the light of a friend, might she not—oh, might she not!—take the benefit of the doubt and stay there till he went away, and beas happy as she could for as long as she could? She felt that she must not quarrel with Rivers’ reserve, since it gave her the title to his company. She decided not to do so.
She was beginning to find him less obscure, for she had learned to seek for the expression of him in his art: the art by which he chose to reveal himself to those who had the will and the skill to read. Where other men spoke or wrote, he painted. She had only to look at the beautifully stained bits of paper that issued from his hand, to watch the wonderful combinations of colour—subtle, passionate, striking, tender—that were evolved by this man of few words, to see that he was no stranger to the whole gamut of human emotions, full of delightful, undisciplined moods, and mutabilities, and pleasant perversions of character. There were strength and force in certain abrupt combinations that stirred like the sound of a trumpet; there were tenderness and the fancifulness that women love in certain harmonies that moved almost to tears. She read sentiment and sweetness in the delicacy of his sunsets, and character and passion in the gloom of deep cloud-shadows, and sullen mist-wreaths lurking in clefts and hollows of the hills, and mystery in the tangled undergrowth whose complication and variety he rendered so well.