He knew that evening that Kitty was horribly frightened from the fact that she was horribly careful. She did not once press for assurances or demonstrations of love. She foresaw all his needs, even his need of silence. Delicately assiduous, she pulled his chair near the lamp for him, lit his cigar, cut the pages of his review, even brought a footstool for his feet, saying, when he protested, "You are tired, darling; you must let me wait on you."
"And won't you read, or sew,—or do something, dear?" he asked, as she drew her low chair near his.
"I only want to sit here quietly, and look at your dear face," she said.
And she sat there, quietly, not moving, not speaking, only mutely, gently, fiercely watching him. Holland felt his hand tremble as he turned the pages.
A full hour passed so. Accurately, punctually, he turned the pages; he had not understood one page; and he had not once looked up.
It was almost a sense of nightmare that grew upon him, as if he were going to sit there for ever, hearing the clock tick, hearing Kitty breathe, knowing that he was watched. Fear, pity, and repulsion filled his soul.
He longed at last to hear her voice. He did not dare to hear his own; something in it would have broken and revealed him to her; but if she would but speak the nightmare might pass. And, with the longing, furtively, involuntarily, he glanced round at her.
Her eyes were on him, fixed, shining. How horrible;—how ridiculous. Their gaze smote upon his heart and shattered something,—the nightmare, or the repulsion. An hysterical sob and laugh rose in his throat. He dropped the review, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and the tears ran down his face.
She was there, of course, poor creature, there, close, holding him, moaning, weeping with him. He could do nothing but yield to her arms, feel his head pillowed on her breast, and mingle his tears with hers; but horribly, ridiculously, he knew that laughter as well as weeping shook him.
And he heard her saying "Oh, my darling—my darling—is it because you must leave me?"—and heard himself answering "Yes, because I must leave you."
"You love me—so much—so much——"
"So much," he echoed.
And, her voice rising to a cry, he knew how dead, as if sounded from the cavern, his echo had been: "You are not dying! Not now!" And it was again only the echo he could give her: "Not now," it came. Why not now? Why could it not be, mercifully now? When in heaven's name was he going to die?
A strong suspicion rose in him and seemed to pulse into life with the strong beat of his heart. How strong a beat it was; how faint and far any whispers of the old ill. What if he were not going to die? What if he were to go on loving Kitty for a lifetime?
And at that the mere hysterics conquered the tears; he burst out laughing. There, on Kitty's breast, he laughed and laughed, helpless, cruel and ridiculous.
Terrified, she tried to still him. When he lifted his face he saw that hers was ashen, set to meet the tragedy of imminent parting. Did she think it the death rattle?
He flung his head back from her kisses, flung himself back from her arms. Still laughing the convulsive laugh he got up and pushed away the chair.
"I'm tired—I'm so tired, Kitty," he said.
She sat, her hands fallen in her lap, staring at him.
"You are tired, too," he went on; "it's been a tiring day, hasn't it?—we have been through a lot, haven't we, poor Kitty? Poor Kitty:—do go to bed now. Will you go to bed, and leave me here to rest a little?"
"Nicholas, are you mad—what has happened to you?" she murmured, spellbound, not daring to move.
"Why, I'm ill, you know; I'm very ill. I'm not mad—I'm only so abominably tired. You mustn't ask questions; I can't stand it,—I can't stand it——" And, leaning his arms on the back of the chair, resting his face on them, with tears of sheer fatigue, tears untouched by laughter—"I'm so tired. I want to be alone," he sobbed.
The abominable moments that followed were more full of shame for him than any he had even known:—of shame, and of relief. He had torn his way, with his words, out of the nest; he had fallen to the ground. He was ashamed and horrified, yet—oh, the joy, the deep joy of being on the ground, out in the cold, fresh world, out of the nest.
At last he heard her speak, slowly, softly, with difficulty, as though she were afraid of angering him. "Shall I go away, Nicholas?"
His face was still hidden. "Yes, do go to bed," he answered.
"I can do nothing for you?"
"Nothing, dear."
"You are not dying?"
"No; I'm not feeling in the least ill."
"You would—send for me—if you were dying?"
"Dear Kitty,—of course."
"And——" she had risen, not daring to draw near, he knew that the trembling voice came through tears:—"And, you love me? you love me a little?"
"Dear Kitty—of course I love you."
It was over. She was gone. She had not asked for his good-night kiss. It was like a sword between them.
He drew a long breath, lifting his head.
Alone. There was ecstasy in the thought.
He walked out into the garden and looked up at the stars as he walked. There had been no stars in the nest.
He didn't think of death. There had been too much thinking of death; that was one of the things he was tired of. Still less did he want to think of Kitty or of himself.
He looked at the stars and thought of them, but not in any manner emotional or poetical; he thought of astronomical facts, dry, sound, delightful facts: he looked at the darkened trees and dim flowers and thought of botany: the earth he trod on was full of scientific interest; the Pierrots, the fairies and the angels—yes, the angels too—were vanished. He hungered for impersonal interests and information.
Kitty would, indeed, have thought him mad; after the calming walk he came in, lit a cigar and sat for hours studying.
Before Kitty was up next morning he was on his way back to London to see the great specialist.
It was a long visit he paid, an astonishing visit, though the astonishment, really, was not his; life had seemed deeply to have promised something when he had ceased to think of death—when he had ceased to want death, even. That strong beating of his heart had been a mute forestalling. The astonishment was the good, great doctor's, and it was reiterated with an emphasis that showed something of wounded professional pride beneath it. It was, indeed, humiliating to have made such a complete mistake, to have seen only one significance in symptoms that, to far-sightedness clairvoyant enough, should have hinted, at all events, at another, and, as a result, to have doomed to speedy death a man now obviously as far from dying as oneself: "I can't forgive myself for robbing you of a month of life," the doctor said. "A month with death at the end of it can't be called a month of life."
"Very much of life," said Holland. "So much so that I hardly know yet whether I am glad or sorry that you were mistaken."
He indeed hardly did know. All the way down in the train he was thinking intently of the new complicated life that had been given back to him, and of what he should do with it. At moments the thought seemed to overwhelm him, to draw him into gulfs deeper than death's had been.
All through that month life had meant the moment only. The vistas and horizons seemed now to open and flash and make him dizzy. How could he take up again the burden of far ends and tangled purposes? The dust of coming conflicts seemed to rise to his nostrils. Life was perilous and appalling in its fluctuating immensity.
But, with all the disillusion and irony of his new experience, with all the unwholesome languor that had unstrung his will, some deeper wisdom, also, had been given him. He could turn from the nightmare vision that saw time as eternity.
The walk in the night had brought a message. He could not say it, nor see it clearly, but the sense of its presence was like the coolness and freshness of wings fanning away fevers and nightmare. Somewhere there it hovered, the significance of the message, somewhere in those allied yet contrasted thoughts of eternity and time.
There had been his mistake, his and Kitty's, the mistake that had meant irony and lassitude and corruption. To heap all time into the moment, to make a false eternity of it, was to arrest something, to stop blood from flowing, thought from growing, was to create a nightmare distortion, a monstrous, ballooned travesty of the eternity that, in moving life, could never be more, could never be less, than the ideal life sought unceasingly.
As for Paradise, what more grotesque illusion than to see it with walls around it, what more piteous dream than to feel it narrowed to a nest?
He found Kitty alone in the drawing-room, alone, with empty hands and empty, waiting eyes. He saw that she had wept, and that his departure, only a brief note to break it to her, had added deep indignation to her sorrow. She was no longer timid, nor cowed by the change she felt in him. She had cast aside subtlety and appeal. It was a challenge that met him in her eyes.
He had intended to tell her his news at once and the preparatory smile was on his lips as he entered, a smile, though he did not know this, strangely like that smile of reassurance and consolation that had met her in the library a month ago.
But she gave him no time for a word.
Leaping from her chair she faced him, and with a vision still clearer than that which had showed him subtlety a month ago, he saw now her pettiness, her piteousness, her girlish violence and weakness. "Cruel! Cruel! Cruel!"—she cried.
He remained standing at a little distance from her, looking at her sadly and appealingly. Her words of reproach rushed forth and overwhelmed him like a frenzied torrent.
"To leave me without a word, after last night! You treat me like a dog that one kicks aside because it wearies one with its love. You have no heart—I've felt it for days and days!—No heart! You hate me! You despise me! And what have I done to deserve it but love—love—love you—like the poor dog! But I know—I know—It is Sir Walter. You can't forgive me that—It has poisoned everything—that ignorant folly of mine. At first you thought you could forgive, and then you grew to hate me. And I—I—" her voice choked, gasped into sobs;—"I have only loved you—loved you—more and more——"
"Kitty, you are mistaken," said Holland. "I've never given Sir Walter a thought." It was a reed she grasped at in the torrent, he saw that well;—a desperate hope.
"It's false!" she cried. "You have! You thought at first that you would be magnanimous and save me,—you could be magnanimous because you were going to die—it's easy enough to be magnanimous if you are going to die! easy enough to be peaceful and sad—and to stand there and smile and smile as if you were only sorry for me. But you found out that you were alive enough to be jealous after all, and that you could not really forgive me, and then you hated me."
"Kitty—you know that you do not believe what you are saying."
"Can you deny that if you had been going to live you would not have forgiven me?"
"I can. I could have forgiven. But then, as I said to you—that day, Kitty, on the lawn,—it would have been more difficult to save you."
"Your love, then, was a pretence to save me!"
"Nothing was pretence, at first," he answered her patiently. "At first I was only glad for your sake that I was going to be out of the way so soon; and when I found that you could care for me again I was glad that I had still a month to live with you."
His words smote on her heart like stones. He saw it and yearned over her pain; but such yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, he knew, the poison in her veins that maddened her.
She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He had not put it into words, but with the abandonment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it.
"It was, then, because it was only for a month."
He hesitated, seeing, too. "That I was glad?"
"That you loved me."
Across the room, in a long silence, they looked at each other. And in the silence another truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary.
"Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because it was only for a month?"
The shock went as visibly through her as though it had, indeed, been a stone hurled at her breast. "You mean—you mean—" she stammered—"Oh—you don't believe that I love you—You believe that it could pass, with me, as it has with you!" She threw herself into the chair, casting her arms on the back, burying her face in them.
Holland, timidly, approached her. He was afraid of the revelation he must make. "I believe that you do love me, Kitty, and that I love you; but not in the way we thought. We neither of us could go on loving like that; it was because it was only for a month that we thought we could. It wasn't real."
"Oh," she sobbed, "that is the difference—the cruel difference. You love me in that terrible way—the way that could give me up and not mind; but I am in love with you;—that's the dreadful difference. Men get over it; but women are always in love."
Perhaps Kitty saw further than he did. Holland was abashed before the helpless revelation of a mysterious and alien sorrow. For women the brooding dream; for men the active dusty world. Yet even here, on the threshold of a secret, absurd, yet perhaps, in its absurdity, lovelier than man's sterner visions, he felt that, for her sake, he must draw her away from the contemplation of it. That was one thing he had learned, for Kitty. She, too, must manage to fly—or fall—out of the nest; she must get, in some way, more dust into her life. He had forgotten the news he was to tell her; he had forgotten all but her need.
"Perhaps that is true, dear Kitty," he said; "but isn't it, in a way, that women aremerelyin love. It's not with anybody; or, rather, it is with anybody—with me or with Sir Walter; I mean, anybody who seems to promise more love. Horrible I sound, I know. Forgive me. But I wish I could shake you out of being in love. I want you to be more my comrade than you have been. Don't let us think so much of love."
But Kitty moaned: "I don't want a comrade. I want a lover."
And, in the silence that followed, lifting her head suddenly, she fixed her eyes on him.
"You talk as if we could be comrades," she said. "You talk as if we were to go on living together. What did the doctor say? I don't believe that you are going to die."
He felt ridiculous now. The real tragedy was there, between them; but the tragedy upon which all their fictitious romance had been built was to tumble about their ears.
It was as if he had all along been deceiving, misleading her, acting on false pretences, winning her love by his borrowed funereal splendour. Almost shamefacedly, looking down and stammering over the silly confession, he said: "It was all a mistake. I'm not going to die."
He did not look at her for some moments. He was sure that she was deaf and breathless with the crash and crumbling.
Presently, when he did raise his eyes, he found that she was staring at him, curiously, intently. She had found herself: she had found him; and—oh yes—he saw it—he was far from her. The stare, essentially, was one of a hard hostility. She had been betrayed and robbed; she could not forgive him.
"Kitty," he said timidly, "are you sorry?"
Her sombre gaze dwelt on him.
"Tell me you're not sorry," he pleaded.
She answered him at last: "How dare you ask me that? How dare you ask me whether I am sorry that you are not going to die? You must know that it is an insult."
"I mean—if I disappointed—failed you so—"
"I must wish you dead? You have a charming idea of me."
How her voice clashed and clanged with the hardness, the warfare, the uproar of the outer world. After the hush, the gentleness of Paradise, it was like being thrown, dizzy and bewildered, among the traffic and turmoil of a great city.
"Don't be cruel," he murmured.
"I? Cruel!" she laughed.
She got up and walked up and down the room. A fever of desperate, baffled anger burned in her. He saw that she did not trust herself to speak. She was afraid of betraying, to herself and to him, the ugly distortion of her soul.
He was not to die; he was not her lover; and Kitty was the primitive woman. She could be in love, but she could not love unless pity were appealed to. His loss of all passion had killed her romance. His loss of all pathos had, perhaps, killed even human tenderness. For it was he who had drawn away. She was humiliated to the dust.
And that she made a great effort upon herself, so that to his eyes the ugliness might not be betrayed, he guessed presently when, looking persistently away from him and out at the garden—their garden! alas!—where a fine rain fell silently, she said: "I am glad that your sorrow is over. I hope that you will find happier things—and realler things—than you have found in this month. I will remember all that you have said to-day. I think that you have cured me for ever. I shall not be in love again."
"Kitty! Kitty!" he breathed out. She hurt him too much, the poor child, arming its empty heart against him. "Don't speak like that. Remember—the month has been beautiful."
The tears rose in her eyes, but the hostility did not leave them. "Beautiful? When it has not been real?"
"Can't we remember the beauty—make something more real?" he now almost wept. But there it was, the shallow, the hard child's heart. He was not in love with her. And, like a nest of snakes, the memory of all her humiliations—her appeals, her proffered love, his evasions and withdrawals—was awake within her. She smiled, a smile that, seeking magnanimity, found only bitterness. "You must speak for yourself, dear Nicholas. For me it was real, and you have spoiled the beauty."
The servants came in while she spoke and she moved aside to make way for the placing of the tea-table. Traces of the fever were upon her yet; her delicate face was flushed, her eyes sparkled. But she had regained the place she meant to keep. She would own to no discomfitures deeper than those that were creditable to her. Moving here and there, touching the flowers in a vase, straightening reviews scattered on a table, she was even able to smile again at him a smile almost kind, and keeping, before him, as well as for the servants, all the advantage of composure.
That smile would often meet him throughout life, and so he would see her, moving delicately and gracefully, making order and comeliness about her, for many years. She set the key. It was the key of their future life together, Holland knew, as he heard her say: "Do sit down and rest. You must want your tea after that tiresome journey."
The drama of the drawing-rooms had begun years ago, but Owen Stacpole did not come into it until the day on which his cousin Gwendolen, after examining the box of bric-à-brac, remarked, refolding the last pieces of china in their dusty newspapers, that they were rubbish, and silly rubbish, too, of just the sort that Aunt Pickthorne had always unerringly accumulated. The box had arrived that morning, a legacy from this deceased relative; it had been brought up to the drawing-room and placed upon a sheet near the fire, so that Mrs. Conyers might examine its contents in comfort, and Owen, while he wrote at the black lacquer bureau in the window, had been aware of Gwendolen's gibes and exclamations behind him. Now, when she asserted that she would send the whole futile collection down to Mr. Glazebrook and see if he would give her enough for it to buy a pair of gloves with, Owen rose and limped to join her and to look down at the wooden box into which she was thrusting, with some vindictiveness, the dingy parcels.
"Have you looked at them all?" he inquired. "I forget—was your Aunt Pickthorne a Mrs. or a Miss? And how long has it been since she died?"
"About six months, poor old thing. And these treasures have evidently never been dusted since. She was a Mrs. Her husband was old Admiral Pickthorne—don't you remember?—and they lived, after he retired, at Cheltenham. Two more guileless Philistines I've never known. It used to make me feel quite ill to go and stay with them when I was a girl. I've hardly been at all since then, and that's probably why she selected all the most hideous objects in her drawing-room to leave me. How well I remember that drawing-room! Crocheted antimacassars; and a round, mahogany centre-table on which a lamp used to stand in the evening; and the wall-paper of frosted robin's-egg-blue, with stuffed birds in cases, and terracotta plaques framed in ruby plush, hanging upon it—a perfectly horrible room. Half a dozen of the plaques are in there; the birds she spared me. She had one or two lovely old family things which I'd allowed myself to hope for; a Spode tea-set I remember. But, no; there's nothing worth looking at."
Mrs. Conyers lightly dusted her hands together, and rose from her knees. She was, at thirty-eight, a very graceful woman; tall, of ample form, and attired with fashionable ease and fluency. Fashion had been a late development with Gwendolen. In her gaunt and wistful girlhood she had worn her hair in drooping Rossettian masses, and her throat had been differently bare. Now she was as accurate as she was easy. Her hair was even a little too sophisticatedly distended, and her long pearl ear-rings, though they became the tender violet of her eyes, emphasized, as her former Pre-Raphaelite ornaments had not seemed to do, a certain genial commonplaceness in the contours of her cheek and chin. But almost fat and decisively unpoetical as she had become, it was undeniable that this last phase of dress and, in especial, these widow's weeds, with sinuous lines of jet and lustrous falls of fringes, became her better than any in which Owen remembered to have seen her.
Gwendolen's drawing-room, too, had undergone, since the days of her girlhood, as complete a metamorphosis as she had. When she had married and left the big house in Kensington where Owen had spent many a happy holiday—when she had married crabbed old Mr. Conyers, the Chislebridge dignitary, and gone to live in Chislebridge, her convictions had at once expressed themselves luxuriantly in large-patterned wall-papers and deep-cushioned divans and in Eastern fabrics draping the mantelpiece or cast irrelevantly over carved Indian screens. Her teas had been brought in on trays of Indian beaten brass, and the mosque-like opening between the front and back drawing-room had been hung with translucent curtains of beaded reeds, through which one had to plunge as though through a sheet of dropping water. Owen well remembered their tinkle and rattle and the perfume of burning Eastern pastilles that greeted one when, emerging, one found oneself in the dim, rich gloom among the divans and the brasses and the palms. In those days Gwendolen had been draped rather than dressed, and the gestures and attitudes of her languid arms and wrists seemed more adapted to a dulcimer than to a tea-pot. But she dispensed excellent tea, and though her eyes were appropriately yearning, her talk was quite as reassuringly commonplace as Owen had always found it.
It was only in the course of years that the reed curtains and the carved Indian screens and the divans ebbed away; but the change was complete at last, and he found Gwendolen, with undulated hair puffed over a frame, and a small waist,—large waists not having then come in,—receiving her visitors in the most clear, calm, austere of rooms, with polished floor, Sheraton furniture, and Japanese colour-prints framed in white hanging on pensive spaces of willow-leaf-green wall. Gwendolen talked of Strauss's music and of the New English Art Club, was indignant at the prohibition of "Monna Vanna," and to some no longer apt remark of an aspiring caller answered that to speak so was surely to Ruskinize. He realized on this occasion that Gwendolen had become the arbiter of taste in Chislebridge. He followed her into several drawing-rooms and observed that she had set the fashion in furniture and wall-paper; that some were pushing their way toward Japanese prints, and some were even beginning to babble faintly of Manet. Five years had passed since then, and now, on this his first visit to Chislebridge since old Mr. Conyers's death, another change had taken place. Gwendolen's hips were compressed, her waist was large once more, though of a carefully calculated largeness, and only in a fine bit of the old furniture here and there did a trace of the former green drawing-room remain. This was certainly the most interesting room that Gwendolen had yet achieved. There had been little character, if much charm, in the green drawing-room; one knew so many like it. With a slight self-discipline, its harmonies were really easy to attain. But it was not easy to attain a mingled richness and austerity; to be recondite, yet lovely; to set such cabinets of rosy old lacquer near such Chinese screens or hang subtle strips of Chinese painting on just the right shade of dim, white wall. It took money, it took time, it took knowledge to find such delicate cane-seated settees framed in black lacquer, and to pick up such engraved glass, such white Chinese porcelain and white Italian earthenware. Melting together in their dim splendour and shining softness, they had so enchantingly arrested Owen the night before that, pausing on the threshold, he had said with a whole-heartedness she had never yet heard from him, "Well, Gwen, yours is the loveliest room I've ever seen."
It was indeed triumphantly lovely, although, examining it more critically by the morning light, he had found slight dissatisfactions. It was perhaps a little too much like an admirably sophisticated curiosity-shop. It was an object to be examined with delight, hardly a subject to be lived with with love. And it almost distressed him to see the touch of genial commonplaceness expressing itself pervasively in the big bowls and jars and vases of pink roses that burgeoned everywhere. They showed no real sense of what the lacquer and glass and porcelain demanded; for they demanded surely a more fragile, less obvious flower. And one or two minor ornaments, though evidently selected with scrupulous conscientiousness, seemed to him equally at fault. Still, he had again that morning, before seating himself to write, repeated in all sincerity, "This is really the loveliest room," and Gwendolen, from where she knelt above Aunt Pickthorne's box, had answered, following his eyes, "I amsoglad you like it, dear Owen."
Gwendolen was very fond of him, and her fondness had never been so marked. It was of that he had been thinking as he wrote. He had never felt fonder of Gwendolen. Her drawing-room was lovely, her widow's weeds became her, and she was, as she had always been, the kindest of creatures. In every sense the house would be a pleasanter one to stay at than in old Mr. Conyers's lifetime. Owen had not liked old Mr. Conyers, who had had too much the air of thinking himself an historical figure and his breakfast historical events, who snubbed his wife and quoted Greek and Latin pugnaciously, and took the cabinet ministers and duchesses who sometimes sojourned under his roof, with an unctuousness that made more marked the aridity of his manner toward less illustrious guests. The Conyers had come to count in the eyes of Chislebridge and the surrounding country as the social figure-heads of the studious old town, and Owen had found himself, as Gwendolen's crippled, writing, cousin, year by year of relatively less importance in the eyes of Gwendolen's husband. Actually, as it happened, he had during those years become almost illustrious himself; but his austere distinction, such as it was, had been as moonrise rather than dawn, and had left him as gently impersonal as before, and even more impoverished. Negligible-looking as he knew he was, he had sometimes been amused to note old Mr. Conyers's bewilderment when a cabinet minister or a duchess manifested their pleasurable excitement in meeting him. As for Gwendolen, her essential loyalty and kindness had always remained the same since the days when she had protected him from the sallies of her boisterous brothers and sisters in the Kensington family mansion—the same till now. Last night and to-day he had recognised a difference. He wondered whether he was a conceited fool for imagining in Gwendolen a dwelling tenderness, a brooding touch, indeed, of reminiscent wistfulness. Was it to show an unbecoming complacency if he allowed his mind to dwell upon the possibilities that this development in Gwendolen presented to his imagination? He was delicate and poor and, despite a large visiting-list, he was lonely. He was fond of Gwendolen and of her two nice, dull boys. She amused him, it was true, as she had always amused him; for though her drawing-room had become interesting, though she had developed a sense of humour, or at least the intention of humorousness, though she often attempted playfulness and even irony, she was still at heart as disproportionately earnest as she had been in youth. But Gwendolen would make no romantic demands upon him, and she would not expect him to take even red lacquer as seriously as she did, or to follow with the same breathlessness the erratic movements of modern æstheticism. She was accustomed to his passive unresponsiveness, and would resent it no more in the husband than in the friend. Altogether, as he sat there writing at Gwendolen's lovely bureau, he knew that a sense of homely magic grew upon him.
Next morning, wandering about the pleasant streets of the old town, he found himself before the window of Mr. Glazebrook's curiosity-shop—a shop well known to more than Chislebridge. He paused to look at the objects disposed with a dignified reticence against a dark background, and his eye was attracted by a very delightful red lacquer box that at once made him think of Gwendolen's drawing-room. Just the thing for her, it was. But as he entered the shop, Mr. Glazebrook leaned from within and took it from its place in the window. He was showing it to another customer.
Owen now quite vehemently longed to possess the box, which, he saw, as Mr. Glazebrook displayed it, was cunningly fitted with little inner segments, beautifully patterned in gold. Feigning an indifferent survey of the shop, he lingered near, hoping that his rival would relinquish her opportunity.
"Five pounds! O dear, that is too much for me, I'm afraid," he heard her say, and, at the voice, he turned and looked at her. The voice was unusual—a rapid, rather husky voice that made him think of muffled bells or snow-bound water, gay in rhythm, yet marred in tone, almost as though the speaker had cried a great deal. She was an unusual figure, too, though he could not have said why, except that her dress seemed to recall bygone fashions quaintly, though without a hint of dowdiness or affectation. She wore a skirt and jacket of soft gray, with pleated lawn at neck and wrists, and her small gray hat was wreathed with violets. She held the lacquer box, and her face, rosy, crisp, decisive, and showing, like her voice, a marred gaiety, expressed her reluctant relinquishment and her strong desire. Owen had seen a child look at a forbidden fruit with just such an expression and he suddenly wished that he could give the box to her rather than to Gwendolen, to whom five pounds was a matter of small moment.
"I think I mustn't," she repeated, after a further hesitation, and setting the box down with cherishing care. "Not to-day. And I have so much red lacquer. It's like dram-drinking."
Mr. Glazebrook smiled affably. He was evidently on old-established terms with his customer. "Perhaps you'd like to look round a bit, Mrs. Waterlow," he suggested. "There are some nice pieces of old glass in the inner room, quite cheap, some of them—a set of old champagne glasses." Mrs. Waterlow, saying that she wanted some old champagne glasses, moved away.
"Do you think the lady has given up that box?" Owen asked. "I don't want to buy it if there's a chance of her changing her mind."
Mr. Glazebrook said that there was no such chance, the lady being one who knew her own mind; so the box was bought and Owen ordered it to be sent to Gwendolen. He said then that he would like to have a look round, too. He really wanted to have another look at the lady with the rosy face and the small gray hat trimmed with violets. He peered into cabinets ranged thickly with old glass and china, examined the Worcester tea-set disposed upon a table and the case of Chinese tear-bottles and Japanese netzukés, and presently made his way into the smaller, dimmer room at the back.
"Oh, Mr. Glazebrook," said the lady in gray. She had heard his step, but had not turned. She was kneeling before an open packing-case and holding an object that she had drawn from it. Owen suddenly recognised the case. It was the one that Gwendolen yesterday had sent down to Mr. Glazebrook. He called this person, raising his hat, and the lady looked round at him, too preoccupied to express her recognition of her mistake by more than a vague murmur of thanks. "Mr. Glazebrook," she said, holding up a whitish object, "may I have this? Is it expensive?"
"Well, really, I only glanced over the box. A customer sent it down to me to dispose of, and I didn't think there was anything in it worth much. Let me see, Mrs. Waterlow; it's a pagoda, I take it, a Chinese pagoda. We've had them from time to time, in ivory and smaller than this."
"This is in porcelain," said the lady, "and beautifully moulded."
"I see, I see," said Mr. Glazebrook, taking the fragile top segment of the disjointed pagoda in his hand, and rather at a loss; "and it's slightly damaged."
The lady in gray evidently was not a shrewd bargainer. "Only a little," she said. "One or two bits have been chipped out of the roofs, and it's lost one or two of its little crystal rings; but I think it's in quite good condition, and I have it all here." She was placing one segment upon the other. "They are all made to fit, you see, with the little openings in each story."
She had built it up beside her as she knelt on the floor, and it stood like a fragile, fantastic ghost, with the upward tilt of its tiled roofs, its embossed patterns, and the crystal rings trembling from each angle of the roofs like raindrops. "What a darling!" said Mrs. Waterlow. "How much do you ask for it, Mr. Glazebrook?"
Mr. Glazebrook, adjusting his knowledge of the limitations of Mrs. Waterlow's purse to his present appreciation of the pagoda and of her desire for it, said genially, after a moment, that from an old customer like herself he would ask only forty-five shillings.
"Well, I think it's a great bargain, Mr. Glazebrook," said Mrs. Waterlow. "And I'll have it."
"Shall I send it round?" Mr. Glazebrook asked.
"Yes, please; or, no, it isn't heavy,"—she lifted it with both hands, rising with it and looking like a Saint Barbara holding her tower,—"I can manage it to just round the corner. Wrap it up for me, and I'll carry it off myself."
When Owen saw his cousin again at lunch, the red lacquer box had not yet arrived, and, with a touch of friendly mockery, he said:
"Well, you have been unlucky, my dear Gwen. There was the most charming piece of old Chinese porcelain in that scorned Cheltenham box, and I saw Mr. Glazebrook sell it this morning to a lady who wasn't to be put off by dust and newspapers and plush-framed plaques. She carried it off in triumph, saying that it was a great bargain. And so it was; but she might have had it for half the money if she hadn't informed Mr. Glazebrook of its probable value."
Gwendolen fixed her mild, violet eyes upon him. "A piece of old Chinese porcelain? Do you mean that silly white pagoda?"
"You did see it, then?"
"See it? Haven't I seen it all my life? It stood on a purple worsted mat on a little bamboo table between the Nottingham lace curtains in one of Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room windows, and looked like some piece of childish gimcrackery bought at a bazaar, where, I'll wager, she did buy it."
"Well, Mrs. Waterlow evidently didn't think it gimcrackery, or, if she did, she didn't mind. It looked to me, I confess, an exquisite thing. But her admiration may have lent it its enchantment."
Gwendolen's eyes now fixed themselves more searchingly than before.
"Mrs. Waterlow? Did Mrs. Waterlow buy it? How did you know it was Mrs. Waterlow? I thought you'd never met her."
"I haven't; but I heard Mr. Glazebrook call her by her name. She'd wanted to buy a red lacquer box that I spotted in the window and had gone in to get for you, my dear Gwen. It was too expensive for her,—so that it is yours,—and she went rummaging into the back shop and found your box with the things just as you and Mr. Glazebrook had left them, and in no time she'd disinterred the pagoda."
Gwendolen apparently was so arrested by his story that she forgot for the moment to thank him for the lacquer box.
"Do you know her?" he asked.
"Know her? Know Cicely Waterlow? Why, I've known her since she first came to live here, years ago. She's a very dear friend of mine," Gwendolen said, adding: "How much did she pay for it? That wretched man gave me only fifteen shillings for the lot."
"He made her pay forty-five shillings for the pagoda. I suspect myself that it's worth ten times as much. Does she care for things, too—lacquer and engraved glass?"
Gwendolen still showed preoccupation and, he fancied, a touch of vexation.
"Care for them? Yes; who with any taste doesn't care for them? Cicely has very good taste, too, in her little way. She doesn't know anything, but she picks up ideas and puts them together very cleverly. I can't help thinking that she'd never have given the pagoda a thought if my white porcelain hadn't educated her. I really can't believe that it's good, Owen."
Owen waived the point.
"Who is Mr. Waterlow?" he asked.
"He has been dead for fifteen or sixteen years. He died only a year after their marriage. A very delightful man, so people say who knew him. And Cicely lost her little girl, to whom she was passionately devoted, five years ago; she has never really recovered from that. She used to be so pretty, poor Cicely! She's lost it all now. She cried her very eyes out. She has a little money and lives with her mother-in-law, old Mrs. Waterlow, who is very fond of her. They don't entertain except in the quietest way, or go out much, and I do what I can to give Cicely a good time. I often have her here to tea when I have interesting people staying."
"Oh, that's good. Do count me as interesting enough and ask her while I'm here."
"Interesting enough, my dear Owen! I don't suppose that Cicely often has a chance of meeting such an interesting man as you. Of course I'll ask her," said Gwendolen. Then, remembering his gift: "Itwasnice of you to get me a red lacquer box, Owen. I adore red lacquer, and I'm quite sure, whatever you and Cicely Waterlow may say, that it's worth a hundred of your white pagodas."
Mrs. Waterlow came to tea next afternoon, the last of Owen's stay. The drawing-room was crowded, and Owen, when she was announced, was enjoying a talk with a dismal-looking old philosopher who had plaintive, white hairs on his nose and trousers that bagged irremediably at the knees.
"Yes, indeed, I know her well," said Professor Selden, as Owen questioned him. "I play chess with her once a week. Her little girl was a great pet of mine. You never saw the little girl?"
"Never, and I've not yet met Mrs. Waterlow. She is most charming-looking."
"The little girl was so much like her," said Professor Selden, sadly. "Yes, she is a charming woman. Don't let me keep you from meeting her. I am going to sit down here while our young friend Dawkins plays. You know Dawkins? Between ourselves, Mrs. Conyers thinks too highly of him."
Mrs. Waterlow's eyes turned upon him as he limped up to her and Gwendolen, and smiling, she said, "Why, I saw you yesterday in Mr. Glazebrook's shop."
"Yes," said Owen, "and there is the red lacquer box."
"And you, Cicely, bought my pagoda," said Gwendolen.
"Your pagoda?" Mrs. Waterlow questioned, her eyes, that seemed to open with a little difficulty, resting on her hostess with some surprise. "Was the pagoda yours?"
"Yes, mine," said Gwendolen. "It came in a box of rubbish,—you saw the kind of rubbish,—a legacy from an old aunt, and I bundled it off to Glazebrook. Owen says it is really good. Is it?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Mrs. Waterlow.
"I'm sure it is," said Owen, "and I liked the accuracy with which you fell in love with it at first sight."
"I did fall in love with it, good or bad," said Mrs. Waterlow. "Don't tell me that you want it back again, Gwendolen. But if it was a mistake, of course——"
He recognised in her the note of guilelessness and, with some decision, for he actually perceived an eagerness in Gwendolen's glance, interposed with, "But Gwendolen thinks it gimcrackery, and wouldn't have it at any price. Isn't it so, Gwendolen?"
Poor Gwendolen was looking a little glum; but she was the most unresentful of creatures.
"Indeed, it is," she said. "I did think it gimcrackery; but, to tell the truth, I never really saw it at all. I can't believe you'd have seen it, Cicely, standing on its worsted mat in my Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room. But I wouldn't dream, of course, of taking it back; and if it's really good, I'm more glad than I can say that my loss should be your gain. Now, won't you and Owen sit down here and listen to my wonderful Perceval Dawkins? Oh, he is going to astonish the world some day."
Mrs. Waterlow and Owen, in the intervals of the ensuing music, talked together. Seen more closely, he found that her face, though not beautiful, was even more singularly delightful than he had thought it. She had eyes merry, yet tired, like those of a sleepy child, and sweet, small, firm lips and a glance and smile at once very frank and very remote. There was about her none of that aroma of sorrow that some women distil from the tragedies of their lives, and wear, even if unconsciously, like an allurement. He felt that in Mrs. Waterlow sorrow had been an isolating, a bewildering, a devastating experience, making her at once more ready to take refuge in the trivialities of life and more unable to admit an intimacy into the essentials. Yet the spring of vitality and mirth was so strong in her that in all she said he felt a quality restorative, aromatic, fragrant, as if he were walking in spring woods and smelt everywhere the rising sap and the breath of violets. She was remote, blighted, yet buoyant. When she rose to go, he realised with sudden dismay that to-day was his last in Chislebridge and that he should not see her again for who knew how long.
"Is the pagoda placed?" he asked her. "Does it fulfil your expectations?"
"Yes, indeed," she said. "I spent two hours yesterday in washing and mending it. It is immaculate now, as lovely as a pearl."
"I wish I could see it," said Owen.
"Why, pray, then, come and see it. Can you come to tea with me and my mother-in-law to-morrow?"
"I'm going away to-morrow," said Owen, dismally. And then he bethought him. "Can't I walk back with you now? Is it too late? Only five-thirty."
"Not in the least too late. Mamma will still be having tea, and she loves people to drop in. But ought you to come away?" Mrs. Waterlow glanced round the crowded room.
"I'll not be missed," he assured her with some conscious speciousness.
Gwendolen, indeed, had time only for a little stare of surprise when he told her that he was going to look at the pagoda with Mrs. Waterlow. She was receiving new guests, richly furred and motor-veiled ladies who had come in from the country and were expatiating over the beauties of the red lacquer cabinets, Gwendolen's latest acquisitions.
"That will be delightful," she said; "and now Owen will see that sweet drawing-room of yours, dearest. You have made it so pretty!"
Owen observed that Mrs. Waterlow, while maintaining all the suavities of intercourse, did not address Gwendolen as dearest.
It was not far to Mrs. Waterlow's, and he said, in reply to her question, that he liked walking, if she didn't mind going slowly on his account. He found himself telling her, then, about his lameness. A bad fall while skating in boyhood had handicapped him for life. The lamps had just been lighted and the evening of early spring was blurred with mist. Catkins hung against a faintly rosy sky, and in the gardens that they passed the crocuses stood thickly. Owen had a sense of adventure poignant in its reminiscent magic. Not for years had he so felt the savour of youth. He realised, with a deep happiness, that Mrs. Waterlow liked him; sometimes she laughed at things he said, and once or twice when her eyes turned on him he fancied in them the same expression of happy discovery with which she had looked at the pagoda. Well, he reflected, if she thought him delightful, too, she had had to get through a great many dusty newspapers to find him.
Mrs. Waterlow lived, away from the gardened houses of Chislebridge, in a small but rather stately house with a Georgian façade which stood on one of the narrower, older streets. They went up two or three stone steps from the pavement and knocked at a very bright and massive knocker, and the door was opened by a middle-aged Quakerish maid. The drawing-room was on the ground floor, and Mrs. Waterlow led him in.
Owen's astonishment, when he entered, prompted him to stand still and to gaze about him; but luckily he could not yield to the impulse, for he had to cross to the fire, near which, behind her tea-table, old Mrs. Waterlow sat, and had to be presented to her and to the middle-aged, academic-looking lady who was having tea with her. He was glad of the respite, for he had received a shock.
Old Mrs. Waterlow had dark, authoritative eyes and white hair much dressed under black lace, and the finest of hands, decorated with old seals and old diamonds. She must, he felt, be a companion at once inspiriting and disquieting, for she had the demeanour of a naughty, haughty child, and, as she held Owen in talk for some moments, he perceived that her conversation was of a sort to cause alarm and amusement in her listeners. Poor old Professor Selden, who was mentioned, offered her an opportunity for the frankest witticisms, and,—when her daughter-in-law protested,—"Yes, dear, I know you are fond of him," the old lady replied, "and so am I; but he is, all the same, very like a damp potato that has begun to sprout."
"Now look at my pagoda, Mr. Stacpole," said young Mrs. Waterlow, laughing, yet, he saw, not pleased, and turning from the fire where she had been standing with her foot on the fender.
"Does Mr. Stacpole care for bric-à-brac, too?" old Mrs. Waterlow inquired. "Cicely came home with this last treasure in as much triumph as if some one had left her a fortune. I resent the pagoda because it means that she will go without a spring hat. She is always coming home in triumph and always doing without hats; and I sit here without an atom of taste, and get the credit for hers. Frankly, Sybilla, my dear," she addressed the academic lady, "I'd be quite content to sit upon red reps and to cover my tea-pot with a pink satin cosy with apple-blossoms painted on it. I had such a cosy given to me this Christmas; but Cicely wouldn't let me use it."
Owen had risen to face his ordeal. Mrs. Waterlow, he had seen it in the first astonished glance, had, like everybody else in Chislebridge, been imitating Gwendolen, and his whole conception of her was undergoing a reconstruction. He followed her to the table on which the white pagoda stood, glancing about him and taking in deep drafts of disillusion. Red lacquer and Japanese prints, white porcelain and dimly shining jars of old Venetian glass—it was a replica, even to its white walls, of Gwendolen's drawing-room, but hushed and saddened, as it were, humbly smiling, with folded hands and no attempt at emulation. And in the midst, beautifully in place on its little black lacquer table, was the pagoda, offering him not a hint of help, but seeming rather, to smile at him with a fantastic and malicious mirth. He was aware, as from the pagoda he brought his eyes back to young Mrs. Waterlow, that he was dreadfully sorry. In another woman he would not have given the naïve derivativeness a thought; but in her, whom he had felt so full of savour and independence? One thing only helped him, beside the effortless atmosphere of the room, and that was the fact—he clung to it—that the glasses set everywhere among the red and black and white were filled not, thank goodness! with pink roses, but with poppy anemones, white and purple and rose. And the first thing he found to say of the pagoda to Mrs. Waterlow was, "It looks lovely in here," and then, turning to the nearest bowl of delicate colour, he added, "and how beautifully these flowers go with your room!"
He wondered, as their eyes met over the anemones, whether Mrs. Waterlow guessed his discomfiture.
When he saw Gwendolen that evening she asked him at once whether he liked old Mrs. Waterlow. She did not ask him how he liked young Mrs. Waterlow's drawing-room, and he reflected that this was really very magnanimous of her.
"She seems a witty old lady," he said. "Her daughter-in-law can't be dull with her."
"She's witty, but I always feel her a little spiteful, too," said Gwendolen. "We never get on, she and I. I hate hearing my neighbours scored off, and she has such an eye for people's foibles. I don't think that Cicely always quite likes it, either; but they are devoted to each other. If it weren't for old Mrs. Waterlow, I'd try to see a great deal more of Cicely; I'm really fond of her."
He did not go to Chislebridge for another six months. Gwendolen asked him very pressingly on various occasions, but twice he was engaged and once ill and too depressed and jaded to make the effort. It was the time of all others when Gwendolen and her ministrations would have been most acceptable, but he shrank from submitting himself to their influences, feeling that in his very need he might find too great a compulsion. The thought of Gwendolen and of her possible place in his life must be adjourned—adjourned until she was well out of her mourning and he was able to meet it more impartially.
He saw Gwendolen in London and gave her and her boys tea at his rooms, the dingily comfortable rooms near Manchester Square from which for many years he had not had the initiative to move. There was more potency, he found, in the imaginary Gwendolen than in the real one. The sight of her brought back vividly the thought of Mrs. Waterlow. Curiously, they seemed to have spoiled each other. Gwendolen had all the ethical advantages and even, if it came to that, all the æsthetic ones; yet, ambiguous as the image of the other had become, its charm challenged Gwendolen's virtues and Gwendolen's achievements. He even felt that he could be sure of nothing until he next stayed with Gwendolen, when he must see Mrs. Waterlow and weigh the possible friendship with her, tarnished though it were, against the comfortable solutions that Gwendolen held out to him. Again, curiously, he knew that the two could not be combined.
Gwendolen, however, was gone away to the south of France when he wrote to her in November and asked if he might stop a day and night on his way through Chislebridge to a country week-end. But he had a two-hours' wait at the station, and he suddenly determined, when he found himself on the platform, to go and have tea with Mrs. Waterlow.
He drove up to the peaceful street where, above the college wall that ran along its upper end, a close tracery of branches showed against the sky, and he found that a welcoming firelight shone in the spacious windows of the Georgian house. His dismay, therefore, was the more untempered when the mildly austere maid told him that Mrs. Waterlow was away. His pause there on the threshold expressed his condition, and the maid suggested that he might care to come in and see old Mrs. Waterlow. This, he felt, was indeed better than not to go in at all. So he was led for a second time into the drawing-room.
He had been obliged on the former visit to conceal astonishment; but now he found himself alone, and no concealment was needed. And the former astonishment was slight compared with this one. He felt almost giddy as he gazed about him. Nothing was the same. Everything was fantastically, incredibly different, except—his eye caught it with a sharpened pang of wonder—the white pagoda; for there, in the centre of the room, upon a round, mahogany table, with heavily bowed and richly carven legs, the white pagoda stood, and under it an old bead mat,—a mat of faded, old blue beads,—his eyes were riveted on the pagoda and its setting,—of white and gray and blue beads dotted with pink rosebuds. At regular intervals, raying out from the centre, books were placed upon the table—small, sober books bound in calf.
So the pagoda stood, the pivot of an incredible room; yet, inconceivable as it seemed, as right there, all its exquisite absurdity revealed, as it had been right in the other. It was the one link that joined them, the one thread in the labyrinth of his astonishment; and it seemed, with its ambiguous, fantastic smile, to symbolize its absent owner. Was it an exquisite, extravagant, elaborate joke that she and the pagoda were having together?
For the whole room was now a joke. It was furnished with a suite of black satin—sofas, easy-chairs, little chairs with carved, excruciating backs, all densely buttoned and richly fringed. Over the backs of the easy-chairs were laid antimacassars of finely crocheted white lace. Upon two tall pieces of mahogany, ranged up and down with knobbed drawers and recalling in their decorous solidity the buttoned bodices of mid-Victorian matrons, stood high-handled, white marble urns. An oval gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and upon it stood two lustres ringed with prisms of glass and a little clock of gilt and marble, ornamented with two marble doves hovering over a gilt nest wherein lay marble eggs. Between the clock and the lustres, on either side, was a vase of Bohemian glass, each holding a small nosegay of red and white roses. Mahogany footstools with bead-worked tops stood before the fire, and upon the walls hung, exquisite in their absurdity, like the pagoda, a whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower-pieces, neatly coloured drawings, as accurate and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired labour could make them.
No, it was a dream, an insane, delightful dream; for, with it all, above it all, how and why he could not say, the room was delightful. It seemed to set one free from some burden of appreciation that all unconsciously one had been carrying and had been finding heavy. One could live in it, laughing at and with it. For it all laughed—surely yes; and the elfish chorus was led by the white pagoda, standing like a Chinese Pierrot, at the centre of the revels.
Old Mrs. Waterlow at last came sailing in, and her black lace shawl and lace-draped head looked as appropriate in the room as everything else seemed to do. Her eyes dwelt on him with a certain fixity, and in them he seemed to read further significances. They held an intention, gay, precise, such as he had felt in the room; and they held, too, it might be, a touch of light-hearted cruelty.
"Yes, isn't it changed?" she said, and he knew that his state of astonishment had spoken from his face.
He stared round him again, smiling.
"It makes me feel," he said, "like the old woman in the nursery rhyme whose skirts were cut up to her knees while she was asleep. One says, 'If I be I.'"
"And I'm the little dog," said Mrs. Waterlow; "but one who doesn't bark at you, so that you can be assured of your identity. I am really more aware of my own in this room than in any I've lived in for years. It is like one of the rooms of my girlhood. Rooms weren't so important then as they are now, and the people who lived in them, I sometimes think, were more so. It amuses me nowadays," said the old lady moving to her tea-table and seating herself, "to observe the way in which people are assessed by their tastes and their belongings. You say of some one that she is a dull or a disagreeable woman, and the answer and rebuke you receive is, 'Oh, but she has such wonderful Chinese screens!' Sit down here, Mr. Stacpole. It is very nice to see you again."
"But tell me, where is the other room?" Owen asked, drawing his chair to the table, "Is it disbanded, dissolved, gone for ever?"
Mrs. Waterlow looked at him with an air of half-malicious mystery.
"That is a secret, my own little secret, just as this room is, in a way, a little joke which, for my sake, Cicely has made for me. It was finished last week, by the way, and you are the first person to see it. Your cousin is in the south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Waterlow, with bland inconsequence.
"Yes; I'm only passing through. Gwendolen's been gone for nearly a month."
"Yes; I know," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, still with the genial blandness. "And as to our little joke, Mr. Stacpole, this room, in fact, is in many ways a room of my girlhood. The furniture was my mother's, and Cicely, when the idea struck her, had it brought from the garret of my old home, where it has stood in disgrace for many a year. She has been clever about it, hasn't she?"
"It's genius," said Owen, "What made her think of it?" And then, with a pang, he wondered whether Gwendolen had thought of it first. Was it imaginable that Gwendolen could have turned away from beauty and plunged herself into such gay austerities of ugliness?
"Well, things are in the air, you know," said Mrs. Waterlow, pouring out the tea,—"that's what Cicely always says, at all events,—reactions, repulsions, wearinesses. This room is, she says, a discipline."
"Things in the air": had Gwendolen felt them first, and Mrs. Waterlow felt them after her? This question of priority became of burning interest for him.
"The trouble is that one may get too much of any discipline," he commented, "if it ceases to be self-inflicted and is imposed upon us. How would your daughter like it if all Chislebridge took to buttoned black satin and old flower-pieces? It's as an exception that it has its charm and its meaning. But if it became a commonplace?"
"Well, that's the point," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "Will it? It has very much vexed me for years to watch Chislebridge picking Cicely's brains. And I said to her that I wondered whether it would be possible for her to make a room that wouldn't be copied, and she said that she believed she could. If she could achieve ugliness, she said—downright ugliness, she believed they would fall back. The room is a sort of wager between us, for I am not at all convinced that she will succeed. Sheep, you know, will leap into the ditch if they see their leader land there."
Owen's head was whirling. It was as though suddenly the little crystal rings of the pagoda had given out a sportive, significant tinkle. This, then, was what it meant? It was a jest, a game; but it was also a trap. For whom? Chislebridge, on old Mrs. Waterlow's lips, could mean only Gwendolen. He did not know quite what he hoped or feared, but he knew that he must conceal from old Mrs. Waterlow his recognition of her meaning.
"I felt from the first moment that I saw her in the curiosity-shop that Mrs. Waterlow was the sort of person who would always find the white pagodas," he said, smiling above his perturbation; "but I shouldn't have supposed that Chislebridge was intelligent enough, let us put it, to realise it, too, and to follow her lead."
"It's not that they realise it," the old lady interpreted, salting her scone; "it's something deeper than realisation. It's instinct—the instinct of the insignificant for aping the significant. They would probably be annoyed if they were told that they aped Cicely. They hardly know they do it, I will say that for them, if it's anything to their credit. And then since she is poor and they—some of them—rich, their copies are seen by a hundred to the one who sees her original, and Cicely, to some people, I've no doubt of it, seems the ape. It has very much vexed me," Mrs. Waterlow repeated.
Owen, for all his loyal feint of unconsciousness, was growing rather angry with Gwendolen.
"I don't wonder that it should," he said. "It vexes me to hear about it. Has it gone on for long?"
"Ever since we came to live here after my son's death. People at that time had draped, crowded drawing-rooms,—you remember the dreadful epoch. The more pots and pans and patterns and palms they could squeeze into them, the better they were pleased. Cicely had simple furniture and quiet spaces and plain green wall-paper when no one else in Chislebridge had. She fell in love with Japanese prints in Paris and bought them when no one else in Chislebridge thought of doing so.—It's wrong, now, I hear, to like them. Chinese paintings are the correct thing.—Chislebridge stared at them and at her empty room, and wondered how she could care for those hideous women. They stared only for a year or two. When they saw that she was quite indifferent to their opinion and intended to remain in the ditch, they jumped in after her. I was amused when I first saw Japanese prints on some one else's green walls and heard the Goncourts and Whistler being quoted to Cicely. Then by degrees Cicely got tired of green paper, especially since everybody in Chislebridge by then had it, and she put, with her white walls, the red lacquer and the glass and that beautiful old set of cane-seated furniture that you saw; and no one else in Chislebridge at that time had white walls or a scrap of lacquer. She shifted and rearranged like a bird building its nest, and Chislebridge stared again and said that the white walls were like a workhouse; and then they began to look for lacquer and to put up white paper. Her very grouping has been copied, the smallest points of adjustment. It's not," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, "that I mind people imitating, if they do it frankly and own themselves plagiarists. We must all see the things we like for the first time. But it's not because they like the things that they have them; they have them because some one else likes them. They dress themselves in other people's tastes and make a fine figure as originators." The vexation of years was crystallized in the lightness and crispness of her voice.
Poor, stupid Gwendolen! After all, one must not be too hard on her. He felt Mrs. Waterlow to be so hard that he reacted to something approaching pitying tolerance, Gwendolen could be stupid in such good faith. There was nothing, when he came to think of it, surprising in this revelation of her stupidity, nothing painful, as there had been in suspecting Cicely Waterlow of stupidity. Gwendolen was so sincerely unaware of having no ideas of her own. He wondered, as he said good-bye to old Mrs. Waterlow and told her that he felt convinced that she had at last reached a haven, whether she guessed that she had made him happy rather than unhappy.
She had made him so happy, with his recovered ideal, that as he drove away it was with a definite thrust of fear that he suddenly remembered Gwendolen's kindly criticism of old Mrs. Waterlow. Was it not possible, after all, that she had been indulging in sheer malice at Gwendolen's expense? Wasn't it possible that Gwendolen and Cicely Waterlow had had the same inspirations independently? But no two people could stumble at once on such a drawing-room as that he had just left. Horrid thought—what if Gwendolen's drawing-room at this moment showed just such a singular reversion to ugliness? After his delicious relief, he could not bear the doubt.
He drove to Gwendolen's. Yes, the old housekeeper, who knew him, said he could of course go up and look at the red lacquer. The red lacquer! He could almost have embraced her for the joy her words gave him. Gwendolen would not have retained red lacquer with a black satin suite. And on the threshold of Gwendolen's drawing-room he received full reassurance. The lovely room was intact. The blacks and whites and reds and golds were all there, unchanged, not a breath of the ambiguous discipline upon them. And in the midst of them all it was not Gwendolen, but Cicely Waterlow, whom he seemed to see smiling upon him, merry, tired, and tolerant. She had, as it were, demonstrated her claim not only to her present, but to her past. For if she had not copied Gwendolen in the mid-Victorian backwater, why should she have copied her in this? She had been first in both, and in her backwater she was now safe.
Many months passed before he saw Gwendolen's drawing-room again. He was felled early in the winter by a long and dangerous illness. When he was able to crawl about, he went to the south of France and stayed there for over a year. He was so ill, so tired, and so weak that, if Gwendolen and the boys hadn't joined him, if she hadn't nursed and amused and encouraged him from day to day, he felt that he should probably have died and made an end of it. Gwendolen was more than kind. She was at once tender and tactful, and the only claim she made was that of her long-standing solicitude on his account. Upon this, as upon a comfortable, impersonal cushion that she adjusted for his weary head, she invited him to lean, and upon it for months of dazed invalidism and dubious convalescence he did lean. Lapped round by this fundamental kindness, the flaws and absurdities of Gwendolen's character disappeared. The long pearl ear-rings dangled now over the most delicious beef-teas, which she herself made for him; the graceful hands could perform efficient tasks. Of how very little importance it was that a woman should not show originality in her drawing-room when she could show in taxing daily intercourse such wisdom and resource and sweetness! Life had contracted about them, and on these simple and elementary terms he found that Gwendolen neither bored nor ruffled him. When she at last left him he knew that the bond between them, unspoken as it remained, was stronger than it had ever yet been, and that when he next saw her he would probably find it the most natural of things to ask her to marry him, and to take care of him for ever. Poor, good, kind Gwendolen! It was with a pensive humility and mirth that he resigned himself to the thought of the bad bargain she would make.
He came back to England in the spring following that in which he had left it, and went at once to Chislebridge. It was late afternoon when he drove, in a twilight like his own mood of meditative acceptance, to the well-known house. Ample and benignant it stood behind its walls and lawns and trees, and seemed to look upon him with eyes of unresentful patience.
He limped in and Gwendolen met him in the hall.
"My dear, dear Owen, how are you? Yes, I had your wire this morning. Good; I see that the journey has done you no harm. But you are tired, aren't you? Will you go to your own room or have tea with me at once? It's just been brought in."
He said that he would have tea with her. She did not actually help him up the stairs, but as, with skill impaired, he swung himself from step to step, the touch of her tactful and ready hand was upon his arm, a caress rather than a sustainment. Passing the hand through his arm, she led him into the drawing-room.
Owen looked about him. He stood for a long moment in the door and looked. He then allowed himself a cautious, side-long glance at Gwendolen. Her eyes, unaware in their bland complacency, had followed his and rested upon her room.
"Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that you hadn't seen my new drawing-room," she said. "We've had great changes."
Even in his horror, for it was hardly less, he was touched to realize that Gwendolen was thinking far less of her drawing-room than of him. She might have forgotten that it had changed, had he not so helplessly displayed his amazement.
"Yes, indeed," he said. He limped to the fire and sank heavily into the deep, black satin easy-chair drawn before it. He leaned his elbow on his knee and rested his head on his hand, and as he did so he observed that before the fire stood a mahogany footstool with a bead-worked top.
"You are tired, dear Owen. Do you feel ill?" Gwendolen hovered above his chair.
"I do feel a little giddy," he confessed. "I'm not all right yet, I see."
He raised his head. It was to face the mantelpiece, with its oval, gilt mirror and crystal lustres and gilt-and-marble clock. No, there were not doves and a nest upon it. This was a finer clock than the one with the doves, and the lustres were larger, and the flowers that stood between were mauve orchids. Gwendolen always went astray over her flowers.
"Here is tea," she said, seating herself at a little mahogany table with bowed and decorated legs. "Of course you're bound to feel tired, dear Owen, after your journey. Tea will be the very thing for you."
He turned now a furtive eye along the wall. Flower-pieces, dim, flat, old flower-pieces and arid steel-engravings and tall pieces of mahogany furniture with marble vases upon them—no mistakes had been made here, for if the vases were not urns, they were of marble and in their places.
"How do you like it in this phase?" Gwendolen asked him, tactfully turning from the question of his weakness. "I love it myself, I own, though of course Chislebridge thinks I've lost my wits. To tell you the truth, Owen, I was tired of beauty. One may come to that. One may feel," said Gwendolen, pouring out the tea, "that one needs a discipline. This room is my discipline, and after it I know that I shall find self-indulgence almost vulgar."
No; his mind was working to and fro between the present and the past with the rapidity and accuracy of a shuttle threading an intricate pattern—no, he had never mentioned to Gwendolen that late autumnal visit of his to Chislebridge eighteen months ago. Had that been because to mention it and the transformation he had been the first to witness in Mrs. Waterlow's drawing-room would have been, in a sense, to give Gwendolen a warning? And had he not, in his deepening affection for her, conceived her to be above the need of such warnings? Yes; for though he had been glad to recover his ideal of young Mrs. Waterlow, though he had been more than willing that Gwendolen should occupy the slightly ridiculous and humiliating position that he had imagined to be Mrs. Waterlow's, he had never for a moment imagined that Gwendolen's disingenuous docility would go as far as this. So many people might love red lacquer and old glass with a clear conscience, once they had been brought to see them; but who, with a clear conscience, could love black satin furniture and marble vases?
"It is a very singular room," he found at last, in comment upon her information. "How—and when—did you come to think of it?" He heard the hollow sound of his own voice; but Gwendolen remained unaware. The fact of her stupidity cast a merciful veil of pitifulness over her.