“Rosina!” He sprang to his feet, thundering. The image of Eleanor Wyndwood swept involuntarily before him, and he felt that this coarse-tongued woman had profaned it.
She flinched before the cry, but parodied it daringly.
“Matthew!”
He flung from the room. Billy prodded frantically after him.
“Don’t go, Matt! Don’t go! You’ll never come back again.”
The piteous appeal sounded like a prophecy. He paused in the hall, irresolute.
Rosina laughed hysterically. “You had better go with him, Billy, if you’re so frightened. And good riddance to the pair of you. I’ve got my bread and butter, thank God. My children sha’n’t starve, if their fatherdoesdesert them.”
“Let me go, Billy,” he said, hoarsely, shaking off the cripple’s clutch. “I can’t breathe here. Come with me—write to me—do what you like.” He opened the hall-door and closed it behind him, and dashed against his children coming back through the gate, with their mouths full of almond-rock. Clara caught at the skirts of his coat.
“Don’t go away again, father,” she mumbled, peevishly. “Mother cries for you in the night, and I can’t get to sleep.”
He swayed as if struck by a bullet. Then he took the little girl’s sticky hand, and suffered himself to be led back through the area door. As Clara unlatched it he heard her mother sobbing hysterically above. The servant’s foolish face peeped, white and scared, from the kitchen door, and made his own scarlet with shame.
“Your mistress is ill,” he muttered, and ran hastily up-stairs.
Rosina detected his footstep, and the sobs changed back to frenzied laughter. Then she controlled both by sheer pride, all the steel in her springing back unsnapped from its bend, and she opposed a mocking smile to his discomfited concern. The strength that had kept her silent for years was now summoned to undo the effects of speech.
“What have you forgotten?” she asked, tauntingly. “Have you come back for your good-bye kiss or your umbrella orwhat? Kisses, they’re off; we’re an old married couple now, but I don’t want to stick to your umbrella. It might be a present from somebody nice.Isthere an umbrella about, Billy? No? Dear me! Then it must be that rose. Ah, but Davie gave me that.” She called down the stairs. “Wasn’t it you that gave me the rose, Davie? Yes, and I’m not going to give it back. Don’t be afraid, dear. Mummy won’t give away her darling’s present. Did ’um bruise himself to give it to me? Poor Davie!”
There was a hectic flush on her cheek; her voice rang false. Matthew was afraid.
“Well, good-bye,” she jerked, after a pause. “What are you waiting for?”
“Don’t go away,” whispered Billy, nervously, shattered by the scenes of the afternoon. “Come to the study; she’ll cool down soon.”
The suggestion commended itself to Matthew. It seemed cowardly to leave this hysteric couple to themselves. He descended the kitchen stairs once more, and passed along the corridor that led to his old studio, now turned into a workroom for Billy, and fitted up with bookshelves, whose contents hid the whitewashed walls. A writing-table, littered with papers, occupied the centre of the floor, and piles of manuscript showed within a little angle cupboard, whose door swung open. There were several reproductions of his brother’s works roughly stuck on the wall—one a valuable engraving signed by the artist; and the “Triumph of Bacchus” was already represented in two shapes—once by the half-page cut out of “The Season’s Pictures,” and again by a full-page photograph of it from theGraphic.
“It’s a shame they don’t make you an A.R.A., Matt,” said Billy. “Your pictures get more advertisement for the Academy than almost anybody else’s.”
“For God’s sake, don’t talk of that now,” said the painter, brokenly. His eye noted curiously that ancient engraving of “The Angelus,” miraculously preserved to be one of Billy’s treasures, by the world’s refusal to give more than eighteenpence for it.
It was a poor representative of the original, but the other ornaments of the study seemed to him tawdry in comparison. His taste had changed: the picture attracted him now. Without analyzing—the turmoil of his mind did not permit that—he had an impression of sincerity, of sympathetic vision, of work done inevitably; not, like his own work, from cleverness. Despair of his life and his Art mingled in one dark paroxysm as he dropped upon a chair and laid his head upon the writing-table.
“Don’t, you may get your hair sticky,” said Billy. “I don’t think it’s quite dry—I was just pasting it in before you came.”
He withdrew the album from under his brother’s head—the pious compilation with which he fed at once his jealousy and his pride. “I suppose you saw that little sketch of your life in ‘Our Celebrities’ this month?”
Matthew did not answer.
“It’s not quite accurate, you know,” went on Billy. “It says you’re a bachelor, and that you were born in Canada, and so on. But that doesn’t matter. There are always mistakes, and, of course, nobody knows about Rosina. Listen! ‘The eldest child of a prosperous Canadian farmer, he gave early evidence of talent, and was sent to England to study art, and soon became the favorite pupil at Grainger’s well-known Art School in central London, where he studied under Tarmigan, a frigid artist who at one time enjoyed considerable repute. Later, Mr. Strang pursued his studies in Paris and Rome, and, returning to London with ripened art, sought and obtained the suffrages of the Academicians with his picture entitled “Motherhood,” since so familiar to the public in countless reproductions, and the herald of a career of uniform success. Next year his classic picture—’ ”
“My God! Do you want to drive me mad?” roared the sick lion, raising his head. “I know all about it.”
“You needn’t bully my head off,” said Billy, pettishly. “I asked you if you’d seen it.”
“It’s copied fromPeople of the Time,” groaned the painter. He clinched his fists in a blind rage against the universe. This was what the public read and believed about his life—his life,with its slow, sick struggles, its inner and outer discords, its poignant pathos. And this was what he read and believed about other men. Good God! What was behind their lives, the lives of his fellows, whose smooth histories he read in biographical summaries? The possibilities of the human tragedy frightened him. Then the realities of the human farce seized him, and he terrified Billy by a long peal of sardonic laughter.
The laughter ceased suddenly. “Go and see how she is,” he commanded the shuddering Billy, and the poor cripple, now less frightened of Rosina than of his brother, sped away as fast as his crutch could carry him.
Left alone, the painter looked abstractedly at “The Angelus,” and it drifted his thoughts back to the time when he had tried to sell it for bread. How happy were those times of youthful aspiration, when all things were new and all things were true, and hunger itself was but a sauce to eke out the scanty meal! What was starvation to this terrible hunger for happiness, what the want of money to this want of something to live for? Ah, money was nothing; money troubles were mental figments. It was the cark of life that killed—money or no money. Oh, to be young and free again; free to be a slave to Art! How hollow it all was—this fame, this running about, this Society that welcomed him, as he had truly told Billy, like a kind of monstrosity! He had been happier when he had toiled in this little whitewashed studio, even after his mistaken marriage. The lines of the poet in whom he had read most of late fell from his lips like an original personal cry:
“Oh, I could lie down like a tired child,And weep away this sordid life of care.”
“Oh, I could lie down like a tired child,And weep away this sordid life of care.”
“Oh, I could lie down like a tired child,And weep away this sordid life of care.”
And thus Billy found him, his head on the desk, his shoulders heaving convulsively.
“Matt!” he cried, timidly.
“Well!” in muffled accents.
“She’s gone to her room and locked herself in. She says you’re not to come near her any more ever.”
A long silence.
“But I dare say it’ll blow over, Matt. This is not the firsttime she’s been taken like that, though you’ve not been here to bear it.”
A longer silence.
Billy cudgelled his brain to rouse his brother.
“I saw Ruth Hailey a month ago,” he said at last. This time he succeeded in evoking an indifferent monosyllable.
“Yes?”
“Yes. She called here to see us—she was in London. She had got our address from Abner Preep before leaving America. I gave her the address of your studio, but she said she was uncertain whether she would have time to look you up. She seems to be secretary to Mrs. Verder, the Woman’s Rights woman, goes about with her everywhere. Linda Verder’s lectures—you remember them at the St. James’s Hall in July. She’s in Scotland now, and later on, Ruth writes to me (for I asked her to correspond with me a little) they’re going to Paris for a course, under the patronage of the American Embassy. They’ll stay in Paris some time, as Linda Verder wants a rest badly, and has a lot of American friends there. Then they go to Australia and New Zealand. Curious, isn’t it?”
“How did she look?”
“Ruth? Oh, she’s gone off a good deal, to my thinking. She must be getting pretty old now—about as old as you, which is young for a man, but old for a woman. But her eyes are fine, and there’s a sweetness—I can’t describe it. She says she used to teach Sunday-school in the States, and, though she enjoys travelling about, regrets having had to give up her class. Fancy! She used to be such a smart girl, too, and I should have thought the deacon had disgusted her with religion. You know she won’t have anything to do with him.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Oh, he’s just as spry as ever. His father’s curled up his toes, though. Old Hey had the old man from Digby to live with him, and they used to go at it hammer and tongs.”
Billy could extract no further answer. But he would not let his brother go that night, insisting he must sleep with him as usual in the spare bed in his bedroom.
About nine o’clock Rosina sent a specially nice supper fortwo down to the study. Matthew roused himself to eat a morsel to keep Billy company, and then, before going to his sleepless couch in Billy’s room, bethought himself of whiling away the time by answering some letters which had been bulking his inner coat-pocket for days. One of these was a reverential request for an autograph, addressed from a fine-sounding country house, and backed by the compulsive seduction of a stamped envelope.
His emotions were exhausted. He wrote apathetically, “Yours truly, Matthew Strang,” writing very near the top of the note-paper for fear of fraud, and cutting off the Camden Town heading.
The celebrity was at home for once.
Theold-fashioned yellow coach, top-heavy with pyramidal luggage, rattled along the Devonshire coast, striking its apex against over-arching boughs, and Matthew Strang sat on the box-seat, forgetting London in the prospect of Eleanor Wyndwood and in the view of white and red houses scattered like wild-flowers about a steep green hill overhanging the curve of a lovely bay.
For Rosina had continued obdurate and invisible; she had sent up breakfast from the kitchen without appearing, and with an irritating air of cooking for a gentleman-boarder, and he, fretful and anguished after a wretched wakeful night, had fled, snarling even at Billy, who would have stayed him further. The remembrance of her cantankerousness and of his own ill-humor had accompanied him all the way to Devonshire, but the sight of the sea—rolling vast and green and sun-dimpled—the wrinkled unaging sea, had calmed him. His burdens fell from him. The last vapors of London, the torpid miasma of the packed streets, the cabbage odors of Camden Town, were blown afar; he drew deep breaths of the delicious air.
How lucky it was Rosina had shied at the suggestion which he had thrown out on the reckless impulse of a desperate moment! How could they possibly live together any more? To draw the same atmosphere with her was stifling; and at the thought his deep inspirations took on a new voluptuousness of freedom regained. Decidedly he had not counted the cost when the quixotic proposal sprang to his lips. For that atmosphere meant death to his soul—nothing less; death to all his new stirrings and yearnings—asphyxiation to his Art. Ah! the good salt air, let it blow on his free forehead, let it play among his early-graying locks. Let it whisper the brave dreams of youth till the nimble blood tingles and the eyes are wet with tears. Let him feel the freshness of morning, though the sun is hastening westward, and the best of the day is spent. The coachman blows his horn, and the hills are filled with the echoes of romance. Away with the clogging mists and the moral fogs of the town, away with the moody vision of a narrow-souled virago in a gray house in a drab labyrinth, and ho! for the enchanted cliffs and waters, where loveliness broods like light over earth and sea, and a spirit that is half a woman and half the soul of all beauty waits with swelling bosom and kindling eyes. Oh, the bonny horses, the spanking quartette, how they sweep round the curves and dash down the dales, and how gallantly the ruddy-faced driver holds them in the hollow of his hand! What delightful villages, primitive as the rough stone of which they are built, what quaint old hostels and archaic streets steeped in the mingled scent of the sea and the moors! Here be old-world orchards, here be cosey cottages and sweet homely gardens, gay with nasturtiums and hollyhocks and scarlet-runners, with roses and pansies.
Ta-ra! Ta-ra-ra-ra! Ta-ra! The driver airily salutes the afternoon. Over the ferny walls of the Devonshire lanes, the outside passengers behold the red crags perching picturesquely on the sea-front like petrified monsters of an earlier era, and the trail of redder gold quivering across the great water; the wind rises and flecks the shimmering green as with a flock of skimming sea-birds. Oh, the beauty of the good round earth, the beauty forgotten and blotted out in the reeking back streets ofgreat cities! Oh, gracious privilege of the artist, to seize a moment of the flowing loveliness of all things; to pass it through the alembic of his soul, and give it back transfigured and immortal.
“To feel Beauty growing under one’s hand.” The words were Eleanor’s—they chimed celestially in his ears, not as words, but asherwords, stored up as in a phonograph with every dainty intonation, but with their music sweetened rather than deadened. All she had ever said to him he could recall as from a box of heavenly airs. Every syllable had the golden cadence of poesie. To love her was to be young again, fit for every high emprise, sensitive to every tremor of fantasy and romance.
“Stiff collar-work that, sir.”
The driver’s tongue was clattering tirelessly—of his horses, which, more sensible than men, wouldn’t touch a drop more than was good for them; of his life on the box from boyhood, his easy-going content, his pioneer daughter, the first in those parts to wear spectacles; his pleasure in seeing gentlefolk come down to circulate the money, his scorn of chapel-goers; but Matthew Strang’s private phonograph was performing with equal indefatigability, and his spirit leaped incessantly from one to the other, touched to a large geniality for horn-blowing humanity.
The sun was sinking royally in the sea, like a Viking in his burning vessel, when the coach obligingly drew up with a flourish of the horn and a scattering of chickens and a barking of dogs at the farm where Herbert had his headquarters. He was disappointed not to find Herbert there to receive him, as he had telegraphed his advent; but just as he was comfortably installed and was beginning to wonder whether he should start dining alone, that ever-young gentleman galloped up, flushed with health and sun and exercise, and, leaping from his horse, gave Matthew such hearty greeting that the painter had a grateful sense of being welcomed to an ancient seignorial home by a bluff and hospitable squire.
“I’ve been working at the portrait,” Herbert explained, ascending to his room with his hand affectionately on the shoulderof Matthew, who was thus forced to remount the stairs. “Of course I keep my painting kit at their place. And a jolly old place it is, with the sea cleaning the doorsteps, or pretty nearly. They’re beastly comfortable, with their London servants and carriages, and they’ve a motherly old person who seems a combination of cook and chaperon, and turns out delicious dishes, and they’ve taken on a native girl to help them—a sweet simple creature with cheeks like strawberries and cream. Do you remember the lady who said strawberries and cream needed only to be forbidden to be an ecstasy? Theseareforbidden. Oh, don’t look glum, I haven’t indulged. Forbidden fruit is out of season. I’m tired of it. It’s generally canned. And I have had too much of the foreign brands—ugh! I can see the litter of broken tins. I’m developing a healthy taste for the fresh-growing article, without any prohibitive tariff.”
Matthew turned to grasp his friend’s hand silently, as though sealing some compact. He felt it was Eleanor whose magnetism had uplifted Herbert to that reverence for womanhood he himself had always entertained. It was impossible to live under her spell and remain coarse. And, paradoxically enough, he was glad Herbert was living on a higher plane—it strengthened him in his own purely spiritual devotion to the beautiful friend of his soul. How stupid to have hesitated; how commonplace and ignoble to have gone to see Rosina for fear of Eleanor’s influence upon him. Like the old Roman, he had lost a day. And he had uselessly harrowed his soul to boot.
And yet, perhaps, not altogether uselessly, he reflected consolingly. The visit had laid the ghost of remorse; the full daylight had been turned upon the situation; he had seen beyond reach of further doubt that he was not to blame for it; that he was the victim of the blind tragedy of circumstance. True, the full daylight had also revealed that Rosina was taking the situation far more tragically than he had ever allowed himself to suspect; it was pitiful, but it could not be helped. His own mother had fared far worse, her living death had taught him resentful resignation to the workings of fate. No, Rosina must be put on one side. He had lost happiness; his Art at least must be saved.
Waiting for Herbert to change his clothes, he looked out of the ivy-wreathed, diamond-paned casement, and saw a lonely white wraith of a moon glimmering in the great spaces over the great lonely deep, and heard the moan of the waves under the wind’s lash, and watched the sunset dying in pale greens and pinks and saffrons; and so, in an exalted mood, went down to dinner.
It was getting towards nine o’clock when the cousins lit their cigars and strolled along the cliffs, their feet taking them westwards, where phosphorescent streaks of light green lingered in the sky, sending out thinner lucent shoots to join the eastern gray.
“I’ll show you the house—it’s not more than a mile,” Herbert volunteered.
“We can’t call to-night,” said Matthew.
“What! Not with a madcap like Olive? You don’t mind my calling her Olive, do you, old man?”
“No,” laughed Matthew.
“Well, then! If I may call her Olive, why mayn’t I call on her in the evening? But that’s an argument rather in Olive’s vein, though it appears to puzzle you—ha! ha! ha! But you mustn’t bring your London etiquette down here with you, my boy,” he went on in a harangue tempered by puffs—”you’d better send it back by the carrier to-morrow if you packed it in your luggage by mistake. We’re in another world, and in an earlier century. What a superficial view to think contemporaries live in the same century! These people—as yet unsophisticated by the tourist—are living in the seventeenth centuryA.D.at the latest; they’d burn Olive for a witch if they knew her as I do, the droll elf, with her masculine brain and her tricksy femininity. I think I’ve lived in every place and time under the sun. I’ve been with fourteenth-century brigands and sixth-century monks. And in Jerusalem with the Jews I was back in theB.C.ages. I really think all the centuries live side by side. There must have beenA.D.people in theB.C.times, just as there areB.C.people living inA.D.times. Fancy thinking these bucolics an evolutionary advance on Pericles and Horace. Evolution must move like those waves down below,sending scouts out here and there far in advance of the general march of the waters, whenever there’s a hollow curve in the coast. I’m a twenty-fifth century man myself, which makes the nineteenth call me godless and immoral. But what were we talking about?”
“Goodness knows. Oh, I know—”
“I’m aware you are goodness incarnate,” interpolated Herbert.
“I was saying we couldn’t call on Mrs. Wyndwood to-night.”
“Ah, but why shouldn’t Mrs. Wyndwood want a stroll after dinner as much as we? I told her of your wire. What more natural than that they should stroll eastward?” And Herbert smiled mysteriously, as one with experience. “I told you we made our own etiquette—laws are for the benefit of the community.Weare the community, we four, the only civilized beings in a loutish world. We began as a triumvirate, but your coming has changed the form of government. You are the fourth party. We are now—what shall I say?—a constitutional quartette.”
As Herbert rattled on, Matthew felt more and more the fascination of his gay cousin, whose white teeth flashed as facetiously as in the days of yore, and whose lissome figure was a continuous pleasure to the artistic eye. Gratitude mingled with his admiration; but for Herbert’s ingenuity he would never have been a citizen of the earthly paradise that was opening before him. The smoke of his cigar rose like incense on the solemn air, upon which the sound of the wind and the sea broke like a hush. Under foot were gorse and bracken, mixed with sparse sprouts of grass; overhead a rich yellow half-moon, partly hidden by scowling clouds, but throwing a band of pale gold, that changed with the deepening dusk to rippling silver, across the sombre bay, in whose distant cliffs the lights of vague scattered villages twinkled mysteriously, suggesting romantic windows of illumined hollow chambers in the steep rock. And presently white figures were seen advancing slowly to meet them, pausing each instant as if to drink in the beauty of the night.
“Ah, there they are!” cried Herbert.
“No, there are three of them,” said Matthew, in disappointed tones.
“That’s the maid, carrying a reserve of wraps, you duffer! Don’t throw away your cigar. There’s Olive herself with a cigarette, if my eyes do not deceive me.”
But Matthew Strang’s cigar went out ere the two parties—sauntering more slowly than before they had become unconscious of each other—were startled to find themselves face to face. His heart was beating furiously as if he were really startled by the apparition of a queenly figure and a lovely flushed face on the background of the night. A smile danced in the eyes and parted the red lips with an expression of more eager welcome than had ever been accorded him in town; and there was a more intimate pressure in the clasp of the warm hand, subtly heralding a new phase in their friendship, in this disappearance of the conventional stage properties of the fashionable human scene, in this isolation amid the primitiveness of nature, and of a humanity simpler than their own; while Miss Regan’s cigarette and her frank laugh and hand-shake indicated less subtly, but no less pleasantly, the commencement of a semi-Bohemian artistic period which loomed more agreeably to Matthew than any of the periods Herbert had boasted of living in.
“Welcome to the Creamery,” said Olive, “or rather to the Ice-Creamery, as we’ve had to call it lately.”
“Then why don’t you put on your wraps?” said Matthew, anxiously.
“Oh, it’s comparatively tropical to-night, and we had to give Primitiva a pretext for accompanying us. This is Primitiva (néeRose) the ex-post.” The pretty lass made a courtesy. “She was the post, you know, when we first came. She used to bring letters from the post-office, which is near you, and our first acquaintance with the post was to find it in tears because it had lost a letter of ours. She had dropped iten route.”
“Was it an important letter?” asked Matthew.
“That is very nearly a bull, Mr. Strang,” replied Olive. “However, as the letter was picked up by a coast-guard, I am able to tell you it wasn’t of the slightest importance—merely arequest from Mr. Harold Lavender to be allowed to dedicate his next book of poems to Nor. Still it might have been important; it might have contained a P.O.M.”
“Do you mean a poem or a post-office order?” laughed Mrs. Wyndwood, turning a flippant face towards Matthew’s, over which a cloud had come like that now entirely over the moon.
“Neither,” said Olive, gravely; “a P.O.M., a proposal of marriage. But wasn’t it odd to see the post crying? I fell in love with her at once. I saw that such a quaint creature would do more good to me than to Her Majesty’s service, and so, hey, presto! she was whisked from the post-office and changed into a tire-woman.”
“And, oh! what a refreshing contrast with the London servant,” added Mrs. Wyndwood. “Primitiva is really a servant, not a critic on the hearth.”
“Yes,” said Olive, “she believes that all London ladies smoke, and considers Nor eccentric for not indulging. And whatever I tell her is gospel; she thinks I’m like George Washington—invariably truthful.”
“Then she thinks you eccentric, too,” said Herbert, smiling back.
Olive’s eyes danced; her lips quivered trying to keep back the smile of response.
“Save your cynicism for town, sir,” she said. “Primitiva doesn’t think anything of the kind. The world is not a whited sepulchre to her. It is lucky I removed her from the sphere of your blighting influence.”
“Yes,” grumbled Herbert. “She’s our farmer’s daughter, Matt. And she might have hovered about our dinner-table.”
“I couldn’t leave Marguerite in the way of Faust,” said Olive, plumply.
Matthew Strang winced; Miss Regan’s plain speaking grated upon him, and he saw that Mrs. Wyndwood had lowered her eyes in like annoyance and had commenced to walk homewards. And he resented this preoccupation with Primitiva; he feared she was going to play the part of the dog, Roy. Herbert hummed an operatic bar or two and broke off laughing: “Iwish I had Faust’s voice. A lovely tenor voice was apparently among the profits of his bargain with the devil.”
Miss Regan laughed merrily. “Are you going back, Nor?” she called out.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “We must say good-night.”
“Oh, we must see you home,” protested Matthew, as he moved to her side.
“There’s really no need,” she returned. “We sha’n’t meet anybody.”
“But it’s so dark,” said Matthew, for the moon still dallied behind its cloud-rack, and threw only a faint wavering circle of light on the weird water, though the stars were now clear enough.
“Then, come along!” cried Olive, bounding forwards, from Herbert’s side, rather to his disgust. “Run straight home, Primitiva.” And, waving her cigarette-tip in the darkness, she disappeared in the earth like a red witch.
Herbert dashed after her down the cliff descent. The exhilaration of their spirits caught Eleanor. She was swallowed down abruptly. Matthew followed more cautiously, wondering. And then began a mad, unforgetable, breakneck, joyous scramble in the darkness down the steepest and craggiest of roughly worn paths, diversified by great sheer gaps without foothold for a goat, down which they had to drop. At first Matthew tried to steady and help himself by clutching at the vegetation and bushes through which the path broke, but it was all blackberry-bushes and prickly gorse, and his involuntary interjections were answered by peals of mocking laughter from the invisible pioneer below.
“How do you like seeing us home?” she called up.
But Matthew was rapt far beyond the sting of taunts and blackberry-bushes. Mrs. Wyndwood was only a few inches ahead of him; every moment she turned to cheer him on, and her face was close to his, and the divine darkness was filled with light and perfume. Twice or thrice in this topsy-turvy harum-scarum descent she gave him a helping hand, as one familiar with the ground, and he took it with no sense of unmanliness. “Be careful here,” she said once, “or the brambleswill scratch your face,” and she looked up adorably from her insecure perch below, holding the prickly net-work apart with her upper arm as he slid cautiously towards her, blissfully conscious that this sharing of common—if petty—peril was bringing them together beyond the reach of ceremonial coldness for evermore. Sometimes the gray sea showed below through the interstices on the left, and its dull boom mingled with the gentle swish of the wind and the gurgle of a little water-fall. The last twenty feet were the worst, and they were aggravated by the banter of the couple safely below. Herbert had never caught up with Olive, who had skeltered down like a wild-cat, leaving a trail of gay ejaculations; but Mrs. Wyndwood herself had to be helped in the precipitous windings of the base, with its tiny niches of crumbling stone at long intervals, and now in sweet revenge Matthew held her hand to steady her from above, while below Herbert waited with open arms for her final jump. An odd recollection of his climbing down the steeple in Economy flashed through his brain, as he himself half slipped, half leaped to the ground, hot and red and breathless; and gratitude for the miraculous metamorphosis in his fortunes added to the tenderness of his mood. How good it was to be alive—there in the brave night, moneyed and famous and still young, glowing with physical well-being—amid a joyous human company, with a delightful friend and cousin, and two brilliant and beautiful ladies, both members of that fashionable world which had once filled him with envious bitterness, and one of them a woman whose presence made everything magical. Rosina was very shadowy now.
They seemed in a great closed circle, walled by cliffs, with a roof fretted by stars. Two glooming pools made dark patches in the lighter soil, and they heard the stir of fish.
“A deserted stone quarry,” Olive explained.
“There are carp in the pools,” said Herbert.
“We live outside,” said Mrs. Wyndwood.
“It’s nearer over the cliff and more ladylike,” added Olive.
“It was hardly fair to Mr. Matthew Strang, though,” Eleanor remarked, smiling. “We’ve all learned the way in the daylight. When you see it in the morning, Mr. Strang, you’ll find it sometimeswithin a few inches of the sheer precipice, and if you had caught hold of the bushes to stay your fall you would have dropped them like a hornet’s nest. We ought to have warned him—in the dark, too.”
“If we had warned him he would have fallen,” laughed Olive, gayly. “Anybody could walk a four-inch plank over a precipice if he thought it was on the ground. Ignorance is salvation. But you will have to come in, Strangs, and brush yourselves before you go. What a nuisance your both having the same name. When I insult Mr. Herbert I shall excite the animosity of Mr. Matthew, and vice versa. I really think, Nor, we shall have to call them by their Christian names.”
“Only when they’re together,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, smiling.
“We must always stick together, Matt,” cried Herbert, with jocose enthusiasm. “Your hand, Matt.”
“We might call one the Painter,” began Mrs. Wyndwood, “and the other—”
“No, that’s ungrateful,” Olive remonstrated, “after the beautiful success Mr. Herbert has made of you.”
“I meant Mr. Herbert,” replied Eleanor, roguishly, and for once Olive had no retort ready.
“No, even taking the portrait into account, Matt’s the Painter,” said Herbert, placing his hand lovingly on the shoulder of his friend, who thrilled with a sense of his cousin’s large-heartedness. “Call me the Playwright.”
“You are both Painters,” Miss Regan persisted. “But the problem is solved—one is Mr. Herbert and the other Mr. Matthew.” She took Eleanor’s arm and led the way to the house.
“Since when are you a playwright, Mr. Herbert?” asked Matthew, as they fell a little into the rear.
“None ofyoursarcasm, you beggar. I’ve always been a playwright. Don’t you remember my doing a burlesque for the Academy students? I’m writing a comedy in the evenings—the lessee of the Folly is a friend of mine—I must make some money now—there’s that hundred pounds I owe you—and I know I’m not going to make it by painting.”
“But surely you will let me know if you want anything,”said Matthew, with genuine concern, for there seemed something immoral in the idea of Herbert feeling the pinch of need, to say nothing of his shock at finding that his cousin had run through all that money. Herbert had, indeed, several times hinted at his impecuniosity, but Matthew had never taken him seriously.
Herbert shook his head. “I know you’re a brick, old chap, but a hundred pounds is as much as I care to owe any one man.”
“But you don’t consider meanyone man.”
“Ah! it’s awfully good of you to remember that I did as much for you—comparatively speaking—in your tenpenny times, but still it isn’t quite agreeable to find one’s bread on the waters after many days. I never did like soaked bread, even in milk. The most I could do would be to let you settle up every week with Primitiva’s father. But it’s really halves, mind you, and when my comedy is produced, you’ll have to reckon with me. They like what I’ve written—the women—they think it’ll make a hit—I read them the night’s work after lunch the next day—of course, I always lunch with them after the morning’s sitting. Ah, here we are!”
They had emerged from the sheltered quarry and met the smack of the salt wind from the moaning sea-front. A lawn ran out to meet the pebbly beach, from which it was separated by a low stone wall; the ancient slate-roofed house stood out radiantly cheerful against the dusky background of the night and the cliffs. Primitiva was at the door looking out anxiously, and a man-servant shared her anxiety, or at least her vigil.
“How delightful!” exclaimed Matthew.
“Yes, weren’t we lucky?” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “It’s an old family residence. The owner kept it untenanted for thirty years, and has never consented to let it before.”
The ladies took off their things while the men brushed themselves in the hall, where, divided by a heavily carved barometer, a pair of faded oil-paintings hung—a gentleman in a wig and a lady in a coif. These reminded Miss Regan that Matthew must see how splendidly Herbert’s portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood had turned out after all. “The rogue!” she cried. “As soon ashe thought the sittings were to cease, the picture picked up wonderfully! And now he’s dilly-dallying with it again!”
So they wandered through the large rambling house with its old-fashioned belongings till they reached the room which Herbert had been allowed to use as a studio. Matthew saw with joy that Herbert had let the glorious face and figure be as he himself had painted them in that spurt of inspiration, and had confined his own attention to the minutiæ of the dress, which was nearly finished. Olive held a lamp to it, awaiting his praises. He had a moment of embarrassment.
“She is very beautiful,” he said, ambiguously, but rapturously. Then, turning to Herbert, he added, heartily, “If your comedy is only as good, old fellow—”
“It will be,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, enthusiastically. “Who should write comedy if not a man like Mr. Strang—I mean Mr. Herbert—a man who has seen the manners of men and cities? I should think he could do it even better than he can paint.”
“But he has one disadvantage,” said Olive, gloomily. “He is witty.”
Herbert stood bowing with his hand on his breast in mock acknowledgment. His boyish face looked flushed and handsome in the lamplight. Matthew had a spasm of despair—a momentary sense of being an outsider.
“Don’t practise your footlights bow here,” said Olive. “No one has called ‘author!’ ”
“ ‘Many are called, but few chosen,’ ” quoted Herbert.
“I wonder how I should come out underyourbrush?” said Eleanor, turning to Matthew. His black fit vanished; he was taken back again into the charmed circle. But the question remained awkward.
“Not more beautiful than this,” he murmured. “Perhaps you will give me the pleasure. I am here to paint—partly, that is.”
“Perhaps in town; not here. I want to be out and about. Olive, we must give them something before they go back through the cold night.”
Olive rang the bell and ordered refreshment. They adjourned to the drawing-room, a spacious apartment, with strange heavy antique furniture and curious bronzes and vases, theensemblemade more quaint by the irrelevant presence of a grandfather’s chair, with its high, stiff canvas back.
“I fished that up from the kitchen,” said Olive. “It’s jolly to sit there and imagine one’s self an old crone nodding to one’s last sleep.”
She seated herself upon it forthwith, nid-nodding, and against the white canvas her dark face shone, lovely and young and more provoking by the suggestive contrast.
Herbert stood over her, fidgeting, his fingers drumming nervously on the canvas awning.
She sprang up and threw back the lid of a mahogany instrument, and began to play a joyous melody.
Matthew had seated himself in an arm-chair near the window. Eleanor, her superb arms and neck bare, was opposite him, a wonderful white vision in the soft-toned light. He caught her eyes and they smiled at him, the friendly smile that means nothing and everything.
As Olive touched the keys, his breast grew tenderer; where had he heard those tinkling harmonies before? His dead childhood came back to him for a moment—it was a harpsichord, and the last person he had heard playing it was Ruth Hailey. A vision of her girlish figure flitted before him, then passed into the picture of the young woman with the sweet earnest eyes that Billy had conjured up, then faded into the sweeter vision of reality, as, through eyes still misty, he saw Eleanor’s bosom softly rising and falling with the melody, the joyous soul of which sparkled in her eager eyes. The tune grew merrier, madder. Herbert was at the player’s side now; he was talking to her as her long, white fingers darted among the keys. Suddenly the music jarred and stopped; Olive leaped up and ran to the window and threw it open, and a cold wind swept in, and the solemn sobbing of the waves.
“There it is,” she cried, “the great lonely blackness, roaring outside like a wild beast in its lonely agony. We shut it out with our walls, and hang them with pictures and plaques, but there it is all the same, and all our tapestries cannot quite deaden its wail. Don’t you hear it in the darkness, don’t you hear it crying out there—the pain of the world?”
Mrs. Wyndwood sprang up in alarm and closed the window.
“Olive, Olive, calm yourself,” she said, tenderly, pressing the girl’s face to her bosom.
Olive broke from her with a peal of laughter. “You look as if you had seen a ghost, Nor. Are you afraid of the black night that you shut it out? Are you out of tune with it already?”
“You exaggerate the pain of the world, dearest,” said Eleanor, soothingly.
Herbert looked startled. “The pain of the world?” he said. “The futility of the world, you mean. People eat and drink and go to theatres, and over their graves the parson prates of infinities and immortalities. Religion is too big for us. We’re like mice in a cathedral.”
“You are right.” Olive dropped wearily into the grandfather’s chair. “God said, ‘Let man be,’ andnascitur ridiculus mus.”
Eleanor’s eyes kindled. “We are small most times,” she said. “But there are moments when, as Wordsworth says:
“ ‘Through Love, through Hope, and Faith’s transcendent dower,We feel that we are greater than we know.’
“ ‘Through Love, through Hope, and Faith’s transcendent dower,We feel that we are greater than we know.’
“ ‘Through Love, through Hope, and Faith’s transcendent dower,We feel that we are greater than we know.’
I’m not afraid, Olive. There! I open the window again. Come and look—not at the black night, but up at the stars.”
Matthew’s soul melted in worship. He moved to her side and, refreshed by the cool sea air, lifted his eyes to the far-sprinkled vault where the moon had now suffused the dark clouds, which seemed to have grown light and porous. The two infinities of sky and sea brooded together in the night, ineffably solemn.
Olive would not budge. “The stars!” she shuddered. “Big, lonely worlds.”
Mrs. Wyndwood did not hear her. “Ah, there’s the Plough,” she said; “and there’s the Polar Star in a straight line, and there’s Cassiopeia. And that’s all I know. But, oh! surely they are havens of rest, where the tears are wiped from all faces.” Her voice faltered, her face was rapt as in prayer.
“Won’t you put something over your shoulders?” Matthew said, anxiously.
“No; it’s quite warm. Unless perhaps we take a turn up and down the beach before you go; shall we? It looks so divine out there.”
He was startled and intoxicated by the proposal.
“Won’t you come, too, Olive? It’s nearly ten o’clock. We must be sending them home to their farm, or Primitiva’s father will bar the door. Already we have a reputation for witchcraft because our house shines afar at eleven o’clock, a beacon of evil to all the neighboring hamlets. In London we should just be preparing to go out.”
“I am tired, Nor. You can have a turn, if you like. You go, too, Mr. Herbert.”
Herbert hesitated. “No, it wouldn’t be fair to leave you alone.”
“Does company prevent one from being alone?”
“I’vegotto have a turn in a moment, anyhow,” said Herbert, weakly. “Areturn, alas!”
“We’ll leave them to fight it out.” And Mrs. Wyndwood laid her hand a moment on Matthew’s shoulder, thrilling him. They went out under the stars. She had taken only a light, fleecy wrap, beneath which the white shoulders were half defined, half divined. They went across the lawn and through the gate, and crunching lightly over the little pebbles, walked towards where the surf bubbled white in the grayness. All was very still, save for the eternal monotone of the sea. There were a few yellow glimmers from the villages on the cliffs. Far to the east a light-house sent watery rays across the night. They stood without speaking, in a religious ecstasy, breathing in the salt air.
At last the delicious silence was broken by her more delicious voice.
“I am so glad you came,” she said, simply.
His breast swelled painfully.
“You are very good to me.”
“Oh, I mean your cousin will have company.”
“Is that all?” he said, audaciously.
“And then, he likes to be with Miss Regan.”
“Is that all?”
She smiled.
“You are too ambiguous. The plain truth is that your cousin prefers to talk to Miss Regan alone, and I didn’t care about appearing a marplot. You know the proverb.”
He was never shrewd. Harassed as he had been by his own affairs, Herbert’s admiration of Olive had never struck him as a serious passion. He conceived his cousin as a philandering person, a man of many flirtations. But now the suggestion that came from Eleanor’s lips seemed to throw a flood of light on everything, even on Herbert’s remark about forbidden fruit. For once Herbert was veritably in love. In his relief at the butterfly’s choice of a definite flower he forgot to resent Mrs. Wyndwood’s reason for giving himself her company.
“Are you sure it isn’t you he admires?” he asked, merely for the pleasure of her denial.
“Oh no! I’m an old, staid, prosaic, mature widow. My romance is over,” she sighed.
She never looked more spiritual than thus in the moonlight. But he could never bring himself to the conventional compliments. He asked, simply:
“And what about Miss Regan?”
“Ah! I should not tell you if I knew, and I don’t know. I don’t profess to understand Miss Regan. I never knew any one so easy to live with and so difficult to understand. But, as she doesn’t understand herself, I don’t feel humiliated. Of course she has always had men at her feet, and she has refused one of the most brilliantpartisin the kingdom. I was afraid she hated men, and I’m still uncertain. If she ever does marry I think it will be to spite her relatives, to make them lament she has thrown herself away. Did I tell you that she quarrelled with them all and came to live with me?”
“Yes, you told me. And you were unhappy then?”
She passed her hand across her eyes, but did not speak.
“You are not unhappy now?”
She smiled. “Are you fishing for compliments?”