There was one drawing of his that she specially cared for, and whose progress she surveyed as she might that of a beloved child of his brain and hers. “Oh, Brignal Banks are wild and fair!” says the ladyin Scott’s ballad, and here they were, caught and immortalized forever on one piece of Whatman’s paper, three feet by two. There was hardly any sky in it. The leafy, heavily-berried coverts hung tossing from the cliff, streaming down to the water’s edge, that lay, in brown pools, deep and immutable, like a true man’s heart, at its base. In the immediate foreground was the broken mass of stones that formed the bed of the wayward river that had so many moods, both of grave and gay. There the painter sat, on one of these stones, with the water parted and rippling all round him, in the most precarious of positions, his drawing propped on his knee, uncomfortably, his feet nearly in the stream. The burning sun shone straight down on his head, for there was no foothold for his umbrella in the spot which he had chosen. He never spared himself, or complained of the terrible constriction of the chest, which the constrained attitude of stooping necessarily engendered. Perhaps he did not notice it in the excitement of his work. She sat under his umbrella, on the bank, and watched him.
Morning after morning she sat there, as it were in a bay of opalescent colours; the horizon of her landscape bounded by the pink cliffs and overhanging belts of trees, the foreground quivering with refraction, and golden with the flowering ragwort. She was drunk, but not blind with light, and lulled continually by the hum of the bees at their task and the self-satisfied purl of the stream at her feet, she satpeacefully noting and enjoying the dreamy transitions of a painter’s day.
To herself, she seemed to be fast becoming a “green thought in a green shade”—the fanciful title of Rivers’ picture, adopted from his favourite poet, Marvel—her favourite, too, now. Rivers was for ever associated in her mind with green, the colour of hope; she had banished grey—the colour of despair and Newcastle—from her mind, as it certainly existed not in the landscape before her eyes. Newcastle, under its smoky pall, and Rokeby, in its gorgeous vestiture of many colours, could not surely form a part of the same hemisphere. And the extraordinary thing was, that she had run away to find adventure, and had found peace! She had thought she had need of a world full of men, and now the society of one summed up all interest, all excitement, all hope, all that she had ever dreamed. She had longed for the fuller life of cities; now a lonely grove by the side of the river sufficed her.
Her eyes—she never read, or cared to read—were continually fixed on the stooping figure, in its neutral garb of brown, perched so precariously on a rock in mid-stream. In front of his post was the dell of Brignal, where the river wound round abruptly, and seemed to issue from a darksome hollow, formed by the meeting trees on either bank. Suddenly, her eyes grew eager and then startled—she fancied all was not right. Something was different. The hollow was filled up. A brown wall of water was gathering fromthat hollow, was advancing, rushing, with a dull, murmurous roar as of distant thunder, straight down between the two banks towards the painter.
She sprang to her feet.
Rivers had told her of the Bore of the Greta—she knew how, after a very slight rainfall such as they had had, the river was used to come down without warning. This was it! And his life was in danger! She screamed frantically to the artist, whose head had for an unconscionable time been bent over his drawing. She screamed as loudly as she could, but her voice came thinly and hoarsely, so he did not hear her.
Then she began to leap from rock to rock to go to him, when she saw him suddenly spring to his feet, take in the whole situation at a glance, and, his drawing held high in the air in one hand, begin to make for the shore.
Then he caught sight of Phœbe Elles, and his course deviated. She had not got very far from the bank, but she was in danger, and he was coming to her. The flood was very nearly on them both. Even in her agony, she noticed his slight pause of hesitation before he tossed the drawing he held recklessly on to the bank without looking after it, and the next moment his protecting arm was round her, and the flood swept partially over them. His other arm was round the bough of a tree that hung over the stream near where she was standing when he reached her. They were both overthrown by the rush of water, which passed over them, and then seemed to subside somewhat. She fainted, for the first time in her life.
She was lying on her bed at the “Heather Bell,” with only a very confused recollection of what had happened, and a bandaged foot that hurt dreadfully. A doctor had been sent for from Barnard Castle, so she was told, who had pronounced it only a slight sprain, but the skin of her leg was abraded from knee to instep, and that was the cause of the pain. She could not remember how it had happened—there was a jagged bough, or a snag, she supposed, of the tree that Rivers had held on to, as the flood rushed past them, and which had caught her, somehow, as she slid down in his arms. She was a little light-headed still, and she kept calling out for the artist like a fretful child, and upbraiding him for refusing to come to her. Jane Anne, who was in and out of her room a great deal, treated these appeals sternly, and ministered to her with stony, condemnatory eyes, but Mrs. Watson’s motherly heart was melted by her distress.
“Just ye get yerself well, ma honey, and then ye’ll see him! He’s sore put out about ye, sure and that he is, and he’s alway axing me how you’s getting on. But ye must just keep yerself quiet!”
Realizing that her only chance of seeing Rivers depended on her recovery, the restless woman putgreat constraint upon herself, and in a couple of days, was well enough to be carried downstairs and laid on a horsehair sofa in the sitting-room.
Her first day downstairs happened to be a hopelessly wet day, and the artist was perforce kept indoors, and painted all day at her side. He was busy, of course, but with extreme unselfishness he offered to read aloud to her.
Tears of gratitude came into her eyes as she realised this.
“I couldn’t let you,” she said, “but if you would let me talk to you a little, and go on painting—the foreground, or some part that doesn’t matter—?”
He smiled, and turned so as to face her. “Don’t let me get absorbed, then, and stray into the middle distance! I can’t promise anything when I have got a brush in my hand.”
“Tell me all about the other day,” she said. “You saved my life!”
“Which you very foolishly risked to save mine!” She was weak and he unconsciously spoke in the aggressively cheerful, indulgent tone one uses to an invalid. “I was very angry with you indeed for jumping in after me like that. A shout would have done.”
“I did call to you, but I could not make you hear.”
“Your voice must have been drowned by the rushing of the water. I knew that there was something wrong, though. I looked up from my drawing, and saw the water coming, and you a yard from the bank!”
At the sound of the word drawing she gave a little scream—she had quite forgotten it!
“I know—I know—the drawing! What became of the drawing?”
“Well, you know, I had to have my hands free—” he began, almost apologetically.
“Of course! For me! And now I remember seeing you fling it away on to the bank. Was it”—she spoke with bated breath, as one might speak of the fall of empires—“was it quite spoiled?”
“Pretty bad,” he answered, moodily.
“You can’t think how I wish you had not saved me at its expense! Why did you? Why did you?” she asked, with absolute sincerity.
Rivers seemed to repent of his lapse into temper, slight as it had been. He said, laughingly, “Well, I must tell you that I thought it over! It was a fearful wrench, of course, but I decided in your favour. Do you blame me?”
She resented his not taking her seriously, and replied, gravely, “Yes, I do. I was not worth the drawing to you, I am sure. You should have considered it first of all. Who was it—was it Cæsar—who swam across the Channel with his Commentaries in his mouth?”
“He did—something of the kind—but I never heard that he had a woman to look after as well.”
“And then—you carried me home?” she went on, in a tone of sentimental reminiscence.
“Yes,” he replied, briskly. “One couldn’t havegot a carriage down there, and I could hardly have packed you into Farmer Ward’s wheelbarrow!”
“Did anyone see you carry me across the fields?”
“Mrs. Popham did,” he said, laughing at the recollection. “She even offered to help me! A woman who could hardly lift a fly!”
“I must have looked awful!” Mrs. Elles pondered; she had often thought it over. “A wet woman is such an abject object!... And then you carried me up to bed?”
“Yes. Mrs. Watson was very anxious to get her son, Jock, to do it—but I thought of Jock and how he would have knocked your head against the banisters at every step, so I insisted on doing it myself.”
“And then?”
“And then the doctor came, and saw you, and saw me, and told me it was not much—and then I was easier in my mind.”
“Then you were anxious about me?”
“Very,” he said. “Poor thing, you suffered so; and you were so good about it!”
“Was I? I am glad.”
She then returned to the subject that was distressing her. “Are you sure you don’t regret the drawing—are not cross with me about it? Isn’t it in that portfolio—what remains of it? Show it me.”
“Oh, no, no!” he said, shuddering.
But she had reached out for the portfolio that lay near her hand, and, with the wilfulness of illness, insisted on taking out the hopelessly blurred, grey-streaked sheet of paper stretched on a board. There was a hole in the paper, the size of a shilling, just where the sky-line met the cliff. It was utterly ruined, as the merest tyro in art must have realised.
“Oh, poor, poor thing! A snag has caught it, too, like my leg,” she moaned.
Rivers dabbled furiously away in the glass of water with his fat brush. He was an artist and human.
“I wish you would take it away!” he said, sulkily, without looking at it or her.
“Where to?” asked Mrs. Elles, almost weeping.
“Oh, anywhere—to the devil, if you like.”
“I’ll put it in my room, then,” she said, calmly. “I shall like to have it as a memento.”
She slyly dropped it behind the sofa until she could carry it upstairs, and he did not seem even to notice what she was doing.
. . . . . . . .
The next day was very fine, and the artist had perforce to go out and paint as usual. Mrs. Elles felt unutterably solitary. She could not walk as far as Brignal, but she could not expect Rivers to stop at home and neglect his picture in order to amuse her. She virtuously stayed upstairs on one floor, as she was recommended to do, until evening, but she was too restless to sit or lie still, and wandered about from one room of the old inn to another.
There were three bedrooms on the first story, hers and Rivers’ and one unoccupied room whose floor was on a somewhat higher level than the others, up a tinyflight of stairs. She “changed the air,” as Mrs. Watson put it, by sitting in there some part of the morning, and once an irresistible impulse led her into the artist’s room, which was the most ascetic and the least comfortable of the three.
She stayed a long while looking out of the window, gazing fondly at the view which must meet his eyes every morning as he lay in his bed. It was very nearly the same as that which met hers, naturally, since the two rooms adjoined.
She noticed a chair, drawn between the dressing-table and the window. He sat there, she supposed, sometimes, and looked out. So would she.
But she found herself looking in, not out. Her loving eyes gloated on all the details of his room; the little heap of sketch books on the corner of the dressing-table; the martyred pocket-handkerchief, stained all the colours of the rainbow, that he had used to dab his drawing with; and the razors, that he kept so sharp, wherewith to scrape down its surface, lying beside those devoted to his own use; the three mother o’ pearl studs placed neatly on the ledge of the looking-glass, beside the heap of pence he had last turned out of his pockets; the fair white china palettes that he made a point of washing out carefully with his own hands, and whereon it was now her adored occupation to “rub” the delicate proportions of each colour required during the day. All this curious intermixture of art materials and objects of personal use, so characteristic of the artist’s room, struck her sense ofdramatic incongruity and pleased her. Then she leaned out over the sill in a dream of what never could be, and forgot herself. Half an hour elapsed.
A slight rustle behind her warned her of the presence of Jane Anne, who, aggressively remarking, “I came to see to the blind,” established herself there with a needle and cotton and drove Mrs. Elles away, although to uninitiated eyes the blind seemed in very good order.
She went into her own room and spent the afternoon there; she fell asleep, or she would have heard voices in the room below—the sitting-room she shared with Rivers.
A little, thin, consumptive-looking woman of fifty, in a homely utilitarian suit of tweeds which made her look like a schoolgirl, was interviewing Jane Anne on the subject of the harmonium’s programme for next Sunday. She was the Vicar’s wife, and, that subject concluded, the pair had moved across the hall and over the threshold of Rivers’ sitting-room, the door of which stood carelessly open.
“Out?” said Mrs. Popham, with an interrogatory gesture. “Both of them?”
“He’s out,” answered Jane Anne. “She’s upstairs!”
“Now, who and what is she?” asked the other, in the tone of decent curiosity. “I asked your aunt, but she says she knows nothing, and doesn’t care.”
“Aunt’s fulish!”
“I told her she’d care fast enough if her inn wereto lose its character, as it’s in a very fine way to do with all this. Mr. Popham and I have been talking about it only to-day. Everybody is talking about it!” Mrs. Popham spoke as if Rokeby were a centre of civilization. “Several people saw Mr. Rivers carrying her back across the fields, the day of her accident, and we all wonder what her relationship to him can be! Frick is a foreign name. Is she a foreigner?”
“Nay, she’s right English!” Jane Anne replied, with conviction, forgetting, in her excitement, to mince her words as usual. “And Frick is not her name, neither!”
“How do you know that? Then I am right and my husband is wrong. He is for taking the most charitable view of her, as indeed he does of everyone—but I told him that I was perfectly convinced, in my own mind, that the woman is an adventuress of the most disreputable kind! Everything proves it!”
“Can you tell me what is meant precisely by an adventuress, Ma’am?” her favourite Sunday-school teacher enquired, pedantically.
“People mean by an adventuress,” Mrs. Popham replied, “an unclassed creature, a person with no visible means of subsistence or regular occupation. They go about the country seeing whom they can make fools of. There are plenty of them about, I am told. Russian spies, some of them, who worm themselves into families as governesses, and so on, inorder to surprise secrets. What this one can possibly want with Mr. Rivers, I can’t tell, but no good, I am sure!”
“Him to marry her!” said Jane Anne sombrely, as one who had thought out thoroughly all the tragic issues of the case.
“It is possible,” said Mrs. Popham, “and he is so good, so trusting, that anybody could take him in who set herself to do it, as this creature is probably doing. I can’t tell you how it distresses me that such a nice man should be made a prey of! It must really be put a stop to, Jane Anne!”
“Yes, Ma’am,” eagerly agreed Jane, forgetting to be dignified. Whether Mrs. Elles should prove to be a Russian spy or not, the important thing was to separate her from Mr. Rivers. “She isn’t fit for him. I can’t abide her myself. I mistrusted her from the very first time I set eyes on her. Nasty painted thing! She’s only got two dresses to her back, and yet she wears rings worth I don’t know how much! Great big stones. She sings foreign songs to him, of an evening, in all sorts of queer languages—on my piano! He niver speaks a word to me now that she’s come! He used to say a kind word now and then. She was out with him in the Park, one night lately, till I don’t know what hour. It’s not decent! I was waiting at my window and I saw through a chink in the trees—I can see all down the Broad Walk, if I have a mind. I waited long enough, and I saw them come back down the walk together,and the moon was shining full on them, and I saw—” She hesitated.
“Was he?—Was she—?” Mrs. Popham asked, with timid, scared eagerness.
“They were walking hand in hand,” said Jane Anne, shyly, “and if that’s not being lovers, I don’t know what is!”
Her face relaxed, and she burst into tears.
“Don’t, Jane Anne, don’t go on like that! Perhaps they are engaged. My husband says so,” said Mrs. Popham, assuming that the staid girl’s tears proceeded from her sense of outraged morality. “But still, it is a very odd way to behave. They ought to get married, that’s all I can say!”
“Oh, ma’am, Mr. Rivers and a woman like that, with her painted cheeks and her hair—well, I shouldn’t like to have to swear that it is even her own! She’s not respectable, even if she is engaged to him. I could tell you things—and so could Dorothy, who waits on them!”
“Sh-h!” said the Vicar’s wife. “But we must get her away from him, somehow, Jane Anne.”
“Oh, Ma’am, if we only could! Dear Mr. Rivers! I’d do anything I could. Only, she can’t walk now.”
“If she is what we think her, that sprain of hers may be just a ruse. It probably is. I can bring myself to believe anything of a woman who masquerades under an assumed name. How do you know, by the way, that it is so?”
Jane Anne went into Rivers’ room with the air ofone performing a religious rite, and fetched an umbrella out of the corner and handed it solemnly to the Vicar’s wife.
“That is hers!” she said.
Mrs. Popham held it up to the light and read—in characters half effaced by time, not by prudence—the letters “P. E.” on its battered, silver handle, and, furthermore, the address, 59 Saville Place, Newcastle.
“E. doesn’t spell Frick!” said the Board School girl, proudly.
“I don’t quite like doing it,” murmured the Vicar’s wife. “But—really—I can’t let this go on! It can do her no harm if she is respectable, and if she isn’t—? One must think of Mr. Rivers! Read out that address again, Jane Anne.”
Jane Anne looked quite animated as she did so, and Mrs. Popham wrote it down in a note-book.
“Now, put the umbrella back!” that lady added, in rather a shame-faced way, “and leave it all to me. And, Jane Anne, mind you practise up that thing of Arcadelt’s in time for Divine service; you seemed rather weak in it last Sunday, or perhaps you were not attending? I saw her in church. She probably gets Mr. Rivers to take her there to throw a little dust in all our eyes. I notice she never kneels or sings. It is evidently the first time she has ever been regularly to church in her life!”
Two days after this incident, of which she naturally remained unaware, Mrs. Elles was well enough to walk across three fields to meet the artist on his way back from his work. She exulted in the fact that she had become so countrified as to disdain to put on a hat even, and her red-golden hair, less elaborately arranged than it used to be, shone beautifully in the slanting light of the setting sun.
She waved her hand to him as he came in sight, crying, in accents of frank camaraderie: “Have you had a good day?”
“Not at all!”
“He’s cross,” she thought, and as he answered her so curtly, and moreover stared at her in an oddly unconscious way, as if he were taking her in for the first time, she felt all her joyous welcome frozen on her lips and at once jumped to the conclusion that somebody had been abusing her to him.
“You look at me as if you didn’t know me or like me!” she said, undiplomatically, because she felt it so acutely.
“And as I happen to do both——” He spoke quite roughly between his teeth the justification she forced upon him. He re-adjusted the sketching bagon his shoulders with a hasty impatient movement. The bag was heavy, and it had been a very hot day.
“Did any tiresome tourists come and overlook you?” she asked presently. She knew how he hated being overlooked, and even here in these wilds, periodical intrusions of the outer barbarian were possible. An encounter with an ’Arry of Leeds or Scarborough would account for any amount of ill-temper.
“The Vicar came and spoke to me,” he answered her grudgingly.
“Ah! Like old times,” she said. “It was I who frightened him away. Ever since the Vicaress saw you carry me home, I think she has disapproved of us both. She never came to call on me, as you said she would. I don’t want her to, I am sure, I could not return a formal call in a sailor hat, and that is all I have got.... Do you mind not walking quite so fast? It hurts my foot.”
“I beg your pardon!” he said. “I keep forgetting you are an invalid still. It is most unfortunate!”
Again she noticed the accents of irritation and wondered at them. He had always been so nice about her accident till now.
“It will be all right if we go on gently like this,” she said with intent to soothe. “In a few days I shan’t mind what I do. We can go one of our nice long Sunday walks again.” He made a movement. “They are the greatest pleasure I have in the world—even when it thunders and lightens.... By the way, I have some news for you—bad news. There is anew arrival at the hotel. I heard the noise of installation.”
“The deuce there is!” he said, the current of his thoughts, whatever they were, entirely changed in a moment by news so stirring. “A man or a woman?”
“A man, I think. His boots made such a noise, stamping over my head.”
“One of those wretched touring bicyclists probably. He will perhaps only stop the night. Any luggage?”
“I saw none. That rather helps the bicyclist theory. But then, I saw no bicycle. Oh! I do hope, though, that it is all right. We don’t want anyone else here, do we?”
She came a little nearer to him, unconsciously, as she spoke. “We”—she enjoyed using the pronoun. Together they walked down the espalier-bordered path of the inn garden; and, as they turned in under the porch, she raised her arm and broke off a rose and put it, somewhat obtrusively, and a little against his will perhaps, into the artist’s button-hole.
It was all done in the sight of Jane Anne, who came rushing downstairs from the upper rooms as they entered, looking, somehow, very busy and excited. It was Jane Anne, not Dorothy, who for some reason or other brought in the lamp to them that evening, setting it down heavily, so heavily that Mrs. Elles, looking up, saw that the girl’s hands were trembling with nervousness.
But through some unaccountable swing of the mental pendulum Phœbe Elles was to-night so nearlyabsolutely happy that she did not waste a thought on the causes of the young woman’s excitement, or that other problem, the possible duration of the mysterious visitor’s stay. Tourists might—and would—come and go, she and Rivers were there it might be for ever. For ever! Yes, she felt to-night as if that might really be, and life remain for ever a fairy tale. The prince was here, in the enchanted castle, in willing bonds to the enchanted princess, and so far, no dragons—or other princesses contested him with her.
She sat in the low window seat and leaned back against the sill, her hands idly clasped behind her head, and closed her eyes now and then, and felt so happy that she smiled without knowing it. She had bidden truce to her eternal self-consciousness for once.
Rivers looked up now and then, but there was no apprehension in his eyes. He did not see her—he was in another world—a world where neither Phœbe Elles, nor any other woman, could follow him. That could not be helped, but meantime his physical presence sufficed the woman who adored him. Her tense nerve fibres were momentarily relaxed, she was soothed and lulled into a state of happy acquiescence in the present order of things. It had been very hot all this August day, but now the cool airs of evening were just beginning to qualify the dry heat that had been so intense as to blister the window shutters, and make the air seem to dance on the distant skyline of the moors. Mrs. Elles was very lightly dressed, her thinmuslin shirt showed the rosy skin of her shoulder that rested against the jamb of the window frame, half in, half out. She deliberately inhaled the sweet aromatic smell of the jessamine and the phloxes that grew under the window, and the mild breath of the cows that leaned over the fence. There were people in the garden, she could hear their whispering voices.
“Lovers probably,” she thought—“the landlady’s sons courting their lasses. How sweet it all is!”
After half an hour’s steady work, the painter became restless. Perhaps he remembered the advent of the presumed cyclist, and if he did, it worried him. He seemed to be listening once or twice to vague sounds heard in the passage outside, then he began to walk about. Once he brought up sharply in his walk in front of the stack of umbrellas and travelling gear in the corner of the room, and stood there. She happened to be looking out into the garden just then, or she would have thought this terribly ominous, and all her peace of mind would have been destroyed. When he came back to the table, he looked at the drawing and shook his head. That gesture escaped her too. Then he left the room and she saw him stroll deviously up the garden and look over the gate into the fields. When he came back, she had not moved or in any way modified the picture of restful contentment she presented. He looked at her—a puzzled look—then he said:
“I have seen the new lodger!” he said. “At least I think it was she!”
“You have? A woman?”
“Yes, a tall, handsome personage, dressed all in forbidding and ponderous black. She was sitting in the arbour out there, talking to Jane Anne in a very friendly way.”
“It was the girl’s own mother, probably. Every girl of her class has got a bombazine mother that she produces on occasion.”
“Jane Anne is an orphan. Besides this was more than bombazine—it was—it was something very handsome, if I know anything about it—which I don’t!”
“No, there’s no black in nature!” said Mrs. Elles, smiling fondly at him. “And I should not expect you to know much about women’s dress. My—er—father knows there are such things as ruches and pipings, and that is all.”
“I do happen to know that there is such a thing as jet, and that it is very expensive. A sort of glittering coat of mail, you know, that women wear.”
“Egidia does!” cried Mrs. Elles, with a sudden little pang of jealousy. “She wore one in Newcastle, I remember, when I went to see her. Sequins!”
“Yes, the ‘bombazine mother’ wore little shining things like hers,” he replied, with a disconcerting apprehension of the intricacies of feminine apparel in Miss Giles’s case which disclosed to the woman at his side the parlous state of her own heart, if indeed she had been under any doubt about it.
He went on, “As for this wretched woman, I dohope we shall not come across her! Her voice was enough for me. I wonder how a woman with a strident unsympathetic voice like that can find anyone to live with her. I could not be in her company an hour.”
“I daresay she is somebody’s mother-in-law,” remarked Mrs. Elles, with pathos.
“And eyes like gimlets! She had a good look at me!”
“And now she is most probably pumping them about you, and me, and who and what we are!”
“Probably,” he replied rather grimly, and sat down in front of his drawing, and began to work at it with all the signs of intense concentration.
She stayed where she was, in the window seat, and watched him, with an ardent, timidly devouring gaze. This time, he was too much absorbed to look up, so it was quite safe.
She found herself wondering how a man could live in such an atmosphere of passionate regard, and not know it. It seemed to her that the cloud, as it were, of devotion and admiration with which she enwrapped him, was so intensely actual—a positive physical fact,—it seemed to her that she could see the halo with which she crowned him.
For literally half-an-hour she heard nothing but the intermittent plip-plop of the brush in the glass of water, fast growing muddy coloured. He seemed to her to dash the brush into it with more energy—nay virulence—than usual.
She presently observed aloud, with the sweet impertinence permitted by intimacy: “How you are dashing it in! I call that the splash and carry one of art, but I suppose it will all come out right in the end.”
“Or all wrong,” he said—and his voice was so changed that she looked up in surprise. “The chances are that I shall never finish it. I am thinking of leaving this place to-morrow!”
“What?” she screamed, rather than said; and her voice from excess of emotion was shrill and strident enough to apprise even one so absorbed as Rivers that his intelligence was of no ordinary degree of importance to his listener.
She had known all along that this must come and she had made up her mind how she would behave when it came—but not so suddenly, good God! Her resolution deserted her and her voice betrayed her.
The painter deliberately laid down his brush, and came to where she was sitting in the window-seat, and taking her two unresisting hands, led her a few paces into the room.
“There are people in the garden,” he said quietly. He screwed up his eyes, and looked at her exactly as if she were a “subject,”—and a difficult one, as she thought afterwards.
“Now, please listen to me,” he went on, with a little gentle pressure of the hands pushing her into a seat. “I have been thinking——”
“Oh, dear!” she murmured, like a spoilt child. She was so acutely conscious that any reflection on hispart was likely to mean a conclusion inimical to her peace. The moment he thought about it, he would be sure to see how wrong and impossible the whole situation was.
“I am a careless fellow,” Rivers proceeded to say, “and my head is generally full of my own work, to the exclusion of everything else.... I can’t say I ever thought about it, but I have heard something to-day—Mr. Popham made an absurd suggestion to me—which shows me that I am very stupidly compromising you by my presence here.”
Mrs. Elles interrupted him with vehemence, stung by his generosity in putting it so.
“Indeed no, it is I who am the interloper! It is I who ought to go—and I will!” She drew herself up proudly. “You to go! Why, your picture isn’t anything like finished.”
“The picture is a minor matter, compared with—”
“It is quite the most important thing in the world,” she rejoined, with a little touch of irony, bitterly aware that to him it was so, indeed. Then her spirit oozed away, and she said, weakly, “No, no, it is for me to go, of course—but, oh, we were so happy! Why must you make me——”
“I don’t make you go—of course not!” he said irritably. “I intend to go myself. Did I not say so?”
“Nonsense,” she answered, quite rudely, in her extreme anguish. “That would be no good at all. Besides, do you suppose I should care to be here at all—unless you were?”
She uttered the crude fact recklessly, imperiously, contemptuously almost. Surely he must see; she had nothing to conceal from him now! She hid her face in her hands a moment after, and tried to leave the room, but Rivers caught her to him as she passed.
“Then, for God’s sake, don’t go!” he said, tearing her hands down from her face. With one quick look at him as he sat across the chair holding her body, she flung her arms round his neck, and returned his embrace with all the passion and abandonment of one doomed. Married to one man and beloved of another, she felt herself to be so. A look in Rivers’ eyes had warned her that Alastor’s asceticism was only skin deep; a mysterious, material rapport was established between them. She felt as if she had known him all her life.
“It is all right, then, if you care for me,” he said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “What do you suppose it was that Mr. Popham wanted to-day? He wanted to marry us, by way of looking after the morals of his parish!”
He laughed; he was gay. Even she had never dreamed that he could be so charming! She removed herself a few paces away from him, and stood, sobbing convulsively.
“Oh, forgive me, forgive me!” she repeated.
He became grave and stern in a moment, struck by the utter conviction in her tone.
“What for? Because you don’t care for me? Why should you? I have made a mistake, that’s all!”
He turned away impatiently, possessed for the moment by the mere surface irritation of the man who has been refused.
“No, no, not that! Oh, I adore you!”
She laid frantic hold on the lapel of his coat. He covered her hand with his.
“What then? How nervous you are! What can it be?”
He laughed.
“You are not going to tell me that you are married already, I suppose?”
“Yes, yes, that’s just it. I am!”
There was a pause. Then—
“I said it in joke. Do you mean to say that you are not joking?”
“No, no, I wish I were. I have deceived you shamefully.”
He stared at her, then he sat down heavily on the chair by the table in front of his work. He looked a little bewildered and very angry.
“Shall I tell you all?”
“Oh, yes, if you care to—not that it concerns me now.”
He idly picked up his brush, charged with colour as it was, and let it fall full on the drawing in front of him.
She caught his hands.
“Oh, don’t, don’t spoil your drawing because of me! And listen to me, for it does concern you, since I love you, and you say that you love me. I musttell you, I must explain what I have done. Oh, don’t look at me so! You were my lover a moment ago, and now you are my judge.”
“A woman has no right to let a man——”
“No, I know she hasn’t. I ought not to have let you tell me that you cared for me. But I am so glad you did! It will be something to remember afterwards. I must tell you my story—my true story! I told you once, you remember, the story of Phœbe Elles—the woman who left her husband, because he was so unkind to her——”
“Oh, so that is your story, is it? And the one you told me about yourself—your pretended self——”
“That I invented. I had to tell you something——” He rose from his chair. She went on—“Oh, forgive me, forgive me! I have not told you the truth——”
“So it seems!” he replied, coldly, opening the door, and going out. “Good-night.”
. . . . . . . .
She was left alone, with the worst of all scourges that a woman may have to suffer, that of reading in the eyes of the man she loves the expression of the scorn, deserved or undeserved, that he bears her.
. . . . . . . .
For a long time she sat there, in this little narrow room that had framed all her brief happiness, half stunned by the judgment that had been passed on her, and also by the shock of self-revelation that went with it. She felt mean, as well as miserable.
The noises about the house ceased gradually—there was no sound of footsteps overhead, yet she had heard Rivers go to his room and close the door. He was probably sitting brooding by the window in that chair she had sat in. He had omitted to put his drawing away,—presently she rose and tenderly put a sheet of tissue paper over it, as she had seen him do sometimes, when called away even for a moment. Then she sat down again. Her eyes fell on a Bradshaw on the mantelpiece; she thought of getting it and looking out a train to go home by to-morrow. She had no longer any thought of committing suicide, the idea of expiation of which she was now possessed did not admit of any selfish solution of that sort. But she had never yet been able to find out anything in Bradshaw for herself; she would have to ask Mr. Rivers.
That she must not do; on the contrary, she must never see him again! She must arrange to breakfast in her own room to-morrow, wait till he went out to his work, and leave Greta Bridge without even attempting to bid him good-bye!
The lamp began to gurgle, and she realised that the oil in it was getting so low that it would be out in a few minutes. She would be left alone in the dark! She was afraid of the dark like a child. The window was still wide open to the night, she could tell by the cool wind blowing in on her and chilling her through her thin blouse. Suppose, too, that the Spirit of the Greta, evolved in happier days by Rivers’ imagination,should suddenly appear, framed in the black square! She was indeed haunted by the vision of a face seen there during her recent interview with him; it had impressed itself somehow on her consciousness, though she was too much excited to take cognizance of it at the time, but now the impression returned to her with extraordinary vividness, as of a real person who had been there!
She started to her feet in terror, and made for the door.
She ran upstairs all in one breath, as it were, and then paused, by the door of his room, panting a little. She gently proceeded to run her fingers down its uncommunicable surface. Behind those boards was the man she loved, and who despised her.
But he had said he loved her, before he had found out that she was a liar. Nothing could take that away.
She crouched down by the door, forgetful of every consideration of prudence. She was a chidden child, that longed to sue childishly for pardon.
Yes, she was a liar, a criminal!
She had almost tamely accepted his view in the first instance, because it was his view, it was his contempt that had made her feel contemptible. But now her eyes—the eyes of her spirit—were opened, and she even exaggerated the heinousness of her crime, the blackness of her own soul, till she felt herself absolutely shrink from her own carefully cherished and pampered personality. She saw herself morally naked andunpicturesque. All her little ingeniously disposed veils of sophistry and plausibility she tore rudely away. She took a quite savage joy in shattering her own elaborate life-system of pose. The truth, she sadly, tragically perceived, was not in her—it never had been, and again she blamed her mother’s training,—and Truth was everything.
No sound came from the room within. Had she but known it, the artist had flung himself on the bed in his clothes as he was, and had fallen asleep, the heavy complete sleep of a man whose lungs have been breathing in the fresh outside air all day, under circumstances of intense creative excitement. Even now, Art came first.
The door of room number three, a few steps along the passage, opened and closed again. It was the room necessarily occupied by the unknown lodger. Mrs. Elles was too much absorbed either to hear or notice. Her thought, like the thought of a hypnotic subject, was concentrated on the yellow brass handle of the door against which she crouched, which mesmerized her, in its shining immutability. In about half an hour, she made an effort to shake off the lethargy which had taken possession of her, and walking away, like a somnambulist, her hand to her head, and stumbling over her gown, regained her own room.
She cried a great deal—and she slept a little. She would have died sooner than own it, but luckily for her newly developed sense of veracity, there was no one to question her on this point. About eight o’clock in the morning she rose and dressed, resolved to go downstairs to breakfast as usual. She found it practically impossible not to see Rivers again. If he wished to avoid her, he easily could do so.
So at the usual hour, she drifted into the little sitting-room, her face composed to a certain extent, but her eyelids swelled, and her cheeks bleached and seared by a sufficient percentage of the hours of the night devoted to weeping.
The man of her thoughts was sitting at the breakfast table, bending studiously over a Bradshaw. He hardly looked up, but he muttered something civil. Mrs. Elles was woman of the world enough to be able to murmur her conventional “Good morning” in return, for the benefit of Dorothy, who was in attendance, and who watched them both so intently as to justify Mrs. Elles’ peevish remark, “I do wish Dorothy would not stare so.”
“Does she? I have not noticed,” he replied, listlessly. “Would you mind pouring out the tea?”
This commonplace suggestion brought her back from the verge of hysterics, as it was perhaps intended to do.
“Oh, I forgot,” she exclaimed, taking her hands out of her lap, and becoming suddenly and inefficiently active. Rivers never got a worse cup of tea in his life, probably, than the one Mrs. Elles gave him that morning, and he took it without sugar, comment, or complaint.
They ate and drank in silence. Mrs. Elles could bear anything but that.
“Will you look out a train for me—a train home?” she asked, in tones as nearly devoid of all emotion as she could compass.
“I will, if you will tell me where you live!” he replied, with equal coldness.
“Newcastle,” she murmured, in a voice choked with incipient sobs.
He opened the Guide with cruelly assured hands. “There is a train at 12:45,” he said, looking up.
But the strain had been too much for her, she had flung down her napkin, and had risen from the table, and hurrying across the room to the sofa, had flung herself down there in a heap, with her face to the wall. He caught the white gleam of a pocket handkerchief, which alone told him she was weeping.
There was a silence. Rivers groaned—the nervous groan of a man who is too well bred to swear at a woman.
She tried to refrain from sobbing aloud. She lay quite still. Her eyes, half open in the dim penumbra of the sofa corner, saw only, as in a nightmare, its rough horse-hair surface, like a dreary hill, studded with briars of incommensurate proportions, and over which she somehow imagined herself climbing. Her ears, preposterously sharpened by her excitement, next heard the faint click of a teacup, hastily pushed aside. A panic fear overcame her, lest this should be the signal of his rising, and that the clash of the door closing behind him, as she had heard it last night, and remembered it, would be the next sound that would come to her ears. But as in some stages of the mesmeric trance, she was powerless to stop him; she would not be able to raise a finger even to save her life, and her life it would be that she would lose. He would go out of the room—out of her world for ever! She listened ... her ears were tingling ... it was positive pain....
He did rise—and she presently felt his hand on her shoulder, and heard strange, unexpected words of tenderness from his lips.
“Dear—I love you—but what can I do? You are another man’s wife.”
She turned her whole body round, and caught his arm to her, and hid her face on his sleeve.
“Yes, I know, but can you ever forgive me—for the lies I have told you? That is what I want to know.”
“I have said that I loved you,” he said, simply.“I can’t say more than that. Women are different, I suppose.”
She never remembered anything sadder than the sigh with which he said this. She realized that in order to exonerate the woman he said he cared for, and to condone her fault, he had been obliged to involve the whole of her sex in her disgrace, and to set all womankind a few degrees lower.
“What am I to do then?” she asked like a child, sitting up, and pushing the disordered hair off her brows without regard to order or becomingness.
“Obviously,” he said, and his tone was almost brutal, “go, unless you will let me? Only, as you have a home and a husband to go to——”
“You might have spared me that!” she said, with a flash of her old spirit, rising, and wandering deviously towards the door, like one in a sad and hopeless dream. “Of course I must go!” she said meekly, fumbling with the door handle. “Will you please open it? I have things to do ... give up my room ... pay my bill....”
“Have you—are you sure you have enough money?”
“No, I daresay not,” she answered with dreary inconsequence. “But it doesn’t matter!”
“What nonsense! Of course it matters. You must let me lend you some.”
She shuddered. “Oh, I couldn’t borrow of you.”
“Why not? You don’t know what you are saying, poor thing!”
At that word she began to cry.
“Look here——” His words were rough, but his voice was gentle. “For Heaven’s sake, don’t go and expose yourself—expose us”—for she had made a gesture expressive of entire disregard of all malign inferences with regard to herself—“to the whole household! It is bad enough already!”
He took her hand, and she ceased to weep, and looked up into the face of her supreme arbiter with a dull submission.
“You must take these three notes that I am going to give you,” he said authoritatively, “and go quietly up to your room and ring for the servant and ask for your bill and pay it—I can’t do all this for you, or I would—but I will order the trap to take you to the station in time for the 12:45!”
“Drive to the station with me,” she murmured.
“No, I must not do that, but I will tell you what I will do. As soon as you have made all your arrangements, we will take a little walk in the Park, shall we?”
He spoke like an ascetic, dealing himself out many penances, and but one indulgence. His tone throughout was businesslike and decided, he was no longer the quiet indifferent dreamer of dreams, but the efficient man of the world, the man of action; and the fanciful hysterical woman at his side was completely dominated by his decision, and stilled for the moment into something like acquiescence with her fate.
She carried out all his directions faithfully andaccurately, and in less than half an hour, joined him in the road outside the inn, veiled and spectacled, and demure as a nun about to take the vow!
“I have told them,” he said, “to bring the trap round to the Park Gates to meet you. So you will not need to go back to the inn at all. We have just half an hour.”
“But you are wasting your whole morning’s work,” she said as they turned in at the Park Gates. It was the first thing that occurred to her to say.
“Oh, just for once!” he replied. “My work will have no cause to complain of me—after to-day.”
She shuddered at the grimness of his accent—she apprehended his meaning only too well. She seemed to see him in her mind’s eye, as he would be henceforth, stooping, brooding, gloating over his work in the dell of Brignal, alone, as he was before she came there, and mildly, dully happy perhaps, as he may have been, before the Human Interest came to trouble him.
And yet—“He does not want to let me see how he feels it,” was the secret consolation that lay all the while at the back of her thought, explaining his brusqueness, his taciturnity, his hardness, which her surface mind could not help resenting and deprecating. Her soul’s life, which was then at its lowest ebb, lived on that thought, and her body took courage from it.
She walked into the Park almost briskly by his side, and when they had travelled a certain distancealong the broad path, he made a significant movement of his hand towards her spectacles.
“Can you take those things off?” he asked her, imperiously.
She obediently doffed the symbol of her martyrdom and return to the paths of virtue, and handed them to him. He folded the spectacles and put them in his coat pocket.
“The bill was only thirteen pounds,” she next remarked, holding out the notes he had lent her. “I had plenty of money of my own, so I return these.”
The notes, too, he put into his pocket without comment. Then she said reproachfully:—
“Don’t you want to know my name?”
He started. “Your name? That does not matter, does it?”
“But you surely must know my name to write to me by?”
“I am not going to write to you.”
“Why not?” There was a sharp note of prescient anguish in her voice.
“I am not good at writing letters.”
“Ah, no, it isn’t that,” she answered sadly. “You mean of course that you want to go quite out of my life.”
“What can I do?”
“Do!” she repeated after him vaguely. Then—“Must you?”
“Yes—I must.”
“But it isn’t possible,—no, it isn’t possible!” she cried.
“Quite possible,” he answered her doggedly. “I did not know you a month ago—I shall not know you a month hence, that’s all!”
She wailed out gently, like a child. “But what am I to do? What are you going to do?”
“I am going to do my work,” he answered her severely and coldly. “My work, that I have been letting go to the dogs lately. I shall paint and paint—like the very devil—as I did before you came. You must do that too. Work is the only thing, I find.”
“Work, work, honest work!” she repeated mechanically. “But will you tell me what work I have to do? It is all very well for you—you speak as if you quite looked forward to your life without me—but I shall eat my heart out.”
“Oh, people say that, but there is a certain savage pleasure in renunciation, as you will find.”
His tone was so extraordinarily bitter, that she cried out joyfully, “Oh, then you do care a little? You speak of renunciation! Then I can speak. I was afraid to. I was beginning to think—that you had only—oh, how difficult it is to say these things!—that you had only—proposed—to me, because I had compromised myself by staying here with you so long. Out of pity, you know!”
They had left the Broad Walk, and were wandering down a track in the undergrowth. He turned roundto her, and his voice was quite different from the one he had been hitherto using.
“You are quite wrong if you think that. On the contrary——” He stopped, and seemed embarrassed for the first time. “It was what I wanted—I said that I loved you—and I did. I do—only——”
“Then—then—if you can say that——” She seized his hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “Then let him—let my husband divorce me! I must say it! I can’t let myself drown without a word! Mortimer will have every excuse to divorce me, don’t you see? I have been living practically alone with you for a whole month! It looks bad enough—even old Mr. Popham saw it. I could not defend it—and I won’t! Mortimer will have to divorce me, and we will marry each other and be happy.... Why do you shake your head like that? No! But why not? You think my proposal dreadful! So it is, but I would do anything—anything in the world to come to you.”
“And so would I for you—you must not doubt that!” he replied, and his slow deliberate tones in no wise expressed the emotion that, for her comfort, she could see in his eyes. He gave her back her hands, as it were.
“Anything,”—he repeated gravely, “but a dishonourable thing! No, not even for you!... Look here! it is now half past eleven—you can only just do it! The trap will be there already! You shall leave me here.... Please—don’t make difficulties, my dear. It has to be. We have decided it, haven’t we? Good-bye ... good-bye!”
She did not cry. She stood still and leant her head against the trunk of a huge beech tree, and felt her hair catch in its rough bark, and half closed her eyes in anticipation of a parting that would be worse to bear than a blow. Would he kiss her? He must, and yet she would not ask him.
He did; he took her in his arms, and gratified her great love with a kiss more perfunctory than passionate, perhaps, and which yet awakened the woman’s heart in her body once and for all. Then he turned sharply on his heel and raised his hat—she smiled even in her misery at the irony of it, but she understood him now—and left her.
She dared not watch him go, lest she fall into the crime of calling him back to her. He might hate her for that. She looked up into the branches of the tree overhead, till a sudden rush of tears mercifully blinded her!
Ten minutes later, she made her way down the Broad Walk to the Gate, turning a foolish unintelligent stare on the porter who opened it for her as he had done for Rivers ten minutes before—she felt a wild desire to ask him how her lover had looked as he passed through. Still in a merciful dream she mounted the steps of the dog-cart that was waiting in the road for her, and was whirled away in the direction of Barnard Castle.
She was wrong in her supposition—Rivers had notleft the Park, but had turned down a little side path to the right. He stayed in the Park till he heard the sound of the wheels of the dog-cart going past the high boundary wall. Then he walked with his quick elastic step to the gate, and back to the “Heather Bell.”
“I wonder if I shall ever paint another decent picture?” was the purely technical remark that he made to himself. He was very pale, and he lifted his hat off, once or twice, and breathed deeply as the cold morning air met his forehead.
“A lady to see you, Mr. Rivers,” said Jane Anne to him, as he crossed the porch.
“Where?”
“She asked to be shown into your sitting-room, Sir,” answered Jane Anne, with great suavity of manner.
“You should not have done that!” the painter said wearily, and passed in.
The first thing that caught his eyes on entering the little parlour that he had shared with Mrs. Elles was her tear-stained handkerchief lying like a white blot on the black horsehair sofa, and her long tan-coloured gloves spread at length upon the table. If he had thought about it, he would have recollected that the gloves had not lain there when he left the room, or at any rate, were not in the same position. In the very middle of the room stood a tall commanding presence, the “Bombazine Mother”—as Mrs. Elles had insisted on calling her—the lady he had seen talking to Jane Anne in the garden last night!
One bony hand was firmly planted on the table in the neighbourhood of the gloves, the other flourished a letter in an aggressively judicial manner. The artist bowed, and waited for her to speak.
“I daresay you know my name, Sir!” she said.
“I have not the pleasure,” he answered, curtly. Her voice had a most painful effect on him.
“Poynder—Mrs. George Poynder—I am the aunt—by marriage—of the lady who has been living with you here for one calendar month! Don’t attempt to deny it, man——”
She spoke so preposterously fast that he had no opportunity of doing so. Pointing to Jane Anne, who had slunk into the room during her speech, she continued:
“This young lady will bear out what I have said, and the good people of the inn. There are plenty of Phœbe’s things about; for instance, that object on the sofa—you will hardly say it is yours, I presume? I saw besides, with my own eyes last night, an unparallelled scene of——”
Here the painter interrupted her by almost roaring out:
“Please to leave the room, Jane Anne!”
The girl, cowed, crept out. The painter continued:
“If this lady is your niece, Madam, you will hardly wish to discuss her reputation in public. Now, all I have to say to you is this, that this is the parlour of the inn, common to all, and the only available sitting-room.Your niece, Miss——,” he hesitated, he did not remember to have ever called Mrs. Elles by any name—“has been good enough to consent to share it with me during the time you name——”
“Nonsense! Now look here! it is no earthly use your beginning to tell me a pack of cock-and-bull stories like that!” struck in the old woman, and her overpowering emphasis actually silenced the man with the mere physical oppression of volume of sound and harsh quality of tone. The genius was no match for the virago.
“I have stayed here, in this very inn, from last night. I meant to see for myself—and I have seen! The Vicar’s wife—if there is such a thing as a vicar in this God-forgotten place!—who was scandalized by the goings on here, wrote to me and apprised me that Mrs. Elles—my niece—by marriage—perhaps you will have the brass to say that you did not know that she was a married lady?”
“I certainly did not know”—began the artist, almost mildly—for the sake of another woman, grown suddenly dearer to him than she had been, he thought to exercise diplomacy in dealing with the coarse virago who held that woman’s fate in her hands—but it was of no avail, since she interrupted him again, stridently, volubly, overwhelmingly, so that his forehead contracted, and he turned pale under the mere shock of the impact of the words she flung at him.
“Yes, my niece Phœbe ran away from her husband—my nephew—and came straight here to you, and hasbeen living here with you for a clear month under an assumed name. That looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? So bad that Mortimer—my nephew—will have no difficulty in getting his divorce?”
“Divorce!” muttered Rivers, taken by surprise, and foolishly allowing her to see the shock her words had given him.
“Yes indeed, divorce, what else would you have? He will be perfectly justified. The woman has always been a constant source of trouble and disgrace to him. She has never known how to behave herself, and God knows what might have happened, and I, for one, am rare and glad to be shot of the little baggage! And now——”
Mrs. Poynder was not without a certain kind of penetration, and seeing herself in imminent danger of being ordered out of the room, adroitly concluded to be beforehand with the man whom she had goaded into fury.
“And now, Sir, I will wish you a very good day!” she said, quite quietly, moving towards the door. “And since you are so very careful of Phœbe’s reputation—there isn’t much of it—but the landlady here tells me she was under the impression that you and she were courting. Well, perhaps now that you have ruined her, you will be gentleman enough to marry her. It is the very least you can do, when you have got her kicked out of her husband’s house!”
“And by God, I will, if it comes to that!” Riverssaid, with sudden and determined emphasis. He strode to the door.
“Now, Madam, have the goodness to leave my room.”
He held the door open for her as she passed out. He was white with rage.
“I am sure I thought I heard you say it was the common parlour?” the terrible woman remarked to him, over her shoulder.
. . . . . . . .
A moment later, he seized his hat and went out. Jane Anne was waiting for him in the passage, her comely face marred with tears. She caught his hand and held it.
“Oh, Mr. Rivers, do please forgive me! Mrs. Topham wrote the letter, she did indeed, and the other lady stayed here all night—and saw you——”
He shook her hand off his sleeve, and passed out into the road, without even looking at her.
Jane Anne looked at her hand—the hand he had disdained—as if she would like to cut it off. Her heavy brows contracted—met together in a dull frown of rage and disappointment.
“Then I’ll just swear anything they like!” she muttered to herself.