This unlooked-for outburst had the happy effect of bringing the evening to an end. It seemed to be part of the program that the Colonel should go home with Mrs. Fazakerly to take care of her, and that Miss Tancred should go with them both to take care of the Colonel. They had not far to walk; only through the park and across the road to a little house opposite the lodge gates.
While they were looking for their hats Durant was left for a moment alone with Mrs. Fazakerly. She sank into a seat beside him, unstrung, exhausted; she seemed to be verging on that state of nervous collapse which disposes to untimely confidence.
"I like whist," said Mrs. Fazakerly; "but it must be an awful game to play if you don't like it."
He followed her gaze. It was fixed on Miss Tancred's retreating figure.
"Why on earth does she play if she doesn't like it?"
Mrs. Fazakerly turned on him, suddenly serious.
"She plays because the Colonel likes it—because she is the best girl in the world, Mr. Durant."
He stood reproved.
Three days passed; they brought nothing new; each was a repetition of the other; each merged itself in whist. No relief came from the outside world; the outside world must have found out long ago that it was not worth while driving many miles to call on the Tancreds.
Three days at Coton Manor would have been trying to anyone; to Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the apron-strings of the Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. He hovered perpetually round him; he watched his goings-out and his comings-in; there was no escaping his devilish ingenuity. While Durant was looking for a stick or a hat, he would secure him softly by the arm and lead him out for a stroll. He would say, "My dear Durant, the women are all very well in their way, but it is a luxury to have another man to talk to." He talked to Durant, leaning toward him lover-like, with the awful passion of the bore for his victim.
These strolls extended over several miles, without taking them beyond the bounds of Coton Manor. Durant began to disbelieve in the existence of a world beyond. Coton Manor had swallowed up the county; it seemed to have opened its gates and swallowed him up, too.
He told himself that he had done nothing to deserve his doom. He was not more selfish or more exactingthan other men; he was not sensual; he had not made mere physical pleasure his being's end and aim. He had been content with a somewhat negative ideal, the mere avoidance of boredom. He never struggled or argued with it, but whenever and wherever he met it he had simply packed his portmanteau and gone away. This repugnance of his had entailed endless traveling, but Durant was a born traveler. Hitherto his life had been free from any care beyond the trouble of avoiding trouble. But he had been lax in this matter of Coton Manor; he had had reason enough to suppose that the visit would bring him face to face with the thing he feared, and he had rushed into the adventure with open arms. And now, this horror that he had eluded so successfully for seven years he was to know more intimately than his own soul; he was to sound all the depths beyond depths of boredom. He had stayed in dull places before, but their dulness struck him now as naïf and entertaining by comparison. Other people lapsed helplessly into dulness; at Coton Manor they cultivated it; they kept it up. What was worse, they took it for granted in other people. It never seemed to occur to Miss Tancred or the Colonel that Maurice Durant could be interesting, that he had done anything worth mentioning. Not that he was sensitive to their opinion, it was simply that this attitude of theirs appealed unpleasantly to his imagination, giving it a cold foretaste of extinction. It was as if his flaming intellectual youth, with all its achievements, had been dropped into the dark, where such things are forgotten. At Coton Manor his claim to distinction rested on the fact that he was the Colonel's godson. The Colonel had appropriated, absorbed him, swallowed him up.
The fact that Durant was lapped in material comfort only intensified his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds wererich, and their wealth was not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake night after night in his luxurious bed he wondered how he ever got there, what on earth had induced him to accept their invitation. He cursed his infernal rashness, his ungovernable optimism; he had spent half his life in jumping at conclusions and at things, and the other half in jumping away from them, however difficult the backward leap. He had jumped at the Colonel's invitation.
To tell the truth, he would have jumped at anybody's at the time.
When he came back from his travels he had found himself a stranger in his own country. In every place he touched he had left new friends most agreeably disconsolate at his departure; he supposed (rashly again) that the old ones would be overjoyed at his return. As it happened, his reception in England was not cold exactly, but temperate, like the climate, and Durant had found both a little trying after the fervors and ardors of the South. The poor fellow had spent his first week at home in hansoms, rushing passionately from one end of London to the other, looking up his various acquaintances. He was disappointed, not to say disgusted, with the result. (Maurice Durant was always disgusted when other people failed to come up to his expectations.) His best friends were out of town, his second best were only too much in it. Many of them had abjured art and taken to stiff collars and conventions. He called on these at their offices. They were all diabolically busy in the morning and insufferably polite in the afternoon; they had flung him a nodor a smile or a "Glad to see you back again, old fellow," and turned from him with a preoccupied air. He remembered them as they were seven years ago, when they were all Bohemians together. They had no manners, good or bad, in those days, those young men; they called you by strange names; they posed you in peculiar attitudes and made abominable caricatures of your noble profile; but they would lend or borrow a five-pound note with equal readiness; they would give you a supper and a shake-down at any time of the night or morning. Now it seemed they thought twice about asking you to dinner, if indeed they thought about it at all. So Durant had been pleasantly surprised at his godfather's genial letter. Why, bless his little heart, the old boy had actually pressed him to stay for a fortnight.
Well, how was he to get through that fortnight? He decided that he would not get through it at all. He kept himself awake devising schemes for his liberation; he would find some business to take him up to town to-morrow; or, if he could not find it, he would invent it; he would send himself a telegram. And then, against his will, his mind began running on Miss Tancred. As he had been possessed by the ideal, so now he was haunted by the reality; it had a horrible fascination for him. He wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been young; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever made a joke; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been in love. This third idea was so incongruous, so impossible, that at last he found himself dallying with it for the mere extravagant humor of the thing.
If he had only been able to make himself agreeable to Miss Tancred—for Miss Tancred, if she had the will, had certainly the power to help him. The unhappy young man had made a careful inspection of the stablesto see if there was a lingering chance for him there. The sleek bays that brought him from the station—impossible; the Colonel's cob, a creature too safe to be exciting; and—yes, there was Miss Tancred's mare. The sight of the fiery little beast dancing in her stall had affected him with an uncontrollable desire to ride her. The groom, not without sympathy, had interpreted his longing glances.
"There's a-many casts sheep's eyes at that there mare, sir; but it 'ud be as much as my place is worth, sir, to let you or any other gentleman get atop of her. Nobody lays a 'and on that annymal but Miss Tancred. Miss Tancred's orders, sir."
He might have known it. Miss Tancred was good for nothing, not even for the loan of a mount.
Miss Tancred seemed aware that nothing was expected from her, and kept conscientiously out of his way. He saw nothing of her from breakfast till dinnertime and the evening, when she appeared as his official partner in the game of whist. What became of her in the meanwhile he did not know; he could only vaguely conjecture. She seemed to vanish, to lose herself in the vast workings of Coton Manor, or in that vaster entity, the Colonel.
By the fourth day Durant's irritable mood had changed to resignation. If he could not altogether adopt Mrs. Fazakerly's attitude and smile pleasantly into the jaws of dulness, he consented to be bored to death with a certain melancholy grace.
He had made a dash for freedom; he had actually started first thing in the morning with his sketching block and easel, and was congratulating himself on his benignant chance, when, as he sneaked round a corner of the house, the Colonel stepped out upon him from a side window. There was one hope for him.Rain had fallen over night, and the little gentleman was as yet in his slippers; he was feeling the damp gravel like a fastidious cat.
"Ah-ha!" said he, in the tone of joyful encounter. "And what do you propose to do with yourself this morning?"
Durant looked at his host with a sad reproachful gaze from which all bitterness had departed. He had felt inclined to reply that he proposed to commit suicide; as it was, he only said he thought of trying to sketch something.
The Colonel seemed a little offended at the proposal; it certainly implied that Durant had more confidence in his own resources than in those of the house.
"So that's your fad, is it? I think we can do better for you than that."
And as Durant had calculated he skipped back into the house, and before he could return with his boots on, Durant, by another miracle of chance or his own cunning, had contrived his escape.
He made his way up a slight slope, whence he could see far over the landscape. What he had as yet seen was not inspiring, the heavy full-blown charm of the Midlands in July, lonely, without any of the poetry of loneliness. As he looked about him he realized again that he was in the heart of the country, the great, slow, passionless heart whose pulses are interminable hours. If you love Nature as Durant loved her, for her sex with its divine caprices, its madness and its mystery, you will be disappointed with Wickshire. In Wickshire Mother Nature is no dubious Aphrodite; she is indissolubly married to man, and behaves like an ordinary British matron, comely and correct. Durant saw in the immediate foreground a paddock dotted with young firs, each in a ring fence, beyond the paddock afield of buttercups shining with a polished gleam, beyond the buttercups a horizon of trees. Before him to the southeast, soaring above the roofs of Whithorn-in-Arden, a church spire pointed the way to heaven; beyond that, traveling low above the railway cutting, a thin line of smoke indicated the way into the world. Behind him were more trees; the green crescent of the woods with the white front of Coton Manor shining in their arms like a heavy, foolish face. He had no patience with the landscape, with this Nature trimmed and tamed, these shaven meadows and clean-cut hedges and little rectangular plantations. It was a typical English landscape, a landscape most unnecessarily draped, where the bosom of the hills was always covered, and the very elms were muffled to their feet. A landscape destitute of passion and sensual charm, a landscape like Miss Tancred.
Miss Tancred. He no longer felt any wild resentment against that poor girl; he had learned to judge her leniently. If you live with bores you inevitably become a bore; at the same time, he admitted that she was doing her best not to bore him. Meanwhile he transferred his hatred to her surroundings.
This young man had no philosophy beyond the general impression that the universe was under infinite obligations to be good to him, a belief that had found itself rather rudely shaken. He chose his view and pitched his easel and relieved himself by one deep, metaphysical, soul-satisfying curse at the devilry of things. Then he set to work, and with the instinct of a born painter he tried to find possibilities in the despised landscape. Before long he had discovered mystery in the woods that lifted their heavy rounded contours to the sky, gathered and massed and piled on one another like clouds; deep mystery in their green,green drenched with liquid and aerial gray, pierced by thick black veins and hollowed into caverns of darkness and blue dusk. And, though he knew that he was tying himself to the place by taking it seriously, in an hour's time he was absorbed and happy.
He was startled by a voice behind him. "Do you think that it's so very beautiful?"
He turned round. Miss Tancred stood looking over his shoulders, not at him nor at his sketch, but at the distant prospect.
"It's—nice and open," he answered absently.
"Open? Wait till you've lived in it. To me it's like living with all the doors shut."
"Too many woods, perhaps. And yet there's always a charm about a wooded country; it's English."
"Yes, and, like everything English, it's much too serious, too conventional, too"—she paused for her epithet—"too disgustingly rich."
He was more startled than ever; she had put his own feeling about it into words.
"And then it's so painfully proper and respectable. Look at those ridiculous trees in their petticoats. English to a degree."
"Ah!—if you've been abroad——"
"I haven't been abroad."
"Proud insular boast!"
"I wasn't boasting. I was stating a fact."
"Well, you've some cause to boast. Not to have been abroad is distinction nowadays."
"If it comes to that I've never been out of this county, except to London now and then. You wouldn't think it."
He smiled, for it happened to be precisely what he had thought. It explained her somehow; he recognized in Miss Tancred the incurable provincial. To be sure,her sentiments were somewhat at variance with her character, an inconsistency not unusual in woman. All he said was, "It is a little extraordinary." He was wondering when she was going to go. She did not go.
"I'm glad you've discovered something to do here. It must be so deadly dull."
He found relief in ambiguity. "I am never dull"; adding irrelevantly, "it's a glorious view."
She brightened visibly. "If you like I can show you a better one than this. It's not so very far;"—she hesitated—"we might go to-morrow, perhaps; though it wouldn't be very amusing, I'm afraid."
Again he felt a touch of compunction. She had so clearly grasped the situation; she was so evidently sorry for him, so conscientious, even if mistaken, in her efforts to make amends, that he found her positively pathetic. He answered humbly that he would be delighted if she would be so good.
Then, conscientiously again, she left him. He watched her tall figure departing with energetic strides, and he decided that Miss Tancred was not so bad out of doors, but that she needed a large background.
The next morning he had the grace to remind her of her promise. They started at a rapid pace. Durant left the paraphernalia of his art behind him by way of intimating delicately that the hour was hers. Miss Tancred was evidently prepared for vigorous walking. She was dressed suitably and inoffensively in brown holland. She took him up a long, gradually rising hill to where a group of firs stood on an isolated mound.
Here Miss Tancred paused, with tilted profile, sniffing the ambient air. "This," she said, "is the highest point in the county; there is always a fresh breeze here; to-day you can smell the sea."
"Impossible; we must be right in the very center ofEngland, about a hundred miles from the nearest coast."
"You can hear it, then. Shut your eyes and listen."
He obeyed. The wind moved and the firs gave out their voice. He opened his eyes and glanced at Miss Tancred. She was leaning up against a fir; her eyes looked straight past him into the distance; the wind had loosened the hair about her forehead; her lips were parted, her eyes shone; there was an eagerness in her face he had not yet seen there. It was as if a dead woman had been suddenly made alive before him. She was gazing and listening.
"If you've never been out of Wickshire, where have you heard the sea?"
She answered curtly, "I don't know where I've heard it"; then added, as if by way of apology for her manner, "Do you like it?"
"Immensely."
"Then you must come up whenever you want to. You can always be alone here."
She spoke as if she were giving him the freedom of her private sanctuary.
"Have you any sketches of those places you've been to abroad?"
"Sketches? Any amount."
"Have you brought them with you?"
He blushed. He had brought many sketches in the hope of showing them to a wealthy godfather and an admiring god-sister.
"Some—a few."
"I wish you'd show them to me."
"I shall be delighted." He blushed again, this time for pleasure. With the desire to bestow a little of it, he asked rashly, "Do you sketch, Miss Tancred? I saw some water-colors——"
"They were my mother's. I do nothing."
"Oh, I see." (They were going home now.) "I was wondering what on earth you found to do here."
"I? A great many things. Business chiefly. My father is secretary to the Primrose League. I write all his letters for him."
"That's one way of being secretary to the Primrose League."
"The usual way, I think. Secretaries generally have under-secretaries, haven't they? My father dictates."
Durant smiled. He could see him doing it. "What else does Colonel Tancred do?"
"He does no end of things. All the business of the estate; and he speaks, at meetings, everywhere. He has lectured——"
It was pathetic, her eagerness to vindicate his intellect, to record his achievements, to convince Durant that she was proud of him, not to let him see.
For the rest of the way she was silent, the light died out of her eyes with every turning, and by the time they had reached Coton Manor Miss Tancred was herself again.
At whist that evening nobody was pleased. The Colonel looked sulky and offended, possibly at Durant's disaffection; Durant was moodier than ever, and even Mrs. Fazakerly seemed depressed. Miss Tancred remained imperturbable and indifferent, she won every trick without turning a hair, but when it was all over she left the table abruptly. She was visibly distressed. Mrs. Fazakerly gazed after her with an affectionate stare. She turned to Durant.
"For goodness' sake," she whispered, "say something nice to her."
For the life of him Durant could think of nothingnice to say, beyond congratulating her on her success in the accursed game.
Mrs. Fazakerly chimed in, "With or without a partner Miss Tancred wins!"
"I always win. So, I imagine, does Mr. Durant."
"And why should I always win?"
"You? You win because you care nothing about the game."
If you had told Durant that the end of his first week would find him sitting under the firs in lonely conversation with Miss Tancred, he would have smiled at you incredulously. Yet so it was. Her fear of him, if fear it had been, and not indifference, was wearing away. She seemed anxious to make friends with him if possible in a less painfully conscientious manner, and he, on his side, was beginning to tolerate her. In fact, he went so far as to own that, if it had not been for that ridiculous idea of his, he would have tolerated her from the first. It was not her fault if he had been fool enough to fall in love with her before sight or at half-sight. She had disappointed him (hence his natural disgust); but the thing had happened many times before in his experience. After all, he had had no grounds for his passionate belief in Miss Tancred beyond the argument from defect, the vague feeling that Destiny owed him amends for her intolerable shortcomings. But Durant's mind was too sane and versatile to be long concerned with passion yet unborn. He was not one of those pitiable sentimentalists who imagine that every petticoat, or at any rate every well-cut skirt, conceals a probable ideal. Some women of his acquaintance had defined, not to say denounced, him asa consummate and dangerous flirt, but these were not the most discerning of their sex. Durant described himself more correctly as a sympathetic, though dispassionate, observer of womankind. In other words, he was not a vulgar flirt; he flirted with understanding.
An understanding without flirtation was springing up between him and Miss Tancred. In this God-forsaken place they were comrades in boredom and isolation. She had said nothing, but in some impalpable yet intimate way he knew that she, too, was bored, that the Colonel bored her. The knowledge lay between them unnamed, untouched by either of them; they passed it by, she in her shame and he in his delicacy, with eyes averted from it and from each other. It was as if the horror had crept out through some invisible, intangible doorway of confession; unseen, unapproached, it remained their secret and the source of their mutual pity. Meanwhile she no longer avoided him; on the contrary, she showed an unmistakable liking for his society. She would come while he was sketching and sit beside him for five minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, remaining silent, or merely exchanging a few frank words with him before she went her way. In these matters she was gifted with an unerring tact; without a hint on Durant's part she seemed to know to a nicety how far her presence was agreeable or otherwise.
This time he had gone up the hill after dinner, and had found her sitting in the accustomed place. They had been alone that evening, for the Colonel was dining intimately with Mrs. Fazakerly. That lady, with a refined friendliness that did her credit, had refrained from including Miss Tancred and Durant in the invitation, thereby insuring them one evening's immunity from whist. Durant could make no better use of hisfreedom than by spending it alone out of doors; it seemed that Miss Tancred had done the same with hers.
She was sitting there on the edge of the mound, clasping her knees and gazing into the distance. He apologized for his intrusion, and she waked from her abstraction with a dreamy air, making a visible effort to take him in and realize him. But, though she said simply that she was glad he had come, the effect of his coming was to plunge her into deeper abstraction. They sat for some time without speaking. Miss Tancred had a prodigious faculty for silence, and Durant let her have her way, being indeed indifferent to Miss Tancred's way.
At last she spoke.
"It's odd how some people take Nature," said she; "for instance, Mrs. Fazakerly says she loves it because it's so soothing. She might just as well say she liked listening to an orchestra because it sends her to sleep. She can't love it for its own sake."
"You'll think me horribly rude, but I doubt if any woman can. That is the one thing a woman is incapable of—a pure passion for Nature, a really disinterested love of life. It's an essentially masculine sentiment."
"I don't at all agree with you."
"Don't you? To begin with, it argues more vitality than most women have got. They take to it as a substitute for other things; and to be content with it would mean that they had exhausted, outlived the other things."
"What other things?"
She was studying every line of his young, repugnant face, and Durant was a little embarrassed by her steady gaze.
"Other interests, other feelings—whatever it is that women do care for most."
"I don't know anything about women."
Her remark might have borne various interpretations, either that she knew nothing about herself, that she despised her own sex too much to include herself in it, or that she had tacitly adopted Durant's attitude, which seemed to leave her altogether outside of the discussion. He talked to her unconsciously, without any desire to please, as if he assumed that she expected as little from him as he from her. She never reminded him that she was a woman. It would have been absurd if she had insisted on it, and whatever she was Miss Tancred was not absurd.
She went on calmly, "So I can't say what they care for most; can you?"
"You know my opinion. I wanted yours."
"Mine isn't worth much. But I should say that in these things no two women were alike. You talk as if they were all made of the same stuff."
"So they are inside—in their souls, I mean."
"There's more unlikeness in their souls, I imagine, than there ever is in their bodies; and you wouldn't say an ugly woman was quite the same as a pretty one, would you?"
"Yes; in the obvious sense that they are both women. I admit that there may be an ugliness that cancels sex, to say nothing of a beauty that transcends it; but in either case the woman is unique."
"And if the woman, why not her soul?"
"Because—because—because there is a certain psychical quality that is eternal and unchangeable; because the soul is the seat of the cosmic difference we call sex. In man or woman that is the one unalterable fact—the last reality."
He spoke coldly, brutally almost, as if he, like herself, was blind to the pathos of her ignored and rejected womanhood.
She seemed to be thinking that last point over.
"Yes," she said, "I'm glad you came. I believe you can help me."
"I shall be delighted if I can."
"What do you think of Mrs. Fazakerly?"
Durant was a little taken aback by the suddenness of the question.
"What should I think?"
"I—I hardly know."
She knitted her black brows till they almost touched, and propped her chin with her hand, as if she were oppressed with the weight of her own thoughts. It struck him that her provincial mind entertained an unreasonable suspicion of the consummate little widow, a woman's jealousy of the superior creature compact of sex; and a sense of justice made him inclined to defend Mrs. Fazakerly. Besides, he liked Mrs. Fazakerly; she, at any rate, was not a bore.
"She's a very amusing woman, and I should say she was an uncommonly good sort, too."
To his surprise her face brightened. "Should you? Should you say that she had a good heart?"
"Really, Miss Tancred, I can't see into Mrs. Fazakerly's heart, but I wouldn't mind betting——"
"That she's good? And affectionate? And straight?"
"Straight as a die."
"And honest?"
"Oh, Lord, yes." He wondered whatever primitive meaning she attached to the word.
"Well, if you think that——"
"Mind you, my opinion may be utterly worthless."
"No, no. It's just the very sort of opinion I want."
"Why should it be?"
"Because it's the opinion of a man of the world. Mrs. Fazakerly's a woman of the world, so I thought you'd understand her. I don't."
"I've known her exactly a week, and you?"
"Two years. But then I don't observe character, and you do. And yet I have an intuition."
"Then by all means trust your intuition."
"That's it—I daren't. The truth is, I'm afraid of myself—my motives."
"Your motives are not yourself."
"Aren't they? If it wasn't for them I should be certain. I see she's a dear little woman, and I know that I like her."
"Then, for Heaven's sake, go on liking her; it's the best thing you can do."
"Isn't it rather horrid to like a person just because they may be of use to you?"
"Not in the least. You were pleased to say I might be of use to you, and I'm sure I hope you like me."
"Yes, I like you; but I think I like you for yourself. I'm afraid of liking Mrs. Fazakerly from the wrong motive."
"You can't like her from the wrong motive. You can't have a motive at all, if it comes to that. You might have a motive for killing her, or for cultivating her acquaintance, but not for liking her. You either like a person or not, and there's an end of it."
"If your motives are not yourself, what are they?"
"Lord only knows. Forces, tendencies, that determine your actions, which are the very smallest part of you. What you call intuitions, your feelings—hate (I should say you were a good hater), and love——" (her eyes, which had been fixed on his, dropped suddenly),"don't wait for motives. They're the only spontaneous things about you, the only realities you know." (And of these he had said just now that the last reality was sex. It was his point of view, a point from which it appeared that for him Miss Tancred had no existence.) "Of course there may be some transcendental sense in which they're not realities at all; but as far as we are concerned they're not only real, but positively self-existent."
As he thus discoursed, Durant blinked critically at the sky, while his pencil described an airy curve on the infinite blue, symbolizing the grace, the fluency, and the vastness of his thought.
"They, if you like, are you. It's very odd that you don't seem to trust them more."
She had turned from him till her face was a thin outline against the sky. She had a fine head, and carried it well, too; and at the moment the twilight dealt tenderly with her dress and face; it purified the tragic pallor of her forehead and all but defined that vague, haunting suggestion of a possible charm. Durant had it a moment ago—there—then. Ah! now he had lost it.
"I daren't trust my feelings. I can't. There are too many of them. They won't work the same way. They're all fighting against each other."
"Then let them fight it out, and let the strongest win."
"If I only knew whichwasthe strongest."
"You'll know some day. In the long run, you see, the strongest is bound to win."
"Not necessarily. There might be a number of little ones that all together would be stronger still."
"Oh, kill off the little beggars one at a time—go for them, throttle them, wring their necks, jump on them; and if they wriggle,stamp!"
"You can't jump on your own shadow. You can't stamp on them if they'reyou."
He groaned. Miss Tancred was getting too subtle; it was like sitting in the desert and playing at metaphysics with the Sphinx. He had had about enough of it. He rose, stretching his long limbs, and the action suggested the hideous tension of his intellect.
"You must let yourself go, Miss Tancred—let yourself go!" And he laughed at his own vision of Miss Tancred; Miss Tancred insurgent, Miss Tancred flamboyant, Miss Tancred voluptuous, volatile, victorious!
And then a thought struck him.
He turned and saw Miss Tancred still sitting motionless, nursing her knees; her pure inflexible profile glimmered against the dusk.
Durant had an idea, or rather two ideas, one purely comic, the other comic or tragic, according to the way you took it. He first of all discovered that the Colonel was laying siege to the heart of Mrs. Fazakerly, and at the same time conducting his campaign with an admirable discretion. There never was a little Colonel of militia so anxious to avoid committing himself. Not that the event could be considered doubtful for a moment. Measuring all risks, it was in the highest degree incredible that he would be called upon to suffer the indignity of repulse.
There was nothing extraordinary in that. To be sure, on the first face and blush of it, Durant had wondered how on earth Mrs. Fazakerly could tolerate the Colonel; but, when he came to think of it, there was no reason why she should not go a great deal farther thanthat. The Colonel's dullness would not depress her, she having such an eternal spring of gaiety in herself. She might even find it "soothing," like the neighboring landscape. And as she loved her laughter, it was not improbable that she loved its cause. Then she had the inestimable advantage of knowing the worst of him; her intelligent little eyes had seen him as he was; she could lay a soft finger on all his weak spots. There was this to be said for the Colonel, that he was all on the surface; there was nothing, positively nothing, behind him. Besides, Mrs. Fazakerly was not exacting. She had not lived forty years in the world without knowing the world, and no doubt she knew it too well to ask very much from it. Then the fact remained that the Colonel was an immaculate gentleman, immaculately dressed, and he was not the only item in the program. Coton Manor would be thrown in, and there were other agreeable accessories. Mrs. Fazakerly's tastes were all of the expensive sort, and her ambition aimed at something vaster than the mere adornment of her own person. In her household she displayed a talent, not to say a genius, for luxurious order. But a little dinner at the cottage opposite the lodge gates had convinced Durant that this elegance of hers was of a fragile and perishable sort. The peculiar genius of Mrs. Fazakerly clamored for material and for boundless scope. It could not do itself justice under two thousand a year at the very least. As things stood its exuberance was hampered both as to actual space (her drawing-room was only eighteen feet by twelve) and as to the more glorious possibilities that depend on income. At Coton Manor she would have a large field and a free hand. Heaven only knew what Mrs. Fazakerly's mind was made up of; but quite evidently it was made up.
So far so good; but there was less certainty as to the Colonel's attitude. As yet nothing was to be seen, so to speak, but his attitudes, which indeed were extremely entertaining. The little gentleman was balancing himself very deftly on the edge of matrimony, and Durant watched with a fearful interest the rash advance and circumspect retreat, the oscillating hair's-breadth pause, the perilous swerve, and desperate contortion of recovery.
Durant felt for him; he had so much to lose. Under Miss Tancred the working of his household was already brought to such exquisite perfection that any change must be for the worse. He had found out what became of Miss Tancred in her mysterious disappearances. As far as he could see the business of the estate was entirely superintended by the lady. He came across her in earnest conversation with the gardener; he met her striding across the fields with the farm-bailiff; he had seen her once on her black mare inspecting some buildings on the farthest limit of the property, the obsequious builder taking notes of her directions. She was obviously a capable woman, a woman of affairs. He presumed that these matters, with her household and secretarial work, filled up her days; he knew too well that whist accounted for her evenings. He did not know if there was any margin, any dim intellectual region, out of time, out of space, where Miss Tancred's soul was permitted to disport itself in freedom; she seemed to exist merely in order to supply certain deficiencies in the Colonel's nature. Mrs. Fazakerly had once remarked that Frida was "her father's right hand." It would have been truer to have said that she was right hand and left hand, and legs and brain to the student of meteorology. There had evidently been some tacit division of labor, by whichshe did all the thinking and all the work while he did the talking. Thus, to continue Durant's line of argument, the Colonel's comfort was secured to him without an effort on his part (otherwise it would not have been comfort); and when all was said and done Mrs. Fazakerly was a most indifferent player of whist.
Then there was the Colonel's age. Durant knew a man who had taught himself the 'cello at fifty-five. But the Colonel was not that sort of adventurous dilettante. Neither was Mrs. Fazakerly exactly like a violoncello, she was more like a piano; while Miss Tancred, from the Colonel's point of view, was like a hurdy-gurdy. Not a difficult instrument the hurdy-gurdy; you have only to keep on turning a handle to make it go. To be sure, you can get rather more out of a piano; but pianos are passionate things, ungovernable and slippery to the touch. The Colonel was fond of the humbler instrument that gave him the sense of accomplishment without the effort, the joys of themaestrowithout his labor and his pain.
He was in a double dilemma. If he had to choose between Miss Tancred and Mrs. Fazakerly his choice would never be made. On the other hand, if he decided for both, his comfort would be more insecure than ever. There would be jealousy to a dead certainty; in all mixed households that was where the shoe pinched. To pursue that vulgar figure, the Colonel's daughter was like a pair of old and easy shoes made by a good maker, a maker on whom he could rely; a wife would be like new boots ordered rashly from an unknown firm. They would be his best pair, no doubt, but your best pair is generally the tightest. He had some trying years before him; and well, a man does not put on new boots for a long uphill scramble.
So the Colonel's breast was torn with internecinewarfare, desire battling with habit, and habit with desire. No wonder if in that awful struggle the fate of one insignificant individual counted for nothing. Frida Tancred never had counted.
Durant admitted that his imagination was apt to work in somewhat violent colors, and that there might be a point of view from which the Colonel would tone down into a very harmless and even pathetic figure; for Mrs. Fazakerly he had no terrors. But there was the girl. It was hard to say exactly what he had done to her. Apparently he had taken her soul while it was young and squeezable, and had crushed it till it fitted into all his little habits; he had silenced her heart with commonplaces, and dulled her intellect with his incomprehensible fatuity. And through it all he had been the most innocent little gentleman alive. Oh, yes, he was pathetic enough in his way. He himself was only an instrument in the hands of irrepressible Nature who couples wild soul with tame, hot blood with cold blood, genius with folly, and makes her sport of their unhappy offspring. And Nature was playing a glorious game with Frida Tancred now.
That was Durant's second idea; the thought that had struck him so unpleasantly after his last interview with her. To put it coarsely, he had a suspicion, a fear, that Miss Tancred was beginning to fall in love with him. He might have known that it would happen. It was just the sort of damnable irony most likely to pursue that unfortunate woman. There could be no mistake about it; he knew it; he knew it by many subtle and infallible signs. Somewhere he had heard or read that no nice man ever knows these things. That was all nonsense; or, if it had any meaning at all, it could only mean that no nice man ever shows thathe knows. The fact remained that if he had loved her he would not have known.
For the disagreeable circumstance itself he called Heaven to witness that he had not been to blame. He had been ready to do his part, to fall down and worship the unknown Miss Tancred, the Miss Tancred of his vision. The hour had been ripe, the situation also, and the mood; the woman alone had failed him. Heaven knew he had done nothing to make her care for him. True, he had given her a certain amount of his society; since she found a pleasure in it he would have been a brute to deny her that poor diversion, that miserable consolation for the tedium of her existence. Perhaps he had tried too much to be sympathetic; but who again would not have tried? He had given her nothing to go upon. What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself—given herself away. How ludicrously pathetic some women are! You do them some kindness on an afternoon when you have nothing better to do and they reward you with the devotion of eternity; for they have no sense of proportion. The awkward thing is that it lays you under an eternal obligation to do something or other for them, you don't know exactly what; an intolerable position for a nice man.
So Durant's first feelings were surprise, annoyance, and a certain shame. Then he began to feel a little flattered, being perfectly sure that Frida Tancred was not the woman to give herself away to any ordinary man. He was the first, the only one, the one in a thousand, who had broken down her implacable reserve. He ended by feeling positively proud of hispower to draw out the soul of a creature so reticent and passionless and strange.
His time was not yet up, and the question was: Ought he to go or stay? He would have found or invented some pretext, and left long ago, but that in him the love of pleasure brought with it an equal fear of giving pain. It would give pain to the Colonel (who, after all, had received him kindly) if he went before his time. By the art of graceful evasion Durant had escaped many such an old gentleman as the Colonel; but when it came to doing the really disagreeable and ungraceful thing it seemed that his courage failed him.
There was no doubt in Miss Tancred's mind on the delicate point. She was even capable of making a sacrifice to keep him.
He met her one morning riding on her black mare. Miss Tancred looked well on horseback; the habit, the stiff collar, the hard hat, were positively becoming, perhaps because they left no room for decorative caprice. She drew up, and Durant ran his hand lovingly over the warm shining neck and shoulders of the mare. Miss Tancred's eyes followed the movements of his hand, then they traveled up his tall figure and down again.
"Your legs are rather long," said she, "and you're heavier than I am; but you can ride her if you like."
"I shouldn't think of it," said Durant, magnificently mendacious. He had been very early enlightened as to his chances with the mare; but the temptation to ride her had never died in him.
"Unless you ride," she continued, "there is nothing for you to do here. Then you'll be bored to death; and then, I suppose, you'll go?"
"And bury myself? And then?"
"You won't be buried long. You'll rise again fast enough, somewhere else."
"And what if I do go and do all these things?"
"Well, I don't want you to go—and do them."
She moved on, and he walked beside her, his hand on the mare's mane.
"I can't think why you've stopped so long. Every morning since you came I've been expecting you to go. I thought you'd say your father was dying, or that your partner was ill, and you had urgent business in town. It's what they all do. Do you know, we've asked no end of people down, and they never stay more than three days. They always get letters or telegrams, or something. No, I'm wrong; one man stopped a week. He sprained his ankle the first day, and left before he was fit to travel."
(Durant laughed. She really amused him, thisingénueof thirty, with the face of a Sphinx and the conversation of a child.)
"And they never come again. There's something about the place they cannotstand."
They were walking leisurely together in full sight of Coton Manor. She gazed at it anxiously.
"Does it—does it look so very awful?"
"Well—architecturally speaking—no, of course it doesn't."
"Ah, you're getting used to it. Do you know you'll have been here a fortnight next Monday?"
About the corners of her mouth and eyes there played a dawning humor.
"Come, that sounds as if you did want me to go."
"No it doesn't. How could it? If you don't believe me, here's the proof—you can ride Polly every day if you'll stop another week."
Another week! Most decidedly she had a sense ofthe monstrous humor of the thing. If she could see it that way she was saved. He had not the heart to kill that happy mood by a coarse refusal; it would have been like grinding his heel on some delicate, struggling thing just lifting its head into life.
Besides, she had really touched him. His legs, as Miss Tancred had observed, were a little long, otherwise Durant had the soul and the physique of a tamer of horses. The sight of Polly filled him with desire that was agony and rapture; he saw himself controlling the splendid animal; he could feel her under him, bounding, quivering, pulsating, he himself made one with every movement of her nervous, passionate body. It was too much. Beside that large, full-blooded pleasure, his scruples showed colorless and light as air.
That happened on a Friday. He had only two clear days more. He found himself seriously considering the desirability of staying over Monday.
As ill-luck would have it Saturday was a wet day, and Durant, instead of riding the mare, was wandering aimlessly about the house. He had finished all the books in his bedroom and was badly in want of more. He knocked up against Frida Tancred in a dark passage, apologized, and confided in her. As usual she was sorry for him.
"I'm afraid we haven't many books; but you'll find some of mine in here." She opened a door as she spoke, and passed on.
Durant found himself in a room which he had not yet investigated. It was somewhat bare as to furniture; it struck strange to his senses as if he had stumbledinto another world; in some occult way it preserved a tradition of travel and adventure. The bookcase he came to inspect was flanked by a small cabinet of coins and curios—Italian, Grecian, Egyptian, and Japanese; the walls were hung with bad landscapes interspersed with maps.
One of these, an uncolored map of Europe, attracted his attention. It was drawn by hand in Indian ink, a red line and accompanying arrow heads followed the coast and strung together such inland places as were marked upon the blank. The line started from Southampton and reached the Mediterranean by the Bay of Biscay; it shot inland to the great cities of Italy, returning always to the sea. It skirted Greece, wound in and out of the Ionian islands, touched at Constantinople, ringed the Bosporus and the Black Sea, wheeled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then swept wildly up the north of Russia to Archangel and the Arctic Ocean; thence it followed the Scandinavian coast-line, darted to Iceland, and dipped southward again to Britain by way of the Hebrides. Off Queenstown the arrowheads pointed west, winged for the Atlantic. He found the same red line again on a blank map of Asia heading for India by China and Japan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route?
But it was not these things alone that gave the room its fantastic and alien air. What dominated the place was the portrait of a woman, a woman who had Frida's queer accented eyebrows and Frida's eyes, with some more fiery and penetrating quality of her own, something more inimitably fine and foreign. The portrait(which struck Durant as decidedly clever) was signed by some unknown Russian artist, and he recognized it as that of Frida's mother, the lady of the landscapes. He wondered if it was the demon ofennuithat had driven poor Mrs. Tancred to the practice of her terrible art, if she had had a spite against Coton Manor, which she vented by covering its walls with bad pictures.
He turned to the bookcase. Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Björnsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came across some odd volumes of modern Greek. A whole shelf was devoted to books of travel; grammars and dictionaries made up the rest. Miss Tancred's taste in books was a little outlandish, but it was singularly virile and robust. He had been prepared to suspect her of a morbid pedantry, having known more than one lady in her desperate case who found consolation in the dead languages. But Miss Tancred betrayed no ghoulish appetites; if she had a weakness for tongues, she had also the good taste to prefer them living.
Durant was so much absorbed in these observations that he did not hear her come into the room.
"Have you found anything you can read?" she asked.
"I've found a great deal that I can't read. Youdogo in strong for languages."
"That's nothing; my mother was a Russian, and Russians know every language better than their own. I don't know more than seven besides mine. And I can only read and write them. They will never be any use to me."
"How can you tell what may be of use to you? Even Mrs. Fazakerly, or I?" Durant was anxious to give a playful turn to that remarkable discussion they once had; he thus hoped to set the tone for all future conversations with Miss Tancred. "I admit that you can't live on languages, they are not exactly safety-valves for the emotions; nobody can swear in more than three of them at a time. I think music's better. Instead of playing whist you ought to play Chopin."
"It's better to play whist well than Chopin badly."
"Better to rule in Hades than fool in the other place, you think? Miss Tancred, you are as proud as Lucifer."
"I don't see that any good is got by murdering the masters."
"It saves some women from worse crimes, I believe. Why didn't you take to sketching, then?Thatonly kills time."
Miss Tancred was splendid in her scorn. "Kill time with painting bad pictures? I'd rather time killed me."
Ah, that was what he liked about her. She had not revenged herself on Nature by making hideous caricatures of Nature's face; she did not draw in milk-and-water colors, and she did not strum. She had none of the exasperating talents, the ludicrous ambitions of the amateur; she was altogether innocent of intellectual vanity.
"That reminds me," said she, "that I've seen nothing of those wonderful sketches you said you'd show me."
He had clean forgotten the things. Well, he could hardly do better than exhibit them; it would keep her quiet, and save him from perilous personalities.
At first he thought the exhibition was going to give her more pain than pleasure. He sat beside her, and she took the sketches from him gingerly, one by one,and looked at them without a word. A visible nervousness possessed her; her pulses clamored, she seemed to struggle with her own unsteady breathing. Once, when in the transfer of a drawing her hand brushed against his, she drew it back again as if it had dashed against a flame. Durant had noticed once or twice before that she avoided his touch.
Suddenly she awoke out of the agony of her consciousness. One picture had held her longer than the rest.
"It's beautiful—beautiful," she murmured.
"I'm glad you like it," said Durant, pleased at her first sign of admiration.
"Oh, I don't mean your picture—I mean the place."
"It's not a very good picture perhaps——"
"I don't know whether it's good or bad; it seems to me rather bad, though I can't say what's wrong with it. It looks unfinished."
"Itisunfinished, but that's not what's wrong with it. These are better—better painting."
His hand brushed hers in vain this time. She remained absorbed. "I don't care two straws about the painting; they may be masterpieces for all I know; it'sthat—that stretch of sand licked by the sea, and the grass trodden down by the wind—the agony and beauty and desolation of it——" She laid it down unwillingly, and took the others from his hand.
"Oh, what's this?"
"A wall in Suza."
"I've never seen anything like that. The light seems to be moving—soaking into it and streaming out again. It looks as if it would burn if you touched it."
The artist in him laughed for pure pleasure. "It's all very well, you know, but they must be infernally good if they make you feel like that."
"They may be. Have you seen all these things, or have you done any of them out of your head?"
"Seen them, of course. I never paint 'out of my head'; I haven't enough imagination."
"Show me more places where you've been. Tell me about them. You might have done that before."
He obeyed, giving her his experience, his richest and his best; he drew for her scenes and things, not in their crude and temporary form, but as they lived for him and for his art, idealized, eternalized by the imagination that sees them as parts of the immortal whole; and yet vivid, individual, drenched with the peculiar color that made them equally and forever one with the soul of Maurice Durant. She hardly seemed to heed, hardly seemed to listen or to follow. She looked as if hearing were already absorbed in sight.
Durant put a small oil painting into her hand. He had kept his finest to the last. "If you're fond of the sea that may please you."
Mid-ocean, the slope and trough of a luminous sea; in the foreground one smooth, high-bosomed, unbroken wave, the light flung off from its crest like foam, to slide down its shoulder like oil on rounded glass. On the sky-line the white peak of a sail; the whole a heaving waste of wind and water, light and air. It was a consummate bit of painting, as nobody knew better than Maurice Durant.
She looked at it as though she would never be tired of looking. A sudden impulse seized him, a blind instinct to give pleasure at any cost, to make amends for pain.
"If you honestly like it, I wish you'd keep it."
"Keep it? Keep it? Do you really mean it?"
"It would give me pleasure if you would."
"But isn't—might it not be valuable?"
It was valuable, as Durant reflected somewhat regretfully, but he answered well. "Valuable chiefly to me, I fancy. Which is all the more reason, if you like it——"
"Like it? I should lo——" She drew back her breath. "No; I think I'd better not. Thank you very much, all the same." She laid the canvas down with a gesture of renunciation.
"Now that's foolish. Why ever won't you?"
"I daren't. I daren't live with it. It would remind me of all the things I want to forget."
"What things?" He felt that the question was cruel, it was probing the very heart of pain. But his curiosity was too strong. The fountains of the deep were breaking up; he knew that he had only to give the word to witness an astounding transformation of the woman. He had given the word. Her face was changing; it had taken on the likeness of her foreign mother, intensified in its subtlety and fire.
"What things? The things I want to do and can't; the things I want to see—the things——" She stopped. "Do you know, I don't even like to have those sketches of my mother's hanging about; they haunt me so intolerably, they tempt me to that degree that sometimes I can hardly bear to look at them."
He glanced at the drawings.Hecould hardly bear to look at them either. Poor wraiths and skeletons of landscapes, he would have thought them too fleshless and bloodless to touch even the ghost of longing.
She took up the picture she had just laid down. "Butthis—it's not painting, it's real; it's a piece torn out of the living world. It would bring it so horribly near me—don't you see?"
He thought he saw. He looked, and she lowered hereyelids. On to the slope of his wave there splashed a tear, salt to the salt.
She got up, turned away from him, and leaned against the window frame, staring out at the gravel walk, the lawn, the paddock, all the sedate, intolerable scene. Her breast heaved; she was shaken by a tumult of vision and desire.
"If only I could get away—get away from this!"
It was not she that cried out, but some other self, unacknowledged and unappeased, smothered and crushed and hidden out of sight.
Durant was moved by the revelation, and a little frightened, too.
"And why not get away?" he asked gently.
"Because I can't do anything like other people, by bits and halves. If I once go, I shall never come back—never. There's no use thinking about it. I've thought about it till I could have gone mad." She faced him bravely. "Mr. Durant, if you ever want a thing as badly as I want that, let me tell you that it will be simpler and easier to give it up altogether, for always, than to keep on looking at it and touching it and letting it go."
"Do you apply that principle to everything?"
"Nearly everything."
"H'm. Uncompromising. Yet I doubt if you are wise."
"Wise? Isn't it wiser to stand a little hunger than to go back to starvation after luxury?"
"Oh, of course; at that rate you can bring your soul down to a straw a day. But in the end, you know, it dies."
"If it comes to that, mine was dead ages ago, and buried quite decently, too. I think we won't dig it up again; by this time it might not look pretty."
At any other time she would have alienated his sympathy by that nasty speech; it was the sort of thing he hated women to say. But he forgave her because of her evident sincerity.
She dried her eyes and left him to his own reflections.
So this was Frida Tancred? And he had thought of her as the Colonel's daughter, a poor creature, subdued to the tyranny of habit. Habit indeed! She had never known even that comparative calm. It was not habit that had bound her to that dreadful old man, who was the father of her body, but with whom her soul recognized no kinship. Her life must have been an agony of self-renunciation, an eternal effort not to be.
He doubted her wisdom; but he was not sure that he did not admire her courage. That uncompromising attitude was more dignified than the hesitations of weaker natures. When women set out with the bold intention of living resolutely in the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful, they sometimes find themselves brought up sharply midway at the threshold of the Good; and there they stand vacillating all the time, or at the most content themselves now and then with a terrified rush for the Beautiful and the Whole. They are fascinated by all three and faithful to none. Frida Tancred scorned their fatuous procedure. Balked of the best, she would never console herself with half-measures and the second best; as for all lesser values, there was something in her which would always mark her from Mrs. Fazakerly and her kind. With Frida it was either the whole or nothing; either four bare walls or the open road where there is no returning.
She would go no way where the Colonel could not follow.
Durant, on his way to bed that night, saw somethingthat told him so much. Father and daughter stood with their backs to him at the end of the long corridor. The Colonel was putting out the lights. Frida had just nodded good night to him at her bedroom door, when she turned impetuously and flung her arms round the little gentleman. She pressed his head against her neck and held it there an instant, a passion of remorse and tenderness in the belated caress. The Colonel was, as it were, taken off his feet; he was visibly embarrassed. Durant saw his eyes staring over her shoulder, in their profound stupidity helpless and uncomprehending.
It was Sunday afternoon, and they had been taking tea with Mrs. Fazakerly. This was the second time that Durant had had the opportunity of studying Mrs. Fazakerly at home, of filling in the little figure on its own appropriate background. The first thing that struck him was that the background was not appropriate, or rather that it was inadequate. Mrs. Fazakerly's drawing-room had an air of uneasy elegance, of appearances painfully supported on the thin edge of two hundred a year. It was furnished with a too conspicuous care; the most insignificant details were arranged so as to lead up to and set off her good things, which were few and far between. There was no rest in it for the eye that was perpetually seized and riveted on some bit of old silver, or Oriental drapery, some Chippendale cabinet or chair. Such things were the commonplaces of Coton Manor, and there they fell unobtrusively into their place. Here they were touched up and handled, posed out of all simplicity;they bore themselves accordingly with a shining consciousness of their own rarity; they made an unblushing bid for praise. In Mrs. Fazakerly's drawing-room the note of taste was forced.
The invitation had come as a sort of farewell attention to Durant. Its valedictory character was further emphasized by Mrs. Fazakerly's proposing to walk home with them, and finally falling into the rear with Durant.
As a turn in the drive brought them within sight of Coton Manor, Mrs. Fazakerly balanced herpince-nezon the bridge of her nose. It remained there, and he judged that Mrs. Fazakerly was in no mood for mirth.
"That house," said Mrs. Fazakerly, "annoys me."
"Why?"
"Because it hasn't had justice done to it."
"I should have thought that was a ground for pity rather than resentment."
Mrs. Fazakerly shrugged her shoulders ever so little. "That drawing-room—did you ever see anything like it? And such possibilities in it, too. I can't bear to think of all those beautiful things wasted, just for want of a little taste, a little arrangement—the right touch."
The widow's white fingers twitched. It was not vulgar cupidity; it was the passion of the born genius, of the lover of art for art's sake, who sees his opportunity given into the hands of an inferior. If only she had the ordering, the decoration of Coton Manor! Durant thought of the cottage at the gates, her cramped and humble sphere; it was not her fault so much as the defect of her instrument, that forcing of the note of taste; no wonder that she longed for the rich harmonies of Coton Manor under "the right touch," the touch of the master.
She continued, "But poor dear Miss Tancred, you know, she will have it left just as it was in Mrs. Tancred's time; she won't change a picture or a chair in it. That's Frida all over. She's made that house a monument to her mother's memory. And think what she might have made it."
"I'm thinking what she might have made of her life. She seems to be making that a monument to her father's memory."
"Ah! and the things she could have done with it."
Impossible to say whether Mrs. Fazakerly referred to Miss Tancred's house or her life. Durant smiled at her probable conception of Coton Manor, with its tragedy of splendid possibilities gone to waste; but Mrs. Fazakerly's idea cut both ways.
She sighed wearily.
"These drives were not made to be walked up. There's another mile and a half of it, and I'm half-dead already. I shall sit down."
She led the way to an elm tree fallen in the grass, examined it critically, sat down, and made a place for him at her side.
"So you're going to-morrow? Is that so?"
"It is—probably."
"It's a pity—just as you and Miss Tancred have made friends."
"The best of friends must part," said he lightly.
"Yes. Well, I'm glad you've managed to be nice to her, after all. She's come out in the most astonishing manner since you came. What have you been doing to her?"
"I've done nothing to her, I assure you."
"Ah, you mean you've not been making love to her."
"I don't mean anything of the sort."
Durant was angry. It was borne in upon him thatMrs. Fazakerly was vulgar, after all. She looked at him, and herpince-nezbalanced itself on the bridge of her nose, then leapt its suicidal leap. She was amused with the ambiguity of his reply.
"That'sall right. Heaven help the man who does make love to her, if he means it. That girl's a riddle to me. I used to think she cared a little for her father; but it's my belief that Frida Tancred cares for nobody, not even herself. She simply doesn't know what love is, and she doesn't want to know. Why am I saying these alarming things to you? I'm saying them because I'm old enough to be your mother, and because I like you. You're clever, and you've got a sense of humor, too, though I can't say it's been much use to you since you came here. But, with all your cleverness, you'll never understand Frida Tancred. She's not like other women, the sort you've flirted with so much. Don't tell me you haven't; for you have. She can't help it. Her mother was a queer fantastic creature, and Frida's just like her, only stronger, much stronger, and deeper, which makes it worse. I'm sorry for her, because you see I'm very fond of her, and I think there's nothing—positively nothing—I wouldn't do to help her."