A fortnight laterThe Wandererlay at anchor in the harbor of Algiers. But only the captain and some of the crew were on board. Mrs. Shiffney, Max Elliot, and Paul Lane had gone off in a motor to Bou-Saada. Alfred Waring, the extra man who had come instead of Claude Heath, had run over to Biskra to see some old friends, and Charmian and Susan Fleet were at the Hôtel St. George at Mustapha Supérieur.
Charmian was not very well. The passage from Marseilles had been rough, and she had suffered. As she had never before seen Algiers she had got out of the expedition to Bou-Saada. And Susan Fleet had, apparently, volunteered to stay with her, but had really stayed, as she did a great many things when she was with Mrs. Shiffney, because there was no one else to do it and Mrs. Shiffney had told her so.
Nevertheless, though she wanted to see Bou-Saada, she was reconciled to her lot. She liked Charmian very well, though she knew her very little. And she had the great advantage in life—so, at least, she considered it—of being a theosophist.
Mrs. Shiffney had not known how to put Charmian off. After hearing againPetite Fille de Tombouctoushe had felt she must get out of Europe, if only for five minutes. So she had made the best of things. And Charmian would rather have died than have given up going after Claude Heath's refusal to go. A run over to Algiers was nothing. They could be back in England in two or three weeks. SoThe Wandererhad gone round to Marseilles, and the party of six had come out by train to meet her there.
Susan Fleet was one of those capable and intelligent women who are apt to develop sturdiness if they do not marry and have children. Susan had not married, and at the age offorty-nine and nine months she was sturdy. She wore coats and skirts whenever they could be worn, and some people professed to believe that she slept in them. Her one extravagance was the wearing of white gloves which fitted her hands perfectly. Her collars were immaculate, and she always looked almost startlingly neat. All her dresses were "off the ground." In appearance she was plain, but she was not ugly. She had a fairly good nose and mouth, but they were never admired, thick brown hair which no one ever noticed, and a passable complexion. Her eyes were her worst feature. They looked as if they were loose in her head and might easily drop out, and they were rather glazed than luminous, and were indefinite in color. But they were eyes which reassured doubtful people, eyes which could be, and were, trusted "on sight," eyes which had seen a good deal but which could never take nastiness into the soul to its harming. Her father was dead, and she had a mother who, at the age of sixty-seven—she had really been married at sixteen—was living as companion at Folkestone with an old lady of eighty-two.
Susan Fleet was one of those absolutely unsycophantic and naturally well-bred persons who are often liked by those "at the top of the tree," and who sometimes, without beauty, great talent, money, or other worldly advantages, and without any thought of striving, achieve "positions" which everybody recognizes. Susan had a "position." She knew and was liked by all sorts and conditions of important people, had been about, had stayed in houses with Royalties, and had always remained just herself, perfectly natural, quite unpretending, and wholly free from every grain of nonsense. "There's no nonsense about Susan Fleet!" many said approvingly, especially those who themselves were full of it. She possessed one shining advantage, a constitutional inability to be a snob, and she was completely ignorant of possessing it. Mrs. Shiffney and various other very rich women could not do without Susan. Unlike her mother, she had no permanent post. But she was always being "wanted," and was well paid, not always in money only, for the excellent services she was able to render. She never made any secret of her poverty, though she never put it forward, and it was understood by everyone that she hadto earn her own living. Many years ago she had qualified to do this by mastering various homely accomplishments. She was a competent accountant, an excellent typewriter, a lucid writer of letters, knew how to manage servants, and was a mistress of the art of travelling. When looking out trains she never made a mistake. She was never sea or train sick, never lost her temper or her own or other people's luggage, had a perfect sense of time without being aggressively punctual, and seemed totally unaffected by changes of climate. And she knew nothing about the meaning of the word shyness.
When the big motor had gone off with its trio to desert places Charmian suddenly realized the unexpectedness of her situation—alone above Algiers with a woman who was almost a stranger. This scarcely seemed like yachting. They had come up to the hotel because Mrs. Shiffney always stayed at an hotel, if there was a good one, when the yacht was in harbor, "to make a change." It was full of English and Americans, but they knew nobody, and, having two sitting-rooms, had no reason to seek public rooms where acquaintances are made. Charmian wondered how long Mrs. Shiffney would stay at Bou-Saada.
"Back to-morrow!" she had said airily as she waved her hand. The assertion meant next week if only she were sufficiently amused.
Charmian had been really stricken on the stormy voyage, and still had a sensation of oppression in the head, of vagueness, of smallness, and of general degradation. She felt also terribly depressed, like one under sentence not of death, but of something very disagreeable. And when Susan Fleet said to her in a chest voice, "Do you want to do anything this afternoon?" she answered:
"I'll keep quiet to-day. I'll sit in the garden. But, please, don't bother about me."
"I'll come and sit in the garden, too," said Miss Fleet in a calm and business-like manner.
Charmian thought she was going to add, "And bring my work with me." But she did not.
On the first terrace there were several people in long chairs looking lazy; women with picture papers, men smoking, oldbuffers talking about politics and Arabs. Charmian glanced at them and instinctively went on, descending toward a quieter part of the prettily and cleverly arranged garden. The weather was beautiful, warm, but not sultry. Already she was conscious of a feeling of greater ease.
"Shall we sit here?" she said, pointing to two chairs under some palm trees by a little table.
"Yes. Why not?" returned Susan Fleet.
They sat down.
"Do you feel better?" asked Susan.
"I shall."
"It must be dreadful being ill at sea. I never am."
"And you have travelled a great deal, haven't you?"
"Yes, I have. I often go with Adelaide. Once we went to India."
"Was it there you became a Theosophist?"
"That had something to do with it, I suppose. When we were at Benares Adelaide thought she would like to live there. The day after she thought so she found we must go away."
Miss Fleet carefully peeled off her white gloves and leaned back. Her odd eyes seemed to drop in their sockets, as if they were trying to tumble out.
"Isn't it—" Charmian began, and stopped abruptly.
"Yes?"
"I don't know what I was going to say."
"Perhaps a great bore not to be one's own mistress?" suggested Miss Fleet, composedly.
"Something of that sort perhaps."
"Oh, no! I'm accustomed to it. Freedom is a phrase. I'm quite as free as Adelaide. It's usually a great mistake to pity servants."
"And oneself? I suppose you would say it was a great mistake to pity oneself?"
"I never do it," replied Miss Fleet.
She had charming hands. One of them lay on the little table with a beam of the sun on it.
"Perhaps you haven't great desires? Perhaps you don't want many things?"
"I suppose I've been like most women in that respect. But I shall be fifty almost directly."
"How frightful!" was Charmian's mental comment.
"No, it isn't."
"Isn't what?" said Charmian, startled.
"It isn't at all awful to be fifty, or any other age, if you accept it quietly as inevitable. But everything one kicks against hurts one, of course. I expect to pass a very pleasant day on my fiftieth birthday."
Charmian put her chin in her hand.
"How did you know what I thought?"
"A girl of your age would be almost certain to think something of that kind."
"Yes, I suppose so."
Charmian sighed, and then suddenly felt rather angry, and lifted her chin.
"But surely I need not be exactly like every other girl of twenty-one!" she exclaimed, with much more vivacity.
"You aren't. No girl is. But you all think it must be dreadful to be a moneyless spinster of fifty. I believe, for my part, that there's many avieille fillewho is not particularly sorry for herself or for the man who didn't want to marry her."
Miss Fleet was smiling.
"But I'm not a pessimist as regards marriage," she added. "And I think men are quite as good as women, and quite as bad."
"How calm you are!"
"Why not?"
"I could never be like that."
"Perhaps when you are fifty."
"Not if I'm unmarried!" said Charmian, with a bluntness, a lack of caution very rare in her.
"I don't think you will be, unless you go on before you are fifty."
Charmian gazed at Miss Fleet, and was conscious that she herself was entirely concentrated on the present life; she was a good girl, she had principles, even sometimes desires not free from nobility. She believed in a religion—the Protestantreligion it happened to be. And yet—yes, certainly—she was absolutely concentrated on the present life. She even felt as if it were somehow physically impossible for her to be anything else. To "go on" before she was fifty! What a horror in that idea! To "go on" at all, ever—how strange, how dreadful! She was silent for some minutes, with her pretty head against the back of a chair.
An Arab dragoman went by among the trees. The strangled yelp of a motor-car rose out of a cloud of white dust at the bottom of the garden. The faint cry of a siren came up from the distant sea whereThe Wandererlay at rest. And suddenly Charmian thought, "When am I going to be here again?"
"Do you ever feel you have lived before in some place when you visit it for the first time?" she said, moving her head from the back of her chair.
"I did once."
"Do you ever feel you will live in a place that's new to you, that you have no connection with, and that you have only come to for a day or two?"
"I can't say I do."
"I suppose we all have lots of absurd fancies."
"I don't think I do," responded Miss Fleet, quite without arrogance.
"I—I wish you'd tell me where you got that coat and skirt," said Charmian.
"I will. I got it at Folkestone. I'll give you the address when we go on board again. My mother lives at Folkestone. She is a companion to a dear old Mrs. Simpkins, so I go down there whenever I have time."
One's mother companion to a dear old Mrs. Simpkins! How extraordinary! And why did it make Charmian feel as if she were almost fond of Susan Fleet?
"And I get really well-cut things for a very small price there, so I'm lucky."
"I think you are lucky in another way," hazarded Charmian.
"Yes?"
"To be as you are."
After that day in the garden Charmian knew that she wasgoing to be fond of Susan Fleet. Mrs. Shiffney, of course, did not return on the following afternoon.
"I daresay she'll be away for a week," Susan said. "If you feel better we might go and see the town and visit some of the villas. There are several that are beautiful."
Quite eagerly Charmian acquiesced. But she soon had reason to be sorry that she had done so. For much that she saw increased her misery. Boldly now she applied that word to her condition, moved perhaps to be at last frank with herself by the frankness of her quite unintrusive companion. Algiers affected her somewhat as thePetite Fille de Tombouctouhad affected her, but much more powerfully. This was exactly how she put it to herself: it made her feel that she was violently in love with Claude Heath. What a lie that had been before the mirror after Max Elliot's party. How dreadful it was to walk in these exquisite and tropical gardens, to stand upon these terraces, to wander over these marble pavements and beneath these tiled colonnades, to hear these fountains singing under orange trees, to see these far stretches of turquoise and deep blue water, to watch Arabs on white roads passing noiselessly by night under a Heaven thick with stars, and to know "He is not here and I am nothing to him!"
Charmian's romantic tendency, her sense of, and desire for, wonder were violently stirred by the new surroundings. She was painfully affected. She began to feel almost desperate. That terrible sensation, known perhaps in its frightening nightmare fulness only to youth, "My life is done, all real life is at an end for me, because I cannot be linked with my other half, because I have found it, but it has not found me!" besieged, assailed her. It shook her, as neurasthenia shakes its victim, squeezing as if with fierce and powerful hands till the blood seems to be driven out of the arteries. It changed the world for her, making of beauty a phenomenon to terrify. She looked at loveliness, and it sent a lacerating ache all through her, because only the half looked at it and not the whole, some hideous astral shape, not the joyous, powerful body meant for the life of this splendid world, at home in the atmosphere specially created for it. She began to be frightened and to think, "But what can I do? How will it end?" She longedto do something active, to make an exertion, and struggle out of all this assailing strangeness. Like one attacked in a tunnel by claustrophobia, she had an impulse to dash open doors and windows, to burst arching, solid walls, and to be elsewhere.
At first she carefully concealed her condition from Susan Fleet, but when three days had gone by, and no word came from Mrs. Shiffney, she began to feel that fate had left her alone with the one human being of whom she could make a confidante. Again and again she looked furtively at Miss Fleet's serene and practical face, and wondered what effect her revelation would have upon the very sensible personality it indicated. "She'll think it is all nonsense, that it doesn't matter at all!" thought Charmian. And more than ever she wanted to tell Miss Fleet. In self-restraint she became violently excited. Often she felt on the verge of tears. And at last, very suddenly and without premeditation, she spoke.
They were visiting "Djenan el Ali," the lovely villa of an acquaintance of Mrs. Shiffney's who was away in Europe. Miss Fleet had been there before and knew the servants, who gladly gave her permission to show Charmian everything. After wandering through the house, which was a pure gem of Arab architecture, five hundred years old, and in excellent preservation, they descended into the garden, which was on the slope of the hill over which the houses of Mustapha Supérieur are scattered. Here no sounds of voices reached them, no tram bells, no shrieks from motors buzzing along the white road high above them. The garden was large and laid out with subtle ingenuity. The house was hidden away from the world that was so near.
Miss Fleet strolled on, descending by winding paths, closely followed by Charmian, till she came to a sheet of artificial water, whose uneven banks were covered with masses of azaleas, rhododendrons, bamboos, and flowering shrubs. In the midst of this lake there was a tiny island, just big enough to give room for the growth of one gigantic date palm, and for a mass of arum lilies from which it rose towering toward the delicate blue of the cloudless sky. The lilies and the palm—they were the island, round which slept greenish-yellowwater guarded by the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the bamboos, and the shrubs. And on the path where Charmian and Miss Fleet stood there was a long pergola of roses, making a half-moon.
Charmian stood still and looked. The ground formed a sort of basin sheltering the little lake. Even the white Arab house was hidden from it by a screen of trees. The island, a wonderfully clever thing, attained by artificiality a sort of strange exoticism which almost intoxicated Charmian. Perhaps nothing wholly natural could have affected her in quite the same way. There was something of the art of a Ferdinand Rades in the art which had created that island, had set it just where it was. It had been planned to communicate a thrill to highly civilized people, to suggest to them—what? the Fortunate Isles, perhaps, the strange isles, which they dream of when they have a moment to dream, but which they will certainly never see. It was a suggestive little isle. One longed to sail away, to land on it—and then?
Charmian stood as if hypnotized by it. Her eyes went from the lilies up the great wrinkled trunk of the palm to its far away tufted head, then travelled down to the big white flowers. She sighed and gazed. And just at that moment she felt that she was going to tell Susan Fleet immediately.
On the shore of the lake there was a seat.
"I must tell you something," Charmian said, sinking down on it. "I'm very unhappy."
She looked again at the island and the tears came to her eyes.
"He never has even let me hear a note of his music!" she thought, connecting Claude Heath's talent with the lilies and the palm in some strange way that seemed inevitable.
Susan Fleet sat down and folded her white-gloved hands in her neat tailor-made lap.
"I'm sorry for that," she said.
"And seeing that island, seeing all these lovely places and things makes it so much worse. I didn't know—till I came here. At least, I didn't really know I knew. Oh, Miss Fleet, how happy I could be here if I wasn't so dreadfully wretched."
A sort of wave of desperation—it seemed a hot wave—surged through Charmian. All the strangeness of Claude Heath flowed upon her and receded from her, leaving her in a sort of dreadful acrid dryness.
"Surely," she said, "when you are in places like this you must feel that nothing is of any real use if one has it alone."
"But I'm with you now," returned Miss Fleet, evidently wishing to give Charmian a chance to regain her reserve.
"With me! What's the use of that? You must know what I mean."
"I suppose you mean a man."
Charmian blushed.
"That sounds—oh, well, how can we help it? It is not our fault. We have to be so, even if we hate it. And I do hate it. I don't want to care about him. I never have. He's not in my set. He doesn't know anyone I know, or do anything I do, or care for almost anything I care for—perhaps. But I feel I could do such things for him, that he will never do for himself. And I want to do them. I must do them, but he will never let me."
"I hope he's a gentleman. I don't believe in mixing classes, simply because it seems to me that one class never really understands another, not at all because one class isn't just as good as another."
"Of course he's a gentleman. Mrs. Shiffney asked him to come on the yacht."
"Oh! Mr. Heath!" observed Miss Fleet.
Charmian thought she detected a slight change in the deep chest tone of her companion's voice.
"D'you know him?" she asked, almost sharply.
"No."
"Have you seen him?"
"No, never. I only heard that he might be coming from Adelaide, and then that he wasn't coming."
"He knew I was coming and he refused to come. Isn't it degrading?"
"Is he a great friend of yours?"
"No, but he is of my mother's. What must you think of me? What do you think of me?"
Charmian put her hand impulsively on Miss Fleet's arm.
"I didn't know till I came here. I thought I disliked him, I almost thought I hated him."
"That's always a bad sign, I believe," said Miss Fleet.
"Yes, I know. But he doesn't hate me. He doesn't think about me. He's mother's friend and not even my enemy. Do tell me, Miss Fleet—or may I call you Susan to-day?"
"Of course, and to-morrow, too."
"Thank you. You've seen lots of people. Do you think I have personality? Do you think I—am I just like everyone else? That's such a hideous idea! Have I anything that stamps me? Am I a little different from all the other girls—you know, in our sort of set? Do tell me!"
There was something humble in her quivering eagerness that quite touched Susan Fleet.
"No, I don't think you're just like everyone else."
"You aren't. And he isn't. He's not in the least like any other man I ever saw. That's the dreadful part of it. I can't imagine why I care for him, and that's why I know I shall never care for anyone else."
"Perhaps he likes you."
"No, no! No, I'm sure he doesn't. He thinks, like everyone else, that I have nothing particular in me. But it isn't true. Susan, sometimes we know a thing by instinct—don't we?"
"Certainly. Instinct is often the experience of the past working within us."
"Well, I know that I am the woman who could make Claude Heath famous, who could do for him what he could never do for himself. He has genius, I believe. Max Elliot says so. And I feel it when I'm with him. But he has no capacity for using it, as it ought to be used, to dominate the world. He's never been in the world. He knows, and wishes to know, nothing of it. That's absurd, isn't it? We ought to give, if we have anything extraordinary to give. Oh, if you knew how I've longed and pined to be extraordinary!"
"Extraordinary? In what way?"
"In gifts, in talent! I've suffered dreadfully because I simply can't endure just to be one of the silly, dull crowd. But lately—quite lately—I've begun to realize what I couldbe, do. I could be the perfect wife to a great man. Don't laugh at me!"
"I'm not laughing."
"Aren't you? You are a dear! I knew you would understand. You see I've always been among people who matter. I've always known clever men who've made their names. I've always breathed in the atmosphere of culture. I'm at home in the world. I know how to take people. I have social capacities. Now he's quite different. The fact is, I have all he hasn't. And he has what I haven't, his talent. He's remarkable. Anyone would feel it in an instant. I believe he's a great manmanquébecause of a sort of kink in his temperament. And—I know that I could get rid of that kinkif—"
She stopped. The tears rushed into her eyes. "Oh, isn't it awful to be madly in love with a man who doesn't care for you?" she exclaimed, almost fiercely.
"I'm not," returned Susan Fleet, quietly. "But I daresay it is."
"When I look at that island—"
Charmian stopped and took out her handkerchief. After using it she said, in a way that made Susan think of a fierce little cat spitting:
"But I will bring out what is in me! I will not let all my capacities go to rust."
Quite abruptly, she could not tell why, Charmian felt that there was a dawning of hope in her sky. Her depression seemed to lift a little. She was conscious of her youth, of her grace and charm, her prettiness, her intelligence. She was able to put a little trust in them.
"Susan," she said, clasping her companion's left hand, "the other day, when we were in the garden of the hotel, such a strange feeling came to me. I couldn't trust it then. I thought it must be nonsense. But it has come to me again. It seems somehow to be connected with all sorts of things—here."
"Tell me what it is."
"Yes, I must. The other day it came when I saw the dragoman, Mustapha Ali, walking toward the hotel—when he was just under that arch of pink roses. The horn of a motorsounded in the road, and the white dust flew up in a cloud. Then I heard, far away, the siren of a ship. It was all an impression of Algiers. It was Algiers. And I felt—I shall be here again withhim."
She gazed at Susan. Romance was alight in her long eyes.
"And now, when I look at that island, the feeling comes again. It seems to come to me out of the palm trunk and the lilies, almost as if they knew, and told me."
Susan Fleet looked at Charmian with a new interest.
"It may be so," she said. "Perhaps part of your destiny is to learn through that man, and to teach him."
"Oh, Susan! If it should be!"
Life suddenly seemed glittering with wonder to Charmian, quivering with possibility.
"But you must learn to love, if you are to do any real good."
"Learn! Why, I've just told you—"
"No, no. You don't quite understand me. Our personal loves must be expanded. They must become universal. We must overflow with love."
Charmian stared. This very quiet, very neat, and very practical woman had astonished her.
"Do you?" she almost blurted out.
"It's very, very difficult. But I wish to and try to. Do you know, I think perhaps that is why you have told me all this."
"Perhaps it is," said Charmian. "I could never have told it to anyone else."
Just before Charmian left England Mrs. Mansfield had begun to suspect her secret. Already from time to time she had wondered whether Charmian refused to accept Claude Heath, as she had accepted all the other habitués of the house, because she really liked him much better than she liked them. She had wondered and she had said, "No, it is not so." Had she not been less than frank with herself, and for another reason which made her reluctant to see truth? She scarcely knew. But when Charmian was gone and her mother was quite alone, she felt almost sure that she had to face a fact very unpleasant to her. There had been something in the girl's eyes as she said good-bye, a slight hardness, a lurking defiance, something about her lips, something even in the sound of her voice which had troubled Mrs. Mansfield, which continued to trouble her while Charmian was away.
Charmian in love with Claude Heath!
It seemed to the mother in those first moments of contemplation that, if she were right in her surmise, Charmian could scarcely have set her affections on a man less suited to enter into her life, less likely to make her happy.
Charmian belonged to a certain world not merely because she was born in it, and had always lived in it, but by temperament, by character. Essentially she was of it. She could surely never be happy in the life led by Claude Heath. Could Claude Heath be happy in the sort of life led by her?
Abruptly Mrs. Mansfield felt as if she did not really know Heath very well. A great many things about him she knew. But how much of him was beyond her ken. She was not even sure how he regarded Charmian. Now she wished very much to be more clear about that.
Among her many friends Heath stood apart, and for this reason: all the other men of talent whom she knew intimately were in the same set, or belonged to sets which overlapped andintermingled. They were men who were making, or had made, their names; men who knew, and were known by, her friends and acquaintances, who needed no explanation, who were thoroughly "in it." Only Heath was outside, was unknown, was not taking an active part in the battle of art or of life. And this fact gave him a certain strangeness, not free from romance, gave him a peculiar value in Mrs. Mansfield's eyes. She secretly cherished the thought of his individuality. She could not wish it changed. But she knew very well that though such an individuality might attract her child, indeed, she feared, had attracted Charmian, yet Charmian, if she had any influence over it, would not be satisfied to let it alone, to leave it quietly to its own natural development. Charmian would never let any plant that belonged to her grow in darkness. She understood well enough the many clever men who frequented the house, men with ambitions which they were gratifying, men who were known, or who wished and intended to be known, men, as a rule, who were fighting, or who had fought, hard battles. To several of these men Charmian could have made an excellent wife.
But if she had set her affections on Heath she had made a sad mistake. His peculiarity of temperament was in accord surely with nothing in Charmian. That very fact, perhaps, had grasped her attention, had excited her curiosity, even stirred sentiment within her. Having perceived a gulf she had longed to bridge it, to set her feet on the farther side. Mrs. Mansfield was glad that Charmian was away. Hitherto she had cultivated the friendship with Heath without arrière pensée. Now she was more conscious in it. Her great love of her only child made her wish to study Heath.
The more she studied him the more she hoped that her guess about Charmian had been wrong, and yet the more she studied him the better she liked him. There was an intensity in him that captivated her intense mind, an unworldliness that her soul approved. His lack of social ambition, of all desire to be rich and prosperous, refreshed her. She compared him secretly with other men of great talent. Some of them were not greedy for money, but even they were greedy for fame, were almost fearfully solicitous about their "position," if not their socialposition then their position in the artistic world. Jealousies accompanied them, and within them were jealousies. They had not only the desire to build, but also the desire to pull down, to obliterate, to make ruins and dust.
Among all the men whom she knew, Claude Heath was the only one who was alone with his art, and who wished to remain alone with the thing he loved. There was a purity in the situation which delighted Mrs. Mansfield. Yet she realized that Heath was a man who might be won away from that which was best in him, from that which he almost sternly clung to and cherished. And one day he made her aware that he knew this.
They went to a concert together at Queen's Hall, and sat in the gallery, in seats which Heath habitually frequented when the music given was orchestral, when he wished to see as little as possible and to hear perfectly. He enjoyed hearing a fine orchestra without watching the conductor, whose necessary gestures, sometimes not free from an element of the grotesque, hindered the sweet toil of his imagination, held him back from worlds he desired to enter.
Between the two parts of the not long concert there was a pause. During it Mrs. Mansfield and Claude left their seats and strolled about in the corridor, talking. They were both of them heated by music and ready for mental intimacy. But they did not discuss the works they had just heard. Combinations of melody and harmony turned them toward life and humanity. The voices of the great orchestral family called them toward the dim avenues where in the shadows destiny wanders. Some music enlarges the borders, sets us free in regions whose confines we cannot perceive. They spoke of aims, of ideals, of goals which are very far off.
"Fine music gives me the conception of great distances," Mrs. Mansfield said presently. "It makes me feel that the soul is born for travel."
Heath stood still.
"The winding white road over the hills that loses itself in the vagueness which, in a picture, only some shade of blue can suggest. The road! The road!"
He stood leaning against the wall. As she stood by himMrs. Mansfield felt strangely, almost cruelly, young. It was as if student days had come for them both. She could hardly believe that her hair was snow-white, and that Charmian had been going to parties for nearly four years.
"The worst of it is," Claude continued, "that it is so hard sometimes not to wander from it."
"It seems to me you never wander."
"Because I know that, if I did, I should probably never come back to the road. What you perhaps consider my strength takes its rise, I believe, in my knowledge of my weakness. Things that are right for others aren't right for me."
No one was near them. The music seemed to have abolished for the moment the difference in age between them. Claude spoke to her as he had seldom spoken to her before, with an almost complete unreserve of manner.
"Do you know why some men enter the cloister?" he continued. "It's because they feel that if they are not monks they will be libertines. Mullion House is my cloister. I haven't got the power of apportioning my life with sweet reason, so much work, so much play, so much retirement, so much society, so much restraint, so much license. I could never pursue my art through wildness, as so many men have done, women too. I don't believe I could even stick to it in the midst of the ordinary life of pleasures and distractions. It's like a bone that I have to seize and take away into a cave where no one can see me gnaw it. Isn't that a beastly simile?"
"Is that why you won't go to Max Elliot's, that you refused Mrs. Shiffney? Do you think that the sort of thing which inspires many men—the audience, let us say, watching the combat—would unnerve you?"
"I don't say that. But I think it might lead me into wild extravagance, or into complete idleness. And I think, I know, that I might be tempted irresistibly to give an audience what it wanted. There's something in me which is ready to rush out to satisfy expectation. I hate it, but it's there."
"And yet you're so uncompromising."
"That's my armor. I daren't wear ordinary clothes, lest every arrow should pierce me."
A bell sounded. They returned to the concert room. When the second part was over Heath looked at Mrs. Mansfield and said:
"Where are we going?"
They were in the midst of the crowd passing out. Women were winding soft things about their necks, men were buttoning up their coats. For a March wind was about in the great city. She returned his look and smiled.
"Ah! You guessed! It's the gallery, I suppose. I'm not accustomed to all this fun. Isn't it amazing what a groove one lives in? Berkeley Square shadows the whole of my life I begin to believe."
"Don't say the motor is waiting!"
"No, it isn't."
"Shall we go to some preposterous place—to the Monico?"
"Where you like. It's just tea time, or coffee time."
They walked to the Monico in the March wind, and went in with a group of Italians, passing the woman who sells foreign papers, and seeing names that transported them to Paris, to Milan, to Rome, to Berlin. A vastness of marble contained a myriad of swarthy strangers, releasing souls astoundingly foreign in vivid gesture and talk. They had coffee with cream like a burgeoning cloud floating airily on the top.
"The only word to describe the effect of all this upon me is spree," said Mrs. Mansfield. "I am out on the spree."
"Capital! And if I stepped right in to your sort of life," said Heath, "would it have the same kind of effect upon me?"
"I don't think it could. It's too conscious, too critical, too fastidious. There's nothing fastidious in a spree. I like the March wind outside, too—the thought of it."
Suddenly her mind went to Charmian and Algiers.
"Charmian's in the sun," she said.
Directly she said this Heath looked slightly self-conscious.
"Have you heard from her?"
"This morning. She has made great friends with Susan Fleet."
"Yes?"
"Oh, a woman we all like, who often helps Adelaide Shiffney with things."
"We all like," he repeated.
"Acliché! And indeed I scarcely know Susan Fleet. You see what an absurd close borough I live in, have always lived in. And I never thoroughly realized that till I met you."
"And I live in loneliness, outside of it all, of everything almost."
Lightly she answered:
"With Mrs. Shiffney and others holding open the door, holding up the lamp, and imploring you to come in, to come right in as they say on the other side of the Atlantic."
"You don't do that."
"Do you wish me to?"
"I don't know what I wish. But I am dissatisfied."
He frowned, moving his chair, lit a cigarette, pushed away his coffee cup.
"What is it like at Algiers?"
"Very beautiful, Charmian says. Adelaide and the others have gone off to a desert place called Bou-Saada—"
"Bou-Saada!" he said slowly.
"And Charmian and Susan Fleet are up on the hill at Mustapha Supérieur. They've left the yacht for a few days. They are visiting Arab villas and exploring tropical gardens."
She watched him and sipped her coffee. All the student feeling had gone from her. And now she was deeply aware of the difference between her age and Heath's.
"I suppose they won't be back for a good while," he said.
"Oh, I expect them in a week or two."
"So soon?"
"Adelaide is always in a hurry, and this was only to be quite a short trip."
"Once out there how can they come away so soon? I should want to stay for months. If I once began really to travel there would never be an end to it, unless I were not my own master."
"It's quite extraordinary how you master yourself," Mrs. Mansfield said. "You are a dragon to yourself, and what afierce unyielding dragon! It's a fine thing to have such a strong will."
"Ah! But if I let it go!"
"Do you think you ever will?"
"Yes," he said with a sort of deep sadness. "On one side's the will. But on the other side there's an absurd impulsiveness. But don't let's talk any more of me. Do tell me some more about Algiers and your daughter."
When Heath left her that day Mrs. Mansfield said to herself, "If Charmian really does care for him he doesn't know it."
What were Heath's feelings toward Charmian she could not divine. She was unconscious of any desire to baffle her on Heath's part, and was inclined to think that he was so wrapped up in the rather solitary life he had planned out for himself, and in his art, was so detached from the normal preoccupations of strong and healthy young men, that Charmian meant very little, perhaps nothing at all, to him. She had noted, of course, the slightly self-conscious look which had come into Heath's face when she had mentioned Charmian, but she explained that to herself easily enough. Her mention of Charmian in the sun had recalled to him the persistence of Mrs. Shiffney, which he knew she was aware of. In such matters he was like a sensitive boy. He had the peculiar delicacies of the nervously constituted artist, which seem very ridiculous to the average man, but not to the discerning woman. Mrs. Mansfield felt almost sure that his self-consciousness arose not from memories of Charmian, but of Adelaide Shiffney. And she supposed that he was probably quite indifferent to Charmian. It was better so. Although she believed that it was wise for most men to marry, and not very late in life, she excepted Heath from her theory. She could not "see" him married. She could not pick out any girl or woman whom she knew, and say: "That would be the wife for him." Evidently he was one of the exceptional men for whom the normal conditions are not intended. She thought again of his music, and found a reason there. But then she remembered yellow-haired Fan. He was at home with a child, why not with a wife and child of his own? She put aside the problem, but did not resign the thought, "In any case Charmian would be thewrong woman for him to marry." And when she said that to herself she was thinking solely of the welfare of Heath. Because he was a man, and had been unreserved with her, Mrs. Mansfield instinctively desired to protect his life. She had the feeling, "I understand him better than others." In a chivalrous nature understanding breeds a strong sense of obligation. Mrs. Mansfield felt as if she had duties toward Heath. During the two weeks which elapsed before Charmian's return from Algiers she thought more about his future than about her child's. But she was a very feminine woman and, to her, a man's future always seemed to matter more than a woman's.
Heath, too, had his great talent. That might need protection in the future. Mrs. Mansfield did not believe in an untroubled life for such a man as Heath. There was something disturbing both in his personality and in his music which seemed to her to preclude the possibility of his dwelling always in peace. But she hoped he would be true to his instinct, to the strange instinct which kept him now in a sort of cloistered seclusion. She knew he had friends, acquaintances, made during his time at the College of Music, through the introductions he had brought to London from Cornwall, through family connections. Human intercourse must be part of every life. But she was glad, very glad, that neither Mrs. Shiffney nor Max Elliot had persuaded him into the world where artists are handed on and on till they "know everybody." His words: "Do you know why some men enter the cloister? It's because they feel that if they are not monks they will be libertines," remained with her. Doubtless Heath knew himself. She thought of those who have pursued their art through wildness—Heath's expression—with an inflexibility quite marvellous, an order in the midst of disorder, which to the onlooker seems no less than a miracle. But they were surely Bohemians born, and full of characteristics that were racial. Such characteristics did not exist in Heath, she thought. She pondered. He was surely not a Bohemian. And yet he did not belong to the other race so noticeable in England, the race of the cultured talented, who live well-ordered lives in the calm light of a mild and unobjectionablepublicity, who produce in the midst of comfort, giving birth to nothing on straw, who are sane even to the extent of thinking very much as the man in Sloane Street thinks, who occasionally go to a levée, and have set foot on summer days in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Heath, perhaps, could not be dubbed with a name. Was he a Bohemian who, for his health's sake, could not live in Bohemia? She remembered the crucifix standing in front of the piano where he passed so many hours, the strange and terrible words he had chosen to set to music, the setting he had given them. It was an uncompromising nature, an uncompromising talent. And yet—there was the other side. There was something ready to rush out to satisfy expectation.
She was deeply interested in Heath.
About ten days after the "spree" at the Monico she received a telegram from Marseilles—"Starting to-night, home the day after to-morrow; love.—Charmian."
Heath dropped in that day, and Mrs. Mansfield mentioned the telegram.
"Charmian will be back on Thursday. I told you Adelaide Shiffney would be in a hurry."
"Then they are not going on to the Greek Isles," he said.
"Not this time."
She glanced at him and thought he was looking rather sad.
"Will you come and dine on Thursday night just with me and Charmian?" she said. "If she is tired with the journey from Paris you may be alone with me. If not, she can tell us about her little African experiences."
"Thank you. Yes, I should like to come very much!"
The strangely imaginative expression, which made his rather plain face almost beautiful, shone in his eyes and seemed to shed a flicker of light about his brow and lips, as he added:
"I have travelled so little that to me there is something almost wonderful in the arrival of someone from Africa. Even the name comes to me always like fire and black mystery. Last night, just before I went to bed, I was reading Chateaubriand, and I came across a passage that kept me awake for hours."
"What was it?"
She leaned a little forward, ready to be fascinated as evidently he had been.
"He is writing of Napoleon, and says of him something like this."
Heath paused, looked down, seemed to make an effort, and continued, with his eyes turned away from Mrs. Mansfield:
"'His enemies, fascinated, seek him and do not see him. He hides himself in his glory, as the lion of the Sahara hides himself in the rays of the sun to escape from the searching eyes of the dazzled hunters.' Isn't that simply gorgeous? It set my imagination galloping. 'As the lion of the Sahara hides himself in the rays of the sun'—by Jove!" He got up. "I was out of England last night. And to think that Miss Charmian is actually arriving from Africa!"
When he was gone Mrs. Mansfield said to herself: "He's a child, too!" And she felt restless and troubled. Naïveté leads men of genius into such unsuitable regions sometimes. It was rather wonderful that he could feel as he did about Africa and refuse to go to Africa. For Adelaide would have taken him anywhere. Would Charmian bring back with her something of the wonder of the East? Mrs. Mansfield felt for a moment as if she were going to welcome a stranger in her child. The feeling returned to her on the Thursday afternoon, when she was waiting for Charmian's arrival in her writing-room.
Charmian was due at Charing Cross at three-twenty-five. She ought to be in Berkeley Square about four, unless the train was very crowded, and there was a long delay at the Customs. Four o'clock chimed from the Dresden china clock on the mantelpiece, and she had not arrived. Mrs. Mansfield was conscious of a restlessness almost amounting to nervousness. She got up from her chair, laid down the book she had been reading, and moved slowly about the room.
How would Charmian receive the news that Claude Heath was to dine with them that night? Would she be too tired by the journey to dine? She was a bad sailor. Perhaps the sea in the Channel had been rough. If so, she would arrive not looking her best. Mrs. Mansfield had invited Heath because she wished to be sure at the first possible moment whether Charmian was in love with him or not. And she waspositive that now, consciously alert and suspicious, if she saw the two together even for a short time she would know.
And if she knew that it was so, that Charmian had set her affections on Heath—what then?
She resolved not to look beyond the day. But as the moments passed, and she waited, her mind, like a thing beyond control, began to occupy itself with that question. The distant hoot of a motor startled her. Although their motor had a horn exactly the same as a thousand others she knew at once that Charmian was entering the Square. Half a minute later, standing in the doorway of her sitting-room, she heard the door bell and the footsteps of Lassell, the butler. Impulsively she went to the staircase.
"Charmian!" she called. "Charmian!"
"My only mother!" came up a voice from below.
She saw Charmian pushing up her veil over her three-cornered travelling-hat with a bright red feather.
"Where are you? Oh, there!"
She came up the stairs.
"Such a crossing! I'm an unlucky girl! Remedies are no use. Dearest!"
She put two light hands on her mother's shoulders and kissed her twice with lips which were rather cold. Her face was pale, and her eyes looked unusually haggard and restless. An atmosphere of excitement seemed to surround her like an aura, Mrs. Mansfield thought. She put her arm through her mother's.
"Tea with you, and then I think I must go to bed. How nice to be in my own dear bed again! I thought of my pillows on board with a yearning that came from the soul, I'm sure. Of course, we left the yacht at Marseilles. The yachting there was such a talk about resolved itself into the two crossings. I wasn't sorry, for we never saw a calm sea except from the shore."
"No? What a shame! Sit here."
Charmian threw herself down with a movement that was very young and began taking off her long gloves. As her thin, pretty hands came out of them, Mrs. Mansfield bent down and kissed her.
"Dear child! How nice to have you safe home!"
"Is it?"
"What a silly question to ask your only mother!"
"This chair makes me feel exactly how tired I am. It tells me."
"Take off your hat."
"Shall I?" She put up her hands, but she left the hat where it was, and her mother did not ask why.
"Is Adelaide back?"
"No, I left her glued to Paris. I crossed with Susan Fleet. Oh!"
She rested her head on the back of the big chair, and shut her eyes.
"Only tea. I can't eat!"
"Here it is."
"I feel as if I'd been away for centuries, as if London must have changed."
"It hasn't."
"And you?"
"Oh, of course, I've shed my nature, as you see!"
"I believe you think I've shed mine."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
Her eyes wandered about the room.
"Everything just the same."
"Then Africa really has made a great difference?"
The alert look that Mrs. Mansfield knew so well came into Charmian's face despite her fatigue.
"Who thought it would?"
"Well, you've never been out of Europe before."
"You did?"
"Wouldn't it be natural if I had fancied it might?"
"Perhaps. But it was only the very edge of Africa. I never went beyond Mustapha Supérieur. I didn't even want to go. I wonder if Susan Fleet did."
"Do you think so?"
"I'm afraid I didn't think very much about it. But I begin to wonder now. I think she's so unselfish that perhaps she makes other people selfish."
"You made great friends, didn't you?"
"Yes. I think she's rather wonderful. She's very unlike other women. She seemed actually glad to give me the address of the place where she gets her coats and skirts. If Theosophy made more women like that I should wish it to spread like cholera in the alleys of Naples. Madre, don't mind me! I was really ill coming across. My head feels all light and empty."
She put up her hands to her temples.
"It's as if everything in my poor little brain-box had been shaken about."
"Poor child! And I've been very inconsiderate."
"Inconsiderate? How?"
"About to-night."
"You haven't accepted a party for me?"
"It isn't so bad as that. But I've invited someone to dinner."
"Mother!" Charmian looked genuinely surprised. "Not Aunt Kitty!"
Aunt Kitty was a sister of Mrs. Mansfield's whom Charmian disliked.
"Oh, no—Claude Heath."
After a slight but perceptible pause, Charmian said:
"Mr. Heath. Oh, you asked him for to-night before you knew I should be here. I see."
"No, I didn't. I thought he would like to hear about your African experiences. I asked him after your telegram came."
Charmian got up slowly, and stood where she could see herself in a mirror without seeming intent on looking in the glass. Her glance to it was very swift and surreptitious, and she spoke, to cover it perhaps.
"I'm afraid I've got very little to tell about Algiers that could interest Mr. Heath. Would you mind very much if I gave it up and dined in bed?"
"Do just as you like. It was stupid of me to ask him. I suppose I acted on impulse without thinking first."
"What time is dinner?"
"Eight as usual."
"I'll lie down and rest and then see how I feel. I'll go now. Nice to be with you again, dearest Madre!"
She bent down and kissed her mother's cheek. The touch of her lips just then was not quite pleasant to Mrs. Mansfield. When she was in her bedroom alone, Charmian took off her hat, and, without touching her hair, looked long and earnestly into the glass that stood on her dressing-table. Then she bent down and put her face close to the glass.
"I look dreadful!" was her comment.
Her maid knocked at the door and was sent away. Charmian undressed herself, got into bed, and lay very still. She felt very interesting, and as if she were going to be involved in interesting and strange events, as if destiny were at work, and were selecting instruments to help on the coming of that which had to be. She thought of her mother as one of these instruments.
It was strange that her mother should have been moved to ask Claude Heath, the man she meant to marry, to come to the house alone on the evening of her return. This action was not a very natural one on her mother's part. It had always been tacitly understood that Heath was Mrs. Mansfield's friend. Yet Mrs. Mansfield had invited him for her daughter. Had thought, for which space does not exist, reached across the sea from child to mother mysteriously, saying to the mother, "Do this!"
But unless the glass told a new tale at seven o'clock Charmian did not mean to go down to dinner.
She closed her eyes and said to herself, again and again, "Look better! Look better! Look better!"
When seven o'clock struck she got out of bed, and again looked in the glass. She felt rested in body, and no longer had the tangled sensation in her head. But the face which confronted her reminded her disagreeably of Millie Deans, the American singer. It had what Charmian called the "Pierrot look," a too expressive and unnatural whiteness which surely told secrets. It seemed to her, too, a hard face, too determined in expression, repellent almost. And surely nothing is likely to be more repellent to a man than a girl's face that is hard.
Since her conversation with Susan Fleet by the little lake in the Algerian garden, Charmian had felt that destiny had decreed her marriage with Claude Heath. So she put the matter to herself. Really that conversation had caused her secretly to decide that she would marry Claude Heath.
"It may be so," Susan Fleet had said. "Perhaps part of your destiny is to learn through that man, and to teach him."
The words had gone to join the curious conviction that had come to Charmian out of the white dust floating up from the road that runs through Mustapha, out of the lilies, out of the wrinkled trunk of the great palm that was separated by the yellow-green water from all its fellows, "I shall be here again with him."
Surely the strong assertion of the will is the first step that takes a human being out of the crowd. Charmian had suffered because she was in the crowd, undistinguished, lost like a violet in a prairie abloom with thousands of violets. Something in Algeria, something perhaps in Susan Fleet, had put into her a resolve, unacknowledged even to herself. She had returned to England, meaning to marry Claude Heath, meaning to use her will as the ardent and capable servant of her heart.
But what she said to herself was this, "I believe destiny means to bring us together." She wrapped a naked little fact up in a soft tissue of romance and wonder.
But the face in the glass which now looked at her was too determined, too hard. It startled her. And she changed the expression on it. But then it looked insincere, meretricious, affected, and always haggard.
For a minute Charmian hesitated, almost resolved to go back to bed. But, oh, the dulness of the long evening shut in there! Three hours ago, at Charing Cross Station, she had looked forward to it. But now!
Only once in her life had Charmian made up her face. She knew many girls who disfigured their youth by concealing it with artifice. She thought them rather absurd and rather horrid. Nevertheless she had rouge and powder. One day she had bought them, shut herself in, made up her face, and been thoroughly disgusted with the effect. Yes, but she had done it in a hurry, without care. She had known she was not going to be seen.
Softly she pulled out a drawer.
At half-past seven there was a knock at the door. She opened it and saw her maid.
"If you please, miss, Mrs. Mansfield wishes to know whether you feel rested enough to dine downstairs."
"Yes, I do. Just tell mother, and then come back, please, Halton."
When Halton came Charmian watched her almost as a cat does a mouse, and presently surprised an inquiring look that degenerated into a look of suspicion.
"What's the matter, Halton?"
"Nothing, miss. Which dress will you wear?"
So Halton had guessed, or had suspected—there was not much difference between the two mental processes.
"The green one I took on the yacht."
"Yes, miss."
"Or the—wait a minute."
"Yes, miss?"
"Yes—the green one."
When the maid had taken the dress out Charmian said:"Why did you look at me as you did just now, Halton? I wish to know."
"I don't know, miss."
"Well, I have put something on."
"Yes, miss."
"I looked so sea-sick—yellow. No one wants to look yellow."
"No, I'm sure, miss."
"But I don't want—come and help me, Halton. I believe you know things I don't."
Halton had been with the lovely Mrs. Charlton Hoey before she came to Charmian, and she did know things unknown to her young mistress. Trusted, she was ready to reveal them, and Charmian went downstairs at three minutes past eight more ingenious than she had been at ten minutes before that hour.
Although she was quite, quite certain that neither her mother nor Claude Heath would discover what had been done with Halton's assistance, she was nevertheless sufficiently uncertain to feel a tremor as she put her hand on the drawing-room door, and it was a tremor in which a sense of shame had a part.
Claude Heath was in the room with Mrs. Mansfield. As Charmian looked at him getting quickly up from the sofa where he had been sitting he seemed to her a stranger. Was this really the man who had made her suffer, weep, confide in Susan Fleet, in Algeria? Had pink roses and dust, far-off and near sounds, movements and stillnesses, and that strange little island spoken to her of him, prophesied to her about him? She had a sense of banality, of disillusion, as if all that had been in her own brain only, almost crazily conceived without any action of events to prompt it.
But when she met his eyes the disagreeable sensation dropped away. For his eyes searched her in a way that made her feel suddenly important. He was looking for Africa, but she did not know it.
Although he did not see what Charmian had done to her face, he noticed change in her. She seemed to him more of a personage than she had seemed before she went away. He was not sure that he liked the change. But it made animpression upon him. And what he considered as the weakness within him felt a desire to please and conciliate it.
Mrs. Mansfield had seen at a glance that Charmian had touched up her face, but she showed nothing of what she felt, if she felt anything, about this new departure. And when Heath said to Charmian, "How well you are looking!" Mrs. Mansfield added:
"Your rest has done you good."
"Yes, I feel rather less idiotic!" said Charmian; "but only rather. You mustn't expect me to be quite my usual brilliant self, Mr. Heath. You must wait a day or two for that. What have you been doing all this time?"
It seemed to Heath that there was a hint of light patronage in her tone and manner. He was unpleasantly conscious of the woman of the world. But he did not realize how much Charmian had to conceal at this moment.
When almost immediately they went in to dinner, Mrs. Mansfield deliberately turned the conversation to Charmian's recent journey. This was to be Charmian's dinner. Charmian was the interesting person, the traveller from Algeria. Had not Claude Heath been invited to hear all about the trip? Mrs. Mansfield remembered the imaginative look which had transformed his face just before he had quoted Chateaubriand. And she remembered something else, something Charmian had once said to her: "You jump into minds and hearts and poor little I remain outside, squatting, like a hungry child!" She had a sincere horror of the elderly mother who clings to that power which should rightly be in the hands of youth. And to-night something in her heart said: "Give place! give place!" The fact which she had noticed in connection with Charmian's face had suddenly made something within her weep over the child, take herself to task. There was still much impulse in Mrs. Mansfield. To-night a subtlety in Charmian, which no man could have detected, set that impulse in a generous and warm blaze; filled her with a wish to abdicate in the child's favor, to make her the center of the evening's attention, the source of the evening's conversation; to show Heath that Charmian could be as interesting as herself and more attractive than she was.
The difficulty was to obtain the right response from Charmian. She had learnt, and had decided upon so much in Algiers that she was inclined to pretend that Algiers was very uninteresting. She did not fully realize that Claude Heath was naive as well as clever, was very boyish as well as very observant, very concentrated and very determined. And she feared to play the schoolgirl if she made much of her experience. Algiers meant so much to her just then that she belittled Algiers in self-defense.
Heath was chilled by her curt remarks.
"Of course, it's dreadfully French!" she said. "I suppose the conquerors wish to efface all the traces of the conquered as much as possible. I quite understand their feelings. But it's not very encouraging to the desirous tourist."
"Then you were disappointed?" said Heath.
"You should have gone to Bou-Saada," said Mrs. Mansfield. "You would have seen the real thing there. Why didn't you?"
"Adelaide Shiffney started in such a hurry, before I had had time to see anything, or recover from the horrors of yachting. You know how she rushes on as if driven by furies."
There was a small silence. Charmian knew now that she was making the wrong impression, that she was obstinately doing, being, all that was unattractive to Heath. But she was governed by the demon that often takes possession of girls who love and feel themselves unloved. The demon forced her to show a moral unattractiveness that did not really express her character. And realizing that she must be seeming rather horrid in condemning her hostess and representing the trip as a failure, she felt defiant and almost hard.
"Did you envy me?" she said to Heath, almost a little aggressively.
"Well, I thought you must be having a very interesting time. I thought a first visit to Africa must be a wonderful experience."
"But, then—why refuse to come?"
She gazed full into his face, and made her long eyes look impertinent, challenging. Mrs. Mansfield felt very uncomfortable.
"I!" said Heath. "Oh, I didn't know I was in question! Surely we were talking about the impression Algiers made upon you."
"Well, but if you condemn me for not being more enthusiastic, surely it is natural for me to wonder why you wouldn't for anything set foot in the African Paradise."
She laughed. Her nerves felt on edge after the journey. And something in the mental atmosphere affected her unfavorably.
"But, Miss Charmian, I don't condemn you. It would be monstrous to condemn anyone for not being able to feel in a certain way. I hope I have enough brains to see that."
He spoke almost hotly.
"Your mother and I had been imagining that you were having a wonderful time," he added. "Perhaps it was stupid of us."
"No. Algiers is wonderful."
Heath had changed her, had suddenly enabled her to be more natural.
"I include Mustapha, of course. Some of the gardens are marvellous, and the old Arab houses. And I think perhaps you would have thought them more marvellous even than I did."
"But, why?"