Nigel was late for supper that evening. He came in very quietly, and slipped into his place without a word. He had very little to say about the races.
"Lost your money on Midsummer Moon?" said Leonard. "Well, you needn't look so glum—it was only five bob."
But Janey knew that was not the matter, though she knew nothing more. After supper she put her arm through his, and drew him out into the garden. They walked up and down in front of Sparrow Hall. At first she had meant to ask him questions, but soon she realised that the questions would not come—only a great stillness between her and Nigel, and a fierce clutch of their hands. They walked up and down, up and down, breathing the thick scents of the garden—touched with autumn rottenness, sodden with rain and night. Gradually they pulled each other closer, till she felt the throb of his heart under her hand....
The next day Nigel worked hard with Len at weed-burning. It was strange what a lot of weed-burning there was to do, thought he—not only at Sparrow Hall, but at Wilderwick, and Swites Farm, and Golden Compasses, and the Two-Mile Cottages, and all those places from which little curls of blue, dream-scented smoke were driftingup against the sky. Men were burning the tangles of their summer gardens, they were piling into the flame those trailing sweets, now dead. For autumn was here, and winter was at hand, and a few dead things that must be burnt were all that remained of June.
Nigel wondered if his June had not gone too, and if he had not better burn at once those few sweet, dead, tangled thoughts it had left him. He thought of the dim lane by Goatsluck Farm, with the glare of two motor lights on the hedges. He saw the puddles gleam, and Tony erect in the trickery of light and darkness, shapeless in his coat. Then across the aching silence of his heart came her words—"I can't bear it!—I—I'm so—disappointed."
That was the end of June—and he ought to have expected it. His friendship with Tony Strife could never have lasted in a neighbourhood where both were known and talked about. It had ended a little suddenly, that was all. He did not reproach himself for deceiving her; he did not even regret it, though he guessed what she must think. The doorway of the house of light had stood open, and he had crept in like a beggar, knowing that he must soon be turned out, but resolute meanwhile to bask and be glad.
But he wished she had not been "disappointed," that was so pathetic. Poor little girl! the memory of him would eat into her heart for a while. Girls of her age were righteous, and he had cheated her into friendship with unrighteousness. She would hate him for a bit. "I am so disappointed"—itseemed as if all his seething desires for goodness and peace had died into that little wail of outraged girlhood, and come back to haunt the empty house of his heart.
During the first few days of separation he childishly hoped that he might hear from her—surely she would write if only to upbraid. But no letter came. His coat was returned the next morning, but he searched the parcel in vain for a message. How cruel of Tony!—and yet all children, even girl-children, are cruel. Their experience of sorrow is limited to its tempestuous side—they do not know its aching calms; they quench their thirst with great gulps, and do not know the relief of small drops of water. This was the price he had to pay for seeking his comfort in the gaiety of boys and girls instead of in the more stable sympathy of his contemporaries.
The next two weeks were heartsick and lonely. All day long a piteous consciousness of Tony was present in the background of his thoughts, waiting till night to creep into the foreground of his dreams, and torment him with hungry wakings. Everything that reminded him even of her type was painful. Little ridiculous things twanged chords of plaintive memory—a picture of the Roedean hockey-team, with their short skirts and pig-tails, the demure flappers he sometimes met in his walks, a correspondence on "moral training in girls' schools" which was being waged in a daily paper—everything that reminded him of healthy, growing, undeveloped girlhood, reminded him of Tony,and made his heart ache and yearn and grieve after her.
He wandered about by himself a good deal in the lanes, snatching his few free moments after dusk. He no longer tramped furiously—he roamed, with slow steps and dreaming eyes, drinking a faint peace from the darkness of the fields. He found comfort, too, in his fiddle, and every evening he would play through his banal repertory, "O Caro Nome," fromRigoletto, "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls," the overtures toZampaandLa Gazza Ladra, the Finale fromLucia di Lammermoor. He became wonderfully absorbed in his fiddling, and had recovered a certain amount of his old skill and flexibility.
One day he took his violin to East Grinstead, as the sounding post had fallen down. He came back by a long road—through Hophurst and New Chapel and Blindley Heath. He stopped at the last to have a drink—it was a dreary collection of cottages, scattered round a flat, windswept heath. There were ponds in the corners of the heath, and their waters were always ruffled by a strange wind. Right in the middle of the waste was a little house squatting in its own patch of tillage, an island, a tumble-down oasis, in the great dreariness.
The scene, with the grey, scudding sky behind it, became stamped on Nigel's brain, as he stood with his beer in the pothouse door. It was one of those days when it seems as if our own hopelessness has at last impressed the unfeeling maskof Nature, and caused it to put on the grimace of our despair.
One or two children were playing in the road in front of the tavern, the wind fluttering their pinafores, and blowing their clothes against their limbs. A little boy with a mouth-organ was playing a vague and plaintive tune, to which two little girls were dancing. Nigel stood listening for some minutes, till both the moaning wind and the creaking tune had woven themselves together into a symphony of wretchedness.
Then he put down his beer, and took up his violin. He unfastened the case, unrolled the chrysalis of wrappings, and laid the instrument against his shoulder. The next minute a shrill wail rose up and challenged the wind.
The bar was nearly empty, but Nigel would not have cared had it been full. He stood in the doorway, his hair blowing and ruffling madly, his body swaying, as he forced his fiddle into a duet with the wind. He had never before tried to extemporise, his violin had been for him a memory of sugary tunes, each wrapped up in the tinsel of a little past—he had never tried to wring the present out of it in a sudden, fierce expression of the emotions that tortured him as he played. This evening he wanted to join the wind in its wailing race, to rush with it over the common, to tear with it through the hedges, and sweep with it over the water. He forced out of his fiddle the cries of his own heart—they rose up and challenged the wind. The wind hushed a little—fluttered, throbbed—was still ... the fiddle tore through the silence andshattered it ... then the wind rose, and drummed savagely. Nigel dashed his bow down on the deep strings, and forced deep sounds out of them. The wind galloped up to a shriek—and Nigel's hand tore into harmonics, and wailed there till the wind was only puffing and sobbing. Then the fiddle sobbed. The fiddle and the wind sobbed together ... till the wind swung up a scale—up came the fiddle after it ... the wind rushed higher and higher, it whistled in the dark eaves of the inn, and the fiddle squeaked higher and higher, and Nigel's fingers strained on the fingerboard—he would not be beaten, blind Nature should not defeat him, two should play her game. The wind was like a maniac as it whistled its arpeggios—the casements of the house were rattling like tin, the trees were swishing and bending, the water in the ruts of the lane was rippling, doors were creaking and banging, the fiddle was straining and shrieking ... then suddenly the string broke. Nigel dropped his bow, angry and defeated. The duet with the wind was over.
Then he noticed a strange thing. He had been staring blindly and stupidly ahead of him, all his senses merged into sound, but now he saw that the road was crowded with children, and they were all dancing—little girls with their petticoats held high, little boys jumping aimlessly in their clumsy boots. They stopped as his hand fell, and stared at him in surprise, as if they had expected the music to go on for ever.
"Hullo!" said Nigel—then suddenly he laughed;they all looked so forlorn, holding out their pinafores and pointing their feet.
"Wait a bit," he said, "my string's broken, but I'll have another on in no time."
So he did—but not to play a duet with the wind. He played the Intermezzo fromCavalleria, and the dance went on as raggedly as before. After the Intermezzo he played the Overture toZampa, which was immensely popular, then threaded a patchwork ofLa Somnambula, theBohemian Girl,La Tosca, andAida, till mothers began to appear on the doorsteps with cries of "Supper's waiting."
Supper was waiting for Nigel when he appeared at Sparrow Hall. Len and Janey asked no questions—it was pathetic how few questions they asked him nowadays—but they both noticed he was happier. He did not speak much—he sat in a kind of dream, with a wistful tremulousness in the corners of his mouth. His mouth had always been the oldest part of him—hard in repose and fierce in movement—but to-night it had taken some of the extreme childishness of his eyes. Nigel felt very much the same as a child that cries for the moon and is given a ball to play with—the ball almost makes him forget that he wants the moon so badly. Those dancing children had, for some strange reason, partly filled the place of stalwart Tony in his heart. That night they came and danced in his dreams—in a pale light, to a tinkling tune. He found himself forming plans for making them dance again. He would never be on the old footing with Tony, but those children should dance for him and help him to forget.
So the next evening he went out again with his fiddle, and played at Blindley Heath. Again the children danced—with clumping boots and high petticoats they danced outside the Sweepers Inn. But this time he did not stay long—he went on to Dormans Land, to see if they would dance there. It was nearly dark now, and one or two misty stars shone above the village roofs—the wind was heavy with approaching rain as it soughed up the street towards him. He did not stand at the inn, but where the road to Lingfield joins the road to Cowden, close to the schools. One or two children came and looked at him curiously.
"He wants a halfpenny," said one, "I'll ask my mumma for it."
"No," said Nigel, "I want you to dance."
The children giggled, but at last the little girl who had suggested the halfpenny picked up her skirts, and then it was not long before they were all dancing to the waltz fromTraviata.
Every day afterwards, when evening fell, Nigel took his violin, and went out into the lanes and the dark-swept villages, and played for the children to dance. They grew to expect him, and to clamour for old tunes. "Give us the jiggy one," they would cry, and he would play "O Caro Nome." "Give us the twirly one," and he would play "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls." But sometimes he would not give them what they wanted—he would play what he chose, strange things that came into his head and would not leave it till he had sent them wailing into the dusk. One day he played a duet with some long grassthat rustled and sighed behind him; another day it was with a wood, brown and naked, but full of palpitating mysteries; another time he played an accompaniment to the stars as they crept timidly one by one into the deserts of the sky. He knew the constellations, and gave gentle, bird-like notes to the dim Pleiades, and low, sonorous tones to Orion, and heavy quavers to the Wain; there was a sudden scale for Casseopeia, and harmonics for the Ram. By the time he had finished all the children had gone, and he was alone in the breeze and darkness, in a great, grief-stricken silence, which, he realised painfully, greeted the stars far more fitly than any strivings of his.
It was impossible for this new life to be hidden from the brother and sister at Sparrow Hall. One evening Leonard burst into the kitchen where Janey was sitting.
"What do you think Nigel's up to now?"
"What?"
"Playing the fiddle outside pubs for kids to dance to."
Janey gasped.
"Are you sure, Len?"
"Absolutely pos. Old Pilcher was telling me—the lad was fiddling away for an hour outside the Sweepers at Blindley Heath, and all the brats were on their hind legs, kicking up no end. Janet, do you think he's all there?"
"I—I don't know—I've been wondering."
"There's no doubt that he's been strange ever since he came out of quod. Poor old Nigel—life's hit him hard, and bruised him a lot."
"He was funny about kids from the first. He took a tremendous fancy to that odious little Ivy Batt who comes for the milk."
"I expect this is part of the same game."
"I expect it is—but it hurts me to think of it."
She turned to the fire, and a sigh shook her breast—life had a habit of hitting hard all round.
A few minutes later Nigel came in. He set down his violin, and went over to the hearth, kneeling beside Janey. She put her arms round him, and drew his head to her shoulder.
"Old man ... is it really true that you go about the villages fiddling to kids?"
"Yes—I like to see 'em dance."
"Are you fond of them?"
"Only when they dance."
"What a funny old man you are."
"Ain't I, Janey!"
Every evening the three Furlongers used to sit by the fire and stare into it. Len would sprawl back in his chair with his pipe, and the other two lean forward with needlework and newspapers and cigarettes. They seldom spoke—the wind would howl, and the shadows would creep, and the night drift on through star-strewn silences. At last some one would yawn loudly, and the others laugh—and all go to bed.
Len was worried about Nigel and Janey, and usually devoted these evenings and their pipely inspiration to thinking them out in a blundering way. He was not a man given to problems, and hitherto life had held but few. It was an added bitterness that now his problem should be that brother and sister who had always stood to him for all that was simple and beloved.
Nigel, in his strange fears, his subcurrents of emotion, and quickly changing moods, reminded Len of a horse; he did not object to drawing upon his knowledge of horses and their ways for the management of his brother. He humoured him, bore with him, but kept at the same time a tight hand—especially when the boy's seething restiveness and pain found vent in harsh words to Janey. Janey could not bear harsh words now—she had used to be able to pick them off and throw them back in the true sisterly style, but now she wincedand let them stick. Janey perplexed Len as much as Nigel, and worried him far more. Her eyes seemed to be growing very large, and her cheeks very hollow. When she smiled her lips twitched in a funny way, and when she laughed it grated. Janey cost Len many pipes.
The explanation of Janey was, of course, at Redpale Farm, sitting glumly by his winter fireside, just as she sat by hers. The love of Janet Furlonger and Quentin Lowe had entered on a new phase. Quentin was beginning to be dissatisfied. At first Janey had imagined that she would welcome this, but it did not come as she had expected. It brought their love into spasmodic silences. Up till then Quentin and she had always been writing and meeting, but now he wrote to her and met her in strange, sudden jerks of feeling. Sometimes he left her for days without even a line, but she could never doubt him, because when at last they met, his love seemed to burn with even greater torment and fierceness than in the months of its more regular expression. He began to give her presents, too—a locket, a ring, a book, which she shrank from, but forced herself to accept because of the evident delight he found in giving.
Once more he was rambling restlessly and ineffectively on a quest for independence. His efforts always came to nothing, partly through his own incapacity, but always, too, through a sheer perverseness of fate, thwarting developments, wrecking coincidences—so there really seemed truth in his cry that the stars fought against him.
She began to realise that, much as she haddeplored what looked like his permanent satisfaction with a makeshift, she had found in it a kind of vicarious rest. When anxiety and disillusion lay like stones at the bottom of her heart, she had comforted herself with the thought of the lightness of his. Now she could do so no longer—she had the burden of his sorrow as well as her own to bear, and for a woman like Janey, this was bound much more than to double her load.
Her anxiety about Nigel was also a pain that bruised through the weeks. He was decidedly "queer," and she could not understand his new craze for fiddling to children. Sometimes, too, he would be terribly sentimental, and have fits of more or less maudlin affection for her and Leonard. At other times he would be surly, and during his attacks of surliness he would work with desperation, almost with greed, as if he longed to wear himself out. Then he would come in, and throw himself down in a chair, and sleep the sleep of utter exhaustion with wide-flung limbs—or he would have a bath by the fire, regardless of any cooking operations she might have on hand, or the difficulty of heating gallons of ice-cold water in a not over-large kettle. Len would be furious with him on these occasions, and tell him that if he wanted a Turkish bath built on to Sparrow Hall he had better say so at once.
"I hope we'll have a happy Christmas," remarked Janey rather plaintively to Len one evening late in December.
"Why shouldn't we?" he asked; he was kneeling on the hearthstone, cleaning her boots.
"Well, we've been counting on it so. You remember last Christmas, when I said that next time we'd have Nigel with us...."
"And we've got him, haven't we?"
"Yes."
She was silent then, and the next minute he lifted his eyes from the blacking and laughed up at her.
"There's the rub, Janey. We don't know how Nigel will take Christmas."
"No—he'll probably be frightfully sentimental at breakfast, and kiss us both—and then he'll have a boiling bath—and then he'll take his fiddle and go out for hours to play to those wretched kids."
"A pretty fair prophecy, I should think."
"He's just like a kid himself," sighed Janey.
"Yes—I think he's getting soft in that way. At any rate, he's taken an uncommon fancy to kids. By the bye, that girl he rescued at Grinstead station, Strife's girl, has come home for Christmas. I saw her out with her father this morning, and she'd got her hair up, and looked years older. I expect she'll be getting married soon. Her people will see that she settles down early—they don't want two like her sister."
"What was that?" cried Janey.
"What?"
"I thought I heard some one in the room."
"There's nobody—look, quite empty, except for you and me. You're getting nervy, old girl."
"Perhaps I am."
He stood up, and looked at her closely andrather anxiously. Then he put his arms round her.
"You're not well, sis—I've noticed it for a long time. I say—there's nothing the matter, is there? You'd tell us if there was, wouldn't you?"
"Of course ... there's nothing," she whispered, as his rough hand stroked her hair. He held her to him very tenderly, he was always gentler and less exacting with her than Nigel. Yet, somehow, when she was unhappy it was Nigel she wanted to cling to, whose strong arms she liked to feel round her, whose suffering face she wanted close to hers. She wanted Nigel now.
But Nigel had gone out.
He walked heavily, his arms folded over his chest, his head hanging.
So she was back—and she was grown up—and she would soon be married.
These three contingencies had never struck him before. She had gone so inevitably out of his life, that he had never troubled to consider her return to Shovelstrode. She had stood so inevitably for adolescence, unformed and free, that he had never thought of her growing up. And as for marriage, it had seemed a thing alien and incongruous, her girlhood had been virgin to his timidest desire.
But she was grown up. She was ready for marriage, and most likely would soon be married. He realised that to some other man would be given, probably readily enough, what he had not dared even think about. A shudder passed through him, but the next minute he flung up his head almost triumphantly. He had had from Tony what shewould never give to another—he had had her free thoughtless comradeship, and she would never give it again. She was grown up now, and unconsciously she would realise her womanhood, put up little barriers, put on little airs. He—he alone—would have the memory of her heedless girlhood innocently displayed—he had what no other man had had, or could have ever.
Christmas came, a moist day, warm and rather hazy. Janey had decorated Sparrow Hall with holly and evergreens, and had even compounded an ominous-looking plum-pudding. She was desperately anxious that their first Christmas together for four years should be a success—she even ventured to hint the same to Nigel.
"Why," he drawled, "do we keep Christmas? Is it because Christ was born in a manger?"
"Of course not—how queerly you talk!"
"Because that was why we kept it in prison."
"But we aren't in prison here."
"Aren't we?—aren't we, Janey?—would there be any good keeping Christmas if we weren't?"
She laughed uneasily.
"Nigel, you're balmy. Come along and help me make mince-pies. It's all you're good for."
In spite of her fears, Christmas morning passed happily enough, and though the dinner was culinarily a failure, socially it was a huge success. The pudding, having triumphantly defeated the onslaughts of knives, forks and teeth, was accorded a hero's death in the kitchen fire, to the accompaniment of the Dead March on Nigel's fiddle, andvarious ritual acts extemporised by Len from memories both military and ecclesiastical. He was preparing a ceremonial funeral for the mince-pies, when he and Janey suddenly realised that Nigel had left the room.
"Now where the devil has he gone?"
Janey sighed.
"Some silly game of his. I hope he'll be back soon."
"Not he!—he's probably off for the day, to fiddle to those blasted kids, if they're not too full of plum-pudding to dance. By Christopher, Janey—he's mad."
The dark was gathering stealthily—crawling up from the Kent country in the east, burying the wet winter meadows of Surrey and Sussex in damp and dusk and fogs. In the west a crimson furnace smouldered, showing up a black outline of hills. Moisture was everywhere—the roads gleamed with mud, the banks were sticky with damp tangled grass, and drops quivered and glistened on the bare twigs of the hedges.
A great sense of disheartenment was everywhere. It was Christmas day, and hundreds of hearths were bright—but outside, away from humanity and its cheerful dreams, all Nature mourned, in the curse of the winter solstice, drowned in the water-flood. Furlonger had left his hearth with its cheery flames and loved faces and warm, sweet dreams of goodwill, and was out alone with Nature, who had no warmth nor lovenor make-believe, only wet winds and winter desolation.
He came to Dormans Land. The blinds were down, and through the chinks he saw the leap and spurt of firelight. He stood where three roads met, and the wind swept up from Lingfield, where the first stars had hung their lanterns. He began to play—a dreary, springless tune, that struck cold into the hearts of the few it reached through their closed windows. He played the song of Christmas as Nature keeps it—the festival of life's drowning and despair.
No children came to dance. They were happy beside their parents, with sweets and crackers and fun. They were keeping Christmas as man keeps it, and drew down the blinds on Nature keeping it outside, and the lone fiddler who felt it more congenial to keep it with Nature than to keep it with men.
Nigel stopped playing and looked around him into the gloom. He felt disappointed because the children had not come to dance. He had broken away from his brother and sister because he wanted those dancing children so badly—and they had not come. Perhaps he had better go further up into the village, since the children were not playing in the street as usual, but in their homes.
So he went up, and stood between the church and the Royal Oak. The place seemed deserted—only a great, empty car stood outside the inn. Nigel began to play, but again there was no response. The darkness came fluttering towardshim from the back streets of the village, and seemed to creep right into his heart.
Then suddenly it struck him that he played too doleful a tune for the children. They liked lively airs—they found it hard to dance to those bizarre mournful extempores of his. So he started "O Caro Nome," and when that had jigged and rippled to an end, he played airs from Flotow'sMartha, and then his old favourite, "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls."
The street was still empty. From a cottage close by came the wheeze of a harmonium. He stood drearily snapping the strings with his fingers. Then suddenly he realised how ridiculous he was—playing in the village street, in the damp and the cold and the dark, when he ought to be at home, eating and drinking and singing and joking because Christ was born in a manger.
He turned away—he was a fool. Why did he like seeing children dance?—why did it hurt him so that they were better employed to-day? He did not know. His life, his emotions, his heart, were like the twilight, a dark and cheerless mystery. He could not understand half what he felt in his own breast. He was himself only a child dancing in the dusk, to an unknown fiddler playing a half-comprehended tune.
The next moment he heard the inn door open behind him, and turning round saw a short, broad figure on the doorstep, wrapped in an enormous motor-coat.
"Will you not play something else?"
The words came heavily, with a teutonic lumber.Nigel saw a round, florid face, and dark, very close-cropped hair.
He hesitated—perhaps the stranger was making game of him.
"I have been listening to you for some time, and now I have come to see you. I am surprised. I do not think you are a beggar."
"Not quite," said Nigel.
"Well, play some more."
Again Furlonger hesitated. Then he hoisted his fiddle to his shoulder with a short, rather grating, laugh.
He played the Requiem fromIl Trovatore.
There was silence. The darkness seemed to pass in waves over the sky, each wave engulfing it deeper. The wind sobbed a strange little tune in the eaves of the inn.
"You have tortured my ears," said the stranger. Nigel flushed angrily—so after all the idea had been to make game of him—"with your damned Verdi."
"How do you mean?"
"You are too good to play Verdi."
"Oh!"
"What are your favourite composers?"
"Gounod—Verdi—Balfe——"
"Ai! Ai! Ach!" and the stranger put his hands over his ears.
Nigel was beginning to be faintly amused.
"Well, what's the matter with 'em?"
"The matter?—they are dead."
"That'll be the matter with us all, sooner or later."
"Let us hope it will be sooner for some of us."
Nigel looked into the stranger's face, and again experienced a slight shock of surprise. The eyes in the midst of its florid circumference were haunted with despair, grief-stricken and appealing. He suddenly realised that it was not normal for a man to spend Christmas day in lonely petrol prowlings.
"Play some more."
"I can only play Verdi and Balfe and those others."
"Well, I'll try to endure it."
"Look here," said Furlonger, "what's your game? Why should you want me to play when you hate my music?"
"I hate your music, but I like your playing. You are a wonderful player."
"Oh, rats!" and Nigel felt angry, he did not know why.
"I repeat—you are a wonderful player. Who taught you?"
"Carl Hauptmann."
"Hauptmann!—he was a pupil of mine."
"Then you're Eitel von Gleichroeder!"
"I am."
Nigel looked interested. Memories of his life in London revived—music lessons, concerts, musical jargon, a lost world in which he had once lived, but had now almost forgotten. He seemed to hear Hauptmann's strange, coughing laugh as he chid his pupil for what von Gleichroeder had just chidden him now—his abominable taste. "You are hobeless, hobeless—you and your Balfe andyour Bellini and your odder vons." Von Gleichroeder he knew would take an even more serious view of the case, as he had a reputation for ultra-modernism in music. Hauptmann's contempt for Balfe and Bellini he carried on to Verdi and Gounod, even Tschaikowsky, while though he was obliged to grant Beethoven supremacy with a grudge, he passed over his works in favour of those of Scriabin, d'Indy, Debussy and Strauss.
"Well, well," said the musician, "playZampa, playLucia di Lammermoor, playLa Somnambula—any abomination you please—but play."
Nigel, with rather an evil grin, playedZampa.
"Why do you like those things?"
"Because they are pretty tunes."
"Ach!—and why do you like pretty tunes?"
Nigel stared at him full of hostility, then his manner changed.
"Because they remind me of—of things I used to feel."
He realised dimly that there was a subtle free-masonry between him and this man. In a way it drew them together, in a way it held them apart.
"What you used to feel. So! that is better. It's your heart they tickle, not your ears."
Furlonger nodded.
"Do you play for your living?"
"No—I am a farmer."
"Then what are you doing here?"
"I play for children to dance."
Von Gleichroeder looked round, and shrugged his shoulders. He did not seem particularly surprised.
"Would you not like to play for grown-up children to dance? For fashionable society to crowd to hear you, and gather round you like children round a barrel-organ?"
"Fashionable society won't waste much of its time on me. I've been in prison three years for bogus company promoting."
"So! But that is good. Without that attraction you could fill the Bechstein, but with it you can fill the Albert Hall."
"Gammon."
"Not at all. My dear young man, I see a glorious future ahead of you, if you will only trouble to secure it. Come to London and study music——"
"Please don't talk nonsense."
"It is not nonsense. You are wonderfully gifted. I don't say you are a genius, for you are not—but you are wonderfully gifted, and your history will make you interesting to the ladies. With your talent and your history and—and your face, you ought to do really well, if only some enterprising person would take you in hand."
"Which isn't likely."
"I beg your pardon—it is most likely. I will do it."
Nigel was more surprised than grateful.
"No, thank you."
"Do not be proud. It is purely a business offer. I expect to make money out of you, and—what do you call it?—credit. Listen here—if you cannot pay my fees, I will give you a year's tuition free of charge, on condition that I have a percentage onyour salaries during the next five years. That is a generous offer—many a young man would give much to have me for professor."
Nigel shook his head.
"Thanks awfully—but I'm not keen on it."
"And why?"
"Well, for one thing, I don't want to make my stinking past into an advertisement, and for another I don't want to go back to prison."
"Prison!—that is a strange name for fame and big salaries."
"I'm not thinking of those so much as of what must come before them—all the grind and slavery. My music's the only part of me that has never been in prison, and if I make a trade and treadmill out of it, I shall be degrading it just as I have degraded everything else about me."
"It will not be degradation—on the contrary."
"And I don't believe I shall ever make myself a name."
"That remains to be seen. I don't expect you to become world-famous, but there is no reason why you should not be exceedingly successful in England, where no one bothers very much about taste or technique. Taste you have none, technique—— Lord help us!—but temperament—ach, temperament! You have suffered—hein?"
Nigel coloured. He could not answer—because he felt this man had suffered too.
"Of course, you have suffered—you could not play like that if you had not. Without your suffering you would be a clever amateur—just that. But now, because you have suffered, you aresomething more. 'Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass'—you doubtless know our Goethe's wonderful lines. So"—and his dark, restless eyes looked up almost imploringly to the sky—"sorrow has one use in this world."
There was another pause. The village was quite dark now—lights twinkled. High above the frosty exhalations of the dusk, piling walls of smoke-scented mist round the cottages, the stars shone like the lights of celestial villages, dotting the dark country of the sky. The Wain hung tilted in the north, lonely and ominous, Betelgeuse was bright above Sussex, Aldebaran burned luminous and lonely in his quarter. Nigel watched the Sign of Virgo, which had just risen, and glowed over the woods of Langerish. It flickered like candles in the wind. Then he dropped his eyes to the darkness round him, and through it came the creak of a harmonium.
"Well?" said von Gleichroeder.
"Well?"
"Will you accept my offer?"
"No, thank you."
"Why?"
"I've given you my reasons." The subtle sense of hostility put insolence into his voice.
"They are no reasons."
"They are mine."
The foreigner shrugged his shoulders.
"So be it. I have made my offer—you have refused it. It is your own concern."
He took out his card-case, and presented his card to Furlonger.
"In case you change your mind."
This was anti-climax, and Nigel felt irritated.
"I'm not in the habit of changing my mind."
"Just as you please," and von Gleichroeder put back the card-case in his pocket.
"Good evening," he added politely.
"Good evening," mumbled Furlonger.
He turned away, and walked down the village to where the foot-path to Wilderwick striped the fields. At the stile he paused, and realised that he had been exceptionally insolent.
Nigel reached home only half-an-hour before supper-time. Len and Janey did not receive him cordially, but he was too much preoccupied with his adventure to notice their coldness or take their hints. He poured it all out at the evening meal—the subtle sense of outrage which for some unknown reason von Gleichroeder's offer had stirred up, contending in his voice with a ridiculous, childish pride.
Len and Janey were unfeignedly surprised. It had never occurred to them that Nigel's playing was even tolerable—they had sometimes liked it in the distance, that was all.
"Fancy his wanting you to go and study in London," said Janey. "I'm glad you refused."
"So'm I"!
"It would have been beastly losing you again, old man—we haven't had you back three months."
"Wouldn't you like to see me fill the Albert Hall?"
"Well—er—if you could really do it, it might be interesting to watch—just for once in a way. But I don't see that it would be worth breaking up the 'appy 'ome, only for that."
Nigel would have liked them to be more impressed, but they voiced his own feelings exactly.
"No—nor do I. Well, I've settled the oldgeyser, anyway—and now let's forget all about him."
Which they did at once.
That night Nigel had restless dreams. He dreamed he was playing to crowded audiences in great nightmare-like halls that stretched away to infinity. The circumstances were always unfavourable—sometimes he would have only one string on his violin, and sometimes he would find himself struggling with some horrible dream-begotten instrument with as many strings as a harp. Once he dreamed that all the audience got up and danced a hideous rigadoon, another time they all had the same face—a dark, florid face that leered.
Towards morning he dreamed a quieter dream. He was playing in a very large place, but he had a rational instrument, and he was playing "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls." The melody floated all through his dreams—the same as in waking hours, and yet not quite the same—celestial, rarefied, wistful in heart and ears. He was also conscious of a presence—he knew he was near Tony Strife; he felt her close to him, and it was magic in his blood. The melody drifted on—sometimes pouring out of his violin, sometimes seeming to come from very far away.
"And I also dreamed, which pleased me most,That you loved me still the same ..."
"And I also dreamed, which pleased me most,That you loved me still the same ..."
"And I also dreamed, which pleased me most,That you loved me still the same ..."
"And I also dreamed, which pleased me most,
That you loved me still the same ..."
The music ceased abruptly, and he dropped his bow, looking round to see Tony. She was not there; the great hall was empty—nothing butempty seats stretching away into dimness—except that in the front row of all sat two figures huddled together. He looked down at them, and at first he did not know them, then he saw that they were Len and Janey, staring up at him with hungry, loving eyes....
He woke and sat up, shivering a little. It must be late, for the winter sky was white beyond the woods. Yet he did not feel inclined to rise. He lay back, and folded his hands behind his head, staring out at the dull line of brown that lay against the quivering, dawn-filled clouds.
Those woods always put strange thoughts into his head. They made him think of his own life, lonely, windy and sere. But some day the spring would throb in them, their branches would shine with green, their thickets would thrill with song; in their waste, desolate places primroses would push through the dead leaves of last year.... He sat up again with a jerk—for the first time he realised that the woods would not be always brown.
The thought gave him a faint shock of surprise. Ever since the day he left prison he had looked out on brown woods, rocked by autumn and winter winds, so that he had almost forgotten that autumn and winter would not last for ever. He had never thought of spring, of March and tender green, of April and first flowers, of sweet, quickening rains, and winds full of warmth and the scent of young leaves. It was strange that he should have forgotten spring.
Now in the darkest day of the year, spring held out its promise to the woods—and to him. Theyellow of a hidden sunrise was filling the clouds like hope unbounded—and Nigel's dream came back to him, his dream of marble halls and of love that was "still the same." He saw himself playing to thronged audiences, with Tony close to him, unseen, intangible, but there—with all the sweet memories of Lingfield and Brambletye revived and re-established, her friendship, candour, and tenderness "still the same."
Then he understood. Gulfs unbridgeable might lie between the convict with his stained and broken life and the simple little schoolgirl of Shovelstrode. But the well-known violinist who played for "big salaries," who "filled the Albert Hall."... A terrible thing had happened to Nigel—he had begun to hope. When hope has been a long time away, the return of it is like the return of sensation to a frost-bitten limb. It pricks, it burns, it tortures. It tortured Nigel till a cry of anguish burst from him, bitterer than in any of his fits of despair. He bent forward, clapping his hand to his side.
Hope showed him the doors of his prison flung wide at last. For long years he had never dreamed of escape, he was a captive, so fast in prison that he could not get forth—free only among the dead. But now the doors were open and he could go out. His music would raise him up out of the pit, bring him back to an earth washed in rain and spring, to touch the trembling innocence of the lilies, and drink the sweetness of the eternal May.
"Oh, God! Oh, God!—I want to be free! I want to be free!"
The cry was not a prayer so much as the cry of his great hunger, finding voice at last—"I want to be free! I want to be free!"
His mind dropped hastily to practical details. He had seen von Gleichroeder's address on his card, and that tough memory of his, which was sometimes a curse to him, held it fast. He would write and tell him he had changed his mind. It would be humiliating, but it must be done. Then he would go to London, and work—and work. It was not only the topmost pinnacle that could lift him out of his old life, the name he would make for himself need not be a great name—as long as it was a fair name. That was what he wanted, and would struggle for—a fair name. Hard work, an honest livelihood, self-denial, constant communion with the beautiful and inspired, would purge his soul of its defilement. The hideous stain of his crime would be wiped off. When he had lived for years in poverty and honesty, when he had brought by his music a little sunshine into poor lives like those he had smitten, when the fields of three counties had ceased to reproach him for his treachery, and the name of Furlonger had some faint lustre from his bearing it—then he would be free. And when he was free he would allow himself—not to claim Tony's friendship or anything else beyond him, but just to think of her—think of her with hope.
Oh, Tony, little Tony! his little love!
For weeks now he had known that he loved her. Though he had never dared think of her as a woman, he wanted her. He had wantedwomen before, he had had his adventures with them—though not perhaps as many as the average man—but they had all been stale and ordinary, the stock line, the job lot, which eager, extravagant youth pays high for as a novelty. Now he had something new. He loved a little girl, scarcely more than a child, parted from him by a dozen barriers of his own erecting. He loved her because she was good and innocent, and had given him perfect comradeship; most of all he loved her because of the barriers between them, because she lived utterly apart from him, in a foreign land of liberty and hope and uprightness, towards which he must strive hourly if he were to gain even the frontiers.
He scowled a little. He was not blind, and he knew that he would have to go into slavery, perhaps for a long time, before this new freedom was won. Even in an hour he had been able to see that von Gleichroeder was a technique-fiend, and would make matters hot for his clumsy pupil. He also realized that though the German had borne good humouredly with his insolence, he would not be so patient when he became his master. Yes—he would have a master—he would have to practise scales and exercises—he would be reprimanded, lectured, ordered about. Herr von Gleichroeder would be his master, and the tacit sympathy between them would but make their relations more galling.
There would be other sacrifices too. He would have to say good-bye to Sparrow Hall, and to Len and Janey. He caught his breath—God! howhe loved Len and Janey! He had been brutal and heartless to them again and again, but he loved them with a love that was half pain in its intensity. He would have to be away from them perhaps for years. Yet when he came back he would bring them a gift—the same gift that he would bring Tony—a fair name. That was what he owed every one—the world, his brother and sister, his little love.
The very fact that he was taking his "stinking past" with him into the future would to some extent remove its offensiveness. It was all very well to talk of "starting afresh under another name." What he wanted was to raise his old name—the name of Furlonger—out of the dust. The convict should not just quietly disappear, he should be transfigured into the artist, publicly, before the whole world. As his degradation had been public, the comment of cheap newspapers, so should his exaltation.
A thundering knock at the door broke into his dreams.
"Nigel, in the devil's name, get up!—breakfast's waiting."
The next moment Len was in the room, tearing the bed-clothes off him.
"Youarea fat lot of use on the farm!—I've got through half the morning's work without you."
"Then you won't miss me so much when I'm gone."
"Gone where?"
"To London."
Nigel began to dress himself—Len stared at him gaping.
"To London! why, you aren't going there, are you?"
"I am."
"To that man von what's-his-name?"
"Of course."
Len stared harder than ever. Then he suddenly lost his temper.
"'Of course'!—there's no 'of course' about it—except 'of course not.' Why, you told him you wouldn't hear of such a thing."
"But I may change my mind, mayn't I?"
"No—you mayn't. Look here, Nigel, you've led sister and self an infernal dance for the last three months. Can't you chuck it?"
"I'm going to chuck it—by leaving this place."
Leonard saw his brother was in earnest. He came quickly towards him, and laid his hand on his shoulder.
"What have we done to upset you, old man?"
"Nothing—you've always been sports."
"Then why are you going?"
Nigel hesitated. He could not bring himself to tell even this brother of his sacred, half-formed plans.
"You won't miss me," he faltered.
"Won't miss you! Won't miss you!—what the devil d'you mean?"
"I'm no use on the farm—I laze and I slack. You'll get on much better without me."
"Gammon! You're tumbling into it nicely, and if you go, I'll have to hire a man—and there'll be the expense of your keep in London. No, no, old chap—that won't wash."
"Wait till you've tried it."
"Haven't I been trying it for three years? Besides, my boy, this is only beating round the bush. The main fact is that Janey and I would miss you simply damnably."
"Not really," said Nigel, his mouth drooping with a great tenderness, "you'd soon feel the relief of being rid of me and my tantrums."
There was a knock at the door.
"That's Janey," cried Len. "Come in, old girl—I want you."
Janey came in. Nigel was nearly dressed, and had begun to shave.
"Breakfast's——" began Janey.
"Yes—I know all about breakfast. That isn't what's the matter. Len wants you to join him in trying to persuade me not to go to London."
"But you're not going to London!..."
"I'm writing this morning to von Gleichroeder to say I've changed my mind."
"No!... Nigel!" cried Janey.
For a moment she stood as if paralyzed, then suddenly she darted towards him, and flung her arms round him, looking up beseechingly into his face.
"Nigel! no!—you mustn't leave us—I can't bear it. Oh, say you won't!"
"Damn you, Janey!—can't you see I've got a razor in my hand?"
She was taking it even worse than he had expected. She seemed actually terrified.
"I can't live here without you," she cried brokenly, "indeed I can't."
He gently disengaged himself.
"Most people's difficulty," he said, deliberately lathering his chin, "has not been how to live without me, but how to live with me."
"But I can't live without you."
"You've got Len."
"But he's only—only half."
"The better half. I'm a rotten lot, Janey. You'll be far happier when I'm gone. I'm a sulky brute—don't contradict me; I know it. I'm a sulky, bad-tempered brute. Again and again I've spoiled your happiness and the lad's—I've done nothing but snap and snarl at you, and I've gone whining about the place when you wanted to be cheerful. You've both been utter sports to put up with me so long—you'll notice the difference when I'm away, if you can't realise it now."
Janey was sitting on the bed, drowned in tears.
"Aren't you happy with us?" asked Leonard.
"Hardly—or I shouldn't be going."
He spoke with all the exaggerated brutality of the man who sees himself obliged to hurt those he loves.
"It's not your fault," he continued in a gentler voice, "it's mine. I'm such a waster. I'm a miserable, restless rotter, bound to make myself and every one else unhappy. Now if I go to London, I shall work—I shall have something to live for."
"Fame, you mean," sobbed Janey.
"Well, something of that kind."
He had finished shaving, and came and sat downby her on the bed, forcing her drowned eyes to look into his.
"Janey, don't you want me to be famous? Wouldn't you like to be the sister of a well-known violinist instead of Convict Seventy-six? Wouldn't you like to see me fill the Albert Hall?"
"Fill hell!" shouted Leonard. "D'you really believe all the rot that old bounder spoke?"
"Well, it isn't likely he'd teach me for nothing if he didn't expect to make something out of me."
"Yes—that'll be just what he'll do—and he'll make a fat lot more than you will."
"Oh, don't go!" sobbed Janey.
Nigel looked wretchedly from one to the other.
"Janey," he cried, drawing her close to him, and quivering in the agony of his appeal, "Janey, can't you understand?—I want to start a new life, I want to throw off all my beastly past. I want to make my name—your name—clean and honourable. I dragged it into the mud, and I must pull it out again. Oh, I've suffered so, Janey. I can't get out of prison, I feel more helplessly shut up than ever I did at Parkhurst. But now I—can be—free."
The last words burst from him in a choking cry. He flung himself back from her, and looked into her eyes. Then he was surprised, for he saw in them, swimming in tears, a glimmer of understanding.
"Janey," he continued, putting his lips close to her face, and mumbling his appeal almost incoherently, "I can't expect you to grasp all that this means to me. You're good, you're pure—youdon't know what it is to have a horrible stain on your heart, which all your tears don't seem able to wash away. But can't you put yourself for a moment in my place and realise what it is to hunger for a decent life, to dream of whiteness and purity and innocence, and burn to make them yours?—to be willing to give the whole world—just to be—clean?"
"I think I can," said Janey.
Half-an-hour later the three Furlongers sat down to a cold breakfast. They were almost silent, for there was nothing more to be said. The matter was settled. Nigel had found an unexpected ally in Janet, and had carried his point. Directly after breakfast he wrote to von Gleichroeder. It was a difficult letter, for it meant nothing less than eating humble pie, but for that very reason he did not take long over it. An envelope addressed in his large, scrawling hand was soon ready to be posted.
It was a clear, cold day, this feast of Stephen. A frosty sunshine crisped the grass, scattering the damps of yesterday's fog. The lane smelled of frost as Nigel walked up it to the post-office. But he did not see it as it was—in the duress and beggarliness of winter; he saw it as it would be, bursting with spring, full of scent and softness and song. He pictured those naked bushes when spring had clothed them, those grey banks when spring had fired them—the hedges were full of future song, the hollows of primroses to be.
He posted his letter, then stood for a moment, looking southward. The sunshine was so clear that the rims of distant windows gleamed with white across the fields. He could see the windows of Shovelstrode....
Dared he?
After all, he would have to. He could not leave Sparrow Hall without seeing Tony. He would not tell her of her place in his plans, but he owed it to her and to himself that she should think of him as a man living uprightly, striving after honour. Now she was thinking of him as a scoundrel and an outcast—he came into her thoughts with a shudder. It must not be.
At the same time he was afraid. It gave him a strange, cold qualm to think he was afraid of Tony, once his comrade, now his love—but he was. If he meant to see her, he must go at once, before his resolve lost strength with spontaneity. He turned towards the south, where the sunshine lay.
As he came near Shovelstrode his quakings grew. After all, by the time he had made himself worthy to think of her, she would have given herself to another. He could not even hint that he wanted her to wait. He must trust to her aloofness to keep her free, and the memory of their friendship to keep alive in her heart a little spark that he could some day fan into flame. But it was all rather hopeless, a leap in the dark.
Perhaps, even, she would refuse to see him. He remembered the look in her eyes when she had turned from him by Goatsluck Farm. All the steel-cold virtue, all the ignorant horror, all the cruelty of youth had been in that look. Perhaps she had turned from him for ever. Perhaps nothing that he could ever achieve or be would wipe out from her memory his foul betrayal of others and herself.
But he went too far in his fears for utter despair. Reaction set in—hope began once more to lacerate him, and whipped him forward to make his last desperate appeal to the fates that had always hitherto been deaf and blind.
He hesitated a moment when he came to the house. The servants might know who he was and not allow him in, or he might be seen by some of the family. It struck him that he had better go and look for her in the park before risking himself on the doorstep. She had once told him that she often wandered among the pines.
He slipped round behind the lodge, and was skirting the lawn at the back of the house, when he saw one of the French windows open and a girl come out with her dog. His heart gave a suffocating leap, and something seemed to rise in his throat and stay there, making him gulp idiotically. He had never before felt any emotion at the sight of her—just pleasure, a calm, slow-moving comfort. But to-day his head swam, and he could hardly see her as she came running and skipping across the lawn in a manner wholly at variance with her long skirts and coiled-up hair.
She turned aside before she reached the bushes that hid him, and he just managed to call after her—
"Tony!—Tony!"
The dog barked, and the next minute had scented him, and came cantering over the grass. Tony stood still and listened. She looked uncertain, and he called again—
"Tony!"
She turned quickly, and slipped behind the bushes, running to him along the path. When she was a few yards off she stopped dead.
"Mr. Furlonger...."
She stood outlined against a patch of wintry sky. It was the first time that he had seen her since her return. He thought that she was paler than in the valiant days of their friendship, and certainly the way she did her hair gave her a grown-up look. The stifling sensation in his throat became worse, and he could not speak.
"What is it ... Mr. Furlonger?"
"I—I want to speak to you."
"Oh, no! I can't!" Her voice was quite childish.
"I must—please do."
She hesitated a moment.
"Then come into the shrubbery. We can be seen here from the house."
"I know. I'm not here to get you into trouble. I—I only came to say good-bye."
"Good-bye," she repeated vaguely, not quite understanding him, for her heart had said good-bye to him long ago.
"Yes—I'm going to London."
They were walking away from the house to where the pine-needles were thick under their feet—on a little, moist path smelling of winter. The sunshine came slanting down on Tony as she stopped, showing up her slim, strong figure in a cold purity of light. It rested on her hair, and he saw golden threads in it—in her eyes, and he saw golden sparks in them. For the first time herealised how beautiful she was in all the assurance and unconsciousness of her youth. He longed to tell her so. Instead he muttered—
"How grown-up you look."
"Do I?—it's my hair, I suppose."
"Did they make you put it up?"
"Aunt Maggie said I was old enough—and I think so too."
"I hope you don't mind my coming here to see you." He was desperately embarrassed, and her manner did not reassure him. "I'm going away, you see, to study music, and I—I thought I should like to say good-bye."
"Oh, no," she said rather awkwardly, her excessive youth showing nowhere more clearly than in her inability to put him at his ease. "Oh, no, I'm glad you came—to say good-bye."
"I'm going to work very hard. There's a fellow—Eitel von Gleichroeder, I don't know if you've heard of him—who's taken a fancy to me, and says he'll coach me if I'll take up the violin professionally."
"I didn't know you played."
"Yes—but I'd no idea I was any good till I met this chap. He says I ought to make quite a decent thing out of it. I—I think it's worth trying."
"Oh, yes."
"You see," he continued, his voice shaking with emotion, "I want to start a new life—to be respectable, I suppose you'd call it. If I win fame as a violinist—and von Gleichroeder thinks I may—I—I shall have lived down everything."
"Yes ... of course."
It was embarrassment, not lack of interest, that made her replies so trite. Memories of their friendship—now dim and far-off, separated from her by many wonderful happenings—were creeping up to her and filling her with a vague uneasiness.
As for Nigel, he realised now what had taken place. He understood why his tongue had suddenly become tied in her presence, and his eagerness collapsed into shuffling uncouthness. He had come to Shovelstrode to speak to a little girl—and he had found a woman. Tony the schoolgirl, the hoyden, the gay comrade, was now nothing but a little ghost haunting the slopes of Ashdown and the secret lanes of Kent. In her place stood a woman—come suddenly, as the woman always comes—and the woman, he knew, was trying to call back the girl, and see things from her eyes once more—and could not.
"Tony—Miss Strife—I wanted to tell you this, just to show you I'm not always going to be a convict on ticket-of-leave."
"I'm sure you won't. I hope you'll become very famous."
The words passed her lips in jerks. Her memories of him carried something very like repulsion. The more she struggled to revisualise the comradeship of two months ago, the greater was her distaste and humiliation. The kindest attitude possible for her now was one of embarrassed shyness. At first she had tried to heal herself with her memories, but as soon as she hadworked back to them she found their sweet secrets all sicklied with bitterness and shame.
He looked steadfastly at her, and he saw what had happened.
"Tony—you don't want to know me any longer—you want to forget we ever were friends. There's no good denying it, for I can see it."
She stood motionless, her lips white, her hands clenched in front of her.
"It's true—I can see it," he repeated.
She did not speak. Her memories were calling very loud, and there were tears in the voices, softening the shame.
"You can't bear the thought of having once been my friend."
Tears were rising in her throat, and with her tears the little school-girl who had run away came back, and showed her face again before she went for ever.
"Oh, it's hurt me!" she cried. "You don't know how it's hurt me!"
"To know I was a bad 'un?" He grasped the shaking hand she thrust out before her.
"Yes—I can't bear to think...."
"But I've changed—I swear I have. I'm going to live a decent life; and you're going to help me—by just saying you believe I can."
She shuddered, and pulled her hand away.
"I tell you I've changed," he exclaimed bitterly; "won't you believe me?"
She was crying now.
"You don't understand ... you don'tunderstand ... what one feels about men like you."
He winced.
"You don't know what I felt ... when I heard...."
"Tony!" he cried, "youmustforgive me."
"I do forgive you—it's not me you've hurt—but——"
"'But' you don't forgive me, and it is you I've hurt—that's what your 'but' means."
There was another silence, broken only by her muffled crying and the throbbing of the wind in the pine-tops. Nigel felt that his old life was struggling in its cerements to spring up and strangle the new life at its birth.