CHAPTER VIITHE IDYL CONCLUDES

“ALL WAS VERY STILL SAVE FOR THE ETERNAL MONOTONE OF THE SEA”“ALL WAS VERY STILL SAVE FOR THE ETERNAL MONOTONE OF THE SEA”

“Indeed not. Only I am so sorry for you.” His voice trembled.

“Let us walk along,” she said.

He obeyed. “You are not angry with me for being sorry?” he faltered.

“No, sympathy is always sweet. Though I do not deserve it, some people will tell you.”

“What people?” he asked, fiercely.

“Olive’s people. They all say I saddened my husband’s last hours. He was brought home dead from the hunting-field, you know. He had been—but, no!de mortuis nil nisi bonum.”

“Tell me,” he said, softly.

She began to speak, then broke off. “No, why should I tell you?” she said, gently.

“Because—because—I want to be your friend.”

Her bosom heaved. She caught her breath.

“It was a vile sporting-house.” She shuddered. “He left me with an oath on his lips.”

Matthew Strang was at boiling-point. He ground the pebbles furiously under his foot. Oh, the infamy of Society! That this lily should have been handled roughly! It was sacrilege. And yet, in some subtle way, he felt her more human than before. She, too—painful as it was to realize it—had known the mire of life; she, too, this delicate flower of womanhood! though it had left her unsullied, ethereal still. Then she would understand what he had gone through, she would know how coarse and unlovely life could be. He felt strangely nearer to her heart at this moment; some icy partition had melted away.

She ceased walking, and put both hands over her face. The fleecy wrap quivered on her shoulders. He waited in silent reverence.

“Perhaps Iwasinconsiderate,” she said at last, lifting her face dimmed with tears, “not forbearing enough.”

“You angel!” he whispered.

“You’ll hear another story from his people. All—except Olive. They will tell you that—that I am a—” she smiled wistfully—”a flirt.”

He had no words hot enough. He kicked a stone savagely.“The vile slanderers!” he cried. “They are all tarred with the same brush. You’re lucky to be done with them.”

“There was young Gerard Brode staying in the house, a mere boy up from Oxford and bubbling over with Socialism. I was interested in his theories and we had long talks, and I tried to convert Douglas—that was my poor husband—and to persuade him that we ought to divide our property with everybody; but he met me with coarse ribaldry, and said he wasn’t going to divide his wife with any man, least of all a whipper-snapper like Gerard Brode, and feeble taunts like that, and that was the beginning of our dissensions.”

“Poor Mrs. Wyndwood!” he said, and felt it a sweet privilege to pity her. “And so you spent your fortune on the movement.”

She smiled sadly. “Scarcely my fortune. Poor Douglas never lived to inherit, and I wasn’t born with a gold spoon in my mouth, though it had a crest on it. But who has been telling you about my indiscretions?” She did not wait for an answer, adding: “But, there, you know all about me now,” and her pathetic smile had a dazzlingcamaraderie, though it flickered away as she wound up meditatively: “I wonder why I told you. Shall we go in?”

“Not yet,” he pleaded, hastily. “Oh, if you knew how proud I am of your confidences! That they should be made to me—to me! Oh, if you knew what my life has been!” He felt choking.

“You terrify me,” she returned, lightly. “Nothing very dreadful, I trust.”

“I am nothing, nobody.” He struggled with his voice. “I have slept in the streets. I have consorted with the vilest.”

“All the more honor to you that you are fine.”

“Oh, if I had met you before! You would have inspired me, uplifted me.”

“No higher than you are.”

“Ah, you don’t understand. I have been so poor.”

“Poverty is not a crime.”

“I have been in prison.”

“You were innocent!” Her face shone.

“It was only for debt. I was the victim of a bankruptcy, and I have paid it all off since. But the stain remains.”

“On the laws that put you there.”

He gulped down the great lump that made his throat dry and painful. “I was born in a poor Nova-Scotian village. No one cared for Art.”

She stooped down and plucked up a sea-pink. “See! how sturdily it grows among the stones!”

Now all the pent-up self-pity of the long, solitary years burst forth in a great torrent, breaking through the proud, passionate reserve that no living being had ever penetrated; his soul yielded up its secrets in a strange blend of pride, self-depreciation, and yearning for the woman’s sympathy.

“I have had to carry the hod, to climb the mast.”

“You climbed nearer heaven.”

“Ah, but I swabbed the deck.”

“You touched life at first hand. I have never envied you so much as now. We never get near its secret, we idle rich.”

“You glorify my past for me. I see it now as a divine education. I have been living for false ideals. Oh, if you could glorify my future!”

“I should be proud to inspire it!” The flash in her eyes passed to his.

“If I could see you every day, if I could tell you my hopes, my dreams. But what am I asking? It is impossible. You are the beautiful Mrs. Wyndwood, and I—”

“A genius, a Master! Towering over a humble slave!”

Her eyes, swimming in tears, but shining still, like stars through rain, sought his in humble adoration. Never had he pictured such a look from her. He shook, divining undreamed-of possibilities. For a moment he forgot everything. He caught her hot hand and held it to his lips. In that frenzy of divine fever, half fire, half tears, he felt again that love rationalized life. An infinity of thought and emotion was concentred in the instant; his long, sordid struggles, his craving for happiness, the infinite yearning with which as a boy in a lonely forest he had looked up at the stars. This was the secret of his yearning, this the flash that illumined life. And underlying and intertangledwith everything, an astonishment at the vast sweep of life, the possibilities it held. Last night Rosina and Camden Town; to-night Eleanor and the sea and the stars.

She drew her hand away gently, though there was no rebuke in the withdrawal, murmuring, “We must be going in,” and straightway the image of Rosina arose sinister and vindictive, her voice raucous and strained to a ghastly jocosity, crying, “Kisses, they’re off!” And then, as he moved silently towards the house, thrilling with the memory of her hand and her look, prisoned sobs still fluttering at his throat, he had a sudden paradoxical intuition that if he spoke of his wife, as he had been on the point of doing, something would go out of the magic of those touches and glances, all spiritual though they were. The figure of Rosina—sinister and vindictive—would stand between their souls, troubling their most transcendental moments. Was not a man’s wife the natural recipient of his confidences, the nurse of his Art? And then, if Eleanor knew that he was ashamed of his wife, that he had always passed as a bachelor, would she not deem him contemptible? The fine ethical sense that had refused to despise him for material degradations, would it not certainly scorn him for moral weaknesses? A great temptation took him not to imperil by indiscreet speech the footing he had won. But his soul had been moved to its depths. To be false—and with her!

“I have not told you all, Mrs. Wyndwood.”

“You can tell me nothing nobler.”

That was like an icy wind. He walked on storm-tossed. They came to a jutting crag, skirted it, and the house rose radiant in the hollow of the cliff. He had an aching vision of their living there together, she and he, with all the dear domesticities of wedded union. His fancy feigned them re-entering now their joint domain. The pretence left his heart sick and empty. They walked across the lawn. “You would not call me noble,” he said, coming to an abrupt stand-still, “if you knew that I—”

He flinched under the sceptical, confident smile she threw over her shoulder.

“That I am married.”

The half-mocking smile faded from the beautiful face, andwith it the color. She turned her head again towards the house, but she was not moving forward.

He was glad he had not to meet her eyes. The sea broke solemnly with a fused roar of irregular waves, and he wondered why the sound was so continuous. A cricket’s chirp in the cliff-bushes seemed to him extraordinarily loud. He looked up at the stars. Were the tears, indeed, wiped from all eyes in those shining islands, he thought, or were they only dead, lonely worlds? Or were they alive and full of unhappy people like the star he stood on?

She spoke at last, with a catch in her breath and a strained smile in her voice.

“Why should that make me think less of you?”

He caught only the celestial reassurance of her reply. How fine, how sympathetic she was! But he hastened to immolate himself. Her unexpected question had thrown him off the track; he forgot that hisconcealmentof his marriage was the only circumstance for which he had foreseen the world’s blame, and he answered, desperately,

“Because I married for money.”

“For money,” she repeated, in a toneless voice.

He was cold and sick with shame. Despite her experience of the coarser side of life, such a contingency was, he felt, quite beyond her comprehension. That money played no part in her consciousness he would have divined, even if her friend had not informed him of the fact in their first talk. An impulse had driven him to humble himself, a counter-instinct now spurred him to excuse himself.

“It was to pursue my art career,” he said, deprecatingly. Even now he would not speak of the younger children he had had to support.

She turned her head again, and the smile was struggling back, and her voice had an echo of the old enthusiastic ring.

“Then you married for Art, not for money!”

“Ah, do not comfort me! My God, how I am punished!”

She veered round now. Her tones were low and trembling with compassion.

“Is she a bad woman?”

“She is worse! She is a good woman. All her thoughts are on the household; it is unbearable. Never a thought of anything but the kitchen and cabbages.”

“Poor woman!” she said.

The prisoned sobs could hardly be choked back now.

“The world does not know. I have been ashamed of her. Now you see how low I am, you cannot respect me.”

Her voice was almost a whisper.

“I respect you the more for what you have done in despite of her. You have had a hard life.”

“Oh, have I not?” and a sob escaped at last.

“Compose yourself. We must go in.”

“You will be my friend all the same?”

“Yes, I will be your friend. Your confidences are safe in my keeping. There is my hand.”

He took it again and held it fast, feeling its warm response. “You make me so happy! Life will not be empty now.” He struggled with the lump in his throat. “With your friendship, what can I not achieve? You shall tell me what I am to strive for.”

“It is too great a responsibility. It was all very well to criticise. I sha’n’t know what to say.”

“You need say nothing. I shall look into your eyes and read it there.”

He looked into them now, and they were not lowered. They were full of sympathetic sweetness, glistening behind tears.

“I am afraid they are rather red,” she said, with a melancholy smile. “If I am not careful they may betray your confidences.”

She moved forward in the direction of the water, and he, turning on his heel, followed, wondering. By a salt pool near the rim of the billows she bent down and bathed her face. To see her half kneeling in the moonlight affected him like reading poetry; and as she washed off the traces of the tears he had made her shed, it seemed to him as if their spiritual friendship were being consecrated by some mystic baptism.

They went in. Olive had not moved from her indolent attitude in the grandfather’s chair. Herbert was standing at the window-curtain.

“I’m so glad you’ve come in,” she said, yawning. “Mr. Herbert has been sulking at having been left behind, and I have been snapping his head off for not leaving me to myself.”

“Yes; Miss Regan speaks the truth for once,” said Herbert, audaciously.

“Oh, I am glad Primitiva is not here to have her ideal shattered. Good-night—before you get ruder.”

“Good-night,” he responded, “before you get truthfuller.”

“Take care of him to-night, Mr. Matthew. He is irresponsible. Don’t go by the cliff route.”

“Not I. Good-night, Miss Regan. Good-night, Mrs. Wyndwood.” And that dear secret pressure thrilled his palm again.

In a few moments the two cousins were marching with measured step along the winding road. Herbert had lit a cigar, but Matthew was busy enough chewing the cud of his memories.

“Olive was rather strange to-night,” said Herbert, breaking the silence of the cliff-tops.

“Not more than usual, surely?” answered Matthew.

“That’s your conventionality and your ignorance of women. I never found her strange except to-night with her nonsense about the pain of the world.”

“She’s talked to me like that before several times; she thinks people with souls can’t be happy. I suppose it’s Mrs. Wyndwood’s influence over her natural flippancy.”

“Ah, perhaps so. But why so formal, Matt? You have my permission to call her Eleanor.”

“Thank you,” said Matthew, with a forced smile.

“I hope you enjoyed yourtête-à-têtemore than I did. Not that there isn’t a certain fascination in sparring. But perhaps you fought, too.”

He returned a staccato “No.”

After a silence accentuated by the tramp, tramp of their automatic feet as they swung along, he said: “I told her I was married.”

Herbert gave a long whistle. “The devil you did! And you don’t call that fighting? What a knock-down blow!”

“What do you mean?” Matthew murmured.

“D’ you mean to say you don’t know the woman is in love with you?”

Matthew’s blood made delicious riot in his veins. He saw that strange look of worship in her eyes again.

“Nonsense!” he jerked, thickly. “The Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood in love with me!”

“I didn’t say the Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood. I said the woman. Trust me. Behind all the titles and the purple and the fine linen—there’s flesh and blood.”

“It is impossible. In love withme!”

“You may well be astonished, you duffer. To fix her affections on you with me in the neighborhood! But women were always strange. And men were deceivers ever.”

“All the more reason I shouldn’t deceive her. How glad I am I told her the truth. I breathe easier, there’s a weight off my mind.”

“You selfish beggar! And now it’s all over between you, I suppose, and our nice little constitutional quartette is broken up. And I thought it was going to be so jolly when you came down. Heigho!”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Matthew, with a touch of bitterness. “Eleanor—Mrs. Wyndwood and I are going to be better friends than ever—thank God!”

“Thank whom? Don’t be blasphemous.”

“Thank God,” repeated Matthew, firmly.

“Oh, well, you were always a Methodist parson. But if I were a Jew, I wouldn’t say grace over pork. Not a bad epigram that; I must get it into my comedy.”

Matthew shuddered. Herbert’s tone was desecrating. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t plume yourself on your superior intelligence, old man. Mine’s quite equal to the study of Plato. It isn’t such Greek to me as you imagine.”

“Well, whatever you think, you are quite wrong,” he replied, with spirit. “Our friendship is on a different plane. It is based on our common interest in Art—and Mrs. Wyndwood’s not the sort of woman you’ve had experience of.”

“Well, that’s cool! How do you know what sort of womenI’ve had experience of? Besides, a woman is a woman. The world—our world, that is—is full of Greek scholars who study Plato. Strictly under the rose. Society is only an incarnate wink.”

“I should put that into the comedy,” sneered Matthew.

“It’s a quotation from it,” laughed Herbert. “Had you there, my boy.”

It nearly came to a quarrel. But Herbert good-naturedly said he must save Matthew from himself, and he fervently hoped his cousin would not confide in any more women. “You can’t syndicate a secret,” he said, sternly.

At the house they had left, things were equally disturbed. Mrs. Wyndwood retired at once to bed, throwing herself upon it in her clothes; and her delicate white shoulders, which, like her emotions, had no need to be covered up now, rose and fell spasmodically. After a while she got up, bathed her eyes again, in fresh water this time, and went into Olive’s room. Miss Regan was brushing her dusky tresses savagely. She had sent her maid to bed.

“Nice hours,” she growled.

“You’ll catch cold, dear,” Eleanor replied, gently, for a window was wide open at the bottom.

“Nonsense, Nor,” said Olive, petulantly. “I should like to sleep on the beach.”

“What, in this costume?”

“One bathes in less. Still, while you’re here—”

She closed the window with a bang.

“Olive! You make my heart jump.”

“Really? I’m not a man.”

Mrs. Wyndwood colored painfully, then looked at her with brimming eyes of reproach. “And this is my reward for leaving youtête-à-tête.”

“Leavingme tête-à-tête. I thought that was a by-product.”

Mrs. Wyndwood controlled her vexation. “I said just now I had never known any one so easy to live with. Don’t make me change my opinion, dear.”

“So you’ve been discussing me with Matthew! And what right have you to discuss me with anybody? Oh, how hatefuleverybody is! I know what it is. You’d like to see me brought down to your level.”

“Good-night, Miss Regan. You will apologize in the morning.”

“Don’t glare. The level of womanhood, if you like. You’ve loved a man.”

Eleanor’s face flushed. “That is the height of womanhood, Olive.”

“Oh yes—fine phrases! The height of womanhood!” She drew a comb fiercely through her hair. “To hang on a man’s lips, to feel a foolish sense of blankness when he isn’t there, and a great wave of joyful pain when he heaves in sight again. To kiss his every little note! To think of him and your trivial self as the centre of the universe, and to want the planets to spin for your joint happiness—oh!” She pulled the comb viciously through a knot.

“You describe it very accurately, Olive,” said her friend, maliciously.

“I’m quoting the novels. This passion that they crack up so much seems nothing more than selfishness at compound interest.”

“Selfishness! When you yourself say it makes you yearn for the other person’s happiness.”

“So that it may subserve yours.”

“You are a cynic.”

“What is a cynic? An accurate observer of life. Oh, you needn’t smile. I know I’m quoting, but one can’t put quotation marks into one’s conversation. You can’t face the facts of life, Nor. You like dull people without insight.”

“I like you.”

“That’s too cheap. You like socialists and spiritualists and poets and painters—the whole spawn of idealists. Bah! They ought to have a month’s experience of a hospital.”

“The world isn’t a hospital ward, Olive. The people I like have the truer insight.”

“What insight has your Matthew Strang?”

“He is as much yours as mine.”

“Don’t shuffle out of the question.”

“His insight expresses itself through his work. He doesn’t talk.”

“Is that a hit at his cousin?” queried Olive, savagely. “If so, it falls remarkably flat, considering Herbert Strang paints as well as talks.”

“Olive, why will you put words into my mouth? You know how much I admire Herbert Strang.”

“Ah, then you have more insight than I gave you credit for. You may even understand that a cynic is only a disappointed idealist, a saint plus insight. His soul is a palace of truth; society and its shams come to the test, yield up their implicit falseness, and are scornfully rejected. The stroke of wit is made with the sword of judgment. Its shaft is the lightning of righteous indignation.”

Mrs. Wyndwood felt this might pass well enough for an analysis of Olive’s own cynicism, but she had her doubts as to its applicability to Herbert’s.

Olive puzzled her frequently, and shocked her not seldom, but she felt instinctively that hers were the aberrations of a noble nature, while the cynicisms of Herbert jarred upon her without such reassurance of sweet bells jangled. Not that she doubted but that he, too, was much more idealistic than he made himself out—did he not write charming comedy love-scenes? Still he was a man who had seen the world, not a crude girl like Olive, and in the face of Olive’s affectionate analysis of Herbert—which she rightly divined owed less to reason than to the growing love for him which she had long suspected in her turbulent friend—Eleanor felt vaguely that while jarring notes may be struck from the soundest keyboard, they may also be the index of an instrument hopelessly out of tune. Of course Herbert was not that, she was sure; he lacked Matthew’s idealism and manly beauty, but he was handsome, too, in his daintier way, and charming and gifted, and probably the very husband to put an end to Olive’s psychical growing-pains. All this mixture of acute and feeble insight occupied Eleanor’s consciousness.

But all she said was, “Is that Emerson?”

“No, it’s me. Now go to bed and sleep on it.”

“I sha’n’t. I couldn’t sleep on anything so hard. Dear me, what a lot of hair-pins you have! What nice ones! I must borrow some.”

“Take them all and go.”

“Not yet.”

“I shall blow out the candles,” snapped Olive.

“I love talking in the dark. I’m pining for feminine conversation to soothe my overwrought nerves. How pretty that lace is!” Eleanor touched her friend’s shoulder cajolingly. “What exquisite things you have! Everything—from hair-pins to carving-knives—perfect after its kind, like the animals that went into the ark. It will be difficult to give you a wedding present.”

Olive laughed, despite herself.

“The only wedding present a woman wants is a husband.”

“You have had plenty of those presents offered you, dear.”

Olive shuddered violently. “Imagine existence with a Guardsman or—worse!—with that doddering young Duke! Dulness without idealism. Your Matthew Strang is endurable—he has at least the family idealism, the Strang goodness, though he carries it so much more heavily than his cousin. But a lifetime with a dull man—who wouldn’t understand a joke—who would smile and smile and be a hypocrite! Oh, ye gods! I should shriek! In a year I should be in a lunatic asylum, or the Divorce Court. Oh, why do you women who have been through the mill egg us girls on? Is it the same instinct that makes an ex-fag send his boy to Eton? Or do you think it improves our health? I know you think me hysterical.”

Mrs. Wyndwood flushed.

“Your tongue runs away with you, Olive. You’d do better to say your prayers. I’ll leave you to them.”

Olive laughed hilariously. “Aha! I thought that would get you to go. You always will forget that I’ve been in a hospital. Say my prayers, eh? Let me see, what shall I say? The one I used to say in the hospital, ‘O Lord, I beseech Thee, let not this be counted unto me for righteousness, for Thou knowest, O Lord, that I can’t help it.’ But that’s not applicable now. Suppose I say just what’s in my heart, as the theologians recommend.” She went down on her knees and said solemnly: “OLord, don’t you think you are sometimes a little hard upon us? Don’t you think we are born into a very confusing world? It would be so easy to do Thy will, to make Thy will our will, if we only knew what it was. Don’t you think that half our life that might be devoted to Thy service is wasted because of the mist through which we grope, bearing the offering of our life in quest of we know not what Divine altar, and blurring the road more thickly with our tears?” She sprang up. “How’s that for an addition to the Liturgy, Nor?”

“I am disgusted,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, sternly. “Both blasphemousandungrammatical.”

Olive threw herself back on the bed, laughing unrestrainedly: “You delightful, stupid old thing. Ha! ha! ha! Blasphemousandungrammatical! You Dissenting Hellenist! Sacrilege and Syntax! Ha! ha! ha! No, you sha’n’t escape. You must abide the question. Tell me, O friend of my soul, why do women who have been unhappily married want to see other women victimized equally, like people who have been fooled in a penny show and come out laughing to beguile the other people?”

“That’s not a fair analogy,” said Eleanor, more gently.

Olive looked up archly, her arms under her head.

“No, perhaps not in your case. I dare say you’re quite capable of marrying again, yourself. The triumph of hope over experience. Quotation marks, please. You’re looking awfully handsome, Nor, and that saucy tilt of your nose spoils you for a saint. Speaking as an ex-sculptress, it’s like a blunt pencil.” She sprang up remorsefully: “Oh, I’m a beast. I apologize to your nose. I forgot the tip was a sore point.”

Mrs. Wyndwood drew back in sorrowful hauteur. “I shall never marry again, Olive,” she said, solemnly. There was an under-tone of self-pity, and her eyes were moist. She turned hastily and walked from the room with a firm, stately step.

Olive watched the sweep of the gown till it reached the door. Then she gave chase and renewed her apologies, and let Eleanor sob out sweet reconciliation on her shoulder.

After which she opened the window, sat on the side of the bed, and screwed up her ripe red lips to produce a perplexed whistle.

Theyfleeted the days delightfully, as men did in the golden world. They rode together on the rolling moors, they drove through the Devonshire lanes, they strolled through combe and copse, they climbed the tors, they fished the leys, they swam in the sea, and when it was cloudy and cold, and the wind wailed about the house like a woman in pain, they listened to the comedy which Herbert wrote in those dreary days when the ladies drove off to distant houses for lunch or tennis or croquet. For they had not quite hidden their retreat or detached themselves from their kind.

“There’s always scandal within a four-mile radius,” as Miss Regan put it. “Is there on earth a greater piece of philanthropy than to give your neighbors food for gossip? Man cannot live by bread alone.” Matthew asked her in concern if his and Herbert’s visits were causing any talk.

“My dear Mr. Matthew,” she replied, scornfully, “even an actress cannot escape scandal, especially if she goes into society. And truly society is so corrupt, I have often wondered that actresses’ mothers allow them to go into it!”

During one of these absences of the feminine element, when Herbert went over to the house to put the last touches to the painted costume, grumbling at the boredom of such finicking work, Matthew gladly relieved him of the brush, and worked up the whole portrait, while Herbert lay smoking and thinking out the comedy.

Partly out of bravado, partly to enjoy the series of lovely views of dark-green sea and broken crags and nestling villages, the cousins invariably arrived by the cliff-path, seeing the blackberriesget riper every day. Sometimes they found the ladies sitting reading on the top of the cliff, which was furzy, with a road-side border of hemlock and dandelions and blue orchids, amid which their dainty parasols showed from afar like gigantic tropical flowers. Then while Matthew drowsed in the light of the sun and of Eleanor, inhaling the odors of bracken and thyme, lazily watching the white surf break far below, the brown trawlers glide across the horizon, the swallows swarm on the beach, and the wild ducks over the sea, Herbert and Olive would rattle away by the hour, often in verbal duels. Matthew Strang thought he had never tasted such pure intellectual joy. Art was often on the tapis; they classified the skies—to-day a Constable, and yesterday a Turner, and to-morrow a Corot. Herbert expounded glibly to the rapt Eleanor the Continental ideas, descanting on Manet and Monet. Nature lay all around them like a model to illustrate these theories, and Eleanor discovered all sorts of shadows and subtle effects she had never noticed before, all with the naïve joy of a child lighting on pretty treasures. She cried out that Art taught people to see Nature. And the Impressionists were right. Look over there! You couldn’t tell whether it was a pool or a pile of fish. And the colors of things changed incessantly! Matthew would sometimes put in a word when appealed to by her, but never when the subject was music, concerning which he was as ignorant as the rest of the party was learned. Once Herbert maintained that the musician was better off than the painter, because his work remained, while pictures perished, destroyed by the aniline and bitumen in their own colors. “Even Mona Lisa’s smile will fade,” he said. “The artist lingers a little longer on the stage than the actor. Pictures are but paltry things at best, and few artists have brains or any large outlook upon life. They’re a petty, quarrelsome clan.” Matthew did not deny it.

Olive cited sculpture as a more durable art than the musician’s, which only lived when performed. Mrs. Wyndwood was convinced that the joy of Art must be to the artist; she said she was fast acquiring a keen interest in the subjective side of Art, and feeling a growing desire to be an artist herself.The Spiritual was all very well, but it needed to be expressed through the Beautiful.

Olive playfully suggested an expedition to the Latin Quarter; Mrs. Wyndwood accepted it seriously and eagerly; she returned to the idea again and again, both in public and in private. Why should they not go to Paris for the winter, and Olive take up sculpture again, and initiate her into the divine mysteries? To judge by the Strangs, artists must be delightful creatures to live among, and sculpture seemed easier and simpler than painting. Olive continued to play with the project. Herbert sneered at the idea of Miss Regan’s return to the plaster of Paris. Literature was, after all, the only art, he said. It contained everything—music of words, painting of scenery, passion of drama. He almost converted Mrs. Wyndwood. She quoted ecstatically, “L’univers a été fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.” But a word from Matthew restored the balance.

They talked of life, too, of fate, free-will, and knowledge absolute, like Milton’s archangels. Herbert, as Lucifer, steadfastly took the lowest views of human nature; now and then Olive’s eye, twinkling with fun, met his as if in a secret understanding that Mrs. Wyndwood must be shocked at all hazards. He fought for the doctrine that sin was a human invention. “Let people have their fling. They exaggerate their powers of sinning. They think they can draw on a boundless internal reservoir of wickedness. As a matter of fact, their powers are singularly limited. They have too much original goodness. For my part, alas! I have found few opportunities of sinning.”

“And have you never found opportunities for remorse?” Mrs. Wyndwood asked, scathingly.

“Alas! often, I tell you. Remorse for the sins I couldn’t do. The remorse of your religious person is too often like the snivelling repentance of the condemned criminal. That murderer felt a truer remorse who was unexpectedly reprieved after indulging in an indigestible breakfast.”

Olive laughed heartily. “That must go into the comedy.”

It had become their stock phrase. Then remembering her part in the comedy was to score off Herbert, she capped his anecdote of the condemned criminal by another about thepoliteness of a Frenchman, who, ascending the scaffold, said to his neighbor in the tumbril, “Après vous.”

Eleanor raised the talk to a more elevated plane, insisting on the value of remorse, and of suffering generally. “I would not recall one of my sufferings,” said she, with her simple earnestness. “If I didn’t suffer I shouldn’t think I had grown.” And her eyes instinctively sought Matthew’s, and he thought she was reminding him of the educative efficacy of his own sufferings as well, and again Herbert’s philosophy jarred.

And whatever she was saying or doing she always fell naturally into some attitude that enchanted his eye by its unaffected grace; always wore an expression whose sweetness and candor softened him in worship. Her beauty—to a painter’s soul the miracle of miracles—she wore with a royal unconsciousness; he could not understand it. She was so simple, just like a human being. He saw her, not in her society drapings, but in all moods and weathers, and she bore the test. On fishing days they would draw up the boat in the centre of the nearest ley, where perch and “rudd” abounded, the former avid of the gentles, the latter only less eager for the paste, but demanding an iota of skill when hooked. Olive would take no hand in this mild sport; she had given up hunting and fishing, she said, when she rose in the ethical scale. Challenged as to her readiness to eat meat and fish, she failed to see the relevancy of the criticism. The reason she wouldn’t kill other creatures was not that it gave them pain, but that it gave her pain; to eat them, on the contrary, gave her pleasure. Mrs. Wyndwood, however, though not callous enough to impale her own worms, was persuaded by Matthew to take a rod, and beguiled numbers of perch, and admitted to a thrill of savage joy each time she hauled up a leaping flash of silver. She was glad, though, she said, that the poor little fishes had horny membranes for gills, so that the hook should not hurt them; when it passed through the eye, she trusted that the cornea was insensitive, too.

“But how would you feel,” Olive once remonstrated, “if, sitting at dinner, just after swallowing a mouthful of mayonnaise, and in the middle of a remark to your neighbor about the Rhine or the Pre-Raphaelites, you were suddenly to find yourself risingtowards the ceiling, at the end of a rope fixed by a hook to your upper lip, and arriving slowly but surely, despite your kicking and writhing, into a stratum of air totally devoid of oxygen?”

Herbert Strang thought one would feel like a fish out of water, but Matthew Strang eluded the point by drawing a pike across the track. The bait of a captured roach had fetched the monster, whose struggles interested even Olive, while Eleanor was wrought up to a wild enthusiasm for Matthew’s prowess, and regretted that in Scotland she had always refused to go to see the grouse-shooting.

“I hear they are doing badly this year,” Olive observed.

“Oh no, Olive,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “Didn’t we hear at the Archdeacon’s yesterday that they were making excellent bags?”

“I meant the birds,” said Olive, dryly.

“Bother the birds! I should love to be a sportsman,” cried Eleanor, exultantly landing her eleventh perch. They trooped like children to the dinner-bell. “I can see how fascinating it must be. To actuallyfeelthe struggle for existence; it brings you back to the primitive. You touch reality; you remember you’re an animal.”

“Lunch always reminds me sufficiently of that,” said Olive.

“No,” Eleanor argued. “The napery and the flowers come between us and the facts. How glorious it would be to be primitive!” Between Art and Sport—with that charming impressionability of hers—she had drifted as far from the spiritualities of Dolkovitch as, under the Russian’s influence, from the Socialism of Gerard Brode.

Herbert, whose skill with the rod was not remarkable, diverged into an account of his stay in a Servian fishing-village which was entirely primitive, “so primitive,” he said, laughing, “that the wives do most of the work.” He sketched the place with admirable literary touches. “Sheepskin is their only wear,” he wound up. “In the winter they wear the wool outside. In the summer they take off their skins and—no, not sit in their bones, as Miss Regan is about to remark—but wear the wool inside.”

Matthew was thus led on to relate juvenile sporting experiences on the shores of the Bay of Fundy, and finally his one encounter with a bear in the Cobequid forest, which put the seal on Mrs. Wyndwood’s new-born ardor for sport. This tame picking-up of perch palled; they must go mackerel-fishing, she insisted. And so Matthew Strang arranged with a fisherman to go out to sea in his boat next day. But the sea ran high, and to the undisguised relief of Herbert, who felt himself rather cut out by his cousin in these unliterary expeditions, Primitiva arrived the first thing in the morning with a note from Mrs. Wyndwood, saying she had forgotten the lawn-meet at Colonel Chesham’s to inaugurate the season of the local pack, and she would ride over to that in the hope of catching sight of a bit of the hunt. There was a postscript from Olive, saying: “And, of course, I must go to chaperon her among all those men.” Nevertheless, they went out in the boat late that same afternoon, when the ocean was calm again and quivering in the sun. Their course lay along a track of diamonds which seemed to dance off the water like a million elves of light. By the time they returned, the path of diamonds had changed to one of red gold. Delicious was the ripping sound of the living boat tearing the water, as it dipped gently from side to side, its white sail bellying gracefully. The sunset was strange: one dull red narrow bar crowned by a ball of molten gold radiating four hazy spokes like mill-sails. The ball gradually sank in the sea. In the south the white sickle of the moon grew yellower and yellower; in the east fleecy strips of cloud reflected the dying day. The colors of the cliffs still stood out vivid. The moment was poetic; the air was charged with amorous electricity. The talk drifted into love and marriage.

They played with the subject, skimming it gracefully, touching it with subtle lights, flashed and withdrawn, shooting out audacities with ingenuous impersonality, all four the while tingling with self-consciousness from crown to sole.

Herbert said that to a woman love is a complete romance, to a man a collection of short stories. Olive maintained that the reverse was true. “Oh, if man knew woman!” she cried. “And you who pretend to write comedies!”

Mrs. Wyndwood admitted that Byron was right about love being all in all to a woman. “Nine-tenths of unmarried women,” she said, looking at Herbert, “have never had a proposal.”

“Nine-tenths of married women more likely,” Olive flashed back.

In Matthew’s opinion marriage was a failure. Mrs. Wyndwood sadly acquiesced. They sought the remedy.

“Marriage may be a failure, but not friendship,” Olive pronounced.

Now it was Matthew’s eyes that Eleanor’s sought, and his involuntarily met hers. There was exaltation in this secret glance, and mutual reassurance.

“Unless,” pursued Olive, “the friendship is contracted between persons of different sex.”

Mrs. Wyndwood’s eyes drooped; then opened full again to note how Matthew took the addendum. The friends perceived themselves reddening in simultaneous confession that Olive was not so very wrong; an indefinable expression, half abashment, half radiance, flickered over Eleanor’s features; her glance, swift, probing, challenging, dazzled him; his whole frame trembled at the thought that this heavenly creature could love him. Then he grew chill again, for she cried, as in the highest spirits:

“Oh, look at the sun! How comic!”

It had, indeed, become a clown’s face, swollen and bulbous and crossed with red bars.

The talk went on to Woman’s Rights, and Matthew mentioned that he had an indirect relation to the subject, because a girl he used to know in childhood had become Linda Verder’s secretary.

“Is she pretty?” Mrs. Wyndwood asked.

“I don’t know; I’ve never seen her.”

“But you said you used to know her.”

“Oh! you mean Ruth Hailey. She used to be pretty, but my brother tells me she’s gone off.”

“Haven’t you seen her yourself?”

“Oh! not for years.”

“I sent Mrs. Verder a subscription some few years ago,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, “but I have ceased to believe in Woman’s Rights.”

“Woman’s Rights are a husband and children,” said Herbert, with his eye fixed on Olive.

“It is a mistake for the movement to be led by women,” pursued Mrs. Wyndwood.

“Oh, was that why you resigned when Lord Boscombe left the Council?” asked Olive, innocently.

Eleanor looked annoyed. “You mean, Mrs. Wyndwood,” Matthew hastened to say, “that they lay themselves open to the imputation of being soured spinsters.”

“Precisely,” she replied. “Besides, they are crying for the moon.”

“Or the man in it,” muttered Olive.

“No; that’s ungenerous to your sisters,” said Eleanor.

“Why demand generosity?” Olive retorted. “We are all in the same trade.” And she smiled audaciously at Herbert. “Even Mrs. Verder didn’t take up with this movement till she lost her husband, and I’ll wager this Ruth Bailey is an old maid.”

“Ruth Hailey,” corrected Matthew, flushing painfully, he scarcely knew why, perhaps from sympathy with the aspersed friend of his childhood. “Sheisunmarried, but I am quite sure it must be from her own choice, for she is very pretty.”

“You said she wasn’t,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, quickly.

He laughed confusedly. “I was thinking of the girl.”

The subject dropped.

Ere they got in the wind freshened and Matthew was busy with the sheet. And now a proposition was broached which promised to bring a new sensation into their comparatively sequestered existence. Light-hearted discussions as to what they would do in the event of capsizing through Matthew’s mishandling of the sail led to estimates of the distance they could swim in their clothes. Mrs. Wyndwood could not swim at all, and complained of the abrupt shelving of the beach, which gave her only a few feet of splashing room, while Olive was sailing gloriously off in search of the horizon. Herbertsaid that, like the man who was asked if he could play the violin, he didn’t know if he could swim in his clothes, because he had never tried, and, besides, he had his comedy in his pocket, which was heavy enough to drag down a theatre. Olive said she didn’t see that it made any difference whether a lady swam in her clothes or not, especially if she was in evening dress. She claimed that the cap and gown worn in the water were as heavy as men’s boating flannels.

The upshot of the discussion was that Miss Regan challenged Mr. Matthew Strang to a race in clothes, which, she insisted, must be new. “You don’t go out getting capsized in old clothes,” she contended. “Boots you needn’t have, nor a coat; people always have time to throw them off—in books. I shall be clothed in a new yachting costume, superficially, of course, to counteract your sheddings from above.”

“What waste!” remonstrated Eleanor.

“You who pretend to philanthropy!” mocked Herbert, mimicking her intonation of “You who pretend to write comedies!”

“Waste? To learn to save my life! And don’t you see I shall forthwith give away the spoiled costume to a poor creature who would never otherwise have got it?” And Olive, who was quite serious, fell to elaborating a facetious programme of “The Creamery Regatta.”

The regatta day duly arrived. Two bathing tents were erected on the beach and decorated with flags. It was arranged that the competitors should swim out leisurely together as far as they cared to go, then turn and race for shore. Herbert was chosen referee; he offered to take them out in a boat and then accompany them back, as a precaution, but Olive laughed at him for an old woman. Eleanor, entering enthusiastically into the fun, had ordered a silver cup from London, and was to present it to the winner.

But the day opened badly, with fitful weather; a gray rain, and thunder and lightning. They waited till the afternoon, when the sun burst out in sudden fire, and in a moment the great stretch of gray cloud was shrivelling off all around it like a burned cobweb. The eager combatants dashed into theirdressing-tents, and, emerging as lightly clad as was compatible with the conditions, they plunged together into the great sapphire sea. Olive’s yachting costume turned out to be a pair of knickerbockers and a jacket, rather lighter than her ordinary bathing costume, and Matthew had begged off his waistcoat, and was only hampered by a white flannel shirt and trousers. The outward swim was an ecstasy; the water was warm and sparkling with patches of molten silver breaking up into little shining circles and reuniting; it sent a voluptuous thrill to the palms to cleave its buoyant elasticity, and the forward movement of the body was a rapture. Drawing in the balmy air with joyous breaths, Matthew felt an immense gratitude for existence. There was exhilaration in the mere proximity of Olive, with her lively snatches of conversation. Her lovely flushed face and dripping hair went with him like a mermaiden’s. The same thought struck her, for she began to sing jerkily with her beautiful voice snatches of Heine’s ballad:

Back to IndexNext