It was a Sunday in June, a year after Sylvester had come to London, and the great stretch of the Park, past Stanhope Gate, north of Achilles' statue, was thronged. The warm breath of the afternoon air scarcely stirred the leaves that chequered with shade and sunshine the mass of cool colour below. Above shone the vivid green of the foliage and the sea-blue of the sky; but beneath the branches the air was tempered by the reflection of the whites, the pale greys, the delicate blues and lavenders, and the soft pinks of dresses and parasols. It was the ordinary crowd that sat there, very fashionable, somewhat vulgar below the surface, but delicately picturesque, like human flower-beds in a sweet but formal garden. And on the walks beside and around and between passed the endless procession of loungers. The hum of talk, the subdued patter of footsteps, and the frou-frou of soft drapery hung upon the air.
Sylvester sat in the sun at the edge of one of the parterres, flanked, on the one side, by an elderly matron chaperoning a line of laughing girls, and on the other by a white-moustached, red-faced Anglo-Indian laying down the law to a neighbour on the preparation of curry. Sylvester stared moodily at the parterre in front, separated from him by the pathway, and felt very lonely. Despite his loss of faith in man and woman, he hungered dumbly for the human companionship from which he shrank. The first sense of novelty over, his practice in London had failed to stimulate him. The interest was absorbing, but unthrilling. He began to realise that he was degenerating into a consulting and recording machine,—very sensitive, it is true, but a machine all the same. He lived alone in a formal house in Weymouth Street. In the morning he rose early, worked in his laboratory, saw patients, ate, saw more patients, worked again in his laboratory, ate, and till bedtime read or worked again among the endless test-tubes and retorts. And so, without change, day after day. His common-sense told him that it was not a healthy life for a human being. But how to alter it effectively save by mixing with his kind? And his kind was hateful to him. He had grown to be a recluse, misanthropically brooding over its worthlessness. Yet now and then, as today, instinct drove him into the crowd.
He caught himself half envying the crowd's irresponsible gaiety. It was quite within his power, as far as external conditions were concerned, to become as one of those he saw and to surround himself with laughter-loving friends. He wondered vaguely what it would be like.
“It's the proportion of turmeric that does it,” exclaimed his neighbour, in a more emphatic tone than he had hitherto used. “The only man I knew that had the secret was poor old Jack Hilton—you remember Jack Hilton—of the Guides? He ran off with Mrs. Algy Broadbent.”
Sylvester shivered slightly. A cloud came before his eyes. Were all men dishonourable and all women faithless? Was all this refined and nicely civilised crowd rotten to its soul? He looked furtively around. Who could tell what Messalina lurked beneath yonder girl's pink and white skin and innocent fresh eyes, what villainy and meanness lay concealed beneath yonder young soldier's specious bearing of manliness? Disgust banished the haunting envy.
A man who had been chattering to the girls on his left took leave of them with a great sweep of his hat. In the act of passing Sylvester, he stopped short and regarded him as though in astonishment.
“Trône de l'air!and by all the oaths of the vehement South, what are you doing here?”
“How do you do, Roderick?” said Sylvester, rising and formally shaking hands.
“Oh, I'm bursting with fatness, which is more than I can say for you. But what are you doing in this galley?”
“Why shouldn't I be here?”
“The eternal fitness of things. One doesn't as a general rule, for instance, meet the Archbishop of Canterbury at a Covent Garden ball.”
He spoke in a hearty voice, with somewhat exotic gestures. Roderick Usher had spent part of his schooldays in France, and was fond of insisting on his cosmopolitan training. He was dressed in the most perfectly fitting of frock-coats and patent leather boots, and wore faultless grey suede gloves. His only departure from the commonplace severity of fashionable attire was a yellow Indian silk bow whose ends spread over the front of his coat. He had light fuzzy hair that protruded bushily behind his glossy silk hat, and his yellow beard was pointed in the Vandyke pattern. He was of medium height, rather stout; his face was broad and ruddy, at first sight giving the impression of frank good humour; but his eyes, small and somewhat shifty, although hidden behind gold pince-nez, detracted from the general air of handsomeness that he was pleased to cultivate. Besides, the deep lines of nearing middle age were growing troublesomely obvious.
Sylvester replied in a matter-of-fact way to his last remark,——
“I was working in my laboratory all the morning, and I felt the need of air. Weymouth Street is not far. I don't come here as a rule.”
“Bless you, my friend, there's no need to apologise. The place belongs to you just as much as it does to me. How's the old man?”
“Which old man?” asked Sylvester.
“Your old man, my old man, both our old men. Our antique but venerated old men.”
“My father is very well,” replied Sylvester, stiffly, “and so, I believe, is yours.”
“A la bonne heure!So you've come to London to make your fortune? You steady scientific files always do. We poor artistic devils generally manage to make other people's.”
“I don't quite understand,” said Sylvester.
The other laughed and drawing a cigarette from a silver case lit it daintily.
“I don't suppose you do. You approach a paradox as solemnly as if it were a disease. We play bat and ball with it. That makes the difference between us. Have a turn?”
Sylvester assented somewhat reluctantly. He disliked the son as much as he disliked the father. But the spirit of lonesomeness had been weighing on him to-day, and human instinct craved relief. They moved away and took their places in the sauntering procession on the broad walk.
“Why don't you do more of this sort of thing?” asked Roderick. “You treat life by rule of thumb, as if it were a science. It isn't; it's an art,—the finest of the Fine Arts. Colour, form, relief, action, sound, articulation, all combined, capable of a myriad permutations, any one of which can be fixed by the inspiration of the moment.”
“My way of life suits me best,” replied Sylvester. “I teach people how to kill bacilli; you teach them how to kill time.”
“Time's a deadlier enemy than all your bacilli, my friend, and takes a devilish sight more killing. But we won't argue. Argument is a discord in the symphony of existence. Besides, it's too confoundedly hot.”
Here he bowed in his grand style to a passing lady acquaintance.
“Ideals can exist outside of little glass bottles, my dear Sylvester,” he resumed. “Perhaps you may be surprised at hearing I am approaching the attainment of one of the ideals of my maturing years. It's a great scheme for the purification of art and the ennoblement of life. It is my own conception. Have you been to the Royal Academy yet?”
“No,” said Sylvester. “I haven't had the time.”
“Happy man! You have been spared a soul-rending spectacle of England's utter degradation. In all our art—drama, music, painting, poetry, architecture—it is the same. The vulgarity of commercialism, the banality of meretricious prettiness, the hand and brain working mechanically while the soul is far away wallowing in pounds, shillings and pence, or following a golf ball, or philandering in my Lady's boudoir. The true artist is suffocated. But we 're going to change all that.”
“How are you going to manage it?” asked Sylvester, with polite indifference.
“Ah, that's my secret. A great and glorious scheme just on the point of ripening. We are going to catch our artists young, painters, musicians, poets, the whole celestial brood, and keep them out of contamination,—give them free elemental surroundings for their art to develop. They will become the teachers and the guides of the race. To carry this dream through to a reality is something to live for,—to make one feel twenty again, with all one's glittering illusions.”
“You are going to carry it through?” said Sylvester.
“My boy, I should just think I am,” replied Roderick, taking his arm confidentially. “Funds have been slow in coming in, but people are promising support, now that they see the magnificence of the concern. I'll send you our prospectus and other publications. You can judge for yourself. Perhaps your father would like to further the work.”
“You'd better ask him,”, said Sylvester, drily. “But where does the money go to?”
“To the Colony. Didn't I tell you it was to be a colony? The Walden Art Colony. After a time it will be self-supporting; the produce will sell in the European and American markets, and the Colony will wax rich. It will become the world's great Palace of Art.”
“How will this fit in with Thoreau and uncontaminated nature?”
Sylvester put the question idly. He took faint interest in Roderick's iridescent scheme, which seemed to have no bearing upon the realities of life, as he understood them. But he could not help wondering as to the mental attitude of the fools who were providing the money to launch it.
“It's too complicated to explain now,” replied Roderick. “You read the literature I shall send you.” He pulled out his watch. “Dear me! it is ten minutes to six, and I promised to meet Lady Milmo and Miss Defries at the quarter by the statue. They are my two most enthusiastic disciples. Shall we turn and seek them?”
“I think not,” said Sylvester. “I'm too dull a dog for fashionable dames. I should be a discord in the polka, or whatever you call it, of existence.”
Roderick laughed with good-humoured indulgence, showing a set of white, even teeth.
“The same oldintransigeant,” said he. “Well, go your ways. I'll convert you to the Colony yet, and make you a director!Auf wiedersehen!”
Sylvester shook hands with him in his glum style and strolled on towards the Marble Arch, glad to be winning homewards again away from the froth of fashion and the jargon of art. He smiled once on his way. It was at the idea of his father, shrewd-headed abhorrer of cranks, putting his hands in his pockets for the Walden Art Colony. Not while there was a lazy miscreant with wife and children in Ayresford, he thought. How could a man of the world like Roderick imagine him to be such a fool?
But Roderick, with his cheery air of confidence, followed the southward stream of people.
“How do, Usher?” said a young man, passing by.
Roderick stopped him. “My dearest boy, I haven't been able to see you to shake you by the hand. The play's immense, colossal. You've marked a new era,—the Marlowe of our time.”
“Very good of you to say so,” murmured the dramatic author.
“It is my most esteemed privilege,” said Roderick, and waving an adieu with his well-gloved hand, he went on his way to Lady Milmo.
At the corner he looked about for a moment, and not seeing her sat down and waited. He gazed on the soft blue sky and stroked his pointed beard, letting his thoughts wander whither they would.
“I am so sorry, Mr. Usher,” said a voice. He started to, his feet; Lady Milmo and Ella were before him.
“A thousand pardons. I was gathering the wool of sweet and bitter fancy! Oh, no, you are not late, indeed not. Won't you sit? It is somewhat deserted here, but it is more rural than further up; we can talk more freely.”
“I am sure you can talk interestingly anywhere,” said Lady Milmo.
She was a small elderly lady dressed somewhat youthfully. She wore a little rouge, a trifle of black along the eyelashes, and a coquettish straw hat with pink roses and an osprey feather. She seemed thoroughly contented with herself and her surroundings.
“One gets into the habit of talking in the key of one's environment,” said Roderick, reflectively. “Don't you think so, Miss Defries?”
“It is the fault of this social life of ours,” replied Ella. “There are so many affectations and insincerities around us that we are afraid to be genuine.”
“It is a great charm of Lady Milmo and yourself that with you one is bound to be genuine.”
“I do like people to appear just as they are,” smiled Lady Milmo.
“That is what we are working for,” said Roderick; “the return to sincerity and simple truth.”
“Well, what have you to tell us?”
“Good news. Raynham has come round, and will take a seat on the Council. He may get a couple more Academicians. One further item in my debt of gratitude to you, Miss Defries.”
“It is very little I have been able to do,” said Ella. “I only asked Mr. Raynham to receive you. Your own earnestness and conviction won him over.”
An old gentleman came up and spoke to Lady Milmo. Roderick politely yielded him his chair and took possession of a vacant one on the other side of Ella.
“It is your womanly sympathy and courage all through that I have to thank; your cheering in depression, your encouragement in the face of defeat. If the star of success has arisen, it is you who have dispersed the obscuring clouds. A man may set his heart on a thing, but a woman keeps it there.”
He spoke in a low voice, and Ella leaned towards him to listen. Her cheeks flushed. The flattery was sweet, and there was a subtle vibration in his voice that stirred her.
“One would die if there were not something noble to live for,” said she, suddenly throwing off the stealing languor. “To rise every morning and look forward to sixteen inevitable waking hours that will not bring one throb to the pulses, one inspiring hope; to go to sleep each night feeling dull and useless, and so on for endless months and years,—it is an unlivable life. It is you I have to thank for putting an interest in my way.”
“I love to hear you speak like that,” he said admiringly. “Pray God you keep your enthusiasms; There are thousands who never know the thrill. It should be part of our mission to awaken their souls. There is one friend of ours, for instance, who needs it to make him a great man. Oddly enough, I have just left him—dear old Sylvester Lanyon, you know. I found him sitting a little higher up, looking like a sick raven among birds of paradise.”
Her clear girl's eyes effected feminine concealment of the old pain that every reference to Sylvester had caused her for the past year. Her heart rebelled against it, resenting the inefficacy of time to cure. Wantonly she ignored it.
“I have not set eyes on him since he settled in town. He never comes to see us. He is still mourning and moping, I suppose. The world is for the living, not the dead; don't you think so?”
“Yes. He should marry again. A woman of exuberant vitality, who would carry him along with her.”
“We'll have to find him a wife, Mr. Usher,” she replied gaily.
Thus she proved to herself defiantly that all her foolish feeling for Sylvester was dead; that she had also attained a standpoint of generous forgetfulness of wrong.
“And send him out with her to doctor the Colony,” laughed Roderick. “It would be the making of him. As it is, he is a man of fine honour and strong character. Even if one's own spiritual horizon is wider than that bounded by his narrow orthodoxy, yet one can but admire the steadfastness with which he keeps within its limits. I have always had, as you know, a great affection for him.”
The girl's responsive nature was touched by the generous tribute. Roderick took a sudden leap in her esteem. She had her own haunting and miserable ideas as to Sylvester's honour, but the praise pleased her,—the fact of a man's loyalty to the ideal of a friend. At least, so she half consciously analysed her feelings.
The talk went on, and time passed. Lady Milmo's friend departed and mingled in the stream that began to make for Hyde Park Corner and home. She turned to Ella and Roderick.
“The dear, tiresome general has been entertaining me with his corns while I have been dying to hear all about the Colony. And now it's too late. You must come soon and see us, Mr. Usher. It is useless to try to talk here. Why didn't we say Battersea? I'm afraid we 're sad creatures of convention.”
“Miss Defries will make an adequate report, I am sure,” said Roderick. “But Raynham's accession to the cause was my main item of news.”
They all rose and walked to Hyde Park Corner. There he saw the ladies into a cab and swept one of his elaborate bows as they drove off. But he remained for some moments on the curb in front of the Park gates absently watching the hansom until it was lost amid the traffic.
“I wonder,” he said half aloud, “I wonder.” And he walked slowly up Piccadilly, his eyes bent on the pavement, his hands behind him, with the air of a man in deep and somewhat harassed thought.
Afew days afterwards Ella was lying on a sofa in her aunt's drawing-room in Pont Street. It was a hot afternoon, the windows were open, and the sun blinds tempered the light. Between their edges and the tops of the flowers in the window-boxes she could see a great band of golden sunshine. Having been to a late dance the evening before and to a stuffy but advanced picture exhibition in the morning, she was feeling physically languid, and glad to be excused from attendance on Lady Milmo, who was indefatigably attending a charitable committee. In her hand she held a letter that had come by the early afternoon post. It was from Matthew Lanyon, bright and gossipy on the surface, but her quick perception divined an undercurrent of sadness. He was looking forward to her promised visit in August. If only he could persuade Syl to come down too, it would be quite like old times. But perhaps it would be better for Syl to get right away among the Swiss mountains, as he proposed. There was nothing like a complete change for a jaded Londoner. He had come down for a week-end lately and was looking fagged and overworked. The garden had never been lovelier. The rhododendrons were out and all a mass of bumble-bees; he had never seen so many in his life. He was writing late at night, on his knees in the library. Dorothy had made a complicated web of Berlin wool all over his writing-chair, by way of fitting it up as a carriage for her doll, which was throned in the midst, and of course he had not dared to disturb it.
“I think I make an average grandfather,” he wrote, “but I do wish some one had given me a few lessons as to how to become a mother.”
The fragrance of the country garden stole elusively upon the hot London room, and awakened a longing to get away from the glare and chatter into the cool quietude of Woodlands; to exchange the heavy dinnerparty where she was due in a few hours' time, with its heavy hot-house flowers and its artificial talk, for the peaceful summer evening in the summer-house under the trees, in the company of the dear old man, so sane, so sincere, and of Miss Lanyon, whose gentle mind seemed to have lain in lavender. She was tired; her heart was tired. The beautiful world lay hidden behind a mountain, up which she was climbing wearily, vainly. Her feet were tangled in an inextricable maze and her steps were devious. Where could she find a guide? She conjured up the picture of the old man's kind, grave smile, and longed, as only a girl can who is enmeshing her life, to throw herself down by his knees and open all her heart. Had he appeared at that moment at the door, she would have arisen and with a cry, half sob, half welcome, have thrown her arms about his neck and burst into tears.
“If only he could come!” she said, and she sank vaguely into the imagined solace. But what could she say to him? The formulated query crystallised her thoughts into chill dismay. How could she make known, even to him, the humiliation of that last interview with Sylvester, expose to him the nakedness of her outraged pride? She shrank from the thought. And the history of the year's follies? No. Never. She crumpled the letter fiercely in her hand. Then, suddenly repenting of her violence, she smoothed the sheet tenderly and kissed it and slipped it into the bosom of her dress.
The year's follies. In this hour of lassitude and depression—rare to Ella, but common to all her sex, coming to woman with rhythmic iteration as inevitable as the tides—they rose up one by one before her, and her cheeks burned with shame. First it was Lionel Kavanagh, the poet and aesthetic critic. She had been reckless, craving excitement, forgetfulness of her burning humiliation. All through the season a year ago, she had flirted with him, openly, outrageously. He was one of Lady Milmo's menagerie, and used to sprawl on the hearth-rug and alternate rhapsody with mordant wit. And alone in her company he would sail perilously near the wind with sensuous allusiveness, until one day he grew bold and brought her a sonnet frankly sensual. She tore the manuscript into tiny pieces during an ominous silence, and ordered him out of the house. The next was Bertie Hetherington, who made violent love to her at Aix-les-Bains, whither she had been led by Lady Milmo's wandering fancy and rheumatic tendencies. He was a fresh, wholesome young Briton in a Hussar regiment. The vehemence of his devotion was sweet to Ella, and she kept him hoping longer than she knew was right. Perhaps if he had possessed more brains she might have married him. But when he wrote her an impassioned letter in which he affirmed that his heartbeetonly for her, the spelling caught the humorous side of Ella's fancy and she laughed herself out of her entanglement. Yet she had wronged him, just as Sylvester had wronged her, and she had wronged herself. The fresh bloom of her maidenhood had gone. Her sensitive pride magnified the taint.
In London once more, the need of an occupation, an aim, a purpose, tormented her. She had tried the ignoble and found it bitter. She craved the higher plane of devotion to a cause, something elevated, impersonal. The ordinary pursuits that call forth a woman's self-sacrifice did not appeal to the unrest of her imagination. Besides, her young blood rebelled against self-suppression. In the stress and storm she caught at the first thing to her hand: Roderick Usher's Utopian scheme for the regeneration of art and the consequent purification of society. She was carried away like a straw on the crest of his vehement pro-pagandism. From an occasional attendant at her aunt's receptions, he became a regular visitor. Together they elaborated the scheme, discussed the details. She worked with him in obtaining supporters and canvassing for subscriptions. At first the correspondence, the interviewing, the plotting and intriguing, kept her enthusiastically occupied. She made converts among the young artists and poets who came to the house, inveighing against the tame formalism on the one hand and the morbid exaggeration on the other that were the curses of modern art. She attended meetings in fashionable drawing-rooms and expounded her theories. Notoriety followed her doings. A weekly paper published an illustrated interview with the priestess of the new gospel.
She believed in the scheme. It was audacious, but practical. It was impossible for convincing art to flourish in the midst of the social insincerity and commercialism of the day. The teachers of men must lead a higher life than the taught; to have authority, must dwell aloof from the world; to have inspiration, must draw it from the pure wells of nature and their own hearts. These postulates being allowed, the logical consequence was the conception of a colony of earnest and devoted artists in some sequestered spot where the world's Babel came but as an echo. Such a spot was readily obtainable in California. A large ranch, in one of the loveliest valleys of the Sierra Nevada, was for sale. Extensions could be built indefinitely at a comparatively trifling cost. Thither the band of youths and maidens, uncorrupted as yet by the deadening influences around them, would proceed, and settling down would allow to flow unchecked the genuine founts of their genius. They would be in Arcadian ignorance of the arch destroyer of art, the public taste, and thus be beyond the reach of the temptation to pander to it. They would reveal the truth as it came crystallised in song or poem or picture from their own souls. The lack of pence would not disturb their serenity. Those who could afford it would pay a modest monthly contribution to the general fund. The penniless children of genius would obtain free food, shelter, and all the privileges of the Colony. The subscriptions of the supporters of the movement in England would defray their expenses. A commission would be levied on the profits of any work produced in the Colony. This, in the course of years, when public taste was revolutionised and the Waldenites' productions obtained great prices, would place the Colony beyond the need of subscriptions or of contributions by members. It would become, in Roderick's words, “The world's great Palace of Art.” Roderick himself was ready to sacrifice his future in London so as to take up the post of director of the Colony at a handsome salary.
She believed in the scheme still; success, in fact, justified her faith. But in this hour of self-abasement she distrusted the sincerity of her enthusiasm. How much had she done genuinely for the cause? How much, unconsciously, for the man? The question racked her. He had woven his influence around her life. Her name was publicly associated with his. She dreaded meeting him, yet felt the heart taken out of the day on which she was not working under his direction. Whither was she tending? She could not answer. Not where happiness would lie. To have brought herself into this morass was the last and greatest of the year's follies. In her helpless anger she hated the scheme and all that she had done to further it. A sickening surmise as to its futility overspread her retrospect.
She clasped her hands over her hot eyes and again longed for Woodlands. Suddenly she sprang to her feet, and smoothed her dress and hair hurriedly, as if ashamed of her nervelessness. She would write to Matthew Lanyon then and there, yield herself wholly to her need of expansion, and let what would flow from her pen. She sat down resolutely at the ornamental escritoire and drew out writing materials. She had never given him any definite account of the scheme. She had alluded to it vaguely, somewhat flippantly, partly anxious to amuse and partly fearful of criticism. The mention of Roderick Usher's name had been rare. She had followed the secretive instinct of her sex. The old man's references hitherto had been jocular; deceived by her manner, he had merely regarded her interest as an idle young woman's harmless hobby. Even in this letter that she carried crumpled in her bosom, he had asked her how her artistic Robinson Crusoes were getting on. He should know the history of the whole movement, her own hopes and fears,—perhaps more of her difficulties. She would write whatever words came into her mind.
She dipped her pen in the ink, dashed off the date and “My darling Uncle Matthew,” and was starting the text of the letter, when the door opened.
“Mr. Usher, miss,” announced the parlour maid.
Ella closed her blotter with a petulant snap, but rose and greeted her visitor with a smile. Roderick looked cool and point-device in a grey frock-coat suit. A slight baldness in front gave his high forehead an air of intellectuality. He had called, he informed her, just to report progress. And as he talked she sat, her chin resting on her knuckles, watching him with that wistful gaze that comes from a woman's weary uncertainties.
“There, that is all,” he said in conclusion; “and I am glad there's no more.”
“Why?” asked Ella.
“Because you want a holiday,—a respite from the worry of affairs. Enthusiasms entail an expenditure of vital force; so there are times when the temperament is at a low ebb, and ought to be treated with gentle indulgence.”
“Do you think I am at low ebb, Mr. Usher?”
“You are tired,—a littlemal de vivre. Isn't it so?”
He said it so kindly that her first impulse of resentment died away.
“How do you know I'm not simply physically out of sorts? I was dancing till four this morning and till three the morning before.”
He smiled with a touch of indulgent superiority.
“As a sailor who knows the sea reads all its moods on its surface, so I read yours in your eyes. Confess. You have been feeling the burthen of life and have not known whence came its heaviness; and you have been longing for relief in the fresh, cool arms of Mother Nature.”
“Perhaps,” she said, looking away from him.
“You are not offended?” he said, after a pause. He had a very musical voice, trained to modulation of feelings. “My heart is always near my lips and at times speaks indiscreetly.”
Ella turned round with a short laugh.
“No, I am not offended. Of course not. But it was scarcely fair to turn me inside out like that without warning.”
Immediately she regretted her confession. His acute perception had half flattered, half frightened her. She felt now that she had yielded some of her ground. She strove to regain it.
“But it's all nonsense,” she added. “And very contemptible, just because it's a close day, with a stuffy dinner-party looming ahead.”
“Phases of morale are never nonsense,” he replied. “No one knows what unrest is better than I. We must find the remedy.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Happiness.”
“What is happiness?”
“The pursuit of the ideal on the wings of—”
“Of what?”
“Dare I say it—in all delicacy? Of love.” Ella again turned her face aside, uncertain whether to resent the implication or to make a light answer. Her hesitation was his opportunity.
“I, too, have been feeling depressed of late,” he said. “All pleasure has in time to be paid for with pain. In a few months our scheme will be launched,—the scheme that you and I have built up with pieces of our hearts,—and I shall go away to end my life in carrying out its working. I shall be alone. My helper and sweet comrade will no longer be by my side. Thus I, too, sigh for happiness.”
He smiled sadly, but she saw that his eyes were regarding her keenly from behind his gold pince-nez.
“We won't think of that,” she said hastily. “So many things may happen between then and now.”
Roderick rose, rested his hand on the back of her chair, and bent over her.
“One thing might happen that would fill the months with glory, and inaugurate our project in the radiance of the rising sun. Yet not for the scheme's sake, but for our lives' sake—for the sake of the expansion and development of all that is yearning within us to find utterance—Ella—Will you come with me?”
She sat, looking straight before her, her lips apart, her body slightly swaying. Words would not come. She vaguely wished that something could happen to rid her of his presence, that he could disappear, there and then, once for all, out of her life. Yet she felt it impossible to dismiss him. Some mysterious feminine chord had been struck whose echoes proclaimed his right to stand over her and speak to her thus.
“What are you saying?” she murmured, with an almost piteous emphasis on the last word.
“I am telling you that I love you, Ella, that my life is bound up in you, that I need you for the accomplishment of my manhood. And I am asking you to come with me to this sweet new land, to be my helper and my star. Say that you will come with me.”
“Give me time,” she breathed. “I can't say—I have been living in a whirl so long. I don't know what I am or think or feel. I will give you an answer some day—soon—not now.”
“I will wait devotedly for your answer,” said Roderick, in his courtliest manner, and moved a pace or two from her chair.
Ella looked up at him, almost grateful for his assurance.
“We will fix no period,” she said. “To have to give such a reply by a definite date—”
“I do not ask it,” said Roderick, quietly, though his heart was beating fast at the certainty of victory.
“You have given me the food of hope, whereon I can live meanwhile.”
“Could you not bear suspense?” she asked. “I might not answer as you would like.”
“I could bear anything for your sake,” said he. Then, after a pause, “And now goodbye. I must have solitude to dream over my happiness.”
She gave him her hand; he bent over it and kissed it, and she felt his lips hot against her skin. It gave her a little shudder of repugnance, and the feeling remained after he had gone. And yet his fascination was strong upon her. He dominated her will as no man had done before. She was conscious that he had the rare power to penetrate to the core of her woman's weaknesses, to understand her as a botanist understands a plant, and the rarer power to touch the fibres delicately, so that it became a pleasure to be weak. Again, her somewhat exaggerated conception of his wide spiritual and intellectual horizon moved her emotional temperament to wondering respect, and she thought gratefully of the expansion of her own under his influence. With the incomplete vision wherewith the wisest of women must of necessity regard a man, she saw him strong and masterful, clearing his way resolutely to a definite end. She felt that he brought this air of mastery into his love; and he had created a need of him within her.
He held her bound by many chains. And as she stood in the drawing-room, half-consciously rubbing the spot on her hand where his lips had rested, she felt the chains grow tighter, one by one.
Her maid came into the room. “When will you dress, miss?”
She remembered the dinner-party and gave her directions. She wished that she had not to attend it. And then unbidden came the longing for “the sweet new land” with its freedom and freshness, and her cheeks flamed at the sudden realisation of what it all implied.
Her glance fell upon the blotter in which lay the just commenced letter to Matthew Lanyon. She sat down again at the escritoire and took up her pen. But the mood had passed. She found herself writing artificially, in the jargon of her set. Angrily she tore up the paper and threw the fragments into the waste-paper basket. No; better nothing than the insincerity he despised; she loved him too dearly for that. So the letter, that was to reveal her inmost struggling self, remained unwritten.
She was very silent as Lady Milmo and herself drove to the dinner-party. Her head ached and her limbs were tired.
“The man who takes me down will over-eat himself dreadfully,” she remarked, as the carriage pulled up.
“I don't think there is any danger,” replied her aunt, who was a woman of experience.
And she was justified; for the girl's youth asserted itself, and as the meal progressed the headache was forgotten and Ella enjoyed herself thoroughly.
“I rather think your partner will want some supper, poor man,” said Lady Milmo, on the homeward journey.
“It's his own fault; he would talk,” said Ella, laughing.
Lady Milmo patted her niece's knee affectionately.
“I love to see you getting all that enjoyment out of life, my dear. You seem to take it out in great chunks, like my neighbour this evening helping himself to iced pudding.”
Ella thought of her enjoyment with a whimsical feeling of shame, a touch of disappointment at not being as jaded as she had expected. But with the quiet darkness of the night her conflict of doubts returned. After all, what trivial topics she had discussed, what inanities she had laughed at, what spiteful little shafts of malice she had flung. If she had enjoyed it, so much the worse spiritually and morally for herself. Oh, the past year! It had corrupted her. She looked back wistfully upon the girl whom Sylvester had kissed at Woodlands. That fresh, shy, sweet something she had given him then was hers no longer to give to any man. What she could give to Roderick Usher, if she yielded to him, she did not know; certainly, not that.
She was very young, very much unversed in the dark and crooked ways of life, in spite of her experience of men and things; intensely eager to keep herself pure and proud, to love the highest when she saw it. It is not to be set down to weakness, therefore, if she grew very sorry for the girl whom Sylvester had kissed, and cried herself miserably to sleep.
The facilities that London offers as a hiding-place are proverbial. A man in good position may disappear entirely from his friends and yet be living for many years as a grocer's assistant half a mile away. But when two acquaintances who belong to the same social class have no particular reasons for lying hidden, they are bound sooner or later to meet. Now Sylvester and Ella had not set eyes on each other since the eve of the former's departure from Ayres-ford, when he had said things which Ella firmly believed at the time had broken her heart. This was not unnatural, seeing that he held rigidly aloof from the society in which Ella moved. Neither did he frequent theatres nor operas nor picture galleries, nor places of public resort. But he went this year to the Ladies' Soirée of the Royal Society, first, because he had been unable to attend the sterner masculine assembly of the former evening, and, secondly, because he desired to meet two or three scientists of European reputation who he knew would be there.
Lady Milmo, who went everywhere and was proud of taking everywhere her beautiful niece, was at the soirée also with Ella. Their progress through the rooms was slow, as they knew many people, and the crowd was great. Suddenly Lady Milmo pulled Ella's arm.
“Dear me, if that isn't Sylvester Lanyon!”
Ella looked instinctively in the indicated direction, and as her eyes fell upon him, her heart gave a great throb. He was in earnest conversation with an elderly man who wore an order of some kind, enforcing his argument, according to a familiar trick of his, with the forefinger of one hand and the palm of the other. His brown, intellectual face and well-knit figure marked him as a man of some distinction. To Ella's dismay he appeared to her the one distinguished personality in the room. His face had grown more worn than she remembered it, and his hair greyer at the temples. She found herself pitying him.
“Come,” said Lady Milmo, “I'm going to give him a good talking to.” Before Ella could resist she had adroitly edged through the press and arrived within his reach, Ella following mechanically.
“Oh, Dr. Lanyon, fancy meeting you here. Ella and I have jars and jars of pickled rods for you. Why do you never come near us? Is it because we 're so aggravatingly healthy?” Sylvester murmured an apology. Indeed, he had no reasons to offer. Lady Milmo was an old friend. He confessed his rudeness.
“Madame,” said Sylvester's companion, with a low bow.
“Professor Steinthal! I didn't know you were in London. Forgive me.”
She turned to speak to him as Ella and Sylvester confronted each other. Ella put out her hand.
“I hope you are well,” she said.
“Quite well; and you?”
“You ought to be able to judge.”
“You seem to be in good health,” he said. “What maladies may lurk beneath the surface, I cannot tell.”
“I don't suppose you can,” she was tempted to say. She saw that he understood, but he made no reply, and there was an awkward pause.
“I'm going to see Uncle Matthew in August,” she said at last.
“So I have heard. I'm going to Switzerland, so I shall not have the pleasure of meeting you. Do you know many people here?”
The pointed banality of the question angered her.
“Will you never have a kind word to say to me?” she flashed out in a quick undertone, then she turned and greeted the professor effusively.
Thus, whatever wild, uncontrollable hopes were newly born at the first sight of him, they were frozen at once to death. She went home in a furious rage of humiliation. He was a man of ice and steel, an automaton equipped with an intellect, scarcely a man at all. She put an imperious end to her doubts.
Roderick Usher called next day, and spoke as one inspired with lofty ideals. Before her fascinated vision he seemed to place realities where hitherto the void had yawned or shadows at the most had shimmered. Life stretched infinitely in front of her, a lush garden, fertile with a myriad beauties. Her expanding soul shone out of dewy eyes. All the blindness, all the weakness, all the deluded nobility of her nature, lay revealed, pathetically defenceless. It was Roderick's golden hour, when he knew that he had her at his mercy.
He rose, flung out his arms in a passionate gesture.
“Come to me, Ella. Our destinies demand it.”
She too rose and faced him, her eyes shining like stars, and held out her hands.
“Yes, I will come,” she said.
Roderick went into the warm June sunshine, thrilled with triumph, holding his head high. He walked along heedless of direction, turned into Hans Place and completed an entire circuit of the gardens before he realised what he had done. He paused, to think of some destination. Then he laughed aloud.
“Roderick, you must be in love,” he said to himself. A long struggle with fortune had rendered it a rare occurrence for Roderick not to be perfectly aware of what he was doing and of what he was about to do. But the victory had come sooner than he had anticipated, and his immediate scheme of life, was thrown into confusion. He turned to the right, and once in Sloane Street, wandered north and found himself again undetermined at the corner of the Brompton Road. The driver of a crawling hansom touched his hat inquiringly. It was a brand-new, summer season cab, with horse and driver well turned out, and it caught his fancy. He stood upon the step, looked east, looked west, up and down the surging thoroughfare. Then obeying a sudden impulse, he shouted laughingly an address over the hood of the cab,—“24 Weymouth Street.”
He would go and present himself to an astonished Sylvester, acquaint him with his good fortune, and perhaps learn certain things concerning which delicacy had forbidden him to make too close inquiries. At any rate, there was a certain attractive impudence in the adventure. He lit a cigar and lay back on the soft cushions of the cab and regarded himself complacently in the strip of mirror. He was wearing well, he thought, as he caressed his Vandyke beard, and appeared by no means an unromantic lover. The deepening crows' feet about his eyes gave him a momentary uneasiness, but he parted his lips, and by way of compensation looked admiringly at his white, even teeth. The conviction that there was nothing about him that would be otherwise than physically attractive to the most fastidious feminine sense brought him an assured content.
He gazed through the blue cigar-smoke up the long vista of clashing traffic broadening out by Hyde Park Corner, where London at its gayest displayed itself in the mellow afternoon sunlight. He waved his hand towards it as if summoning its blithe spirit to hear him.
“Do you think I'm going to give you up?” he said, breaking into a laugh.
For London, to the man of the pavement, the theatres, the studios, the newspaper offices, the clubs, the restaurants, means the elemental medium of his being. The deep bosom of Mother Nature would suffocate him. It is a picturesque thing to talk about, and it may be exploited by an ingenious contriver to his considerable advantage, but it did not satisfy the spiritual cravings of Roderick Usher. He had not the remotest intention of committing himself to lifelong exile with the Walden Art Colony, if his supple wit could devise other means of profiting by the enterprise.
“But I nearly lost you!” he apostrophised London again, after a few moments.
In a certain sense, he had been meditating flight, the summary abandonment of his broken fortunes too far gone for satisfactory repairing. For Roderick was a man who demanded more from society than his talents enabled him to give in return. Not that he was, in the general sense of the term, an adventurer. He had worked hard all his life; but he had always just not succeeded in his undertakings. He had written a play which an enthusiastic young manager had run at a loss for fifty nights. A second play evoked a chorus of delight among the newer school of critics, but had fizzled out after a week's unsatisfactory existence. His succeeding plays went the round of rueful and head-shaking managers. Professionally he was an artist. He painted pictures, but prices were low. One immense and ambitious canvas hung at the Royal Academy was to have brought him everlasting fame and fortune. It was taken over by a firm of art publishers whose royalties on prints after two years' waiting amounted to a few paltry pounds. Then for some reason or the other the Academy refused to hang him. Hence his bitter hatred of the Academy and all its works. He had written a couple of novels which were universally belauded and nowhere bought. He was art critic, dramatic critic, reviewer, short-story writer. This work and the sale of such pictures as the dealers could be prevailed upon to purchase, together with private orders for portraits, brought him a maintenance. It would have been wealth to him who was content with beer, comfort to him who drank modest claret, but it was penury to the man who claimed at least 1889 champagne as a divine right. Roderick's career had therefore been an interminable battle with society. He rode through it a free lance, plundering it blandly whenever a chance offered. He had scarcely ever during his life as a man been free from debt. But his unflagging energy, his suppleness of humour, his buoyancy, his versatility, by winning popular esteem had saved him many times from social disaster. He played billiards too well; he played whist and poker too well. He was too disinterested an adviser of young men in search of ready money. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, he was welcomed at private houses, but looked shyly upon in clubs. Yet no one had hinted a dishonourable action. Twice or three times his father had groaningly sent him a cheque to cover some of his more pressing debts; but in justice to him, it must be said that in speaking of them to Matthew Lanyon, the old man had exaggerated the extent of his culpability. Nor had Roderick the slightest suspicion that any of Matthew Lanyon's money had ever found its way into his own pocket.
Once again, however, he found himself more seriously involved than ever, and his father pleaded empty coffers. There was a billbroking transaction which might lead to unpleasantness. He had persuaded a foolish young man to back bills to the amount of two or three thousand pounds. In two or three months they could be renewed for a further period. But after that would come the deluge. Exile might save him. But where should he go? To the Colonies? He was too old. To Boulogne, to lead a shifty life with compatriot wastrels? “Sooner Death,” said he.
But for some time past, as it happened, the scheme of the Walden Art Colony had been idly occupying his disinterested attention. Suddenly his astute mind perceived in the scheme his own social salvation. His energy quickly brought it into practicable shape. His plausibility staved off his creditors. His future position as salaried director of the Colony would secure him an honourable retreat from an untenable position.
But now with the heiress of an ample fortune as his affianced bride, he could laugh at fears and exultantly send the Colony to the devil. His luck had turned at last. Now he would get to the heart of life. And Ella was sweet, great-hearted, and beautiful. It was not only for her money that he wanted her. Perish the miserable thought! He could conceive a noble existence, all ideals. His thoughts touched the Empyrean. His facile nature easily persuaded itself of lofty purpose, and for the moment he was sincere. For Roderick was a man with wings to fly, but chained to the earth with fetters of brass; and often his wings fanning the air gave him the delusion of mounting heavenward.
The cab drew up at the dull and decorous door in Weymouth Street, at half-past six. A decorous man-servant opened it and showed him into the consulting-room, formally furnished with dark leather chairs and couch, and a desk on which lay the stethoscope, tongue-depressor, and a few other ordinary instruments of the physician. Some old prints hung round the walls. The windows, glazed halfway, to insure privacy from the street, gave an air of gloom to the not over cheerful apartment. Roderick compared it with his own light and artistically furnished chambers, and wondered at the dark soul of the man who could live amid such depression.
He laughed his gayest laugh, however, when Sylvester came in.
“I'm about as incongruous and unexpected here as you were the other day in the Park,” said he. “But you'll understand why I've come when I tell you.”
“I'm very glad to see you,” said Sylvester, politely. “Won't you sit down?”
He seated himself in the writing-chair and motioned his guest to another.
“No, thanks, I'll walk about,” said Roderick. “If I sat there I'd feel too much like a patient, and you'd be wanting to look at my tongue or pommel my stomach. I've come, my boyhood's friend, to tell you some good news, to demand your felicitations. I give you a thousand guesses.”
“Have you succeeded in floating your chartered Thelema Company?” asked Sylvester, with a smile.
“Oh, damn the Colony! That is to say, comparatively damn the Colony. You behold in me the happiest man on earth, engaged to the sweetest and loveliest girl in the world. And the Colony's in it for something. So I ought to have said 'thrice bless the Colony.'” Sylvester started in his chair.
“You are not referring to Miss Defries?”
“I am so.”
“I must offer you my congratulations,” said Sylvester, recovering composure. Then despising himself for a momentary pang, which he could not explain to himself, he added: “I am sure she will make you an excellent wife.”
“An excellent wife! Hear him, ye gods! As who should say, 'You will find this a most serviceable umbrella!' She's the dewy dawn of all things sweet to live for!”
“My habit of mind is more prosaic than yours,” laughed Sylvester. “But I think I am none the less accurate. Is Miss Defries going also to Thelema?”
“That is the present intention. But plans are but frail barks upon the capricious sea of time.”
“I see,” said Sylvester. “Now I understand your condemnation of the Colony.”
“No, no; I am sure you don't,” put in Roderick, hastily.
“Well, never mind,” said Sylvester. “Have you obtained my fathers consent?”
“Mr. Lanyon's consent? What for?”
“The marriage.”
“But Ella is overage,—her own mistress.”
“Still, she must not marry without my father's consent, or she loses her money.”
Roderick swept his hand in a magnificent gesture. “The money's neither here nor there. But of course your father will consent.”
“He's the dearest old man God ever made,” said Sylvester, in his grave way; “but he has queer crotchets now and then.”
“But this is the end of the nineteenth century,” laughed Roderick.
“I don't deny it. The other is a fact, all the same. The late Mr. Defries's will is valid. Appointing my father trustee for his daughter Ella, it provides for his administration of the estate until either her marriage with his consent or his own death, whichever is first. On either of these events, the whole money comes into her own keeping. If during his lifetime she marries without his written consent, the money all goes to some specified charity, I forget what it is.”
“Well, I never heard of such a damned silly will in all my life,” said Roderick, falling, into the vernacular.
“It only shows one man's implicit trust in the honour of another.”
“And how much does it all run to?” asked Roderick, casually.
“I haven't the remotest idea,” replied Sylvester. “It never entered my head to inquire.”
Roderick took a few quick turns about the room, then he laughed in his buoyant way.
“Well, if Damon Lanyon is recalcitrant, Pythias Usher will soothe him down. So it will all come right. And you, camarado, shall dance at the wedding. I swear it. I must go and dress for dinner with some Philistines at Cricklewood. I shall be interested to see how God makes the creatures who live at Cricklewood. By the way, shall I give Ella your good wishes?”
“Most certainly,” said Sylvester.
He accompanied his guest to the front door; then returning to the consulting-room, he opened the window, with an exclamation of distaste. Roderick carried heavy scent about him, and Sylvester, like a wholesome Briton, detested scent. He also in his heart detested Roderick.
Before preparing for his solitary dinner he went into his laboratory to examine some tubes of gelatine in which the anthrax bacillus was thriving. But he gazed at them somewhat absently. Scorn and contempt were in his heart,—contempt for the woman whom once he thought fit to be his own wife, and who had now thrown herself away upon this plausible but vulgar charlatan.
“Like to like,” he muttered cynically.
And putting down his gelatine he went upstairs, apparently satisfied with the examination he had entirely forgotten to make.