“I think that I have become a priest, Alice,” he said. “I see everything differently. And weren’t you brought up in a religious way—to go to church, seek props, say your prayers, sacrifice yourself and live for others? Can’t you take hold of that again? It’s the only way.”
Her quick flaming was justified, he knew; one shouldn’t speak of help when one was so far away; he had exaggerated the sacerdotal note. “Oh, you despise me! It is because of that, and you are trying to hide it from me! What is religion to me, what is anything—anything in the world to me—if I have lost you, Gavan? Why are you so cruel, so horrible? I can’t understand it! I can’t bear it! Oh, I can’t! Why are our lives wrecked like this? Why did you leave me? Why have I become wicked? I was never, never meant to be wicked.” Tears, not of abasement, not of appeal, but of pure anguish ran down her face.
He was nearer to that elemental sadness and could speak with a more human tone. “You are not wicked—no more—no less—than any one. I don’t despise you. Believe me, Alice. If I hadn’t changed, this would have drawn me to you; I should have felt a deeper tenderness because you needed me more. But think of me as a priest: I have changed as much as that. And remember that what you have yourself found out is true—the only thing to be afraid of is oneself, and the only escape from fear is to—is to”—he paused, hearing the tritenessof his own words and wondering with a new wonder at their truth, their gray antiquity, their ever-verdant youth—“is to renounce,” he finished.
He was standing now, ready for departure. In her eyes he saw at last the dignity of hopelessness, of an accepted doom, a pain far above panic.
“Dear Alice,” he said, taking her hand—“dear Alice.” And, with all the delicacy of his shrinking from a too great directness, his eyes had a steadiness of demand that sank into the poor woman’s tossed, unstable soul, he added, “Don’t ever do anything ugly—or foolish—again.”
Her lover lost,—the very slightness of the words “ugly,” “foolish,” told her how utterly lost,—a deep thrill of emotional exaltation went through the emptiness he left. She longed to clasp the lost lover and to sink at the knees of the priest.
“I will be good. I will renounce myself,” she said, as though it were a creed before an altar; and hurriedly she whispered, poor child, “Perhaps in heaven—we will find each other.”
Gavan often thought of that pathetic human clutch. So was the dream of an atoning heaven built. It kept its pathos, even its beauty, for him, when the whole tale ended in the world’s shrug and smile. He heard first that Alice had become an emotionally devout churchwoman;—that lasted for a year;—and then, alas! alas!—but, after all, the smile and shrug was the best philosophy,—that she rode once more with the Nietzschian lover. He had one short note from her: he would have heard—perhaps, at any rate, he would know what to think when he didhear that she saw the man again. And she wanted him to know from her that it was not as he might think: she really loved him now—the other; not as she had loved Gavan,—that would always be first,—but very much; and she needed love, she must have it in her life, and she was lifting this man who loved her, was helping his life, and she had broader views now and did not believe in creeds or in the shibboleths that guided the vulgar. And she was harming no one, no one knew. Life was far too complicated, the intricacies of modern civilization far too enmeshing, for duty to be seen in plain black and white. The whole question of marriage was an open one, and one had a right to interpret one’s duty according to one’s own lights. Gavan saw the hand of the new master through it all. Shortly after, the death of Alice’s husband, killed while tiger-shooting, set her free, and the new master proved himself at all events a fond one by promptly marrying her. So ended Alice in his life.
There was not much more to look back on after that. His return to England; his entering the political arena, with neither desire nor reluctance; his standing for the town his uncle’s influence marked out for him; the fight and the very gallant failure,—there had been, for him, an amused interest in the game of it all. The last year he had spent in his Surrey home, usually in company with a really pathetic effigy of the past—his father, poor and broken in health, the old serpent of Gavan’s childhood basking now in torpid insignificance, its fangs drawn.
People probably thought that he had been soured by an initial defeat. Gavan knew that the game had merely ceased to amuse him. What amused him most was concentrated and accurate scholarship. He was writing a book on some of the obscurer phases of religious enthusiasm, studying from a historical and psychological point of view the origin and formation of queer little sects,—failures in the struggle for survival,—their brief, ambiguous triumphs and their disintegrations.
His unruffled stepping-back from the arena of political activity was to the more congenial activity of understanding and observation. But there burned in him none of the observer’s, the thinker’s passion. He worked as he rode or ate his breakfast. Work was part of the necessary fuel that kept life’s flame bright. While he lived he didn’t want a feeble, flickering flame. But at his heart, he was profoundly indifferent to work, as to all else.
GAVAN’Smind, as he leaned back in the railway carriage, had passed over the visual aspect of this long retrospect, not in meditation, but in a passive seeing of its scenes and faces. Eppie’s face, fading in the mist; Robbie, silhouetted on the sky; the sulky Grainger; his uncle; his mother, and the vision of the spring day where he had wandered in the old dream of pain and into its cessation; finally, Alice, her pale hair and wistful eyes and her look when, at parting, she had said that they might be together in heaven.
He had rarely known a greater lucidity than inthose swift, lonely hours of night. It was like a queer, long pause between a past accomplished and a future not yet begun—as though one should sunder time and stand between its cloven waves. The figures crossed the stage, and he seemed to see them all in the infinite leisure of an eternal moment.
This future, its figures just about to emerge from the wings into full view, slightly troubled his reverie. It was at dawn that his mind again turned to it with a conjecture half amused and half reluctant. There was something disturbing in the linkage he must make between that child’s face on the mist and the Miss Gifford he was so soon to see. That she would, at all events in her own conception, dominate the stage, he felt sure; she might even expect a special attention from a spectator whose memory could join hers in that far first act. He was pretty sure that his memory would have to do service for both; and quite sure that memory would not hold for her, as it did for him, a distinct tincture of pain, of restlessness, as though there strove in it something shackled and unfulfilled.
One’s thoughts, at four o’clock in the morning, after hours of sleeplessness, became fantastic, and Gavan found himself watching, with some shrinking, this image of the past, suddenly released, brought gasping and half stupefied to the air, to freedom, to new, strong activity, after having been, for so long, bound and gagged and thrust into an underground prison.
He turned to a forecast of what Eppie would probably be like. He had heard a good deal abouther, and he had not cared for what he had heard. The fact that one did hear a good deal was not pleasing. Every one, in describing her, used the word charming; he had gathered that it meant, as applied to her, more than mere prettiness, wit, or social deftness; and it was precisely for the more that it meant that he did not care.
Apparently what really distinguished her was her energy. She traveled with her cousin, Lady Alicia Waring, a worldly, kindly dabbler in art and politics; she rushed from country-house to country-house; she worked in the slums; she sat on committees; she canvassed for parliamentary friends; she hunted, she yachted, she sang, she broke hearts, and, by all accounts, had high and resolute matrimonial ambitions. Would Eppie Gifford “get” So-and-so was a question that Gavan had heard more than once repeated, with the graceless terseness of our modern colloquialism, and it spoke much for Eppie’s popularity that it was usually asked in sympathy.
This reputation for a direct and vigorous worldliness was only thrown into more pungent relief by the startling tale of her love-affair. She had fallen in love, helplessly in love, with an impecunious younger son, an officer in the Guards—a lazy, lovable, petulant nobody, the last type one would have expected her to lose her head over. He was not stupid, but he didn’t count and never would. The match would have been a reckless one, for Eppie had, practically, only enough to pay for her clothes and her traveling expenses. The handsome guardsmanhad not even prospects. Yet, deliberately sacrificing all her chances, she had fallen in love, been radiantly engaged, and then, from the radiance, flung into stupefying humiliation. He had thrown her over, quite openly, for an ugly little heiress from Liverpool. Poor Eppie had carried off her broken heart—and she didn’t deny that it was broken—for a year or so of travel. This had happened four years ago. She had mended as bravely as possible,—it wasn’t a deep break after all,—and on the thrilling occasion of her first meeting with the faithless lover and his bride was magnificently sweet and regal to the ugly heiress. It was surmised that the husband was as uncomfortable as he deserved to be. But this capacity for recklessness, this picture of one so dauntless, dazed and discomfited, hardly redeemed the other, the probably fundamental aspect. She had lost her head; but that didn’t prove that when she had it she would not make the best possible use of it. There was talk now—Eppie’s was the publicity of popularity—of Gavan’s old-time rival, Grainger, who had inherited an immense fortune and, unvarnished and defiantly undecorative on his lustrous background, was one of the world’s prizes. All that he had was at Eppie’s feet, and some more brilliant alternative could be the only cause for hesitation in a young woman seared by misfortune and cured forever of folly.
So the talk went, and Gavan took such gabble with a large pinch of ironic incredulity; but at the same time the gossip left its trail. The impetuous and devastating young lady, with her assurance and heraim at large successes, was to him a distasteful figure. There was pain in linking it with little Eppie. It stood waiting in the wings and was altogether novel and a little menacing to one’s peace of mind. He really did not want to see Miss Gilford; she belonged to a modern type intensely wearisome to him. But she was staying with her uncle and aunt—only Miss Barbara was left—at Kirklands, and the general, after a meeting in London, had written begging him to pay them all a visit, and, since there had seemed no reason for not going, here he was.
Here he was, and round the corner of the wing the new Eppie stood waiting. Poor little Eppie of childhood—she was lost forever.
But all the clearness of the night concentrated, at dawn, into that vivid memory of the past where they had wandered together, sharing joy and sorrow.
That was long, long over. To-morrow was already here, and to-morrow belonged to the new Eppie.
GAVAN spent the morning in Edinburgh, seeing an old relative, and reached Kirklands at six.
It was a cold October evening, the moors like a dark, sullenly heaving ocean and a heavy bar of sunset lying along the horizon.
The windows of the old white house mirrored the dying color, and here and there the inner light of fire and candle seemed like laughter on a grave face. With all its loneliness it was a happy-looking house; he remembered that; and in the stillness of the vast moors and the coming night it made him think of a warmly throbbing heart filling with courage and significance a desolate life.
The general came from the long oak library, book in hand, to welcome him. Gavan was almost automatically observant of physical processes and noted now the pronounced limp, the touch of garrulity—symptoms of the fine old organism’s placid disintegration. Life was leaving it unreluctantly, and the mild indifference of age made his cordiality at once warmer and more impersonal than of old.
As he led Gavan to his room, the room of boyhood,near Eppie’s, overlooking the garden and the wooded hills, he told him that Eppie and Miss Barbara were dressing and that he would have time for a talk with them before dinner at eight.
“It’s changed since you were here, Gavan. Ah! time goes—it goes. Poor Rachel! we lost her five years ago. If Eppie didn’t look after us so well we should be lonely, Barbara and I. We seldom get away now. Too old to care for change. But Eppie always gives us three or four months, and a letter once a week while she’s away. She puts us first. This is home, she says. She sees clever people at Alicia Waring’s, has the world at her feet,—you’ve heard, no doubt,—but she loves Kirklands best. She gardens with me—a great gardener Eppie, but she is good at anything she sets herself to; she drives her aunt about, she reads to us and sings to us,—you have heard of her singing, too,—keeps us in touch with life. Eppie is a wonderful person for sharing happiness,” the general monologued, looking about the fire-lit room; and Gavan felt that, from this point of view, some of the little Eppie might still have survived.
“So you have given up the idea of the House?” the general went on.
“I’m no good at it,” said Gavan; “I’ve proved it.”
“Proved it? Nonsense. Wait till you are fifty before saying that. Why, you’ve everything in your favor. You weren’t enough in earnest; that was the trouble. You didn’t care enough; you played into your opponents’ hands. The Britishpublic doesn’t understand idealism or irony. Eppie told us all about it.”
“Eppie? How did Eppie know?” He found himself using her little name as a matter of course.
“She knows everything,” the general rejoined, with his air of happy, derived complacency; “even when she’s not in England, she never loses touch. Eppie is very much behind the scenes.”
The simile recalled to Gavan his own vision of the stage and the waiting figure. “Even behind my scenes!” he ejaculated, smiling at so much omniscience.
“From the moment you came into public life, yes.”
“And she knows why I failed at it? Idealism and irony?”
“That’s what she says; and I usually find Eppie right.” The general, after the half-humorous declaration, had a pause, and before leaving his guest, he added, “Right, except about her own affairs. She is a child there yet.”
Eppie’s disaster must have been keenly felt and keenly resented at Kirklands. The general made no further reference to it and Gavan asked no question.
There was a fire, a lamp, and several clusters of candles in the long, dark library when Gavan entered it an hour later, so that the darkness was full of light; yet he had wandered slowly down its length, looking about him at the faded tan, russet, and gilt of well-remembered books, at the massive chairs and tables, all in their old places, all so intimately familiar,before seeing that he was not alone in the room.
Some one in white was sitting, half submerged in a deep chair, behind the table with its lamp—some one who had been watching him as he wandered, and who now rose to meet him, taking him so unawares that she startled him, all the light in the dim room seeming suddenly to center upon her and she herself to throw everything, even his former thoughts of her, into the background.
It was Eppie, of course, and all that he had heard of her, all that he had conjectured, fell back before the impression that held him in a moment, long, really dazzled, yet very acute.
Her face was narrow, pale, faintly freckled; the jaw long, the nose high-bridged, the lips a little prominent; and, as he now saw, a clear flush sprang easily to her cheeks. Eyes, lips, and hair were vivid with color: the hair, with its remembered rivulets of russet and gold, piled high on her head, framing the narrow face and the long throat; the eyes gray or green or gold, like the depths of a mountain stream.
He had heard many analogies for the haunting and fugitive charm of Miss Gifford’s face—a charm that could only, apparently, be caught with the subtleties of antithesis. One appreciator had said that she was like an angelic jockey; another, that with a statesman’s gaze she had a baby’s smile; another, that she was a Flying Victory done by Velasquez. And with his own dominant impression of strength, sweetness, and daring, there crowded other similes. Her eyes had the steeplechaser’s hard, smiling scrutiny of thenext jump; the halloo of the hunt under a morning sky was in them, the joyous shouts of Spartan boys at play; yet, though eyes of heroism and laughter, they were eyes sad and almost tragically benignant.
She was tall, with the spare lightness of a runner poised for a race, and the firm, ample breast of a hardy nymph. She suggested these pagan, outdoor similes while, at the same time, luxuriously feminine in her more than fashionable aspect, the last touches of modernity were upon her: her dress, the eighteenth-century, interpreted by Paris, her decorations all discretion and distinction—a knot of silver-green at her breast, an emerald ring on her finger, and emerald earrings, two drops of smooth, green light, trembling in the shadows of her hair.
Altogether Gavan was able to grasp the impression even further, to simplify it, to express at once its dazzled quality and its acuteness, as various and almost violent, as if, suddenly, every instrument in an orchestra were to strike one long, clear, vibrating note.
His gaze had been prolonged, and hers had answered it with as open an intentness. And it was at last she who took both his hands, shook them a little, holding them while, not shyly, but with that vivid flush on her cheek, “You,” she said.
For she was startled, too. Itwashe. She remembered, as if she had seen them yesterday, his air of quick response, surface-shrinking, deep composure, the old delicious smile, and the glance swiftly looking and swiftly averted.
“Andyou,” Gavan repeated. “I haven’t changed so much, though,” he said.
“And I have? Really much? Long skirts and turned up hair are a transformation. It’s wonderful to see you, Gavan. It makes one get hold of the past and of oneself in it.”
“Does it?”
“Doesn’tit?” She let go his hands, and moving to the fire and standing before it while she surveyed him, she went on, not waiting for an answer:
“But I don’t suppose that you have my keenness of memory. It all rushes back—our walks, our games, our lessons, the smell of the heather, the very taste of the heather-honey we ate at tea, and all the things you did and said and looked; your building the Petit Trianon, and your playing dolls with me that day; your Agnes, in her pink dress, and my Elspeth, whom I used to whip so.”
“I remember it all,” said Gavan, “and I remember how I broke poor Elspeth.”
“Do you?”
“All of it: the attic windows and the pine-tree under them, and the great white bird, and the dreadful, soft little thud on the garden path.”
“Yes, I can see your face looking down. You were quite silent and frozen. I screamed and screamed. Aunt Barbara thought thatyouhad fallen at first from the way I screamed.”
“Poor little Eppie. Yes, I remember; it was horrid.”
Their eyes, smiling, quizzical, yet sad, watched, measured each other, while they exchanged these trophies from the past. He had joined her beside the fire, and, turning, she leaned her hands on the mantel and looked into the flames. So looking, herface had its aspect of almost tragic brooding. It was as if, Gavan thought, under the light memories, all those visions of his night were there before her, as if, astonishingly, and in almost uncanny measure, she shared them.
“And do you remember Robbie?” she asked presently.
“I was just thinking of Robbie,” Gavan answered. It was her face that had brought back the old sorrow, and that memory, more than any, linked them over all that was new and strange. They glanced at each other.
“I am so glad,” said Eppie.
“Because I remember?”
“Yes, that you haven’t forgotten. You said you would.”
“Did I?” he asked, though he quite remembered that, too.
“Yes; and I should have felt Robbie more dead if you had forgotten him.”
This was wonderfully not the Miss Gifford, and wonderfully the old Eppie. She saw that thought, too, answering it with, “Things haven’t really changed so much, have they? It’s all so very near—all of that.”
So near, that its sudden sharing was making Gavan a little uncomfortable, with the discomfort of the night before justified, intensified.
He hadn’t imagined such familiar closeness with a woman really unknown, nor that, sweeping away all the formalities that might have grown up between them, she should call him Gavan and make itnatural for him to call her Eppie. He didn’t really mind. It was amusing, charming perhaps, perhaps even touching—yes, of course it was that; but she was rather out of place: much nearer than where he had imagined she would be, on the stage before him.
Passing to another memory, she now said, “I clung for years, you know, to your promise to come back.”
“I couldn’t come—really and simply could not.”
“I never for a moment thought you could, any more than I thought you could forget Robbie.”
“And when I could come, you were gone.”
“How miserable that made me! I was in Rome when I had the news from Uncle Nigel.”
He felt bound fully to exonerate the past. “I had the life, during my boyhood, of a sumptuous galley-slave. I had everything except liberty and leisure. I was put into a system and left there until it had had its will of me. And when I was free I imagined that you had forgotten all about me. To a shy, warped boy, a grown-up Eppie was an alarming idea.”
“I never thought you had forgottenme!” said Eppie, smiling.
Again she actually disturbed him; but, lightly, he replied with the truth, feeling a certain satisfaction in its lightness: “Never, never; though, of course, you fell into a background. You can’t deny thatIdid.”
“Oh, no, I don’t deny it.” Her smile met his, seemed placidly to perceive its meaning. She did not for a moment imply, by her admissions, anymore than he did; the only question was, What did his admissions imply?
She left them there, going on in an apparent sequence, “Have you heard much about me, Gavan?”
“A good deal,” he owned.
“I ask because I want to pick up threads; I want to know how many stitches are dropped, so to speak. Since you have heard, I want to know just what; I often seem to leave reverberations behind me. Some rather ugly ones, I fear. You heard, perhaps, that I was that rather ambiguous being, the young woman of fashion, materialistic, ambitious, hard.” Her gaze, with its cool scrutiny, was now upon him.
“Those are really too ugly names for what I heard. I gathered, on the whole, that you were merely very vigorous and that you had more opportunities than most people for vigor.”
“I’m glad that you saw it so; but all the same, the truth, at times, hasn’t been beautiful. I have, often, been too indifferent toward people who didn’t count for me, and too diplomatic toward those who did. You see, Gavan,” she put it placidly before him, not at all as if drawing near in confidence,—she was much further in her confidences than in her memories,—but merely as if she unrolled a map before him so that he might clearly see where, at present, they found themselves, “you see, I am a nearly penniless girl—just enough to dress and go about. Of course if I didn’t dress and didn’t go about I could keep body and soul together; but to the shrewd eyes of the world, a girl living on her friends, making capital of her personality, while she seeks a husbandwho will give her the sort of place she wants—oh, yes, the world isn’t so unfair, either, when one takes off the veils. And this girl, with the personality that pays, was put early in a place from where she could see all sorts of paths at once, see the world, in its ladder aspect, before her—all the horridness of low rungs and all the satisfaction of high ones. I have been tempted through complexity of understanding; perhaps I still am. One wants the best; and when one doesn’t see clearly what the best is, one is in danger of becoming ugly. But echoes are often distorting.”
Miss Gifford was now very fully before him, as she had evidently intended to be. It was as if she herself had drawn between them the barrier of the footlights and as if, on her chosen stage, she swept a really splendid curtsey. And this frank and panoplied young woman of the world was far easier to deal with than the reminiscent Eppie. He could comfortably smile and applaud from his stall, once more the mere spectator—easiest of attitudes.
“The echoes, on the whole, were rather magnificent, as if an Amazon had galloped across mountains and left them calling her prowess from peak to peak.”
Her eyes, quickly on his, seemed to measure the conscious artificiality, to compare it with what he had already, more helplessly, shown her. He felt his rather silly deftness penetrated and that she guessed that the mountain calls had not at all enchanted him. She owned to her own acuteness in her next words:
“And you don’t like young ladies to gallop across mountains. Well, I love galloping, though I’m sorry that I leave over-loud echoes. You, at all events, are noiseless. You seem to have sailed over my head in an air-boat. It was hard for me to keep any trace of you.”
“But I don’t at all mean that I dislike Amazons to have their rides.”
“Let us talk of you now. I have had an eye on you, you know, even when you disappeared into the Indian haze; you had just disappeared when I first came to London. I only heard of lofty things—scholarly distinction, diplomatic grace, exquisite indifference to the world’s prizes and to noisy things in general. It’s all true, I can see.”
“Well, I’m not indifferent to you,” said Gavan, smiling, tossing his appropriate bouquet.
She had at this another, but a sharper, of her penetrative pauses. It was pretty to see her, rather like a deer arrested in its careless speed, suddenly wary, its head high. And, in another moment, he saw that the quick flush, almost violently, sprang to her cheek. Turning her head a little from him, she looked away, almost as if his glib acceptance of a frivolous meaning in her words abashed her—and more for him than for herself; as if she suddenly suspected him of being stupid enough to accept her at the uglier valuation of those echoes he had heard. She had not meant to say that she was one of the world’s prizes, and she had perhaps meant to say, generously, that if he found her noisy she wouldn’t resent indifference. Perhaps she had meant to say nothing of herselfat all. She certainly wasn’t on the stage, and in thinking her so he felt that he had shown himself disloyal to something that she, more nobly, had taken for granted. The flush, so vivid, that stayed made him feel himself a blunderer.
But, in a moment, she went on with a lightness of allusion to his speech that yet oddly answered the last turn of his self-reproach. “Oh, you are loyal, I am sure, even to a memory. I wasn’t thinking of particulars, but of universals. My whole impression of you was of something fragrant, elusive, impalpable. I never felt that I had a glimpse of reallyyou. It was almost gross in comparison actually to see your name in the papers, to read of your fight for Camley, to think of you in that earthly scuffle. It was like roast-beef after roses; and I was glad, because I’m gross. I like roast-beef.”
He was grateful to her for the lightness that carried him so kindly over his own blunder.
“It was only the fragrance of the roast, too, you see, since I was defeated,” he said.
“You didn’t mind a bit, did you?”
“It would sound, wouldn’t it, rather like sour grapes to say it?”
“You can say it. It was so obvious that you might have had the bunch by merely stretching out your hand—they were under it, not over your head. You simply wouldn’t play the game.” She left him now, reaching her chair with a long stride and a curving, gleaming turn of her white skirts, suggesting a graceful adaptation of some outdoor dexterity. As she leaned back in her chair, fixinghim with that look of cheerful hardness, she made him think so strongly of the resolute, winning type, that almost involuntarily he said, “You would have played it, wouldn’t you?”
“I should think so! I care for the grapes, you see. It’s what I said—you didn’t care enough.”
“Well, it’s kind of you to see ineffectuality in that light.” Still examining the steeplechaser quality, he added, “You do care, don’t you, a lot?”
“Yes, a lot. I am worldly to my finger-tips.” Her eyes challenged him—gaily, not defiantly—to misunderstand her again.
“What do you mean, exactly, by worldly?” he asked.
“I mean by it that I believe in the world, that I love the world; I believe that its grapes are worth while,—and by grapes I mean the things that people strive for and that the strong attain. The higher they hang and the harder the climb, the more I like them.”
Gavan received these interpretations without comment. “A seat in the House isn’t very high, though, is it?” he remarked.
“That depends on the sitter. It might be a splendid or a trivial thing.”
“And in my case, if I’d got it, what would it have been? Can you see that, too, you very clear-sighted young woman?”
He stood above her, smiling, but now without suavity or artificiality; looking at her as though she were a pretty gipsy whose palm he had crossed with silver. And Eppie answered, quite like a good-naturedgipsy, conscious of an admiring but skeptical questioner, “I think it would have been neither.”
“But what then? What would this sitter have made of it?”
“A distraction? An experiment upon himself? I’m sure I don’t know. Indeed, I don’t pretend to know you at all yet. Perhaps I will in time.”
Once more he was conscious of the discomfort, slight and stealing, as though the gipsy knew too much already. But he protested, and with sincerity: “If there is anything to find you will certainly find it. I hope that you will find it worth your while. I hope that we shall be great friends.”
She smiled up at him, clearly and quietly: “I have always been your great friend.”
“Always? All this while?”
“All this while. Never mind if you haven’t felt it; I have. I will do for both.”
Her smile, her look, made him finally and completely understand the application of the well-worn word to her. She was charming. She could be lavish, pour out unasked bounty upon one, and yet, in no way undervaluing it, be full of delicacy, of humor, in her generosity.
“I thought I hadn’t any right to feel it,” said Gavan. “I thought you would not have remembered.”
“Well, you will find out—I always remember, it’s my strong point,” said Eppie.
NEXT morning at breakfast he had quite a new impression of her.
Pale sunlight flooded the square, white room where, in all its dignified complexity of appurtenance, the simple meal was laid out. From the windows one saw the clear sky, the moor, its summer purple turned to rich browns and golds, and, nearer, the griffins with their shields.
Eppie was a little late in coming, and Gavan, while he and the general finished their wandering consumption of porridge and sat down to bacon and eggs, had time to observe by daylight in Miss Barbara, behind her high silver urn, the changes that in her were even more emphatic than in her brother. She was sweeter than ever, more appealing, more affirmative, with all manner of futile, fluttering little gestures and gentle, half-inarticulate little ejaculations of pleasure, approbation, or distress. Her smile, rather silly, worked too continually, as though moved by slackened wires. Her hands defined, described, ejaculated; over-expression had become automatic with her.
Eppie, when she appeared, said that she had hada walk, stooping to kiss her aunt and giving Gavan a firm, chill hand on her way to the same office for the general. She took her seat opposite Gavan, whistling an Irish-terrier to her from the door and, before she began to eat, dropping large fragments of bannock into his mouth. Her loose, frieze clothes smelled of peat and sunshine; her hair seemed to have the sparkle of the dew on it; she suggested mountain tarns, skylarks, morning gladness: but, with all this, Gavan, for the first time, now that she faced the hard, high light, saw how deeply, too, she suggested sadness.
Her face had moments of looking older than his own. It was fresh, it was young, but it had lived a great deal, and felt things to the bone, as it were.
There were little wrinkles about her eyes; her white brow, under its sweep of hair, was faintly lined; the oval of her cheek, long and fine, took, at certain angles, an almost haggard sharpness. It was not a faded face, nor a face to wither with years: every line of it spoke of a permanent beauty; but, with all the color that the chill morning air had brought into it, it yet made one think of bleak uplands, of weather-beaten cliffs. Life had engraved it with ineffaceable symbols. Storms had left their mark, bitter conflicts and bitter endurances.
While she ate, with great appetite, she talked incessantly, to the general, to Miss Barbara, to Gavan, but not so much to him, tossing, in the intervals of her knife and fork and cup, bits of food to the attentive terrier. He saw why the old people adored her. She was the light, the movement of their monotonousdays. Not only did she bring them her life: it was their own that she vivified with her interest. The interest was not assumed, dutiful. There was no touch of the conscious being kind. She questioned as eagerly as she told. She knew and cared for every inch of the country, every individual in the country-side. She was full of sagacity and suggestion, full of anecdote and a nipping Scotch humor. And one felt strongly in her the quality of old race. Experience was in her blood, an inheritance of instinct, and, that so significant symptom, the power of playfulness—the intellectual detachment that, toward firm convictions, could afford a lightness scandalous to more crudely compacted natures, could afford gaieties and audacities, like the flights of a bird tethered by an invisible thread to a strong hand.
Miss Barbara, plaintively repining over village delinquencies, was lured to see comedy lurking in the cases of insubordination and thriftlessness, though at the mention of Archie MacHendrie, the local drunkard and wife-beater, Eppie’s brow grew black—with a blackness beside which Miss Barbara’s gloom was pallid. Eppie said that she wished some one would give Archie a thrashing, and Gavan could almost see her doing it herself.
From local topics she followed the general to politics, while he glanced down the columns of the “Scotsman,” so absorbed and so vehement that, meeting at last Gavan’s meditative eye, she seemed to become aware of an irony he had not at all intended, and said, “A crackling of thorns under a pot, allthis, Gavan thinks, and, what does it all matter? You have become a philosopher, Gavan; I can see that.”
“Well, my dear, from Plato down philosophers have thought that politics did matter,” said the general, incredulous of indifference to such a topic.
“Unless they were of a school that thought that nothing did,” said Eppie.
“Gavan’s not of that weak-kneed persuasion.”
“Oh, he isn’t weak-kneed!” laughed Eppie.
She drove her aunt all morning in the little pony-cart and wrote letters after lunch, Gavan being left to the general’s care. It was not until later that she assumed toward him the more personal offices of deputy hostess, meeting him in the hall as she emerged from the morning-room, her thick sheaf of letters in her hand, and proposing a walk before tea. She took him up the well-remembered path beside the burn; but now, in the clear autumnal afternoon, he seemed further from her than last night before the fire. Already he had seen that the sense of nearness or distance depended on her will rather than his own; so that it was now she who chose to talk of trivial things, not referring by word or look to the old memories, deepest of all, that crowded about him on the hilltop, not even when, breasting the wind, they passed the solitary group of pine-trees, where she had so deeply shared his suffering, so wonderfully comprehended his fears.
She strode against the twisted flappings of her skirt, tawny strands of hair whipping across her throat, her hands deeply thrust into her pockets, herhead unbowed before the enormous buffets of the wind, and he felt anew the hardy energy that would make tender, lingering touches upon the notes of the past rare things with her.
In the uproar of air, any sequence of talk was difficult. Her clear voice seemed to shout to him, like the cold shocks of a mountain stream leaping from ledge to ledge, and the trivial things she said were like the tossing of spray upon that current of deep, joyful energy.
“Isn’t it splendid!” she exclaimed at last. They had walked two miles along the crest of the hill, and, smiling in looking round at him, her face, all the sky behind it, all the wind around it, made the word match his own appreciation.
“Splendid,” he assented, thinking of her glance and poise.
Still bending her smile upon him, she said, “You already look different.”
“Different from what?” he asked, amused by her expression, as of a kindly, diagnosing young doctor.
“From last night. From what I felt of you. One might have thought that you had lost the capacity for feeling splendor.”
“Why should you have imagined me so deadened?” He kept his cheerful curiosity.
“I don’t know. I did. There,”—she paused to point,—“do you remember the wind-mill, Gavan? The old miller is dead and his son is the miller now; but the mill looks just as it did when we were little. It makes one think of birds and ships, doesn’t it?—with the beauty that it stays and doesn’t pass.When I was a child—did I ever confide it to you?—my dream was to catch one of the sails as it came down and let it carry me up, up, and right around. What fun it would have been! I suppose that one could have held on.”
“In pretty grim earnest, after the first fun.”
“It would be the sense of coming grimness that would make the desperate thrill of it.”
“You are fond of thrills and perils.”
“Not fond, exactly; the love of risk is a deeper thing—something fundamental in us, I suppose.”
She had walked on, down the hillside, where gorse bushes pulled at her skirts, and he was putting together last night’s impressions with to-day’s, and thinking that if she embodied the instinctive, the life-loving, it wasn’t in the simple, unreflecting forms that the words usually implied. She was simple, but not in the least guileless, and her directness was a choice among recognized complexities. It was no spontaneous child of nature who, on the quieter hillside, where they could talk, talked of India, now, of his life there, the people he had known, many of whom she too knew. He knew that he was being managed, being made to talk of what she wanted to hear, that she was still engaged in penetrating. He was quite willing to be managed, penetrated,—for as far as she could get; he could rely on his own deftness in retreat before too deep a probe, though, should she discover that for him the lessons of life had resulted in an outlook perhaps the antipodes from her own, he guessed that her own would show no wavering. Still, she should run, if possible, nosuch risk. They were to be friends, good friends: that was, as she had said, not only an accomplished, but a long-accomplished fact; but, even more than in childhood, she would be a friend held at arm’s-length.
Meanwhile, unconscious, no doubt, of these barriers, Eppie walked beside him and made him talk about himself. She knew, of course, of his mother’s death; she did not speak of that: many barriers were her own—she was capable of most delicate avoidances. But she asked after his father. “He is still alive, I hear.”
“Yes, indeed, and gives me a good deal of his company.”
“Oh.” She was a little at a loss. He could guess at what she had heard of his father. He went on, though choosing his words in a way that showed a slight wincing behind his wish to be very frank and friendly with her, for even yet his father made him wince, standing, as he did, for the tragedy of his mother’s life: “He is very much alive for a person so gone to pieces. But I can put up with him far more comfortably than when he was less pitiable.”
“How much do you have to put up with him?” she asked, trying to image, as he saw, his ménage in Surrey, in the house he had just been describing to her, its old bricks all vague pinks and mauves, its high-walled gardens clustering near it, its wonderful hedges, that, he said, it ruined him to keep up to their reputation of exquisite formality; and, within, its vast library—all the house a brain, practically, the other rooms like mere places for life’s renewalbefore centering in the intellectual workshop. She evidently found it difficult to place, among the hedges, the lawns, the long walls of the library, a father, gone to pieces perhaps, but displaying all the more helplessly his general unworthiness. Even in lenient circles, Captain Palairet was thought to have an undignified record.
“Oh, he is there for most of the time. He is there now,” said Gavan, without pathos. “He has no money left, and now that I’ve a little I’m the obvious thing to retire to.”
“I hope that it’s not very horrid for you.”
“I can’t say that it’s horrid at all. I don’t see much of him, and, in many respects, he has remained, for the onlooker, rather a charming creature. He gives me very little trouble—smokes, eats, plays billiards. When we meet, we are very affable.”
Eppie did not say, “You tolerate him because he is piteous,” but he imagined that she guessed it.
HE was awakened early next morning by the sound of singing in the garden below.
His windows were widely opened and a cold, pure air filled the room. He lay dreamily listening for some moments before recognizing Eppie’s voice—recognizing it, though he had never heard her sing.
Fresh and strong, it put a new vitality into the simple sadness of an old Scotch ballad, as though in the very sorrow it found joy. It was not an emotional voice. Clearly and firmly it sounded, and seemed a part of the frosty, sunny morning, part of the sky that was like a great chalice filled with light, of the whitened hills, the aromatic pine-woods, and the distant, rushing burn. He had sprung up after the first dreamy listening and looked out at it all, and at her walking through the garden, her dog at her heels. She went out by the little gate sunken deep in the wall, and disappeared in the woods; and still the voice reached him, singing on, and at each repetition of the monotonous, departing melody, a sadder, sweeter sense of pain strove in his heart.
He listened, looking down at the pine-tree beneaththe window, at the garden, the summer-house, the withered tangle of the rose upon the wall, and up at the hilltop, at the crystalline sky; and such a sudden pang of recollection pierced him that tears came to his eyes.
What was it that he remembered? or, rather, what did he not? Things deep and things trivial, idle smiles, wrenching despairs, youth, sorrow, laughter,—all the past was in the pang, all the future, too, it seemed, and he could not have said whether his mother, Alice, Eppie with her dolls, and little Robbie, or the clairvoyant intuition of a future waiting for him here—whether presage or remembrance—were its greater part.
Not until the voice had died, in faintest filaments of sound, far away among the woods, did the pain fade, leaving him shaken. Such moods were like dead things starting to life, and reminded him too vividly of the fact that as long as one was alive, one was, indeed, in danger from life; and though his thought was soon able to disentangle itself from the knot of awakened emotions that had entwined it for a moment, a vague sense of fear remained with him. Something had been demanded of him—something that he had, involuntarily, found himself giving. This it was to have still a young nature, sensitive to impressions. He understood. Yet it was with a slight, a foolishly boyish reluctance, as he told himself, that he went down some hours later to meet Eppie at breakfast.
There was an unlooked-for refuge for him when he found her hardly noticing him, and very angry oversome village misdemeanor. The anger held her far away. She dilated on the subject all during breakfast, pouring forth her wrath, without excitement, but with a steady vehemence. It was an affair of a public-house, and Eppie accused the publican of enticing his clients to drink, of corrupting the village sobriety, and she urged the general, as local magistrate, to take immediate action, showing a very minute knowledge of the technicalities of the case.
“My dear,” the general expostulated, “indeed I don’t think that the man has done anything illegal; we are powerless about the license in such a case. You must get more evidence.”
“I have any amount of evidence. The man is a public nuisance. Poor Mrs. MacHendrie was crying to me about it this morning. Archie is hardly ever sober now. I shall drive over to Carlowrie and see Sir Alec about it; as the wretch’s landlord he can make it uncomfortable for him, and I’ll see that he makes it as uncomfortable as possible.”
Laughingly, but slightly harassed, the general said: “You see, we have a tyrant here. Eppie is really a bit too hard on the man. He is an unpleasant fellow, I own, a most unpleasant manner—a beast, if you will, but a legal beast.”
“The most unpleasant form of animal, isn’t it? It’s very good of Eppie to care so much,” said Gavan.
“You don’t care, I suppose,” she said, turning her eyes on him, as though she saw him for the first time that morning.
“I should feel more hopeless about it, perhaps.”
“Why, pray?”
“At all events, I shouldn’t be able to feel so much righteous indignation.”
“Why not?”
“He is pretty much of a product, isn’t he?—not worse, I suppose, than the men whose weakness enriches him. It’s a pity, of course, that one can’t painlessly pinch such people out of existence, as one would offensive insects.”
Eppie, across the table, eyed him, her anger quieted. “He is a product of a good many things,” she said, now in her most reasonable manner, “and he is going to be a product of some more before I’m done with him,—a product of my hatred for him and his kind, for one thing. That will be a new factor in his development. Gavan,” she smiled, “you and I are going to quarrel.”
“Dear Eppie!” Miss Barbara interposed. “Gavan, you must not take her seriously; she so often says extravagant things just to tease one.” Really dismayed, alternately nodding and shaking her head in reassurance and protest, she looked from one to the other. “And don’t, dear, say such unchristian things of anybody. She is not so hard and unforgiving as she sounds, Gavan.”
“Aunt Barbara! Aunt Barbara!” laughed Eppie, leaning her elbows on the table, her eyes still on Gavan, “my hatred for Macdougall isn’t nearly as unchristian as Gavan’s indifference. I don’t want to pinch him painlessly out of life at all. I think that life has room for us both. I want to have him whipped, or made uncomfortable in some way, until he becomes less horrid.”
“Whipped, dear! People are never whipped nowadays! It was a very barbarous punishment indeed, and, thank God, we have outgrown it. We will outgrow it all some day. And as to any punishment, I don’t know, I really don’t. Resist not evil,” Miss Barbara finished in a vague, helpless murmur, uncertain as to what course would at once best apply to Macdougall’s case and satisfy the needs of public sobriety.
“Perhaps one owes it to people to resist them,” Eppie answered.
“Oh, Eppie dear, if only you cared a little more for Maeterlinck!” sighed Miss Barbara, the more complex readings of whose later years had been somewhat incongruously adapted to her early simple faiths. “Do you remember that beautiful thing he says,—and Gavan’s attitude reminds me of it,—‘Le sage qui passe interrompt mille drâmes’?”
“You will be quoting Tolstoi to me next, Aunt Barbara. I suspect that such sages would interrupt a good deal more than dramas.”
“I hope that you care for Tolstoi, Gavan,” said Miss Barbara, not forgetful of his boyish pieties. “Not the novels,—they are very, very sad, and so long, and the characters have such a number of names it is most confusing,—but the dear little books on religion. It is all there: love of all men, and non-resistance of evil, and self-renunciation.”
“Yes,” Gavan assented, while Eppie looked rather gravely at him.
“How beautiful this world would be if we could see it so—no hatred, no strife, no evil.”
Again Gavan assented with, “None.”
“None; and no life either,” Eppie finished for them.
She rose, thrusting her hands into alternate pockets looking for a note-book, which she found and consulted. “I’m off for the fray, Uncle Nigel, for hatred and strife. You and Gavan are going to shoot, so I’ll bring you your lunch at the corner of the Carlowrie woods.”
“So that you and Gavan may continue your quarrel there. Very well. I prefer listening.”
“Gavan understands that Eppie must not be taken seriously,” Miss Barbara interposed; but Eppie rejoined, drawing on her gloves, “Indeed, I intend to be taken seriously. I quarrel with people I like as well as with those I hate.”
“You are going to be a factor in my development, too?” said Gavan.
“Of course, as you are in mine, as we all are in one another’s. We can’t help that. And my attack on you shall be conscious.”
These open threats didn’t at all alarm him. It was what was unconscious in her that stirred disquiet.
When Eppie had departed and the general had gone off to see to preparations for the morning’s shoot, Miss Barbara, still sitting rather wistfully behind her urn, said: “I hope, dear Gavan, that you will be able to influence Eppie a little. I am so thankful to find you unchanged about all the deeper things of life. You could help her, I am sure. She needs guidance. She is so loving, so clever, a joyto Nigel and to me; but she is very headstrong, very reckless and wilful,—a will in subjection to nothing but her own sense of right. It’s not that she is altogether irreligious,—thank Heaven for that,—but she hasn’t any of the happiness of religion. There is no happiness, is there, Gavan—I feel sure that you see it as I do,—but in having our lives stayed on the Eternal?”
Gavan, as it was very easy to do, assented again.
He spent the morning with the general in shooting over the rather scant covers, and at two, in a sheltered bend of the woods, where the sunlight lay still and bright, Eppie joined them, bringing the lunch-basket in her dog-cart.
She was in a very good humor, and while, sitting above them, she dispensed rations, announced to her uncle the result of her visit to Sir Alec.
“He thinks he can turn him out if any flagrant ease of drunkenness occurs again. We talked over the conditions of his lease.”
“Carston, I am sure, doesn’t care a snap of his fingers about it.”
“Of course not; but he cares that I care.”
“You see, Gavan, by what strings the world is pulled. Carston hasn’t two ideas in his head.”
“Luckily I am here to use his empty head to advantage. I wheedled Lady Carston, too,—the bad influence Macdougall had on church-going. Lady Carston’s one idea, Gavan, is the keeping of the Sabbath. Altogether it was an excellent morning’s work.” Eppie was cheerful and triumphant. She was eating from a plate on her knees and drinkingmilk out of a little silver cup. “Do you think me a tiresome, managing busybody, Gavan?” She smiled down at him, and her lashes catching the sunlight, an odd, misty glitter half veiled her eyes. “You look,” she added, “as you used to look when you were a little boy. The years collapsed just then.”
He was conscious that, under her sudden glance, he had, indeed, looked shy. It was not her light question, but the strange depth of her half-closed eyes.
“I find a great deal of the old Eppie in you: I remember that you used to want to bully the village people for their good.”
“I’m still a bully, I think, but a more discreet one. Won’t you have some milk, Gavan? You used to love milk when you were a little boy. Have you outgrown that?”
“Not at all. I should still love some; but don’t rob yourself.”
“There ‘s heaps here. I’ve no spare glass. Do you mind?” She held out to him the silver cup, turning its untouched edge to him, something maternal in the gesture, in the down-looking of her sun-dazed eyes.
He felt himself foolishly flushing while he drank the milk; and when, really seized by a silly childish shyness, he protested that he wanted no more, she placidly, with an emphasizing of her air of sweet, comprehending authority, said, “Oh, but you must; it holds almost nothing.”
For the second time that day, as he obedientlytook from her hand the innocent little cup, Gavan had the unreasoning impulse of tears.
The sunny afternoon was silent. Overhead, the sky had its chalice look, clear, benignant, brimmed with light. The general, the lolling dogs, were part of the background, with the heather and the wood of larches, the finely falling sprays delicately blurred upon the sky.
It was again something sweet, sweet, simple and profound, that brought again that pang of presage and of pain. But the pain was like a joy, and the tears like tears of happiness in the sunny stillness, where her firm and gentle hand gave him milk in a silver cup.
The actual physical sensation of a rising saltness was an alarm signal that, with a swift reversal of mental wheels, brought a revulsion of consciousness. He saw himself threatened once more by nature’s enchantments: wily nature, luring one always back to life with looks from comrade eyes, touches from comrade fingers, pastoral drinks all seeming innocence, and embracing sunlight. Wily Circe. With a long breath, the mirage was seen as mirage and the moment’s dangerous blossoming withered as if dust had been strewn over it.
TO see his own susceptibility so plainly was, he told himself, to be safe from it; not safe from its pang, perhaps, but safe from its power, and that was the essential thing.
It was not to Eppie, as he further assured himself, that he was susceptible. Eppie stood for life, personified its appeals; he could feel, yet be unmoved, by all life’s blandishments.
Meanwhile on a very different plane—the after all remote plane of mental encounters and skirmishes—he felt, with relief, that he was entirely master of his own meaning. There were many of these skirmishes, and though he did not believe any of them planned, believe that she was carrying out her threat of conscious attack, he was aware that she was alert and inquisitive, and dexterously quick at taking any occasion that offered for further penetration.
The first of these occasions was on Sunday evening when, after tea and in the gloaming, they sat together in the deep window-seat of one of the library windows and listened to Miss Barbara softly touching the chords of a hymn on the plaintive old piano and softly singing—a most unobtrusive accompaniment,at her distance and with her softness, for any talk or any thoughts of theirs. They had talked very little, watching the sunset burn itself out over the frosty moorland, and Gavan presently, while he listened, closed his eyes and leaned his head back upon the oak recess. Eppie, looking now from the sunset to him, observed him with an open, musing curiosity. His head, leaning back in the dusk, was like the ivory carving of a dead saint—a saint young, beautiful, at peace after long sorrow. Peace; that was the quality that his whole being expressed, though, with opened eyes, his face had the more human look of patience, verging now and then on a quiet dejection that would overspread his features like a veil. In boyhood, the peace, the placid dejection, had not been there; his face then had shown the tension of struggle and endurance.