It was late October. People were beginning to return to London, and among the early arrivals was Lady Milmo, who had been longing to escape from the discomforts of foreign hotels and English country-houses to her own familiar surroundings in Pont Street. With her came Ella, who was anxious to resume the work of the Colony. She had spent the latter part of July and August in Ayresford.
It had been a time of rest and quiet happiness, for she loved the old man in a wistful, daughterly way; yet, in spite of his tender courtesy, she had divined in him the same antagonism to Roderick as she had discovered in Sylvester, and this had put a constraint in their relations which had never before existed. The engagement was seldom referred to, and though the girl's cheek flushed with pleasure at Roderick's morning letter, yet during the rest of the day she was happier when he was not vivid in her thoughts.
At first it had been arranged that Roderick should pay a long-promised visit to his father at the same time. But when it came to the point of making definite arrangements, he had found his presence, in the interests of the Colony, essential elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the elder Usher jarred upon his son's more refined susceptibilities. His personal acquaintance with Ella was sufficiently annoying to Roderick; but to sit by in silent apology, while she was being overspread with unctuous and paternal platitudes, was an ordeal too exasperating to face. So following as usual the line of least resistance, he had accepted one or two pleasant and profitable invitations. His non-appearance, though she credited herself with a feeling of disappointment, was a relief to Ella. She had passed lately through many conflicting emotions, and she needed solitude, a period of moral repose, wherein to realise both herself and circumstances. For a proud girl does not surrender to a man almost against her will, without striving in her heart to account it to herself as a victory. The fact of the strained relations between Matthew and Usher, of which Miss Agatha Lanyon informed her, also mitigated her regret. They were at daggers drawn, did not even salute each other in the street. Roderick's absence avoided a grotesque Montague and Capulet situation. It further saved her from much personal intercourse with Usher, for whom she entertained no very high opinion. Once, however, she dined with him ceremoniously. He talked in his reiterative way of the comfort a daughter would be to his old age, and represented himself as the most generous and indulgent of parents. He alluded to Matthew more in sorrow than in anger. A man with whom he had been in intimate bonds of friendship for forty years to throw him over at the last! It was grievous; it was ageing him rapidly. He was always a faithful friend. It was his disposition. The saint leered at her out of his red-rimmed eyes, and Ella felt a shiver of repulsion which lasted till the next morning, when a fervid epistle from Roderick restored her serenity.
“I can't make out why Matthew and Mr. Usher have quarrelled,” said Miss Lanyon during the day.
“And I wonder why they haven't quarrelled for forty years,” returned Ella. “Oh, don't look shocked, auntie. It is no reason for me to adore a man because I am engaged to his son!”
Thenceforward she became a violent though silent partisan of Matthew in his dispute. There must have been serious grounds for such a quarrel; Matthew could do no wrong; therefore Usher must have treated him shamefully. The syllogism was perfectly conclusive. This feeling and a growing anxiety as to the old man's health did much to lessen the constraint between them. For he was constantly ailing, and was not the man she had seen fifteen months before. She left him with great reluctance, in spite of the glowing impatience of Roderick, with whom she was to spend some weeks as the guest of Sir Decimus Bland.
Now it was October, and London life began again. Lady Milmo busied herself in spinning her gossamer web of affairs and appeared smiling and contented. Ella devoted herself to such studies as she considered would be of benefit in her peculiar position as Lady Director of the Colony. Roderick was ever by with suggestion and advice. Things were going splendidly. Some three thousand pounds had already been subscribed and lay at Roderick's bankers. Three thousand more had been promised, irrespective of Sir Decimus's undertaking to provide the Director's salary. With another four thousand they could start. Ella offered to provide it. Roderick shook his head. It had better come from the great heart of the public. She persisted and wrote to Matthew. He urged her almost passionately not to put money into the scheme until she was married. Thus Roderick and Matthew were in accord on the point, and Ella was puzzled.
“When is it to be, dearest?” asked Roderick one day.
The question came suddenly after a short pause in their talk. It was during the few minutes before dinner. Roderick was dining in Pont Street, and Lady Milmo not having come down yet, they were alone.
“You know,” replied Ella, with a half-smile.
“Ah, do I?” said he. “I don't love contingencies. I long for the glorious life with you, my wonderful Ella. And I am a man, and waiting is hard.”
She flushed slightly. The consciousness of being desired ever quickens a woman's pulses. But she also loves the sense of mastery in maintaining herself within impregnable walls. In this perhaps lies the delicious paradox of her sex.
“I keep to my terms,” she said. “Within a week of our starting for the Colony. Not before. It will give a new sacredness to our work and to our married life if we begin them both at the same time.”
“But who knows when the inauguration of the colony will be?” asked Roderick.
“It could be now, practically, if you would let me furnish the deficit.”
“Ah, no,” he said. “You would be acting against a principle very dear to me. It must be others who give their money. We give our lives. If you subscribe, the prestige of the Colony as a great public movement is gone. It is bound to come to ripeness. But like an exquisite fruit it takes time.”
“I am happy to wait for the ripening,” said Ella.
“But I?” He threw out his arms passionately. “Ella, do you know what the madness of love is? Don't you fear that in the first rapturous days of life with you I might forget the work for your enchantment? Would it not be better to begin the work in the sweet fulness of our wedded life,—when we have learned each other in the way that only wedded life can teach?”
“It will be better to begin things together,” she replied with feminine reiteration.
He pleaded flamboyantly. Why not fix the date of his great happiness for Christmas,—the time of universal rejoicing? The marriage would stimulate imaginations. The deficit would be made up fourfold. Subscriptions would come in by way of wedding gifts. Ella remained calmly obdurate.
“Before I loved you, the cause was everything to me. Since then, you are everything. The cause is second. It is the irrefragable law of life and love.”
“To me,” replied Ella, “the cause and you are one.”
She glanced up swiftly and caught, as it seemed, a look of irritation on his face,—a contraction of the brows, a snarl of the lips between the auburn moustache and beard, showing the teeth. But it passed like a lightning flash and left his face aglow with such exuberant adoration that she attributed it to some-trick of shadow, and dismissed it from her mind.
But as the days went on, a vague uneasiness took root and began to grow. Roderick spoke less of the Colony, more of herself. Negotiations appeared to be at a standstill. No more names swelled the subscription list; Roderick took no further steps to make fresh converts among the young and ardent. He pleaded the necessity of work to supply ordinary personal needs. He tried to awaken her enthusiasm over a flaring picture ofLove the Destroyer, which he had begun to paint. She went one day to his studio to see it. Love stood, triumphant and cruel, a two-handed sword in his hand. Around him was the carnage for which he was responsible. An emaciated creature at last gasp was kissing his feet. There was a suggestion of the flesh in it that jarred upon the girl. The commonplace of the conception chilled her. She remained staring at the picture. It was long before she could trust herself to look at Roderick. At last she did so, unable to hide her disappointment.
“You do not like it?” said Roderick, eagerly.
“Forgive me—” she began rather piteously.
“Say no more,” he cried, and with a magnificent gesture he seized a cloth, and in great, swift sweeps of his arm smeared the picture into a horrid chaos of greens and yellows. Ella sprang forward with a little cry.
“So perish all in me that you deem unworthy!” he exclaimed fervently.
The act brought the woman in her to his feet. Who was she to judge the creation of an artist's genius? Had he let it stand, she would have loved the picture. The annihilation, at her bidding, of the result of days of artistic travail smote her with a sense of guilt. She was ready to lament a lost masterpiece. She would never rest until he repainted it. He magnanimously refused. The first impression of a picture on a pure and beautiful soul was the true one. She would be the touchstone of all his life's work. He sent her away at once raised and humbled. But to make amends, she threw herself earnestly into a new conception of the subject that he put before her, and watched it taking shape upon the canvas with intense eagerness. And in the meanwhile the Colony was not quite so much on the surface of her thoughts. Now and then, however, she questioned him anxiously. Once he turned upon her in solemn reproach,—
“Do I understand that you are afraid of my faltering in the sacred cause to which we have devoted ourselves?”
Ella was impressed with his dignity and again rebuked herself for her want of faith. Women are indignant when they are told how often they are taken in by fustian.
November came. She met Sylvester at dinner one evening at Lady Milmo's for the first time since the At Home in July, given to celebrate her engagement. He sat silent during the meal. Roderick, who made the fourth, was in his gayest mood. Rebellious defiance again came uppermost in the girl's heart, and she strove to put forward all her brilliance. She compared the two men: one, cold, sombre, severe,—a mere intellect clothed in the outer semblance of humanity; the other warm-hearted, enthusiastic, sensitive to every impression of life, and gifted with a perception of a world that had never entered into the purview of his fellow's dreams. She fortified her unmitigated resentment against Sylvester with disdain. How could she ever have loved such a bloodless piece of mechanism? She lashed with scorn her girlish folly. A heightened colour and an added lustre to her eyes rendered dazzling her ordinary girlish beauty.
“You are not one, but all wondrous womankind's epitome to-night,” whispered Roderick, in the drawing-room afterwards.
“That is foolishness,” she replied, “but I—I was just going to say I have never felt so proud of you as I have done this evening.”
Roderick laughed. “I'm afraid it is because dear old Syl sits by so glum while I'm such a chatterbox,” he said.
Ella shot a swift glance upwards. Really this man had marvellous intuition. Could he ever have suspected—? Her cheek burned. But to her comforting no trace of malicious insinuation lurked in the frankness of his eyes. His deprecation of her tribute was sincere.
Lady Milmo went to the piano. She had a dainty taste in music, and having lately added an obscure but colossal Herzigovinan rhapsodist to her menagerie, found intense delight in his compositions. He was only two and twenty and had already reached op. 236. This Lady Milmo began to play, while Roderick self-sacrificingly turned over the leaves. Sylvester exchanged commonplace remarks with Ella. The consciousness of the task he had undertaken somewhat weighed upon him. He was to break off the marriage. How? Only by fair means. A man of scrupulous honour, he characterised as foul any secret investigations into Roderick's financial position or past career. Nor could he asperse Roderick's character while maintaining with him a semblance of friendly relations. To declare open war would be foolish. He could do nothing but bide his opportunity. Meanwhile he was less than ever at his ease with Ella. She, however, interpreted his constraint as contemptuous indifference, and once more she longed for battle. The memory of her humiliation on the night of Lady Milmo's reception only made her irritation more unbearable. A chance remark about his father gave her the longed for opportunity to stab.
“I suppose you know Uncle Matthew's health is failing,'' she said suddenly.
“I am afraid so,” he said.
“Then why aren't you by his side to take care of him? Since you left he has been gradually breaking down. Neglect is killing him.”
Sylvester curled the ends of his moustache and regarded her impassively.
“You are trying to hurt me,” he said. “I do not neglect my father.”
“No. You are a paragon of all the excellences. If you had some infirmities, you might be a better and a happier man.”
“I do not believe in the new doctrine of the saving quality of evil,” he replied. “I am of the old-fashioned opinion that evil taints the character, blunts the moral sense, and comes out sooner or later in evil actions.”
“You talk like a Sunday-school tract,” said Ella, with a short laugh. “But I was speaking of Uncle Matthew—”
“I should like to speak of him too,” said Sylvester, curtly. “Your engagement is a great unhappiness to him. He loves you like his own daughter. You know that. If you had consulted him beforehand, perhaps it would have been kinder. What his reasons are for wishing it broken off I do not know, but you may be quite certain they are good ones.”
Ella looked across the room to the piano where the Herzigovinan rhapsody was in full tumult of crashing chords, and then edged nearer Sylvester on the couch where they were sitting.
“Are you aware that you are committing an impertinence in speaking to me like that?” she said in an undertone. “How dare you? I acknowledge Uncle Matthew as my guardian. But you—what right have you to touch upon my affairs? What concern can you have in them?”
“Absolutely none,—personally. But my father is dear to me. If I could break off your engagement to please him, I should do so.”
“Are you going to try?”
“Yes, I shall try,” he replied coldly. Their eyes met in undisguised enmity.
“It would take a better man than you, Sylvester Lanyon,” she said.
She rose and walked to the fireplace, with an air of great stateliness. Sylvester did not attempt to follow her, but lay back on the couch as if rapt in the music. But his evil mood was upon him. He had at once divined her desire to wound him in his tenderest spot. It was like a woman. He felt a great scorn for her. The music suddenly ceased. He uttered a conventional murmur. Roderick broke into ecstatic comment.
“A divine genius! Interpreting the message of the wild winds of his mountain fastnesses,—the elemental throbbing in the hearts of his rugged forefathers. Ella, Moskovic must come to Walden. This supreme spirit must not be clogged by the banality of London concert rooms. He must breathe the freedom of the woods and streams.”
“He has half consented already,” said Ella.
“The silly fool!” muttered Sylvester, beneath his breath.
“Ah, my comrade,” cried Roderick, turning suddenly round, “what message has science to deliver comparable to this?”
“None that I'm aware of, thank Heaven!” replied Sylvester.
Roderick broke into his gay laughter and crossed the room.
“We must think of him kindly, as good Catholics do of those that sit in darkness and ignorance, eh, Ella?”
With a lover's gesture he passed his arm lightly around Ella's waist, and drew her with ever so delicate a pressure a little nearer to him, and looked tenderly into her eyes.
Sylvester started to his feet. A feeling unexpected, undreamed of, hateful, passed through him,—a wave of disgust, of sudden, fierce hatred of Roderick standing there as the undisputed possessor of Ella Defries. Had the man kissed her, he would have struck him. A phrase formulated in Heaven knows what cell of his brain leaped with ghastly suddenness into his mind. How dare that loathsome brute touch her? The revulsion was physical, almost unendurable. It lasted but a moment or two. Then Ella moved away and Lady Milmo came up with a light remark, and the world was as it was before,—a great grim vanity which he regarded with apathetic indifference.
He took his leave early, pleading professional duties. Ella gave him a defiant hand and her lips had a contemptuous curl as she bade him good-night. Roderick, taking upon himself the part of man of the house, accompanied him downstairs and pressed whisky and soda upon him amid fervid expressions of regard. The discreet man-servant helped him on with his overcoat, and the welcome cold air of the street was upon him. There was a touch, of early frost and the stars shone clear. The memory of his unaccountable seizure half an hour ago brought back the memory of a night in Ayresford when he had read, as his heart prompted, the message of the stars. He hailed a passing cab, entered it with the air of a man who has the business of life to consider and not the dreams of a dead past. But in spite of himself the dreams came back, ugly and chilling, and he spent the drive home in brooding thought. What did Roderick's caresses matter to him? Did he not despise Ella utterly? For aught he cared they might marry into eternal misery to-morrow. It was only for his father's sake that he wished to part them. Roderick was a plausible knave, Ella a woman, feline, treacherous, delicate of face and gross of soul. They were well paired. He laughed cynically as he settled down to his evening's work in his laboratory. Here at least were things which he could understand. The growth of a bacillus in a bed of jelly was comprehensible. He could see it, test it. But who could see the growth of a lie in the heart of a human being? And the man himself was unconscious that a dead love had awakened that evening from its sleep and had passionately, for one brief instant, raised the stone that covered the mouth of its tomb.
Roderick drove away from Lady Milmo's in a far more comfortable frame of mind than Sylvester. The evening had been a success. Hitherto, in spite of his conviction that his hold upon Ella was secure, he had been puzzled as to the nature of her feelings towards him. Over the life-work they were to carry out in common she had always glowed; in their purely personal relations she had exhibited a sad lack of emotionality. His vanity had often been piqued by her regarding him less as a man than as the incarnation of an idea. At the same time his own feelings had been simulated to love. He honestly desired her beauty, youth, and wit. As a proof thereof, he had abandoned with entire distaste the latest of the many minor affairs of the heart in which his emotional life had been spent. A breath of something sweeter, purer, nobler, had stirred his soul. The train of courtesans shrank back affrighted, and he walked serene with the higher woman. But desiring her thus uniquely, the man in him craved response. Until to-night she had given none. To-night, however, the statue had grown warm woman. She had avowed her pride in him, had yielded adorably to his caress; before they parted she had given him her lips.
At last he felt the triumph of possession. At last she was his to mould and cherish. A little pleading and their wedded life would dawn with the New Year. He was confident of victory.
Yet his heart sank like lead two days afterwards, when he had dropped a couple of letters into the pillar-box outside his chambers. He stopped and gazed abstractedly at the oblong imperturbable mouth of the red, almost personal thing, to which he had irrevocably intrusted his destiny. For the letters contained cheques to the amount of over three thousand pounds, and the balance at his bankers, on whom they were drawn, consisted mainly of the funds of the Walden Art Colony.
Yet what could he have done? To-morrow the bills, once renewed, with a foolish youngster's name at the back of them, would fall due. His father, to whom he had trusted, had refused help. The forcing of the youngster to pay would at the least create scandal, and scandal would mean loss of reputation, loss of Ella, and general downfall. Misappropriation of the funds saved his credit for a season. It would give him time to urge on his marriage, whilst he cunningly arrested the progress of the Colony. Once married, he was practically master of Ella's fortune. A pretext for obtaining a few thousands, so as to replace the misappropriated sum with his bankers, would easily be found by a man of his resource. Before posting the letters he had felt the half-contemptuous exhilaration of the gambler who bets on a certainty. But now that the bet was entered and made final, doubts and fears began to assail him. He looked two years older as he walked down St. James's Street to his club.
A whisky and apollinaris restored his nerves, so that when young Lathrop, who had backed the bills, came up to him with a long face, he was able to assume his southern manner.
“Dearest of friends—” he began.
“It strikes me, Usher,you'll be the dearest of friends to-morrow,” broke in the young man,—“those confounded bills, you know.”
“Bills!” cried Roderick. “What are you talking to me of bills for? Do you think I am going to let the bloodsuckers feast upon your young and beauteous form? My child, put aside that pessimism which is sapping your youth. Behold, Israel is satisfied.”
He drew his cheque-book from his pocket and showed the counterfoils to the two cheques. Lathrop looked intensely relieved. Then he blushed and stammered. He was devilish sorry; but the time was getting so close. Would Usher have a drink? Roderick assented and drank another whisky and apollinaris.
“You needn't noise abroad the fact of my astounding solvency,” he said, before they parted. “I hope you haven't told any one about the bills.”
“Only Urquhart. I saw him last night,” said the young man.
“You'll be a Metternich yet, Willie,” replied Roderick. As young Lathrop belonged to the diplomatic service, he was dimly conscious that his friend's remark was in some fashion ironical. But Roderick waved him a flourishing adieu and swaggered out of the club.
A man met him on the steps.
“Seen Willie Lathrop lately?”
Roderick looked him squarely between the eyes.
“He 's a braying jackass,” he said.
Having thus conveyed an answer to the implied question and given vent to his anger at the same time, he hailed a cab and drove to Pont Street. It was a foggy, murky day. Already the lights had appeared in shop windows, and, where they streamed, the pavement and roadway glistened in brown slime. Impressionable to external surroundings, Roderick shivered and drew his fur coat closer round him. The world wore an air of hopeless depression. On such a day no human undertaking could prosper. It was only his intellectual contempt for superstition that restrained him from turning round and driving back to his club. The dreary stretch of Sloane Street seemed interminable. At last he arrived and was shown up to the drawing-room. Lady Milmo, Ella, and a lady visitor were having afternoon tea. He exerted himself to amuse in his usual way, but his efforts resulted in failure. When should he be able to see Ella alone? The lady visitor seemed resolved to outstay him. She plied him with questions concerning the Colony. He replied vaguely. Realisation of the project was a long way off. To start such a concern otherwise than on a sound financial basis was magnificent, but it was not business. He was thinking of a last appeal to the public. Ella listened, somewhat out of spirits. Roderick's pessimistic utterances argued loss of faith in the Colony. He caught her glance fixed upon him with perturbed questioning, and his depression deepened.
At last they were alone. He cleared his throat and plunged into the midst of things. Speech restored his confidence. He made an eloquent appeal. He loved her, worshipped her; the deferring of their marriage to an indefinite date was making his heart sick, robbing him of energy and the joy of life. Christmas it must be. He hinted at personages waiting for their marriage to subscribe largely to the fund. What had the marriage to do with it? Well, he was an artist, a Bohemian; his very class did not inspire confidence. But his marriage would set upon him the seal of irreproachable responsibility. He pleaded desperately, the restoration of the three thousand pounds being his paramount and imperative aim. His heart sank at the coldness with which she received his fervour. His ear detected the note of insincerity, to which he felt conscious she, too, was sensitive.
“I can't marry you yet, Roderick,” she said, at length, wearily. “I can't. It means too much.”
“Then you don't love me,” he exclaimed, starting to his feet. The old dramatic device did not succeed.
“Sometimes I do,” she said. “At others—I don't know—I shall love you wholly when we realise our dreams.”
“That will be the Great Never Never,” he replied tragically, “for when did man ever realise his dreams?”
The dressing gong sounded through the house. She rose and put out her hand.
“You must be patient with me, Roderick. Usually you understand so finely; can't you understand now?”
“I understand that you are a woman of an imperious will, to which it will always be my pride to bow,” he responded.
There was no help for it. No more pleading could move her that afternoon. He had to take his leave. When the drawing-room door shut behind him, his expression changed, and he descended the stairs cursing the Colony and all who were concerned therein. He went back to his club, dined, lost fifty pounds at cards, and went to bed morose and miserable.
The next morning he was greatly surprised by a visit from Sylvester. He was sitting in the well-lit corner room of his chambers, which he had converted into a studio, in front of the new picture he was painting from Ella's conception. His heart was not in it. No good could ever come from such tame propriety. And there he sat in an armchair, his legs extended compass-wise, glowering at the picture, when Sylvester came in.
“What fog has driven you here, camarado?” he cried. “You have arrived in season. This beastly world is standing on its head, and I don't know what to make of it. Sit down and have some absinthe, the only true comfort the devil has vouchsafed us.”
He pointed to a glass of the opalescent liquid by his side. Sylvester declined the consolation.
“I want to have a little talk with you about your marriage,” said he.
“Oh, damn my marriage!” exclaimed Roderick, irritably. “I tell you the idiot world is gyrating indecently on its occiput; my engagement with the rest of things.”
“Is it broken off?” inquired Sylvester, hopefully.
“The same thing. Postponed to the Millennium.”
“The Colonial Millennium—?”
“Yes. You are quite right,fratello mio, to keep clear of women and their works. No man can ever fathom their infinite incomprehensibility. Look here—” He rose and marched about the studio, burning with a sense of his wrongs and led by the instinct of his temperament to give vent to his grievances. “I love that girl with an imbecile passion. Art is great, but love is greater. I would make a holocaust of all that is dear to me in the world in the sacred name of Art. Am I not ready to expatriate myself? Have I not been working like Sisyphus for months? But I can't throw my elemental sex into the blaze. Six months' waiting is enough for all but anchorites. Do I look like an anchorite? I urge her to fix the marriage at Christmas. She's as hard as your Philistine's head. We must wait until the Colony is afait accompli. How is it going to be accomplished without money?”
“I thought the scheme was getting along famously,” interposed Sylvester.
“So did I, but it isn't. It hasn't appealed to the imagination of this haggis-brained public, and so funds remain stationary. As if this worry and disappointment isn't enough for a man!Point d'argent, point de Suisse. No money, no colony. No colony, no marriage. The two things could never be connected save in the ineffable convolutions of the feminine brain.”
“I see,” said Sylvester. “It is hard lines on you.”
He was intensely relieved by Roderick's confidences; could afford even to be magnanimous. Since his avowal to Ella of hostile intentions, he had felt it his duty to inform Roderick of his attitude. He had come this morning prepared to make a declaration of war. There were several little things he had learned incidentally of Roderick's past career, with which he had intended to confront him. The memory of Mr. Snodgrass informing the small boy that he was going to begin came into his mind as he mounted the stairs, and he smiled grimly. But, after all, no one had ever questioned the chivalry of Mr. Snodgrass's motives. His first words on entering were an announcement of the object of his visit. Roderick had implicitly declared that object to be futile. To proceed further would be to attack a fallen man. To express satisfaction would be to triumph over a foe's discomfiture. He therefore expressed conventional sympathy. It was hard lines.
Roderick caught up the phrase and wove it into a fugue of indignant lamentation. Luck never came his way. The stars in their courses had fought against him since his cradle.
“Some men's touch turns everything to gold; mine to brass and deuced gimcrack brass at that. I've never loved a dear gazelle; but if I had, the disastrous animal would have got mange or delirium tremens and turned round and bitten me and given me hydrophobia. I suppose it's because of my general nefariousness. I wish I had been an austere embodiment of the seven deadly virtues like you,amigo. Then I should have waxed fat and prosperous. But there,” he added, lighting a cigar, “that's enough. I don't know why I'm washing you in this torrent of my discontent.”
“If it has done you any good, I am not sorry to have heard it,” said Sylvester. “As for the Colony, I never did think much of the idea, you know. It is outside the sphere of practical affairs altogether. Besides, you could never stay more than a month away from Piccadilly.”
“It meant a means of livelihood for this profitless child of nature, anyway,” said Roderick, watching the wreaths of his cigar-smoke.
“Pardon me if I take a liberty,” said Sylvester, “but I was under the impression that your father made you a good allowance.”
Roderick stared at him for a moment and then laughed loud.
“You don't know Usher senior. How much the old man has, or where the devil it all came from, I have no idea; but I don't get any of it. And when he descends to realms below, he'll bequeath it all to a home for decayed postage-stamp collectors. No; I get what I earn. The Colony was a fixed income.”
“Well, you'll have to settle down to something else,” said Sylvester, consolingly.
“And meanwhile you can go and persuade our fair enthusiast that the Colony is all a fizzle and that she must shed happiness upon the head of your devoted friend at Christmas!”
“I don't think I can do that,” said Sylvester, drily. He pulled out his watch, announced his departure. Roderick shook his hand effusively.
“But, by the way,” said he, “you haven't told me what you came for—my marriage—?”
“Oh, after what you've said about the matter that can wait,” replied Sylvester, hurriedly, and he left his friend to his artistic solitude.
Roderick felt somewhat ashamed and somewhat relieved after his burst of confidence. To cry defeat after the first reverse seemed the part of a craven. Thus were women not won. He determined to return to the attack, to choose his time more wisely. A week later he caught Ella in a brighter mood. He had exerted himself to please, to kindle her enthusiasms, which shone from cheeks and eyes. He struck the personal chord, watched eagerly, seemed to perceive it vibrate through her. Then he urged once more. She changed suddenly, held out a warning hand.
“Not that again, Roderick,” she said. “You must not make me dread your coming. Some women yield to insistence; it only hardens me. I thought you knew me better.”
“Then the Colony shall start at Christmas; I swear it,” he cried magniloquently, and the remainder of the interview flowed more smoothly.
It is all very well to command events. But whether they will obey is a different matter. During the last few weeks Roderick had succeeded in his design to quash the Colony in so far as to alienate several hesitating supporters. To win these back was no easy matter. Moreover, his old power of persuasion seemed to have failed him. There was a period when he had deluded himself into the belief that the Colony was a practicable scheme. But the moment it had appeared contrary to his own interest and he had regarded it dispassionately, he despised it from the depths of his soul as an inane chimera. To have to simulate a burnt out enthusiasm was irksome; he failed to carry conviction. And meanwhile he was a prey to gnawing anxiety. How was he to replace the three thousand pounds? He anathematised the feminine temperament.
The feminine temperament, however, was not in that state of dispassionate, yet unreasoning decision in which he imagined it to be. These were unhappy days for Ella. She seemed to have become to herself a vague entity wandering in a land of shadows, forced by some unknown power therein to wander, and finding her only hope of salvation in one elusive light that gleamed fitfully in the distance. Her aunt, being a practical woman, was quick to notice the habitual contraction of her brow and the wearied preoccupation in her eyes. Nowadays she openly mocked at the Colony. On such occasions Ella fired up, defended it with the fierceness of a forlorn hope. Lady Milmo was puzzled. She even went the length of consulting Sylvester, surprising him considerably by a morning call in Weymouth Street.
“The Colony's a fraud, and she knows it's a fraud,” she said, in the vernacular of her class. “And yet she pins her immortal soul to it. Why doesn't she marry the man and be done with it? But no—she won't do that. She's making herself ill because the Colony isn't likely to come off, which is distinctly good business, and what on earth she can find to interest her in the rubbishy scheme, goodness only knows. If she only painted, or wrote poetry, or out-Wagnered Wagner in immortal tunelessness, one could perhaps understand. But she's no more artistic than you are.”
“I know I'm a Philistine,” smiled Sylvester, at the tribute of the artless lady. “Is that why you 've come to me?”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” returned Lady Milmo. “Now can't you put some sense into her, or get that dear Mr. Lanyon to do so? It's my impression she isn't in love with him one little bit.”
“Then, for Heaven's sake, my dear Lady Milmo,” said Sylvester, earnestly, “do all you can to impress that fact upon him!”
“I should be glad if the engagement were broken off,” said Lady Milmo, reflectively.
“So would all the true friends of Ella Defries,” replied Sylvester.
Lady Milmo arched her eyebrows. She looked at him for a moment quizzically.
“Is that purely a disinterested remark, Dr. Lanyon?”
“I would not marry one single woman that is now living on this earth,” said Sylvester.
“Why, whatever have we poor creatures done to you? There are some men, I know, who look upon women as a disease, but I'm sure you 're not one.”
Sylvester scanned his finger nails,—a trick he had caught from his father.
“One marriage is enough for a man, Lady Milmo,” he said in a low voice.
Lady Milmo was conscious of an indiscretion. She escaped adroitly and led the talk back to Roderick.
“I think we'd better get this silly affair of Ella's broken off, don't you?” she said at parting.
“If you could manage it, my father and myself would be exceedingly grateful to you,” he replied.
Lady Milmo was driving away, her kind head filled with schemes for Ella's extrication, when, at the block at Oxford Circus, she caught sight of a news-vendor wearing as an apron the coloured bill of an early edition of an evening paper. Across it in enormous capitals ran the startling legend, “Sudden Death of Sir Decimus Bland.”
“The best thing the pompous old idiot has ever done in his life!” said Lady Milmo.
It was the music-room in Mr. Bevis Urquhart's mansion in Park Street. The floor was polished, the walls panelled in white and gold, the ceiling painted in the Watteau style. About forty fashionably dressed people sat on gilded chairs in the body of the room. High in front of them towered the organ; beneath it stretched a low platform containing a white and gold grand piano pushed into a corner, and a Louis XV. table, at which sat half a dozen men. Among these was Roderick, looking worn and jaded, and from the front row of the chairs Ella Defries viewed him in some concern. The committee of the Walden Art Colony had called a general meeting of those interested in the project, and Mr. Bevis Urquhart had lent his music-room for the purpose.
Mr. Redmayne, R. A., had been voted into the chair. He was a business-like looking little man, clean-shaven and precise in attire, and he spoke in a dry, sharp way like a barrister. He announced to the meeting what Roderick had heard some days before,—that Sir Decimus Bland had died suddenly and had made no testamentary provision for the Colony. They all had looked to him for the payment of the Director's salary and for the guaranteeing of any pecuniary deficit that might occur in working the concern. Their chief support gone, it was for the meeting to decide whether the scheme should be continued or abandoned. From a memorandum supplied by Roderick he read a statement of accounts. Three thousand and twenty pounds at Mr. Usher's bankers; two thousand promised. Was there any person or combination of persons willing to fill Sir Decimus Bland's place? He sat down. No one responded. Lord Eglington, a withered gentleman with a cracked voice, rose from the committee table, and after expounding the aim of the Colony regretfully proposed the entire abandonment of the scheme. Mr. Bevis Urquhart seconded the resolution.
Roderick caught an appealing glance from Ella and sprang to his feet. He pleaded eloquently. He had worked with heart and soul to organise the Colony; was ready to devote his existence to it. The future of Art was at stake. Here was the one glorious chance the century had offered to free Art from the shackles that had degraded it and through its inexorable influence had degraded modern life. Never had he felt such pain as when he had heard Lord Eglington and Mr. Urquhart propose to dismiss the scheme to that unutterable horror of desolation, the limbo of forsaken ideals. He adjured them to weigh the vast responsibility they had taken upon themselves. He urged those present to respond generously to his appeal for funds to carry on the work.
“I speak as a man,” said he, “fighting for dear life, for all that is sacred and holy to me in existence. I have pledged myself to bring this boon upon the world, and I will do it ere I die.”
He sat down, flushed and excited. The company, moved by his enthusiasm, applauded encouragingly. Ella rose.
“It will be a disgrace to us all if the motion is carried,” she said, turning round to the general body. “Let us fill up a subscription list now. I will head it with five thousand pounds.” She sat down. There was a cold silence. Her heart sank with a feeling of shame at her outburst.Qui m'aime me suiveis sometimes an excellent battle-cry. When no one follows, it falls deadly flat. She realised that most of the people there knew her personal interest in the affair, and her cheek grew hotter. Roderick stepped boldly down to her, and whispered in her ear.
“You have the worshipping gratitude of all my life,” said he.
A man rose at the back of the room and began to speak. There was a rustle of garments as every one turned to look at him. He was a well-known journalist, the editor of a weekly paper that made a specialty of diagnosing unsound institutions. Roderick tugged at his Vandyke beard and watched him narrowly. He began in a light bantering tone, described with delicate satiric touch the objects of the Colony. Then he playfully analysed the idyllic conditions under which the colonists would work. The meeting laughed. He sketched the boredom, the universal hatred of the minor poet who insisted on reading his poems aloud to the assembled Colony, the flirtations, imbroglios, jealousies, the lady who paid nothing and went about declaring that the food was not fit to eat. One by one he touched off the types. The meeting was delighted. Then the speaker launched out into a trenchant indictment of the whole scheme, disclosed its absurdity, its financial rottenness, its infinite futility. He ended amid rounds of laughter and applause. Ridicule had killed the scheme outright. There were cries that the motion should be put. It was carried almost by acclamation. Thus ended the great Walden Art Colony.
“I did think you would stand by it, Urquhart,” said Roderick to the young semimillionaire.
The people were beginning to disperse, among much laughter and gossip. Ella had lingered on an imploring sign from Roderick. Urquhart stifled a yawn and buttoned his frock-coat.
“My dear fellow,” said he, from the heights of his superior culture, “if you would only study Pradovitch,—— the one genius this century has produced,—study him as I have done, you would not fail to be convinced that Art is the leprosy of life.”
For once Roderick lost his temper. An evil look came into his face.
“What a God-forsaken fool you are!” he snarled out. And turning on his heel he joined Ella.
The young man turned to Lord Eglington.
“That's the worst of having to do with suchcanaille,” he said languidly. But in spite of his assumption of supercilious indifference, his face wore a malignant expression as he watched Roderick and his companion disappear through the doorway. At the door however, Roderick's indignation evaporated. It is no doubt an immense satisfaction to tell a posturing imbecile exactly what you, think of him, but when you have misappropriated a couple of thousands of that imbecile's money without any reasonable prospect of restoring it, the satisfaction is apt to be short hved.
Roderick and Ella gained the street without saying a word. A cab sauntered up.
“Will you—?” began Roderick.
“I would sooner walk part of the way. Do you mind?”
“Delighted,” said Roderick.
“The room was so hot,” she explained, “and it is a beautiful afternoon.”
They walked down Park Lane in silence, hanging dejected heads, a new Adam and Eve driven from Eden. Now and then she glanced sideways at him, to see his brow set and deep lines descending parallel with his moustache and losing themselves in his beard. His defeat seemed to have crushed him. Ella felt a pang of pity. She touched his arm lightly.
“You must not take it too much to heart,” she said.
“I must,” he replied, with a gesture of despair. “To think it should have all gone down like a house of cards!”
They crossed the road and entered the Park. The grey mists of the early December afternoon were beginning to gather among the trees. Far off a great crimson blur announced the setting sun. To their right the statue of Achilles loomed grimly on its deserted hillock. Roderick pointed to it with his stick.
“Do you remember that Sunday afternoon six months ago, when all was hope and sunshine?”
“Redmayne had just joined,” she remarked.
“And to-day he took the chair, so as to crush us. They had it all arranged beforehand. A damnable conspiracy! And we were powerless. It maddens me!”
His tones were those of intense feeling Ella was compelled to comfort.
“You fought splendidly,” she said. “A man can't do more.”
He stopped abruptly in the path and laid both hands on her wrists by her muff. A belated nursery maid wheeling a perambulator eyed them dully.
“Bless you for the words! You cannot tell what your sympathy means to me now.”
By a happy chance he had struck the right note. Tears came into the girl's eyes. For the first time she was able to disassociate the man from his work. She lost her own sense of disappointment in womanly pity for the man who had been defeated while battling against great odds.
“And bless you for the tears standing in those eyes!” said Roderick.
They walked on. Somehow her hand found its way beneath his arm. They spoke but little. Roderick's pulses fluttered with a new hope; but his perceptions into the nature of women were too keen to allow him to force an advantage. He wore his stricken air, yet subtly conveyed to her the deep comfort of her sympathy. He pressed her hand against his side and left her to work out the situation for herself under these excellent conditions.
Ella had never felt so near him. The unity in their golden dreams had not bound them so closely as this unity in catastrophe. For even when the dreams were most golden, she had haunting misgivings that they were but visions. Outraged by Sylvester's trampling on her heart, sickened at herself by her years reckless follies, eager, with all a proud girl's passion, to vindicate herself, to follow some noble standard, she had caught at the first that flaunted by and compelled herself imperiously to believe in it. This forced faith had been the strenuous labour of her inner life. She had armed herself in triple brass against Lady Milmo's shafts of flippant satire, against Matthew Lanyon's kindly wisdom, against her own common sense. The Colony would be merely a paradise of cranks. No serious artist would throw away his or her career in such a Cloud-cuckoo-land.
She herself, at the best but a well-taught amateur painter in water-colours, what was she doing in that galley? She set aside reason. To believe in Roderick, she must believe in the Colony. To believe in the Colony, she must believe in Roderick. The two were inextricably interfused. Realisation of the dreams was her only justification for marrying the man. The man's personality and enthusiasm for an ideal had overpowered her. She would not think. She was young, inexperienced, warm-natured, seeing things out of proportion. Flight from the self she had deemed dishonoured was her only chance of salvation; and she mistook the imaginary cries behind her, hounding her onward, for the voice of inexorable necessity. If Roderick could accomplish it, the Colony was a glorious thing. The Colony accomplished, Roderick was the conqueror to whom she must yield. When the dreams were most golden she saw him such, and they were near together.
But then had come the days of Roderick's loss of interest in the scheme. He put her above the Colony, desired her above all things. She shivered back. For himself alone she could not marry him. Why, she could not tell. A girl with a mind pure and sweet does not speculate on that which, traced logically to its source, is simply elemental sexual repulsion. She clung fiercely to her point. Then Roderick returned to the scheme with his old ardour. In her heart she believed him passionately sincere. Misfortune had come with terrible unexpectedness. He had fought and failed. He was a beaten man. The dream had been brutally proved to have been the emptiest of hallucinations. She was miserably cast down. Roderick seemed broken-hearted. They were at one in an absolute cynical reality. Both had been pierced by the same shaft. The doors of the cranks' Eden had clanged behind them, and they were walking together in the grey, dreary expanse of Hyde Park, with an unknown world of the most definite prose before them. They seemed alone, to have nothing in common with the rest of society; to have in common with each other this all-filling humiliation of defeat. So when he spoke, the unreasoning woman leaped to comfort the man. She had never felt so near him. A great and natural revulsion of feeling had lifted her heart to consolation.
They quitted the Park at Hyde Park Corner, and paused by common impulse.
“I suppose you will take a cab now,” he said reluctantly.
“I suppose I must,” she said in the same tone. “I would ask you to come with me, but it's auntie's day at home, and the place will be full of chattering people.”
“I can't bear leaving you,” said he.
“Nor I you.”
“You look tired, poor child. Let me give you some tea. Will you? I belong to a club in Piccadilly,—the Hyde Park, where ladies are admitted to tea. It is the home of all the depressed outcasts of London, and even they shun it. We are sure to be alone in the tea-room. Come.”
He hailed a hansom. Ella, in that strange mood of passivity which is woman's fatalest, entered without remark. He followed, and they drove to the Hyde Park Club.
As he had prophesied, the tea-room was empty, save for one dejected member with his neck-tie riding over the back of his collar, who stared at them for a moment and then passed out like a ghost. A blazing fire, however, was burning in the grate, and the maroon leather chairs and divans added a sense of warmth and comfort to the room. The despondent ones took their seats in a little recess by the fireplace, and Roderick ordered tea.
“It's a new club, and no two members are acquainted. It is the most desolate place in London. A man comes here when he wants to work out his suicide. There's no one to distract his thoughts. Then he goes out and commits it.”
“Why did you join?” asked Ella, mechanically.
“Perhaps I foresaw this day. If your worshipped dearness had not waited for me at Urquhart's, I should have come here—and God knows what desperate remedies I should have brooded over. But I never foresaw having you here to strengthen me. Thank Heaven I did join, so as to have a haven of rest and quietude to bring you to.”
He passed his hand across his forehead wearily, and rested his elbow on the little table in front of him.
“My God!” he said. “It has been a bitter day for me.”
The waiter brought a tray with tea and delicately baked scones. Ella filled the cups and tried to cheer her companion, praising the tea and the arrangements of the club. The warmth, the little sense of novelty, working an unconscious influence, had brought back animation to her face. She looked very fresh and winsome in the man's eyes. They fixed themselves upon her despairingly. Ella suddenly broke off her trivial chatter.
“Ah you must not,” she said, with a little choke to keep down the tears. “There are so many great things left in the world to fight for—. Oh, I wish I could help you!”
“Bless you!” he replied solemnly—and how much was acting, and how much was genuine, the man's Maker alone could tell, for the man himself could not; “there is only one way in which you could help me, and that must not be. You are rich, I am poor. We are no longer working in the great common cause in which all such differences could have been sunk. As a man of honour I must release you from your engagement with me, for the conditions on which our engagement was based have lapsed. You are quite free, Ella, and I must go my way alone.”
He hid his face in his hands. Ella trifled with her tea-spoon.
“You are generous,” she said in a low voice. “But if your honour is at stake, so is mine. I could not turn away from you in your hour of need.”
“I am a defeated man,” he replied brokenly. “You would despise me.”
The word pierced her like a knife. At that moment she was noble, with the blind and piteous folly that is so often at the heart of woman's nobility. She drew herself up proudly, then stretched her arm impulsively across the table and closed her fresh young fingers on his hand.
“I will marry you whenever you please, and we will face the world together and begin a new life,” she said.
“My poor dear child,” said Lady Milmo, kissing Ella affectionately, when she came home, “I am so sorry for you. Lady Elstree came here straight after the meeting and told us all about it. But it was bound to come to smash, darling.”
“I suppose it was, auntie,” replied Ella, taking off her fur necklet.
She sat down on the fender stool and looked into the fire. Lady Milmo came up and took one of her hands and petted it in her kindly fashion.
“I'm very glad it's all over,” she said. “As soon as it became serious, I never liked it, you know, dear. And now we can start everything quite fresh, can't we?”
“Yes, quite fresh,” assented Ella.
“You see now,” continued Lady Milmo, “how wise it was to make that condition about your engagement. I don't want to say anything against Roderick, but he's an impossible visionary, dear. I always hated the idea of your marrying him. It is all broken off now, isn't it?”
To Lady Milmo's great astonishment, the girl suddenly burst into a fit of miserable crying. She knelt by her and petted her comfortingly.
“It will be quite easy, my child. I will write him a kind little note about it, and you can go down to Ayresford and take care of that dear Uncle Matthew of yours.”
“Oh, auntie,” cried Ella at last, “you don't understand. I promised Roderick this afternoon to marry him in a fortnight's time.”