CHAPTER IV
‘My dear,’ said Kingston Darnley to his mother one afternoon, ‘being in love is the strangest thing.’
Long habit had taught him to indulge in soliloquy under the mask of a dialogue with his mother. She allowed him to talk, and never interrupted the flow of his self-communings by any sudden sign of understanding them. Few people are more comfortable to confide in than those who can always be safely reckoned on to understand nothing of what is said to them. Lady Adela laid down her knitting and beamed lovingly at her son over her spectacles.
‘A strange and blessed thing,’ she answered in her soft tones.
‘I wonder,’ continued her son, ‘whether everybody feels alike. More or less, I suppose—although everyone thinks that he has the secret all to himself.’
‘Love is sent, sooner or later, to everyone,’ replied Lady Adela.
‘But how do people know that it is the right love?’ questioned Kingston. Then he went on, without waiting for the irrelevant answer which his mother would surely provide. ‘Uncertainty is a deadly thing. And the worst of it is that everyone who really wants to find happiness must always be uncertain as to the way. Only those who don’t care can ever be perfectly, securely certain.’
‘True love is always unmistakable,’ replied his mother, who, in her time, had married the late James Dadd from a feeling that anything would be preferable to prolonged existence with Lady Kirk-Hammerton.
‘Yes; but it must have different manifestations. I remember when Tom Clifford was engaged to thatMenzies girl he couldn’t bear her out of his sight, never let any other man have half a dozen words with her. Now, I don’t mind who Gundred talks to, or what she says—not a scrap. And—well, it’s always a joy to see her, of course—everyone must feel that—but I haven’t any wish to go about all day at the end of her hat-ribbon. Is that because I am cold-blooded, or is it the proper normal thing to feel?’
‘My dear boy is so full of chivalry,’ answered Lady Adela with affectionate vagueness. ‘No nice girl would like to be too much monopolized. It is hardly delicate.’
‘One had a sort of notion,’ continued Kingston, unregarding, ‘that love-making was more of a desperate flesh-and-blood affair. I suppose the real thing is more ethereal than the everlasting philanderings that one reads about. Heaven knows, they are earthly enough.’
‘Marriages are made in heaven,’ replied his mother reverentially.
‘And love is made on earth, I gather—at least, love of the novelist’s sort. Certainly marriage is happier in every way—calmer, less discomposing, more orderly and decent and—and—abstract, as it were. I cannot imagine anyone not loving Gundred. She appeals to everything that is best in one. And the crowning mercy of it all is that she never gives one thrills of any kind, never rouses any primitive, prosaic emotions. She is always just what one expects—gentle and charming and satisfactory—and nothing else. There is no intoxication about her. And, really, you know, that is a relief. One had imagined that love—love in the completest sense—was a kind of celestial drunkenness. It is a tremendous relief to find that it is only a quiet temperance drink after all—the Water of Life, as it were. I don’t think either my head or my stomach care very much for intoxicants.’
‘Your dear father was just the same,’ replied Lady Adela calmly; ‘two glasses of port never failed to upset him. Some people’s interiors are so sensitive. If one is in the least troubled that way, it is far better never to touch stimulants. Or peppermint, they say, does wonders.’
‘One has wrestled through loves of different kinds,’ said Kingston, securely continuing his soliloquy, ‘and it is certainly a blessed surprise to find that the real thing is placid and satisfying. The hunger and thirst of passion are fierce and dreadful—it never seemed likely that perfect happiness could be found in the mere appeasing of them. I am sure I much prefer the lasting, tranquil completeness of an emotion to the feverish clamour of an appetite. And that, after all, is what most people seem to mean by love. I have always rather hated violence and brutal manifestations. They seem a little vulgar, very crude and indecent, very unworthy of our higher emotional powers.’
‘My boy is so full of nice feeling,’ said Lady Adela; ‘violence is a terrible thing. I remember I once saw a dog run over by a tram. I have never forgotten it.’
‘One feels a certain something solid and eternal about real love,’ went on her son, contentedly talking to himself aloud under pretence of addressing his mother. ‘It is a huge level tract of feeling, stretching out into the immensities, without anything to break the enormous flat surface of it. It goes on for ever and ever, without valleys or pinnacles, or rough places of any kind. And surely that is better than perpetually scrambling up peaks and falling off them again, into abysses. Real love is not a mountain track; it is a solid turnpike road with a smooth, sound surface. One’s life jogs along it imperceptibly, and one’s attention need not be kept fixed on the driving to see where one is going. With Gundred I feel that I am withsomeone whom I have known for ages in the past, and whom I shall continue to know for ages in the future, without jars or disconnections. There is something monumental, something filling about the sensation. People who find the hot rough-and-tumble pandemian love enough for them would think the real heavenly feeling stodgy and perhaps—well, perhaps even a little dull. It does lack diversity somehow. It offers repletion without any sauces to appetise. But, then, I suppose the immensities must of necessity seem monotonous to our small, jigging intelligences.’
‘I am sure, Kingston,’ said Lady Adela with conviction, ‘that no one could have a better intelligence than you. It is quite something to be thankful for.’
‘Now, Gundred, for instance—very often with her I have a shut-out feeling of getting no further, of finding locked doors and stone walls. Sometimes I have nothing that I want to say to her, and sometimes she has nothing that she wants to say to me. Sometimes she does not understand what I mean, sometimes we seem to be talking different languages, without any real wish to make ourselves intelligible. When we have said that we love each other there is nothing much left for us to say. And isn’t that exactly as it should be? The love is the only thing that matters, after all. One does not marry for the conversation, but for the love. Other people can give one the conversation. No; one has to look forward over the whole field of life—it is not only the present amusement that matters. What is very amusing and delightful for half an hour would be quite intolerable to put up with for fifty years of marriage life.Marrons glacésand caviare sandwiches are excellent in their way, but, when everything is said and done, bread is the real staple of existence. The primitive passionate lover is trying to make half an hour’s surfeit of sweets andsavouries supply the place of all healthy meals through all the years to come; it is only the idealist who sets himself calmly down to a long indefinite course of bread-and-butter. There can be no doubt that the bread-and-butter regime is the saner and the more blessed and the more refined of the two. But, of course, if one simply lives from hand to mouth and from hour to hour, the bread-and-butter schemeisapt to look a little dull by comparison with frequent snacks of indigestible, exciting dainties. However, thank Heaven, I have got what is best for me—and sense enough to recognise the fact. If Gundred sometimes fails to feed me up with pretty fancies from hour to hour, she is laying up for me a supply of satisfying bread-and-butter for the rest of our lives. And one’s whole life is obviously more important than any given half-hour of it.’
‘Yes,’ replied Lady Adela after a pause, ‘but one must be careful about bread-and-butter. Too much is apt to make one stout. I quite agree with dear Gundred, though, as to plain food being the most satisfactory in the long run. I read the other day a very nice book, in which the characters sat down to “a plain but perfectly-cooked meal.” Now, that struck me as expressing so exactly what one wants.’
‘My dear,’ said her son abruptly, ‘what did my father and you talk about when you were engaged?’
Lady Adela, who had expected from her son the soothing accompaniment of another monologue to the music of her knitting, started at his abrupt question, lost count of her stitches, then looked vaguely up at last, her lips moving in a vain effort to recover her place in the row.
‘What did we talk about?’ she repeated. Then she blushed faintly. The distant past was transfigured with romance.
‘Dear boy,’ she resumed in hushed, reverent tones. ‘The engagement is the sweetest time in a woman’s life. The loveliest things your poor dear father gave me. We were at Naples, you know, and one gets the most charming corals there, and mosaics, and brooches carved out of lava. I have got them all. And then your poor dear father and I used to go out on to the terrace in the evening and look at the sunset and Vesuvius, and the steamers coming into the bay. He used to take my hand, and we stood there, saying nothing. There was nothing to say, dear. We both felt too much. One does not want to talk. And sometimes he—he would give me a kiss. And all the time—well, there was nothing else in the world, somehow, but just ourselves. We were quite alone. We should have been quite alone, even in a crowd.’
‘Ah, that is just exactly different with Gundred and me. We are never alone. We should not be alone in the wilderness. Gundred seems to live her life before an invisible audience of hundreds of people. That is why one can never get near her real self; there is always the consciousness of the audience restraining her.’
Lady Adela, however, was lost in roseate reminiscence.
‘So well I remember,’ she went on, ‘how the evening used to get darker and darker as we stood on the terrace, and the smell of dinner used to float up to us so deliciously from the ground-floor. Your poor dear father adored the Neapolitan cookery, and we used to talk of how we would have someone who could dorisottowhen we were married and settled down. But none of our cooks ever could. Dear me, and the lights in the bay, and the warm, quiet darkness of it all, and just us two, alone in the world.’
The sweet and innocent sentimentality of LadyAdela had succeeded in draping the usual beautiful gauze of romance across an episode which, in its time, had been marked by plain and practical precision. As ivy, in the course of years, grows over the bare stone of a ruin, so does romance cover over the hard bare facts of a woman’s past. No matter how stark and cold it may have been, yet, if her nature be loving and soft, its softness will subdue and transfigure the roughnesses of many crude bygone days. By this time Lady Adela believed in her romantic marriage as firmly as she believed in her vicar and her Sovereign.
‘So delightful it was to be with your poor dear father,’ she went on; ‘he was the kindest and most thoughtful of men. He always saw that I had a footstool and a corner seat, and the sun nicely shaded off my eyes. He used to come and sit by me, too, while I was sketching, and read aloud to me until we both fell asleep. I have never liked any one else to read aloud to me since. Mamma was very bustling and worldly, and I was not at all happy with her. But when your poor dear father came and found me, the whole of my life was changed. He was the fairy prince that came to rescue me.’
‘But you told me once, my dear, that my father had once cared very much for someone else.’
‘The world, dear boy, abounds in the most dreadful women. And, indeed, why God made so many women at all—and most of them so plain—nobody has ever yet been able to tell me. There was a horrid creature who made your poor dear father think he was in love with her, as they call it. But, of course, he was nothing of the kind. For as soon as she was safely drowned and out of the way, he forgot all about her, and came and married me, and no two people were ever happier together in the world than he and I. Ours was a case of true love, dear boy, if ever there was one. AndI am certain yours will be the same. It is my earnest prayer, dear, and my sure hope. Gundred is the most thoroughly nice, good girl.’
‘And it would not matter if a shade of dullness sometimes seemed to fall between us?’
By this time Lady Adela was, for a wonder, awake to the purport of her son’s questionings. Her excursion into the past had brought her back refreshed into the present.
‘Kingston, dear,’ she answered, ‘what else would you expect from a really nice-minded girl? She is not a married woman yet. The time has not yet come for her to enter fully into your life, or you into hers. Remember how your poor dear father and I used to sit silent together for hours, never saying a word.’
‘Yes; but you did not feel the want of words. I think we sometimes almost do. That makes all the difference.’
‘Words will come, dear—words and all other blessings in their time. Gundred will be the greatest help and comfort to you in your life, and I am sure you love each other tenderly.’
Kingston suddenly began to feel the difficulties of the dialogue. To confide is all very well and comfortable, so long as the confidant is not listening or understanding. The moment he shows signs of noticing what is said, the mortifying indelicacy of the proceeding becomes plain. Finding his mother unwontedly awake to his remarks, Kingston’s sensitiveness drew in its horns.
‘Oh, thanks, my dear,’ he said lightly. ‘I am sure everything will turn out for the best. I am the luckiest fellow alive, and don’t suppose I forget it.’
‘Some people always touch wood,’ said Lady Adela meditatively, ‘when they say a thing like that. Sucha silly superstition. But, still, there may be something in it.’ She rapped the tea-table firmly.
Mother and son had been so absorbed in their dialogue that they had not heard the hall door bell ring. Suddenly the door opened, and Miss Mortimer was announced. Fresh, crisp, pleasant as ever, Gundred entered the room and kissed her future mother-in-law.
‘Dear Lady Adela,’ she said, ‘I felt I must come round and see how you were. This heat—so ridiculously trying for a climate like ours.’ Then she turned to Kingston. ‘And Kingston,’ she added; ‘how is he?’
‘Poor gentleman,’ replied her lover tragically. ‘Mr. Darnley has been quite on his last legs lately. But he recovered miraculously all of a sudden, as soon as he saw Mapleton showing somebody into the room.’
‘You really do talk the most shocking rubbish,’ said Gundred sensibly, but without disapproving sternness. ‘Lady Adela, why do you let Kingston talk such rubbish?’
‘My mother,’ replied Kingston, intercepting the mild remonstrance of Lady Adela’s reply, ‘brought me up to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You asked me about the state of my feelings, and I gave you a truthful reply. Behold! Your coming has taught me, for the ninety-ninth time, that life is worth living. Sit down and I will ring for tea. My dear, surely it is tea-time? Gundred has clearly come here simply and solely to get a cup of tea. With me she will have nothing to say. It is tea she wants. She pants for it, like the hart for cooling brooks.’
‘Hush!’ said Gundred; ‘don’t talk like that. It’s irreverent. But, indeed, Lady Adela, I certainly should be delighted if you would let me stay and havesome tea with you. I lunched with Aunt Agnes, and she gave me a lunch of unimaginable nastiness, so that now I feel as if I had not eaten for days.’
‘You poor darling!’ cried Lady Adela with pitying indignation; ‘that is always the way. Wait, and I will order you something really nice. Look after Gundred, Kingston dear, while I go and interview Tessington about to-night. I have been wanting to see her all the afternoon, and I can just as well have her up to the dining-room.’
Having thus tactfully explained her departure, Lady Adela left the lovers alone. A silence fell.
‘What are you thinking of?’ asked Gundred at last.
‘I am wondering,’ replied Kingston, ‘what, precisely, is going on behind those inscrutable eyes of yours—what thoughts are playing about behind that cool white forehead of yours. And the worst of it is that I can never find out. You will never let me in of your own accord; and if I took an axe and forced my way in I should only find a mess of blood and bone.’
‘Don’t be horrid,’ said Gundred, shuddering. ‘I am sure I tell you everything I think. I hide nothing from you.’
‘Perhaps not, you well-mannered Sphinx. But you reveal nothing. Nothing about you gives any index to your thoughts. You are too fearfully and wonderfully trained. I have seen you suffering agonies of boredom with a smile; I have seen you suffering torments of cold and discomfort with the sweetest blandness. No one can ever guess what a person like that is really thinking. For all I know, you may, at this very moment, be remarking a smut on my nose or a blemish on my character. Your behaviour gives no clue.’
‘But, Kingston dear,’ protested Gundred, moved by this denunciation, ‘you would not have a rudeand boorish wife, I am sure. And you know I have no fault to find with you. I think I have shown that—yes?’
‘With really rude people one knows where one is. Their amiability means true friendship and true approval. With your suave, elegant, charming sort smiles may mean anything or nothing. One never knows where one is. “Mind you come again soon,” you tell me, ever so pleasantly. And the very instant before you have said exactly the same thing, in the same cordial inflection, with the same inviting smile, to some woman whom I know you intensely dislike, and only allow inside the house on sufferance. Now, what am I to think?’
Gundred began to feel quite distressed.
‘But, Kingston,’ she cried, ‘one must be civil. One simply must. Why do you attack me like this? What have I done?’
‘You are such a beautiful little icicle,’ answered her lover. ‘Will you never thaw? You are an icicle inside an iron safe. How can one get at you to thaw you?’
‘How utterly absurd you are, Kingston! Haven’t I given you the key? Besides—oh, I’m not an icicle; I’m not a bit of an icicle. Only—well, what is it you want?’
‘Be quite, quite honest for a minute, Gundred. Strip your soul stark, and tell me whether you love me.’
‘Oh, don’t hold my hands like that. It’s so hot....’
‘You are always cool, my dear—a capital refrigerator you are.’
‘Kingston, you are unkind this afternoon.’
‘Well, what about my answer? Do you really love me, Gundred?’
Gundred still shirked the inquisition, though secretly she enjoyed it.
‘I am engaged to you,’ she answered.
‘That is the muffled up, overdressed sort of thing you always say,’ replied Kingston. ‘Give me the bare, naked truth. Do you truly love me, Gundred?’
She turned upon him with a flash of inspiration.
‘You would never ask me such a question if you weren’t sure of your answer already,’ she cried.
‘Perhaps not, but give it me all the same. It’s not enough to know a thing; one wants to be told it sometimes.’
‘Oh, that is just like a silly woman—never believing a man cares for her unless he goes on telling her so twice a minute. Oh, Kingston, don’t let us be so childish. These things don’t need to be talked about. I hate talking about them. It isn’t decent. The more one feels the less one should say. Only kitchen-maids chatter about their love affairs, and wear their hearts on their sleeves.’
‘Anyhow, that’s better than wearing it in someone else’s pocket, as so many others do.... Gundred, does your soul never take off its stays? Does it always live in public, on view, in full Court dress and train and feathers?’
‘Kingston—dear Kingston, I think you must be a little bilious. I am not always in public. Here I am alone with you—yes?’
‘Alone? Oh dear, no! You are always acting, always posing to half a hundred people in the room whom I can’t see. They prevent you from ever speaking honestly to me, as I speak to you. They dictate the way you walk, the chair you sit in, every word and action of your day.’
‘I don’t understand you, Kingston. A woman has so much more to think of than a man in some ways. Surely ... you know by now that I—well, that I do care for you. You mustn’t ask me to be alwayssaying so. You wouldn’t like it if I did. Do be reasonable. One has to behave decently—yes? Our points of view are so different. It seems to me that I tell you far too much—sometimes I think I am shameless and horrid—and yet you—you think me cold and unsatisfactory.’
‘Can’t you realize how a man starves for a little warmth, Gundred?’
‘I hate to think of men like that; I am sure you are not one of them. Anyhow, I hope we shall never condescend to their horrid level. You are engaged to me, Kingston, and that ought to be quite enough.... It is for me.’
She glanced at him with gleaming eyes. He heard the cool, level tone, and missed the gleam. He sighed.
‘And some people have thoughtmecold and fish-blooded,’ he thought, in a spasm of irritation. But clearly it was useless to dash himself against the firm rock of Gundred’s placidity.
‘You are almost as impersonal as one of those Buddhist saints that my Uncle Robert has lived with,’ he replied. ‘You make one feel cold.’
Gundred, resolved in her attitude, would take no notice of his renewed attack. ‘Your Uncle Robert,’ she said, ‘have I heard of him? Oh yes; he is that brother of your father’s who ran away to Japan so many years ago and became a Buddhist himself, poor man, didn’t he? Will he ever come back to England?’
‘Not if he’s as wise as he sounds. His life out there seems to be almost perfect contentment.’
‘How strange that is—yes? Well, I have got odd relations, too, in out-of-the-way corners of the world, you know. There’s poor papa’s sister, Isabel Darrell, away in Australia, with a daughter. I really rather hope they will never come home. Colonial relationsare apt to be so truly dreadful. And now, Kingston dear, what I came to see you about to-day is this. Have you any very strong ideas as to the honeymoon? Because papa and Uncle Henry and Aunt Agnes are all very anxious that we should go to Brakelond. And I do think there is something rather nice in the idea. After all, I suppose it will be our place some day, and our children’s after us. In a way it is my wedding-present to you. Don’t you think we might begin our married life there? Uncle Henry won’t be in our way at all. He is kept in a wing right apart from the rest of the Castle, and the building is so enormous that you might put up twenty people there, and no one need have any notion that there was anyone in the place besides himself.’
‘Yes,’ replied Kingston, warming to the prospect; ‘it sounds a delightful plan. I was wondering when we could go to Brakelond. Hugh Frazer did say something about lending us his place, but I can easily explain. Luckily, all my Dadd relations are out of the reckoning, so there is no one to claim any tiresome rights. By all means let us go to Brakelond. It must be the most gorgeous old place. Haven’t they still got the room where Queen Isabel sat and worked?’
‘Yes, horrid woman!’ said Gundred tersely. ‘I don’t like to talk about her. I can scarcely believe she was my ancestress.’
‘But splendid, Gundred—splendid and tragic and romantic.’
Gundred’s firm, pale lips tightened into a line of disapproval.
‘I never can see why wicked people are especially splendid or tragic or romantic,’ she said. ‘Goodness is so much nicer—yes?’
‘Perhaps it is,’ replied Kingston, after a pause, ‘but not always so interesting.’
‘One has no wish to be interested in anything that is not pure and beautiful and good,’ announced Gundred, with an air of virtuous finality.
‘Oh, well, we’ll go there, anyhow,’ answered Kingston, shying away from the imminent argument, ‘and have no end of a mystic splendid time. We’ll sit about all day, and forget the world, and read novels to each other.’
‘Not novels, dear,’ said Gundred gently; ‘sensible books—yes?’
Kingston shrugged his shoulders. Clearly the conversation had run into one of its frequent culs-de-sac, and there was no continuing it. Gundred was impregnable to all assaults of the picturesque, and adamant to all new opinions or suggestions. Over Kingston was coming that bruised and daunted feeling to which, sooner or later, his meetings with her seemed invariably to lead. She held him at arm’s length, baffled him, rebuffed him, deliberately kept herself a stranger from his ardours, his intimacy. Each dialogue of theirs seemed to resolve itself inevitably into a futile if friendly discussion of topics indifferent. Of course this offered all the richer promise for the long years of coming matrimony, but meanwhile Gundred’s maidenly reserve turned the preliminary canter of courtship into a jog over rather arid and sterile ground. When Lady Adela tardily returned to the room, in the wake of tea, she found the lovers canvassing theAcademy. Gundred, however, was so perfectly certain that her choice was sound and holy that the conversation was unfruitful if amiable. Lady Adela joined it, and it easily admitted a third voice.