“Am I?”
“What do you do with yourself all day?”
“Wander in the woods, watch the birds, collect flowers, bathe in the sea.”
“Bathe—do you!”
“Every day.”
“Beginning to find your father a dull dog, eh? We don’t do a vast amount of entertaining. Rather a quiet place this,” and he laughed.
Joan dangled her hat by the strings and watched her father with a supreme and unconscious gravity. She was ever attempting to understand his mental condition; she had never yet succeeded.
“I often wonder why we have no friends,” she said.
Zeus Gildersedge enveloped himself in an atmosphere of smoke. He distrusted in particular the developing instincts of this queen, realizing that she had little cause to recompense his authority with any great degree of gratitude. He had begotten and reared her, given her the fundamental necessities of life, but little else. She never displayed discontent in his presence, never reproached his niggard régime. Zeus Gildersedge did not expect love from her, seeing that he was barren of that sentiment himself.
“Friendship is an expensive commodity,” he observed, with a sullen yet hypocritical earnestness. “We have to pay for affection in this world; one can get plenty of sympathy by giving dinner-parties. Spend money and people will welcome you. Poverty means isolation and contempt.”
The girl’s eyes were still fixed imperturbably upon his face. She seemed to weigh his words upon the balance of a virgin intuition and to find them inadequate.
“Are we so poor?” she asked.
Zeus Gildersedge grunted.
“Pretty much so.”
“You find it a miserable experience?”
“You think so, eh?”
“If loneliness and poverty go together, you must be very poor.”
“You’re growing too clever with that tongue of yours.”
Joan leaned against the trunk of the acacia and smiled at the clouds. A cataract of golden light poured through the delicate foliage, smiting the shadowy grass with green splendor, painting quivering fleur-de-lis upon the girl’s dark dress.
“Father,” she said, gently enough, “I often wonder what you live for.”
The man in the chair bit his pipe-stem and frowned.
“You do, do you!”
“I am young, you are old. What pleasures can you find in life?”
Zeus Gildersedge eyed her keenly under his drooping lids.
“What do most men live for?” he asked her.
“How should I know?” she answered him.
“Money, gold bags, beer, and bed. You will understand it all well enough some day.”
She looked at him with her large, gray eyes, calm and incredulous.
“And what, then, of death,” she asked, “if we live for nothing more than this?”
The man straightened in his chair.
“What’s that?”
“Death.”
“What’s death to you?”
“The falling of leaves and a silence as of snow under a winter sky. I often think of death; nor is it strange to me. Do you fear the grave?”
“Stop this nonsense,” said the man, with some symptoms of rebellion.
“Are you happy?”
Zeus Gildersedge wriggled in his chair.
“When I want your sympathy I’ll ask for it,” he said. “You’re a little too forward for your years, my dear. Don’t worry your head about my future. Keep your sentimentalities for the birds and the bees and the twaddling rubbish you read in books. Damn sentiment. Supper at eight.”
When the girl had gone Zeus Gildersedge clutched his ledger to him, his brows knitted into a scowl of thought. His hands strained at the book with a tremulous intensity, while his eyes stared into space. Overhead a blackbird was pouring a deep torrent of song to join the sunlight. A slight breeze made the boughs oracular with sudden mysterious mutterings. The beneficent eyes of the universe seemed to watch with a scornful pity the vague dreads of infidelity and greed.
As though waking from some unflattering dream, Zeus Gildersedge’s hands relaxed and suffered the book to slip slowly into his lap. He breathed an oath under his breath, gulped down a mouthful of claret, and lay back in his chair chuckling.
‟IDETEST prigs,” said Mrs. Marjoy, as her hands flickered over the tea-tray in the drawing-room of The Hermitage. “And of that tribe commend me to young Strong as the prince of the sect.”
Mrs. Marjoy was one of those irreproachably vulgar persons whose mission in life appears to be the distilling of spiritual nostrums for the consciences of their neighbors. She was a born critic, a mercurial being ingrained with prejudice and dowered with an inordinate self-esteem. She had run “to tongue” in a remarkable degree; moreover, she scanned the world through the prisms of a none too generous philosophy.
“My dear,” quoth Mrs. Mince, balancing a large slab of cake in her saucer, “young people are naturally irreverent in these days. You would hardly believe me, but Gabriel Strong, a mere boy, had the impudence to argue with my husband on religious matters after dinner the other evening. Poor, dear Jacob came home quite upset.”
Mrs. Marjoy’s chair creaked. She was a lady who seemed to extract discords even from things inanimate. The harmonium in the church school-room was her most eloquent disciple.
“What had the young cub to say?”
“Well, my dear, he contested that he could see no harm in that ignorant nonconformist preaching at the village cross on Sundays. He snubbed poor, dear Jacob most abruptly, and declared that he should go and hear the fellow preach. Think of that—to the vicar of a parish!”
Mrs. Marjoy sniffed, a habit of hers when she wished to be expressive.
“Abominable!”
“Such bad taste!”
“Intellectual young men are always objectionable. Strong, Junior, always strikes me as a dissolute person. What do you think, my dear?”
Mrs. Mince cogitated over her cake. She was not exactly conversant with the characteristics of dissolute young men, but as the vicaress of Saltire she aimed at claiming a mild versatility in the technicalities of vice and virtue.
“Jacob declares,” she said, retreating upon an infallible authority, “that he has never met a young fellow so irreverently arrogant towards the opinions of his elders. And Jacob is such a man of the world!”
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Marjoy, with a tinge of irony. “It is so ill-bred to argue with people more experienced than one’s self.”
The Cassandra of the tray solaced herself with a second cup of anæmic tea. She had an irritable habit of shrugging her shoulders as though troubled—science forgive the expression!—with a chronic urticaria of the brain. Irritability, indeed, was her enshrouding atmosphere.
“As for those Gusset girls—” she began.
Mrs. Mince held up a horror-stricken hand.
“Such underbred young women. Why, I remember one of them coming to church in a red dress on Good Friday. The way they get up, too!”
Mrs. Marjoy plunged into detail with the fervor of a scientist.
“I told that woman Ophelia once,” she observed, “that I wondered how she could go into a public place with a low-cut blouse and no collar.”
“Really!” said Mrs. Mince, rapturously.
“She was rude, as usual. Said some necks did need covering up. It is no use giving such girls advice.”
“Absolutely useless,” observed Mrs. Mince.
The teapot was regarnished and two more slices of cake delivered to martyrdom. Mrs. Marjoy leaned back in her creaking chair and indulged in philosophies.
“The aristocracy is rotten to the core,” she remarked, with comprehensive complacency. “The broad-minded and educated middle-class forms the backbone of the country. Any third-rate actress could teach many duchesses manners.”
“My dear, your opinions are so full of commonsense.”
“I am always outspoken.”
“An excellent habit.”
“I flatter myself that I am a lady, Mrs. Mince, and I like to give people my frank opinion. I never speak wantonly and unjustly of absent neighbors. But as for those simpering and forward young Gussets, well—”
A knock at the door cut short Mrs. Marjoy’s unprejudiced diatribe. A servant entered with a letter on a salver and stood waiting. Mrs. Marjoy slit the envelope with the handle of a teaspoon, perused the contents of the note, flicked it away contemptuously into the grate.
“No answer.”
The girl disappeared. The doctor’s wife flounced back in her chair, shrugged her shoulders viciously, and surveyed her friend irritably through her spectacles.
“From those Mallabys,” she said.
“Of Catford?”
“People I never could stand. An invitation to their garden-party—such garden-parties, too! The ices made me ill there last summer; James was about all night giving me chlorodyne. Let me see, what were we talking about?”
“The Gussets,” crowed Mrs. Mince.
“Oh yes, those most immoral women. Really, my dear, I wonder John Strong lets his daughter associate with such people, but of course everybody knows that John Strong is a snob and a toady. The way the girl Ophelia flirts with that young Gabriel is absolutely indecent. They are always about fishing together, now, down in the Mallan. Most improper! You should hear James’s views on society women. I’ve just been reading that awful Gosling case in the newspapers.”
Mrs. Mince’s interest revived ostensibly. She brushed sundry crumbs from her lap and rearranged her cushions.
“A most deplorable case,” she said, with Christian unction.
“How a man can run away from his wife passes my comprehension,” said the physician’s mate. “I really do not know what we are coming to in these days, what with women like the Gussets taking the lead in society.”
Mrs. Mince sighed an orthodox and Protestant sigh.
“The young men are so different, too,” she said.
“They want discipline, my dear, what with their absurd notions of independence and their revolutionary ideas about the Church and religion. We have had three assistants in a year—such boors! There was Snooks, who fell in love with little Miss Ginge; I soon put my foot on that. Then there was Lily, who talked theosophy and smoked such pipes in the surgery that the whole house stunk. I had to forbid smoking, and Lily left. The man we have now is such a glutton; always has two helpings at dinner and eats half a cake at tea.”
“I never see him at church,” said Mrs. Mince, grievedly.
“Young men never go to church in these days,” quoth Mrs. Marjoy, with an irascible twist of her mouth. “They are too enlightened, you know. I told young Bailey, the man we had last year, that he ought to be ashamed of himself setting the villagers such a bad example. He had the insolence to say that from his own observations church-going did not improve people’s tempers. Of course, I had to get James to give him a month’s notice.”
“Young men must be a great worry in a house,” said Mrs. Mince, sympathetically.
Mrs. Marjoy twitched her shoulders.
“They are so abominably selfish,” she said.
The doctor appeared at this period of the conversation, a kindly and easy-going Briton, artificially cheery and optimistic. He shook hands with Mrs. Mince and sat down on the extreme edge of a chair. His wife gave him the dregs of the teapot, and remarked that he was late.
“Met young Strong in the village and had a chat,” he ventured, by way of justification. “Bright young chap; a little too bookish, though.”
Mrs. Marjoy sniffed.
“The rising generation reads too much,” she said. “Do you remember Bailey, who was always reading novels on a Sunday till I gave him a talking to and he left?”
Mr. Marjoy sipped his tea and sighed. He was a suppressed soul, a Prometheus bound upon the rock of matrimony.
“Bailey was not half a bad chap,” he said, meekly.
Mrs. Marjoy ignored the remark.
“What’s Grimes doing?” she asked.
“He has been seeing folk all the afternoon.”
“James, I believe that fellow’s running after that Ginge girl like Snooks did. I won’t have it, mind. I can never catch Grimes in the surgery. What the man does with himself I can’t think.”
“Grimes is all right,” said the doctor. “I must say I like young Strong.”
“A prig, my dear—an arrant prig.”
The doctor did not contradict her. He had grown wise in season and took his chastenings with reverent patience. It was not his ambition to out-talk his wife.
“You take my word for it,” said Mrs. Marjoy, with acrimony, “there will be a scandal here soon. That young Strong is a most dissolute youth; and as for the Gusset girl—well, I will be charitable and conceal my thoughts. I always try to say kind things of people, when they will let me do so by leading decent and respectable lives.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Mince, “you are a model of tact. By-the-way, I hear the church-bell. I must attend vespers. Are you coming to hear Jacob preach?”
“I will get my prayer-book,” said the doctor’s dame.
PERILOUS and fair as Calypso is the imagination to the mind of man. A strong soul girds the elf in tender subjection. Like wine, the imagination fires the senses; they are saffron spray bubbling in an iris bowl, red poppies smothered in an ecstasy of green, stars, diamonds, and the long glimmer of a moonlit sea. Odors beat upon the imaginative brain; colors burn its vision. Like a siren’s voice falls the chant of the wind through the rose-red halls of summer. To the poet the world leaps like a young lover into the bosom of the sunset. Seas clamor and the stars tune their strings.
Gabriel was an imaginative man. His heart’s cords were subtle, swift, and mystical. Songs born of the infinite strangeness of beauty were ever throbbing at his ear. His senses were as godly as Apollo’s. The scent of a pinewood smote him from afar. He could watch a hawk hovering a glimmering speck beneath the clouds. He was quick and virile, strung to the tense tones of beauty, red and blithe with the blood of June.
With too precocious a wisdom in the vanities of earth, a semi-Byronic cynicism had marred his manhood. Like Joan, he had supped too richly in his April days. Knowledge had bred contempt. To Gabriel women were so many roses, each with a canker under the petals. He had been unfortunate in his experimental philosophy. No superb contradiction had as yet given his shallow pessimism the lie. He had met women, but not a woman. No Shakespearian divinity had shamed the cynicism out of his manhood. To him Sarah Golightly of the Gayety, or Mrs. Marjoy of Saltire, or the numberless worthy daughters of uninteresting neighbors were equally null and unlovable. A melancholy being, he had brought himself to the belief that there were no Britomarts in the woman’s world of the day. He believed in the possibility of womanly loveliness, adored the ideal Beatrice devoutly, but never prognosticated the flitting of a goddess athwart his earthly path.
On the identical afternoon that Mrs. Marjoy was waxing charitable over the moral deficiencies of her acquaintances, Gabriel and his sister Judith were sessioned in the little red drawing-room at the hall. John Strong had driven into Rilchester, leaving the pair to no unwelcome solitude. Saltire Hall seemed to breathe anew through its quaint casements and antique galleries when its most Victorian master had vanished for a season.
Now Judith Strong was the one woman in the world who reclaimed her brother from the charge of callow pessimism. She was one of those grave, lovable, stately beings who shed over the world a lustre of truth. With hair of red gold, eyes dark and contemplative, a complexion delicately pale, she bore upon her face the benign and tender divineness of a young Madonna. Her soul was clear and calm as a crystal sky. A sympathetic wisdom had dowered her with a charm that graced her womanhood like a crown of pearls. To Gabriel she was sister, friend, and mother. The two loved each other with an inseparable tenderness that was, indeed, Christian. Judith had learned to comprehend the subtler instincts of her brother’s nature. He was no ordinary man, in her opinion, and she was jealous for his happiness as for her own faith. But for Judith Saltire would have been a dry desert to the man’s soul.
They had been singing together that afternoon certain old ballads and glees that would have kindled the Pepysian ardor. Judith’s long, lithe fingers were magical on the keys. Her whole being begot music. Gabriel had listened to her playing that afternoon with infinite sympathy of soul. She seemed as spiritual to him, as he sat in the window-seat and watched her, as some fair woman stolen from Rossetti’s brain.
They partook of tea together by the open window, where roses nodded against a gossamer veil of gold. Gardens stretched below into the wastes of the woods, a dim maze of yews and lilacs, laurels and stately firs. It was like some Tuscan landscape spread in quaint loveliness upon one of Angelico’s frescoes. Mystery brooded on the air. The warm hush of the summer noon was unbroken save by the distant sound of reaping in the meadows.
Judith and her brother were in a solemn humor. Music had inspired them to still thought and tenderness of mood. Brother and sister, woman and man, they were glad of each other’s sympathy, grateful for solitude and unbroken union of soul. Judith had long been troubled in her heart for her brother’s future. She knew too well the sensitive necessity that watched over such a mind as his. All women are fearful of prophesying pain for those they love. And Judith feared in measure for her brother.
“Gabriel,” she said, anon, with her stately and simple directness of expression, “it is strange to me that you do not tire of this place and the sameness of its ways. Small decorums and small circles seem so foreign to your nature. It is a year since you were in Italy. You must chafe at times in Saltire. I should have thought liberty essential to a man of your temper.”
Her brother smiled at her with an amused melancholy that often found expression on his face.
“You mean that I am too much here?” he said.
“Not for us, dear. But you are a man of talent, and—”
She hesitated a moment, gazing with an intensity of thought into the blue distance.
“Well?”
“My words were running over fast.”
“My dear girl, say anything you like to me; you are too honest for me to be offended.”
Judith drew her chair nearer to his, and, leaning her elbows on its arms, looked into her brother’s face.
“It is not good for a man to live always at home,” she said.
“Is it my fault?”
“No. I know father desires to keep you here. He is proud of you, and ambitious—God pardon me—in a mistaken way. But then, my dear Gabriel, a father must recognize the individual personality of his son. He can only wrong him till he treats him as a fellow-man and not as a child. Both of you may suffer through your amiable apathy.”
“Go on.”
“I do not pain you?”
“No, dear.”
“You see, a man to be a man must work out his destiny alone. He must not pander to mere blood relationships. And I am so proud of you that I would not have your character weakened by too much kindly sloth. You cannot develop here as you should. You think too much, see too little. And then—”
“Go on, dear.”
“Father is a good man, but prejudiced. He does not understand you. And, my dear boy, one must beware of prejudiced affections; they are stable only so long as we please the bestower. I know father wants to make a county gentleman of you, an M.P., and the like. He does not want you to work. And there I disagree with him. He will cramp your intellect and soul if you are not careful.”
Gabriel looked in her eyes and smiled.
“You fond traitor!” he said.
“No, I am not that,” she answered. “I only want to save you both pain in the future. It is not likely that you will be content to be a boy forever. Some strong circumstance must inevitably set you at variance with father’s prejudices. Then will come struggle and rebellion, anger and reproaches, and sad days. You are a strong man, only you do not respect your strength. I do not think that you realize your responsibilities towards yourself. Filial obedience is good, but honest and manly independence is better.”
They were silent a moment as in mutual thought. A slight breeze stirred the roses; the noise of reaping waxed in the meadows.
“Where did you gather all this wisdom, little woman?”
“From my instincts, dear. Instincts are a woman’s reason. I have been thinking much, debating much in my mind. And I am not at ease as to your future. Pardon me.”
Gabriel reached for Judith’s hand. His bronzed fingers clasped her white ones. They looked into each other’s eyes.
“What would you have me do?” he asked.
“Not surrender to father’s whims in everything. Emancipate yourself by degrees; teach him to respect your individuality; prepare him to recognize your freedom.”
“Yes.”
“Choose your own sphere; you are six-and-twenty. Ask him for an allowance; travel a year or two; work and develop your own powers.”
Gabriel pressed her hand.
“Any more?”
“And oh, Gabriel, don’t let him marry you off-hand from worldly and ambitious motives. Be a man; think and choose for yourself. Don’t give up your soul to a girl because for one month she seems lovely and desirable.”
The man’s face clouded even in the sun.
“You are very frank with me,” he said.
“I am your sister, and I love you.”
“You are a good woman, dear, and I will ponder what you have said to me.”
“And you are not hurt?”
“Who is hurt by a good woman’s love?”
Strangely enough, that same evening, over his after-dinner port, John Strong expounded his principles with regard to the union of the sexes.
“There are many mistaken notions abroad about matrimony,” he said, snuffing the smoke from a favorite cigar. “People drag too much silly sentimentalism into the question. What is marriage but a delicate investment in flesh. I know life, and I give you my word, my boy, that there’s precious little difference between women when you come to study them in detail. One is tall, another short, some pretty, some plain; they all have tempers, they all love dress, they are all vain—much of a muchness. Love is generally a hysterical prejudice. Take my advice and marry by reason.”
Gabriel besought further paternal advice on the subject. His father expanded. He loved dogmatism and was in his element.
“Take a practical view of the question,” he said. “When I see a fine, handsome, good-tempered girl, born of good stock into an excellent social position, possessing grit and savoir faire, then I say to myself, ‘Wise William who secures that investment.’ That, sir, is what I call a reasonable marriage.”
Gabriel meditated a moment over his claret.
“You do not believe in the worth of the deeper sentiments?” he said.
“Poetry, sir, is very well between calf covers and gold lettering, but for God’s sake keep poetical notions out of plain, honest existence. They are ruinous.”
“You think so?”
“I don’t theorize. I know.”
Gabriel smiled one of his melancholy smiles. Traitor to his own craft, he half believed his father’s dictum to be true. His pessimism with regard to the present levelled his expectations to a mundane tone. Sentiment might have suited a Laura or a Fiametta. It was obsolete according to modern notions. An up-to-date woman did not stand in need of poetry and heroics.
“Too much nonsense is talked,” John Strong continued, “on mental attraction, psychical magnetism, and the like. Common-sense is the thing. Consider women as so many nuts. Take any one, it doesn’t matter much which, provided it is not worm-eaten. And if one particular nut has a golden shell, nab it, my boy, and don’t talk about psychology. Poetical impracticabilities have ruined plenty of clever men. So long as a woman has a pretty face, a healthy body, and a fairly amiable mind, don’t you grumble. Give her good pin-money and plenty of honest animal affection and she’ll do. We’ve got to live in this world, not dream.”
LOVELY were the Mallan valleys where the woods came down to drink of the golden meads. The trees clambered up against the clouds, wild yet imperturbable, silent yet steeped in mysterious music that spoke to the soul. Larch and cedar, birch and pine, oak and mountain-ash stood as on the slopes of a great amphitheatre and watched the Mallan moving to the sea. Willows dipped their branches in the stream. Gnarled, cloven oaks thrust their rough fists into the white bosoms of flowering thorns. The Mallan banks were all of gold, of golden tissue spread upon green velvet. Moon-faced daisies whitened the long, languorous grass where wild sorrel shone like flame in the western sun. The blue bloom of summer and a great stillness covered the woods.
The Mallan burned brilliant in the sun. Rippleless, it stretched a band of blackened silver betwixt its sedges. A ring of eddies, a splash of foam, or a golden gleam darting swift and evanescent through the crystal darkness told of the life below. The blue-and-white mosaics of heaven shone on its idle bosom. Dragon-flies, blue, green, and scarlet, skimmed gossamer bright over rush and flag. Gnats played in the shallows and the moorhen paddled in the shade.
Weary of whipping the irresponsive water, the girl kneeling in the grass laid down her rod and glanced at her companion under the broad brim of her rose-laden hat. A June splendor burned upon her face. Her light summer dress of some greenish and opalescent fabric hung about her figure with a cool luxuriousness, tinted as with the cold glimmer of a fading west.
“No sport,” she cried to the man down stream, in her rich, full-throated voice, a voice that seemed in keeping with the opulence of her beauty.
“None,” came the echo.
“I’m bored.”
“At fifty yards!”
Ophelia smiled. Her lips were long and pleasurable, and a physical and sensuous magic seemed radiated from her figure. Her eyes fell into a contemplative stare as she watched the man draw near, swinging his fly to dry in the sun. He was bareheaded and his bronzed and handsome face shone eager to the west. His eyes had a habit of kindling when their glance lighted on the girl’s face. He was a clean-limbed man withal, supple as a young ash, sanguine, keenly sensitive, a man such as women love.
“No sport,” he said, smiling in the sun.
“An empty day, a wasted day. Am I a sentimentalist?”
The woman laughed a laugh that was peculiarly witching.
“We are both unimpeachable.”
“Such enthusiasts.”
“Model piscators, always gossiping, never keeping cover, missing rises, letting our wits wander. Gabriel, you are making a horrible cockney of me. I could not look my Scotch gillie in the face.”
An indefinite suggestiveness appeared even in these sparse, jesting words. The trout silvering the Mallan’s shadows were poorly imperilled by the girl and the man upon the bank. Too human a Providence interfered with the genuine bigotry of sport. The fish, had they known it, were but dumb players in the opening stagecraft of an eternal and stage-worn play.
“We must catch something,” said the girl, decisively, plucking at the grass that caressed her dress.
“Even though it be a cold.”
“Don’t be flippant.”
“Nay, I am serious for your sake.”
“That is very good of you.”
“I am a most serious Walton, a most complete angler.”
“For compliments.”
“I land too many as it is.”
The girl smoothed the creases from her skirt, Gabriel watching her hands gliding over the green undulations with a pleasurable languor. Her hair, full of light, curled over her ears and neck, and her shoulders were peculiarly graceful, as she stood half stooping, her long lashes sweeping her sunburned cheeks. A sudden upward glance and her eyes met Gabriel’s. A passionate challenge flashed in the sun. Ophelia’s cheeks kindled. Gabriel flushed an echo of red under his bronzed skin. They were both silent awhile as in thought.
The girl stretched out her arms like Clytie appealing the setting sun. A golden glow streamed above the woods; the scent of grass lay heavy on the air; a great silence abode over the meadows.
“I am stiff and it is growing late.”
“You are tired?”
“No.”
“Shall I try one more cast?”
“Yes. I will watch you.”
A kingfisher flashed, a living sapphire, before their eyes. Gabriel drew back behind the willows and walked on silently in the long grass. The girl watched him awhile, and then followed, her green skirt sweeping the golden flowers at her feet. She was as fair and perilous as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, perilous with her proud eyes and her glimmering hair.
Gabriel had seen rings swaying on the still silver of the stream. He was on his knees crawling towards the bank. Ophelia, poring over the sensations of her own heart, had drawn near with an unconscious egotism of desire. Not reasoning on the scene before her, she drew nearer still with the western sunlight beating on her face. The man by the bank had half risen from his crouching posture. A swing of the rod, a swishing of tackle, a twinging start of pain. The silver trout had escaped temptation through the flash of a woman’s arm.
Gabriel turned, dropped the rod, came to the girl with warm self-anger. A blue dun-fly specked her green sleeve; her lips were parted over her teeth; the fingers of her right hand gripped the twine. She tugged once at it, winced, and smiled in the man’s face. Gabriel fumbled for a knife and cut the line short.
“Clumsy beast that I am!”
“No,” she said, with a laugh, “better arm than cheek. There’s philosophic vanity for you.”
“Shall we go back home at once? I will ride for Marjoy.”
“Nonsense. Take the hook out here.”
“I?”
“Yes.”
“I shall hurt you.”
“Nonsense. Cut the sleeve.”
He began at the wrist and slit the silk wellnigh to the shoulder with his knife. The green folds fell away, baring the full, round arm white and glimmering in the sunlight. A thin blood track rubied the skin below the shoulder where the fly dipped its wings in the crimson stream. Gabriel’s fingers quivered against the girl’s wrist. They looked into each other’s eyes—a sudden, deep, and questioning look.
“Well?”
“Am I to take the thing out?”
A smile wandered over her lips. The man’s hands still touched her wrist.
“I have nerve. Push the barb through; the rest is easy.”
“I feel a brute.”
“Don’t be sentimental. I would rather you did it than any other man in the world.”
The contradiction passed unheeded, for their eyes were still at gaze into the opposing depths. They could hear each other breathing. Gabriel’s fingers touched the girl’s arm. She shivered and laughed a little, sucking in her breath betwixt her lips.
He steadied his hands against her arm. It was soon ended. A twist, a quiver, a passionate fumbling of fingers, and the barb of steel was tossed into the river.
“I have hurt you.”
Her eyes had grown dark with large and lustrous pupils; the sunlight dusted amber in her hair.
“No.”
“Not a little?”
“Perhaps—a little.”
A streak of blood veined the white satin of her skin. The man went red to the temples, bent suddenly, pressed his lips to the wound, and drew back panting.
“Pardon me, I could not help it.”
“Nor I.”
She laughed very softly. Her hand still rested in his; her fingers were as glowing metal in his palm.
“You rogue!”
“Let me bind it up.”
“You may.”
“Am I forgiven?”
She darted up her lips to his as he bound his handkerchief about her arm. They stood staring in each other’s eyes, breathing hard, straining towards each other. In another minute the girl was sitting amid the feathery grass with the man’s head upon her knees.
UNDER the gloom of seven tall chestnut-trees stood the village school. It was an antique building covered with roses and bounded towards the church by an old-fashioned garden, where the massed scarlet of an array of Oriental poppies contrasted with the white roses on the walls. It was evening, and the western sun glittered on the casements through the shimmering foliage of the trees. Children were playing over the graves in the church-yard, youth mocking at death. By the lych-gate stood a village Abraham cogitating over his evening pipe.
In the “club-room” of the school-house Mrs. Mince, in a magenta blouse and a dark-blue skirt, was flicking the dust from the library shelves with a red-and-white duster. Around her shone scriptural oleographs, texts, and a goodly horde of irreproachable books. Over the fireplace hung a scroll depicting Faith, Hope, and Charity footing it cheerily over emerald grass. Some sylvan humorist had dowered Charity with a pair of spectacles and a very obvious mustache.
Mrs. Mince was in the act of returningHints on Heavento its niche upon a shelf when the eldest Miss Snodley appeared before her, a celestial vision, bearing work-bag and Bible. Miss Zinia Snodley was an excessively thin little lady with prominent teeth, pince-nez, and a high forehead. Her hair was dragged back tyrannically and fastened in a diminutive and irritable bob at the back of her head. She had a habit of tilting her sparrow’s beak of a nose in the air and of chirping volubly with a species of declamatory splutter.
She thrust out a thin hand, its fingers primly extended and pressed into line, and beamed excitably in the vicaress’s big and pallid face.
“Such news, my dear! I am quite out of breath hurrying here to tell you all about it before the others came. Such news!”
Mrs. Mince sat down with some deliberation; she knew the length of Miss Snodley’s despatches.
“Quite romantic,” spluttered Miss Zinia. “He proposed to her in the Gabingly rose-garden, you know. I heard all about it—”
“About what?” interjected the vicaress.
“Young Strong’s engagement, my dear.”
Mrs. Mince held up her duster.
“Not to that woman!”
“There, I knew you would be amazed. They tell me Ophelia fainted; frightful affectation in a great, strapping girl like that; but then, my dear, those big creatures are always so emotional. I told my cousin Herbert years ago that I would never marry, and the poor fellow got engaged to a dissenter two months afterwards out of pique. Men are so inferior in these days. And those Gusset girls are shocking; they remind me of the pictures of that awful man Rossetti. You should have known my grandfather; he was such a gentleman, and could quote Latin like a native.”
Mrs. Mince adjusted the patent ventilator in the roof and remarked that the room seemed “stuffy.”
“Of course I had foreseen the thing for weeks,” she said, with emphasis, not desirous of appearing too markedly impressed. “I expected the affair every day. Mr. Mince is very intimate with dear Lord Gerald.”
Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacles glittered in the doorway. The pair pounced upon her, both speaking at once, as though eager to claim precedence in the sensation. At the conclusion thereof Mrs. Marjoy displayed the deficiencies in her dental array.
“A mere matter of decency,” she observed, with superlative sagacity. “The Gusset girl had to avoid a scandal. These society women are impossible. Ask my husband; he’s a man of the world.”
It was the evening of “The Guild” meeting, and the room was soon surcharged with the matrons of Saltire. Their work-bags, pamphlets, and gloves littered the deal table with its green baize cover. Unfortunately these ladies were not unique, in that they were moved to be charitable to other women’s reputations only by active moral endeavor. Spontaneously invidious, they only transcended their natural impulse towards mendacity by the power of spiritual pride. Venus ruled the room that evening. Many minutes passed before Mrs. Mince could reclaim her sisters from worldly discussion and direct their energies to the prescribed philanthropies of the hour.
After the concluding prayer the members of the Saltire Christian Guild again reverted with ardor to matrimonial topics. Mrs. Jumble, Saltire’s intellectual luminary, discussed the problem with certain of her more youthful disciples. Mrs. Jumble possessed a liking for epigrams; she revered the Johnsonian spirit, and had embraced the dignity of a judge summing up evidence. Moreover, her Roman nose lent color to the latter illusion.
“Marriage, Miss Ginge,” she said, addressing that simpering young lady—“marriage is a most serious and imposing circumstance, the mingling of two individualities in the alembic of love. To be frank, I consider Paul something of a pedant. He was a fanatic who did not comprehend the full significance of woman in religious evolution. Now, dear John would have made an admirable husband, so cultured, so reposeful, so Victorian. Never marry a fanatic, my dear, even though he be insane on the subject of potato-growing. Fanatics are unpleasant persons to live with. As for the present example, after a thorough sifting of individual eccentricities I should expect this alliance to lead to prodigious domestic problems. The begetting of an unwieldy family is the fundamental error of matrimony. Mr. Strong is a poet, I believe. Tin trumpets and sonneteering do not harmonize kindly. Poets and artists are generally undisciplined beings. I could quote you a certain remark of Giotto’s; but you are over young, Miss Ginge, to listen to realisms. Candidly, I foresee a fiasco in the approaching marriage.”
There was one woman in Saltire who aspired to a higher philosophy than that of a monthly nurse. To Judith Strong nothing was more repugnant than the subjection of a brother’s character to the tyranny of trivial tongues. For the prevalent physical estimate of marriage she had a superlative loathing, nor did she love the rustic oracles and their lore.
Judith Strong was one of those rare women blessed with superb instincts, instincts angel-winged towards heaven. Her spiritual rosary was strung with no sordid stones. Her aspirations were of the highest, her ideals begotten of the blood of Christ. She had that power peculiar to women who are great of soul, the power of seeing beyond the curtain of the present and of gazing prophetic into eternal truth. Men might deceive her; women never.
Now Ophelia Gusset was a physical being, a mere houri; a rampant, worldly, yet lovely egotist. She believed in a life of sensations. While fanatics struggled on cloud-solemn Sinai to take the tablets from the Eternal Hands, this fair and complacent pagan garlanded the golden calf, and stared into the mirror of pleasure to satiate her soul. Nor was it a matter for amazement that Judith Strong thought of her future sister with forebodings and repugnance.
There are men whose destinies are balanced upon a woman’s influence; Gabriel Strong was such a man. His sister knew that he was too sensitive to the sensuous waves of life, too easily intoxicated by poetic exaltation of the senses. Like many imaginative men, his fancies, wine-radiant bacchanals, overleaped his reason. Wisdom walked not at his right hand, but pursued him afar off. A unique woman’s love, or a Jesuitical discipline, were the two powers either of which could have steeled his manhood. He needed some ineffably tender and all-wise Beatrice to absorb his soul. As it was, he was to partner a crude Cressida in the perilous path of spiritual evolution. When the mob applauded and gabbled of gold and honor, Judith lifted the curtain covering the hot egotism of this woman’s soul, and found no saving balm there, but a scourge.
As for John Strong, his paternal satisfaction had waxed ecstatic over the fulfilment of his prophecies. He beamed on all creation, even as a man who had received a baronetcy, a seat in Parliament, or some Titanic legacy. So beneficent and seraphic was his humor that Mr. Mince seized the auspicious season, and ventured to persuade him to reseat Saltire church and to retile the floor of the chancel.
Various preliminaries had been amicably settled. Lord Gerald Gusset was a cheery, mellow, and casual being. He was nothing of a prig with regard to his own nativity, and would welcome any man as a retainer, provided he possessed money, passable manners, and a good tailor. The Saltire alliance was no mere sentimental affair. John Strong had disbursed generously to his son’s profit; had engaged to buy The Friary, an old manor-house in the neighborhood, and to allow Gabriel five thousand a year. There was to be no legal settlement in the affair. Lord Gerald and John Strong gossiped amicably over their port, and discussed details with a gentlemanly levity that suited the consideration of such sordid trifles. John Strong was eager to promise; the lord not unwilling to receive. Legalities were shouldered into dusty oblivion. John Strong preferred a free hand, and was not above professing extreme generosity in order to obtain an unfettered monopoly of his son’s future. Gabriel was still to be his son, paid and pampered out of the paternal pocket.
JUDITH’S brother had chosen to sink his deeper convictions and to embrace expediency as his lawful spouse. A callow pessimism had persuaded him to scoff at what he chose to denounce as “the mad posing of hyper-æsthetical principles.” He loved Ophelia Gusset in a rich physical fashion; the mediæval spirituality of the poets had cheated him too long. He began to believe Dante a fool and Petrarch a person who had sentimentally wasted his opportunities. Five thousand a year, a romantic home, a superb and comely wife—these facts suggested compromises that were not to be contemned. What could not money give him—Spanish orange-groves, Italian cypress thickets, brilliant books, pictures, opulence in mood and movement. Were there not thousands of unfortunates scrambling in life’s gutters for bare bread! Pandering to that glib-mouthed sophist known as “common-sense,” he abandoned certain spiritual ideals as the mere excrescences of youth. Having kissed expediency upon both cold cheeks, he was prepared for her to lead him into her most splendid habitation.
Coincidence, predestination, or the voice of the subconscious soul! What matters it which we accept, provided we recognize the intense motive power a single circumstance may exert upon some individual atom. Gabriel Strong, poling out his light “outrigger” from the Saltire Hall boat-house, had no vision of judgment before his eyes. He bared his elbows, swung out manfully, heard the ripples prattling at the prow. He was a man who loved to possess his physical moments in solitude. The quickened blood set streams of thought aspinning, the deeper breathing etherealized the brain.
There had been heavy rain in the night, and blue shadows covered the woods. A haze of heat shimmered above the mist-dimmed hills. Infinite freshness breathed from the dew-brilliant meadows. May seemed to have lifted once again her fair young face to the sun. A deep splendor shone upon wood and meadow, a green radiance dappled over with gold. Earth smiled through her tears; the shadowy trees shook pearls from their stately towers.
“Young man, my ribbon.”
The hail came like elfin music from under the green canopy of a willow. There was a suggestive beauty in the voice that had spoken. Gabriel, dreamer of dreams, had imagined himself supreme in most egotistic solitude. He “backed water” spontaneously. His sculls foamed in the tide.
Philosophy or no philosophy, he saw a young girl standing above him on the bank, with sudden sunlight streaming through her loosened hair. Her face shone like ivory under the green foliage arching her head. The water ran silver bright below the grass and water-weeds at her feet. There was a strange queenliness in her manner as she looked down upon him and pointed with one white hand at the rippling shallows.
“My ribbon.”
Gabriel colored with a curious spontaneity that was particularly boyish. The girl stood above him like some golden child peering deep-eyed from the green umbrage of romance. Her left hand was hooked in the unfastened collar of her blouse. Her shapely throat showed to its ivory base betwixt the golden curtaining of her hair.
“My ribbon,” she explained, with no lessening of her unmeditated stateliness. “I have dropped it in the water. You will give it me.”
A sudden memory swept out from the shadows of days past. Gabriel had seen that face, that cloud of hair, before. He remembered as in a forsaken dream, the blue sea and yellow sand, the black cliffs crescenting the still lagoon. A great silence seemed to fall within his heart as of a forest awed by the full moon.
A band of light blue silk floated amid the green weeds. Gabriel reached for it, pressed out the water with his fingers, stood up in the shallow boat, and hesitated. The girl did not move from her grassy dais under the willow. Her shadow fell athwart the water. When Gabriel looked at her, her eyes were not on the ribbon but upon his face.
The coincidence decided him. He took the near scull from the swivel, poled in, stepped into the bow as the stem brushed the bank, took the painter, gripped a tuft of coarse grass, and scrambled ashore. He twisted the rope round the straggling root of a willow and stood up.
“Thank you.”
The ribbon passed between them; their fingers touched. It was mere mesmerism, nothing more. Gabriel felt stolid.
“I am afraid the color will run,” he remarked.
“Will it?”
“I am not an authority.”
She looked at him with a certain critical candor, and said nothing. The man colored, though he considered himself a metaphysician.
She had a number of pins in a kerchief on the grass, and without more ado she began calmly to bind her hair. The man could see that it was damp and lustreless, not yet reburnished by the sun. The girl had been bathing in the Mallan. The idea inspired him. It was so mediæval—nay, classic.
“Do not let me waste your time.”
“I am not in a hurry,” he answered.
“You want to talk to me.”
“I?”
“You do not go.”
“Why should I?”
There was a curious and superb simplicity about her that confounded custom. Gabriel had a glib tongue on most occasions. For the nonce he discovered gaucherie in his constitution.
“You are fond of the river?” said the girl, smoothing the blue ribbon between her fingers.
“I am fond of being alone.”
“So am I.”
“Do you mean that for a hint?”
“I am always alone. What should I hint at? I dislike obscurities.”
“I was only sensitive for your sake,” said the man, with a smile.
“That is chivalry, is it not?”
“Perhaps.”
“You may talk to me—if you like.”
Gabriel considered her with an elemental sense of awe. Her manner was so essentially natural that he could imagine no flaw in her modesty. He had had abundant experience of coquettes. The girl did not appeal to him as such, rather as a Diana or a Belphœbe.
She sat down a short distance from him, and flicked her skirt over her feet. She had bound back her hair over her neck in rich and ample clusters. Her blouse was still open at the throat.
“Do you live here?”
“At Saltire. And you?”
“With my father, on the hills above Rilchester. Are you twenty yet?”
Gabriel smiled in such fashion that her eyes echoed his.
“I am older than you are,” he said.
“Much?”
“You are illogical; how should I know?”
“You do not look older; I am twenty. I like your face; you have gray eyes, so have I. I like your hair, too; it is dark and shines in the sun. What shall we talk about?”
“As we have begun.”
“Our ages?”
“Ourselves, rather.”
“I never talk about myself.”
“Why not?”
“I never have any one to talk to.”
The sense that he had passed back to childhood seized upon Gabriel with intense vividness. An artificial intellectuality appeared to have fallen from his being. The rust of experience no longer roughened his soul. He faced his deeper self, and the impression startled him. His manhood seemed to untrammel itself from the intricacies of world-wise philosophy; and he stood in the sun.
“You are lonely?” he said, with a sympathetic flexion of voice.
Her face brightened with a peculiarly luminous look, and her eyes held his.
“No.”
“You have friends?”
“None.”
“Strange.”
“Is it?”
“I imagine so. Even the most reserved being possesses some one he can call a friend. Perhaps you are jealous of conferring the epithet.”
“What epithet?”
“Friend.”
“My father does not believe in friends.”
“No?”
“He says they are too expensive.”
Gabriel smiled, but the girl’s face was unceasingly solemn. Her expression, indeed, appeared to partake of the perpetual seriousness of an earnest nature. A calm, unconscious melancholy shone forth from her mind like a glimmer of sunlight reflected from some golden shrine.
“Your father must be something of a cynic.”
“My father is poor.”
“Only in gold, perhaps.”
“In mind, too,” she said, with transcendent and ingenuous candor.
“But you love him?”
“I do not know,” she retorted, with a certain contemplative sincerity. “I have only read of love. I know Britomart and Florimel. I do not think Britomart would have loved my father.”
“Why not?”
“I do not know.”
“Perhaps I ought not to ask you.”
They lapsed suddenly into silence. The girl with the gray eyes was looking afar into the shadows of the woods. The water murmured at their feet, a calm, unceasing monologue like the soft prattle of a mother.
The silence proved but a prelude to one of the girl’s strange and flashing interrogations of the enigmas of life.
“Do you believe in a God?” she said.
“You ask strange questions.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps because I never talk to any one. People only speak to me in books. And one reads of so many gods—Zeus and Apollo, Allah and Christ, Venus, and great Ormuzd. Some mysterious sorrow often seems to tantalize my soul. All nature, the sea, the winds, yearn for something that can never be, and my soul echoes them. I stretch out my hands blindly, as to a dark sky. There should be power and light beyond, yet my heart gropes under the dim stars. There is often great hunger in me, hunger that I cannot satisfy. I yearn for something—what, I cannot tell. I wonder what we live for?”
“Perhaps to die.”
“And then?”
“There men disagree.”
She mused a moment like a Cassandra.
“All men seem to disagree,” she said.
Probably another half-hour passed before the girl rose from the grass with the consciousness of parting. Gabriel, soft-fibred pessimist, stood beside her with an utter sense of unreality bearing upon his brain.
“Good-bye; I must go home.”
“And I, too.”
She flushed a very little and her eyes kindled.
“Do you know—” she began.
“Well?”
“I am feeling lonely for the first time in my life.”
Gabriel said nothing.
“You will tell me your name?”
“Yes. Gabriel Strong.”
“I like it.”
“And yours?”
“Joan Gildersedge.”
She made a step towards him suddenly and extended her hand.
“You may kiss it,” she said. “They did that in the old days.”
And then she left him.
But Gabriel rowed home slowly down the Mallan with his head bowed down in thought. There were certain words of an old legend stirring in his heart, and the girl’s eyes followed him.
“Now when Tristan and Iseult had drunk of the potion, Love, who never resteth but besetteth all hearts, crept softly into the hearts of the twain. But it was not wine that was therein, though like unto it, but bitter pain and enduring sorrow of heart, of which the twain at last lay dead.”