“Torna in fior di giovinezzaIsaotta Blanzesmano,Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
She understood while she sang—she had never understood before, nor could conceive why she understood now—what love had been to the world, was being, would be so long as there was a world. The sweetness of love did not merely present itself to her imagination, but penetrated her soul. And that penetration, while it carried with it and infused through her whole being a delicate radiance, that was as the radiance of light in the midst of surrounding blackness—beams of the moon in a forest—carried with it also into her heart a frightful sense of individual isolation, of having missed the figure of Truth in the jostling crowd of shams.
Fritz stood there against the wall. Yes—Fritz. And he was savagely rejoicing in the effect she was making upon the audience, because he thought, hoped, that it would lessen the triumph of the woman who was punishing him.
She had missed the figure of Truth. That was very certain. And as she sang the refrain for the last time she seemed to herself to be searching for the form that must surely be very wonderful, searching for it in the many eyes that were fixed upon her. She looked at Sir Donald:
“Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:”
She looked at Rupert Carey:
“Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
She still looked at Carey, and the hideous wreckage of the flesh was no longer visible to her. She saw only his burning eyes.
Directly she had finished singing she asked for her motor cloak. While they were fetching it she had to go back twice to the platform to bow to the applause.
Miss Schley, who was looking angry, said to her:
“You’re not going away before my show?”
“I want to go to the concert room, where I can hear better, and see,” she replied.
Miss Schley looked at her doubtfully, but had to go to the platform. As she slowly disappeared behind the screen Lady Holme drew the cloak round her, pulled down her veil and went quickly away.
She wanted—more, she required—to be alone.
At the hall door she sent a footman to find the motor car. When it came up she said to the chauffeur:
“Take me home quickly and then come back for his lordship.”
She got in.
As the car went off swiftly she noticed that the streets were shining with wet.
“Has it been raining?” she asked.
“Raining hard, my lady.”
ON the following morning the newspapers contained an account of the concert at Manchester House. They contained also an account of a motor accident which had occurred the same afternoon between Hyde Park Corner and Knightsbridge.
On the wet pavement Lord Holme’s new car, which was taking Lady Holme to Cadogan Square at a rapid pace, skidded and overturned, pinning Lady Holme beneath it. While she was on the ground a hansom cab ran into the car.
At their breakfasts her friends, her acquaintances, her enemies and the general public read of her beautiful singing at the concert, and read also the following paragraph, which closed the description of the accident:
“We deeply regret to learn that Lady Holme was severely injured inthe face by the accident. Full particulars have not reached us, butwe understand that an immediate operation is necessary and will beperformed to-day by Mr. Bernard Crispin the famous surgeon. Herladyship is suffering great pain, and it is feared that she will bepermanently disfigured.”
The fierce change which Lady Holme had longed for was a reality. One life, the life of the siren, had come to an end. But the eyes of the woman must still see light. The heart of the woman must still beat on.
Death stretched out a hand in the darkness and found the hand of Birth.
ON a warm but overcast day, at the end of the following September, a woman, whose face was completely hidden by a thick black veil, drove up to the boat landing of the town of Como in a hired victoria. She was alone, but behind her followed a second carriage containing an Italian maid and a large quantity of luggage. When the victoria stopped at the water’s edge the woman got out slowly, and stood for a moment, apparently looking for something. There were many boats ranged along the quay, their white awnings thrown back, their oars resting on the painted seats. Beside one, which was larger than the others, soberly decorated in brown with touches of gold, and furnished with broad seats not unlike small armchairs, stood two bold-looking Italian lads dressed in white sailors’ suits. One of them, after staring for a brief instant at the veiled woman, went up to her and said in Italian:
“Is the signora for Casa Felice?”
“Yes.”
The boy took off his round hat with a gallant gesture.
“The boat is here, signora.”
He led the way to the brown-and-gold craft, and helped the lady to get into it. She sat down on one of the big seats.
“That is the luggage,” she said, speaking Italian in a low voice, and pointing to the second carriage from which the maid was stepping. The two boatmen hastened towards it. In a few minutes maid and luggage were installed in a big black gondola, oared by two men standing up, and the brown boat, with the two lads in white and the veiled woman, glided out on the calm water.
The day was a grey dream, mystical in its colourless silence. Blue Italy was shrouded as the woman’s face was shrouded. The speechlessness of Nature environed her speechlessness. She was an enigma set in an enigma, and the two rowers looked at her and at the sunless sky, and bent to their oars gravely. A melancholy stole into their sensitive dark faces. This newpadronahad already cast a shadow upon their buoyant temperaments.
She noticed it and clasped her hands together in her lap. She was not accustomed yet to her newrolein life.
The boat stole on. Como was left behind. The thickly-wooded shores of the lake, dotted with many villas, the tall green mountains covered with chestnut trees, framed the long, winding riband of water which was the way to Casa Felice. There were not many other boats out. The steamer had already started for Bellagio, and was far away near the point where Torno nestles around its sheltered harbour. The black gondola was quickly left behind. Its load of luggage weighed it down. The brown boat was alone in the grey dream of the sunless autumn day.
Behind her veil Lady Holme was watching the two Italian boys, whose lithe bodies bent to their oars, whose dark eyes were often turned upon her with a staring scrutiny, with the morose and almost violent expression that is the child of frustrated curiosity.
Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking, striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations, but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos, grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree. Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was rolling round her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably remote horizons.
Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows inexhaustible?
She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.
Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an under voice to keep his boy’s heart from succumbing to the spell of melancholy. She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that was dreamlike. At first the music was a murmur. But presently it grew louder. She could distinguish words now and then. Once she heardcarissima, a moment afterwardsamore. Then the poison in which the tip of this last arrow had been curiously steeped began its work in her. The quivering creature hidden within her cowered, shrank, put up trembling hands, cried out, “I cannot endure this thing. I do not know how to. I have never learnt the way. This is impossible for me. This is a demand I have not the capacity to fulfil!” And, even while it cowered and cried out, knew, “This I must endure. This demand I shall be made to fulfil. Nothing will serve me; no outstretched hands, no wailings of despair, no prayers, no curses even will save me. For I am the soul in the hands of the vivisector.”
Along the lake, past the old home of La Taglioni, past the Villa Pasta with its long garden, past little Torno with its great round oleanders and its houses crowding to the shore, the boatman sang. Gathering courage as his own voice dispersed his melancholy, and the warm hopes of his youth spread their wings once more, roused by the words of love his lips were uttering, he fearlessly sent out his song. Love in the South was in it, love in the sun, embraces in warm scented nights, longings in moonlight, attainment in darkness. The boy had forgotten the veiled lady, whose shrouded face and whose silence had for a moment saddened him. His hot, bold nature reasserted itself, the fire of his youth blazed up again. He sang as if only the other boatman had been there and they had seen the girls they loved among the trees upon the shore.
And the soul writhed, like an animal stretched and strapped upon the board, to whom no anaesthetic, had been given.
Never before would it have been possible to Lady Holme to believe that the mere sound of a word could inflict such torment upon a heart as the sound of the wordamore, coming from the boatman’s lips, now inflicted upon hers. Each time it came, with its soft beauty, its languor of sweetness—like a word reclining—it flayed her soul alive, and showed her red, raw bareness.
Yet she did not ask the man to stop singing. Few people in the hands of Fate ask Fate for favours. Instinct speaks in the soul and says, “Be silent.”
The boat rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke more plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were more grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little upon the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken to Casa Felice.
Perhaps to combat the gathering gloom of Nature the boatman sang more loudly, with the full force of his voice. But suddenly he seemed to be struck by the singular contrast opposed to his expansive energy by the silent figure opposite to him. A conscious look came into his face. His voice died away abruptly. After a pause he said,
“Perhaps the signora is not fond of music?”
Lady Holme wanted to speak, but she could not. She and this bright-eyed boy were not in the same world. That was what she felt. He did not know it, but she knew it. And one world cannot speak through infinite space with another.
She said nothing. The boy looked over his shoulder at his companion. Then, in silence, they both rowed on.
And now that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which man had no lot.
Presently, with a stroke of his right oar, the boy who had sung turned the boat’s prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely house confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart. For a long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation. The flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle of densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards the grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still too far out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details if she had seen them. Only a sort of heavy impression that this house had a pale, haunted aspect forced itself dully upon her.
“Ecco Casa Felice, signora!” said the foremost rower, half timidly, pointing with his brown hand.
She made an intense effort and uttered some reply. The boy was encouraged and began to tell her about the beauties of the house, the gardens, the chasm behind the piazza down which the waterfall rushed, to dive beneath the house and lose itself in the lake. She tried to listen, but she could not. The strangeness of her being alone, hidden behind a dense veil, of her coming to such a retired house in the autumn to remain there in utter solitude, with no object except that of being safe from the intrusion of anyone who knew her, of being hidden from all watching eyes that had ever looked upon her—the strangeness of it obsessed her, was both powerful and unreal. That she should be one of those lonely women of whom the world speaks with a lightly-contemptuous pity seemed incredible to her. Yet what woman was lonelier than she?
The boat drew in toward the shore and she began to see the house more plainly. It was large, and the flat facade was broken in the middle by an open piazza with round arches and slender columns. This piazza divided the house in two. The villa was in fact composed of two square buildings connected together by it. From the boat, looking up, Lady Holme saw a fierce mountain gorge rising abruptly behind the house. Huge cypresses grew on its sides, towering above the slate roof, and she heard the loud noise of falling water. It seemed to add to the weight of her desolation.
The boat stopped at a flight of worn stone steps. One of the boys sprang out and rang a bell, and presently an Italian man-servant opened a tall iron gate set in a crumbling stone arch, and showed more stone steps leading upward between walls covered with dripping lichen. The boat boy came to help Lady Holme out.
For a moment she did not move. The dreamlike feeling had come upon her with such force that her limbs refused to obey her will. The sound of the falling water in the mountain gorge had sent her farther adrift into the grey, unpeopled eternity, into the vague chaos. But the boy held out his hand, took hers. The strong clasp recalled her. She got up. The Italian man-servant preceded her up the steps into a long garden built up high above the lake on a creeper-covered wall. To the left was the house door. She stood still for an instant looking out over the wide expanse of unruffled grey water. Then, putting her hand up to her veil as if to keep it more closely over her face, she slowly went into the house.
DESPAIR had driven Lady Holme to Casa Felice. When she had found that the accident had disfigured her frightfully, and that the disfigurement would be permanent, she had at first thought of killing herself. But then she had been afraid. Life had abruptly become a horror to her. She felt that it must be a horror to her always. Yet she dared not leave it then, in her home in London, in the midst of the sights and sounds connected with her former happiness. After the operation, and the verdict of the doctors, that no more could be done than had been done, she had had an access of almost crazy misery, in which all the secret violence of her nature had rushed to the surface from the depths. Shut up alone in her room, she had passed a day and a night without food. She had lain upon the floor. She had torn her clothes into fragments. The animal that surely dwells at the door of the soul of each human being had had its way in her, had ravaged her, humiliated her, turned her to savagery. Then at last she had slept, still lying upon the floor. And she had waked feeling worn out but calm, desperately calm. She defied the doctors. What did they know of women, of what women can do to regain a vanished beauty? She would call in specialists, beauty doctors, quacks, the people who fill the papers with their advertisements.
Then began a strange defile of rag-tag humanity to the Cadogan Square door—women, men, of all nationalities and pretensions. But the evil was beyond their power. At last an American specialist, who had won renown by turning a famous woman of sixty into the semblance of a woman of six-and-thirty—for a short time—was called in. Lady Holme knew that his verdict must be final. If he could do nothing to restore her vanished loveliness nothing could be done. After being closeted with her for a long time he came out of her room. There were tears in his eyes. To the footman who opened the hall door, and who stared in surprise, he explained his emotion thus.
“Poor lady,” he said. “It’s a hopeless case.”
“Ah!” said the man, who was the pale footman Lady Holme had sent with the latch-key to Leo Ulford.
“Hopeless. It’s a hard thing to have to tell a lady she’ll always be—be—”
“What, sir?” said the footman.
“Well—what people won’t enjoy looking at.”
He winked his eyes. He was a little bald man, with a hatchet face that did not suggest emotion.
“And judging by part of the left side of the face, I guess she must have been almost a beauty once,” he added, stepping into the square.
That was Lady Holme now. She had to realise herself as a woman whom people would rather not look at.
All this time she had not seen Fritz. He had asked to see her. He had even tried to insist on seeing her, but so long as there was any hope in her of recovering her lost beauty she had refused to let him come near her. The thought of his eyes staring upon the tragic change in her face sent cold creeping through her veins. But when the American had gone she realised that there was nothing to wait for, that if she were ever to let Fritz see her again it had better be now. The bandages in which her face had been swathed had been removed. She went to a mirror and, setting her teeth and clenching her hands, looked into it steadily.
She did not recognise herself. As she stood there she felt as if a dreadful stranger had come into the room and was confronting her.
The accident, and the surgical treatment that had followed upon it, had greatly altered the face. The nose, once fine and delicate, was now coarse and misshapen. A wound had permanently distorted the mouth, producing a strange, sneering expression. The whole of the right side of the face was puffy and heavy-looking, and drawn down towards the chin. It was also at present discoloured. For as Lady Holme lay under the car she had been badly burnt. The raw, red tinge would no doubt fade away with time, but the face must always remain unsightly, even a little grotesque, must always show to the casual passer-by a woman who had been the victim of a dreadful accident.
Lady Holme stared at this woman for a long time. There were no tears in her eyes. Then she went to the dressing-table and began to make up her face. Slowly, deliberately, with a despairing carefulness, she covered it with pigments till she looked like a woman in Regent Street. Her face became a frightful mask, and even then the fact that she was disfigured was not concealed. The application of the pigments began to cause her pain. The right side of her face throbbed. She looked dreadfully old, too, with this mass of paint and powder upon her—like a hag, she thought. And it was obvious that she was trying to hide something. Anyone, man or woman, looking upon her, would divine that so much art could only be used for the concealment of a dreadful disability. People, seeing this mask, would suppose—what might they not suppose? The pain in her face became horrible. Suddenly, with a cry, she began to undo what she had done. When she had finished she rang the bell. Her maid knocked at the door. Without opening it she called out:
“Is his lordship in the house?”
“Yes, my lady. His lordship has just come in.”
“Go and ask him to come up and see me.”
“Yes, my lady.”
Lady Holme sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She was trembling violently. She sat looking on the ground and trying to control her limbs. A sort of dreadful humbleness surged through her, as if she were a guilty creature about to cringe before a judge. She trembled till the sofa on which she was sitting shook. She caught hold of the cushions and made a strong effort to sit still. The handle of the door turned.
“Don’t come in!” she cried out sharply.
But the door opened and her husband appeared on the threshold. As he did so she turned swiftly so that only part of the left side of her face was towards him.
“Vi!” he said. “Poor old girl, I—”
He was coming forward when she called out again “Stay there, Fritz!”
He stopped.
“Why?” he asked.
“I—I—wait a minute. Shut the door.”
He shut the door. She was still looking away from him.
“Do you understand?” she said, still in a sharp voice.
“Understand what?”
“That I’m altered, that the accident’s altered me—very much?”
“I know. The doctor said something. But you look all right.”
“From there.”
The trembling seized her again.
“Well, but—it can’t be so bad—”
“It is. Don’t move! Fritz—”
“Well?”
“You—do you care for me?”
“Of course I do, old girl. Why, you know—”
Suddenly she turned round, stood up and faced him desperately.
“Do you care for me, Fritz?” she said.
There was a dead silence. It seemed to last for a long while. At length it was broken by a woman’s voice crying:
“Fritz,—Fritz—it isn’t my fault! It isn’t my fault!”
“Good God!” Lord Holme said slowly.
“It isn’t my fault, Fritz! It isn’t my fault!”
“Good God! but—the doctor didn’t—Oh—wait a minute—”
A door opened and shut. He was gone. Lady Holme fell down on the sofa. She was alone, but she kept on sobbing:
“It isn’t my fault, Fritz! It isn’t my fault, Fritz!”
And while she sobbed the words she knew that her life with Fritz Holme had come to an end. The chapter was closed.
From that day she had only one desire—to hide herself. The season was over. London was empty. She could travel. She resolved to disappear. Fritz had stayed on in the house, but she would not see him again, and he did not press her to. She knew why. He dreaded to look at her. She would see no one. At first there had been streams of callers, but now almost everybody had left town. Only Sir Donald came to the door each day and inquired after her health. One afternoon a note was brought to her. It was from Fritz, saying that he had been “feeling a bit chippy,” and the doctor advised him to run over to Homburg. But he wished to know what she meant to do. Would she go down to her father?—her mother, Lady St. Loo, was dead, and her father was an old man—or what? Would she come to Homburg too?
When she read those words she laughed out loud. Then she sent for theNew York Heraldand looked for the Homburg notes. She found Miss Pimpernel Schley’s name among the list of the newest arrivals. That evening she wrote to her husband:
“Do not bother about me. Go to Homburg. I need rest and I want tobe alone. Perhaps I may go to some quiet place in Switzerland withmy maid. I’ll let you know if I leave town. Good-bye.“VIOLA HOLME.”
At first she had put only Viola. Then she added the second word. Viola alone suggested an intimacy which no longer existed between her and the man she had married.
The next day Lord Holme crossed the Channel. She was left with the servants.
Till then she had not been out of the house, but two days afterwards, swathed in a thick veil, she went for a drive in the Park, and on returning from it found Sir Donald on the door-step. He looked frailer than ever and very old. Lady Holme would have preferred to avoid him. Since that interview with her husband the idea of meeting anyone she knew terrified her. But he came at once to help her out of the carriage. Her face was invisible, but he knew her, and he greeted her in a rather shaky voice. She could see that he was deeply moved, and thanked him for his many inquiries.
“But why are you still in London?” she said.
“You are still in London,” he replied.
She was about to say good-bye on the door-step; but he kept her hand in his and said:
“Let me come in and speak to you for a moment.”
“Very well,” she said.
When they were in the drawing-room she still kept the veil over her face, and remained standing.
“Sir Donald,” she said, “you cared for me, I know; you were fond of me.”
“Were?” he answered.
“Yes—were. I am no longer the woman you—other people—cared for.”
“If there is any change—” he began.
“I know. You are going to say it is not in the woman, the real woman. But I say it is. The change is in what, to men, is the real woman. This change has destroyed any feeling my husband may have had for me.”
“It could never destroy mine,” Sir Donald said quietly.
“Yes, it could—yours especially, because you are a worshipper of beauty, and Fritz never worshipped anything except himself. I am going to let you say good-bye to me without seeing me. Remember me as I was.”
“But—what do you mean? You speak as if you would no longer go into the world.”
“I go into the world! You haven’t seen me, Sir Donald.”
She saw an expression of nervous apprehension come into his face as he glanced at her veil.
“What are you going to do, then?” he said.
“I don’t know. I—I want a hiding-place.”
She saw tears come into his old, faded eyes.
“Hush!” he said. “Don’t-”
“A hiding-place. I want to travel a long way off and be quite alone, and think, and see how I can go on, if I can go on.”
Her voice was quite steady.
“If I could do something—anything for you!” he murmured.
“You fancy you are still speaking to the woman who sang, Sir Donald.”
“Would you—” Suddenly he spoke with some eagerness. “You want to go away, to be alone?”
“Yes, I must.”
“Let me lend you Casa Felice!”
“Casa Felice!”
She laughed.
“To be sure; I was to baptise it, wasn’t I?”
“Ah, that—will you have it for a while?”
“But you are going there!”
“I will not go. It is all ready. The servants are engaged. You will be perfectly looked after, perfectly comfortable. Let me feel I can do something for you. Try it. You will find beauty there—peace. And I—I shall be on the lake, not far off.”
“I must be alone,” she said wearily.
“You shall be. I will never come unless you send for me.”
“I should never send for you or for anyone.”
She did not say then what she would do, but three days later she accepted Sir Donald’s offer.
And now she was alone in Casa Felice. She had not even brought her French maid, but had engaged an Italian. She was resolved to isolate herself with people who had never seen her as a beautiful woman.
LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The strangeness of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare. When she was shut up in her bedroom in London she had thought she realised all the meaning of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then she had not begun to realise it. For she had been in her own house, in the city which contained a troop of her friends, in the city where she had reigned. And although she knew that she would reign no more, she had not grasped the exact meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known a fact but not fully felt it. She had known what she now was but not fully felt what she now was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified exclamations, had stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the dull clamour of finality as she heard it now.
She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer a beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman—she was a dreadful-looking human being.
The Italian servants by whom she was surrounded suddenly educated her in the lore of exact knowledge of herself and her present situation.
Italians are the most charming of the nations, but Italians of the lower classes are often very unreserved in the display of their most fugitive sensations, their most passing moods. The men, especially when they are young, are highly susceptible to beauty in women. They are also—and the second emotion springs naturally enough from the first—almost childishly averse from female ugliness. It is a common thing in Italy to hear of men of the lower classes speak of a woman’s plainness with brutality, with a manner almost of personal offence. They often shrink from personal ugliness as Englishmen seldom do, like children shrinking from something abnormal—a frightening dwarf, a spectre.
Now that Lady Holme had reached the “hiding-place” for which she had longed, she resolved to be brutal with herself. Till now she had almost perpetually concealed her disfigured face. Even her servants had not seen it. But in this lonely house, among these strangers, she knew that the inevitable moment was come when she must begin the new life, the terrible life that was henceforth to be hers. In her bedroom she took off her hat and veil, and without glancing into the glass she came downstairs. In the hall she met the butler. She saw him start.
“Can I have tea?” she said, looking at him steadily.
“Yes, signora,” he answered, looking down.
“In the piazza, please.”
She went out through the open door into the piazza. The boy who had sung in the boat was there, watering some geraniums in pots. As she came out he glanced up curiously, at the same time pulling off his hat. When he saw her his mouth gaped, and an expression of pitiless repulsion came into his eyes. It died out almost instantaneously, and he smiled and began to speak about the flowers. But Lady Holme had received her education. She knew what she was to youth that instinctively loves beauty.
She sat down in a cane chair. It seemed to her as if people were scourging her with thongs of steel, as if she were bleeding from the strokes.
She looked out across the lake.
The butler brought tea and put it beside her. She did not hear him come or go. Behind her the waterfall roared down between the cypresses. Before her the lake spread out its grey, unruffled surface. And this was the baptism of Casa Felice, her baptism into a new life. Her agony was the more intense because she had never been an intellectual woman, had never lived the inner life. Always she had depended on outward things. Always she had been accustomed to bustle, movement, excitement, perpetual intercourse with people who paid her homage. Always she had lived for the world, and worshipped, because she had seen those around her worshipping, the body.
And now all was taken from her. Without warning, without a moment for preparation, she was cast down into Hell. Even her youth was made useless to her.
When she thought of that she began to cry, sitting there by the stone balustrade of the piazza, to cry convulsively. She remembered her pity for old age, for the monstrous loss it cannot cease from advertising. And now she, in her youth, had passed it on the road to the pit. Lady Cardington was a beautiful woman. She pitied herself bitterly because she was morbid, as many beautiful women are when they approach old age. But she was beautiful. She would always be beautiful. She might not think it, but she was still a power, could still inspire love. In her blanched face framed in white hair there was in truth a wonderful attraction.
Whiteness—Lady Holme shuddered when she thought of whiteness, remembering what the glass had shown her.
Fritz—his animal passion for her—his horror of her now—Miss Schley—their petty, concealed strife—Rupert Carey’s love—Leo Ulford’s desire of conquest—his father’s strange, pathetic devotion—Winter falling at the feet of Spring—figures and events from the panorama of her life now ended flickered through her almost numbed mind, while the tears still ran down her face.
And Robin Pierce?
As she thought of him more life quickened in her mind.
Since her accident he had written to her several times, ardent, tender letters, recalling all he had said to her, recounting again his adoration of her for her nature, her soul, the essence of her, the woman in her, telling her that this terror which had come upon her only made her dearer to him, that—as she knew—he had impiously dared almost to long for it, as for an order of release that would take effect in the liberation of her true self.
These letters she had read, but they had not stirred her. She had told herself that Robin did not know, that he was a self-deceiver, that he did not understand his own nature, which was allied to the nature of every living man. But now, seeking some, even the smallest solace in the intense agony of desolation that was upon her, she caught—in her bleeding woman’s heart—at this hand stretched out from Rome. She got up, went to her bedroom, unlocked her despatch-box, took out these letters of Robin’s. They had not stirred her, yet she had kept them. Now she came down once more to the piazza, sat by the tea-table, opened them, read them, re-read them, whispered them over again and again. Something she must have; some hand she must catch at. She could not die in this freezing cold which she had never known, this cold that came out of the Inferno, at whose cavern mouth she stood. And Robin said he was there—Robin said he was there.
She did not love Robin. It seemed to her now that it would be grotesque for her to love any man. Her face was not meant for love. But as she read these ardent, romantic letters, written since the tragedy that had overtaken her, she began to ask herself, with a fierce anxiety, whether what Robin affirmed could be the truth? Was he unlike other men? Was his nature capable of a devotion of the soul to another soul, of a devotion to which any physical ugliness, even any physical horror, would count as nothing?
After that last scene with Fritz she felt as if he were no longer her husband, as if he were only a man who had fled from her in fear. She did not think any more of his rights, her duties. He had abandoned his rights. What duties could she have towards a man who was frightened when he looked at her? And indeed all the social and moral questions to which the average woman of the world pays—because she must pay—attention had suddenly ceased to exist for Lady Holme. She was no longer a woman of the world. All worldly matters had sunk down beneath her feet with her lost beauty. She had wanted to be free. Well, now she was surely free. Who would care what she did in the future?
Robin said he was there.
She thought that, unless she could feel that in world there was one man who wanted to take care of her, she must destroy herself. The thought grew in her as she sat there, till she said to herself, “If it is true what he says, perhaps I shall be able to live. If it is not true—” She looked over the stone balustrade at the grey waters of the lake. Twilight was darkening over them.
Late that evening, when she was sitting in the big drawing-room staring at the floor, the butler came in with a telegram. She opened it and read:
“Sir Donald has told me you are at Casa Felice; arrive to-morrowfrom Rome—ROBIN.”
“No answer,” she said.
So he was coming—to-morrow. The awful sense of desolation lifted slightly from her. A human being was travelling to her, was wanting to see her. To see her! She shuddered. Then fiercely she asked herself why she was afraid. She would not be afraid. She would trust in Robin. He was unlike other men. There had always been in him something that set him apart, a strangeness, a romance, a love of hidden things, a subtlety. If only he would still care for her, still feel towards her as he had felt, she could face the future, she thought. They might be apart. That did not matter. She had no thought of a close connection, of frequent intercourse even. She only wanted desperately, frantically, to know that someone who had loved her could love her still in spite of what had happened. If she could retain one deep affection she felt that she could live.
The morrow would convince her.
That night she did not sleep. She lay in bed and heard the water falling in the gorge, and when the dawn began to break she did a thing she had not done for a long time.
She got out of bed, knelt down and prayed—prayed to Him who had dealt terribly with her that He would be merciful when Robin came.
When it was daylight and the Italian maid knocked at her door she told her to get out a plain, dark dress. She did her hair herself with the utmost simplicity. That at least was still beautiful. Then she went down and walked in the high garden above the lake. The greyness had lifted and the sky was blue. The mellowness rather than the sadness of autumn was apparent, throned on the tall mountains whose woods were bathed in sunshine. All along the great old wall, that soared forty feet from the water, roses were climbing. Scarlet and white geraniums bloomed in discoloured ancient vases. Clumps of oleanders showed pink showers of blossoms. Tall bamboos reared their thin heads towards the tufted summits of palms that suggested Africa. Monstrous cypresses aspired, with a sort of haughty resignation, above their brother trees. The bees went to and fro. Flies circled and settled. Lizards glided across the warm stones and rustled into hiding among the ruddy fallen leaves. And always the white water sang in the gorge as it rushed towards the piazza of Casa Felice.
And Lady Holme tried to hope.
Yet, as she walked slowly to and fro amid the almost rank luxuriance of the garden, she was gnawed by a terrible anxiety. The dreadful humbleness, the shrinking cowardice of the unsightly human being invaded her. She strove to put them from her. She strove to call Robin’s own arguments and assertions to her aid. What she had been she still was in all essentials. Her self was unharmed, existed, could love, hate, be tender, be passionate as before. Viola was there still within her, the living spirit to which a name had been given when she was a little child. The talent was there which had spoken, which could still speak, through her voice. The beating heart was there which could still speak through her actions. The mysteries of the soul still pursued their secret courses within her, like far-off subterranean streams. The essential part of her remained as it had been. Only a little outside bit of a framework had been twisted awry. Could that matter very much? Had she not perhaps been morbid in her despair?
She determined to take courage. She told herself that if she allowed this dreadful, invading humbleness way in her she would lose all power to dominate another by showing that she had ceased to dominate herself. If she met Robin in fear and trembling she would actually teach him to despise her. If she showed that she thought herself changed, horrible, he would inevitably catch her thought and turn it to her own destruction. Men despise those who despise themselves. She knew that, and she argued with herself, fought with herself. If Robin loved the angel; surely he could still love. For if there were an angel within her it had not been harmed. And she leaned on the stone wall and prayed again while the roses touched her altered face.
It seemed to her then that courage was sent to her. She felt less terrified of what was before her, as if something had risen up within her upon which she could lean, as if her soul began to support the trembling, craven thing that would betray her, began to teach it how to be still.
She did not feel happy, but she felt less desperately miserable than she had felt since the accident.
Afterdejeunershe walked again in the garden. As the time drew near for Robin to arrive, the dreadful feverish anxiety of the early morning awoke again within her. She had not conquered herself. Again the thought of suicide came upon her, and she felt that her life or death were in the hands of this man whom yet she did not love. They were in his hands because he was a human being and she was one. There are straits in which the child of life, whom the invisible hand that is extended in a religion has not yet found, must find in the darkness a human hand stretched out to it or sink down in utter terror and perhaps perish. Lady Holme was in such a strait. She knew it. She said to herself quite plainly that if Robin failed to stretch out his hand to her she could not go on living. It was clear to her that her life or death depended upon whether he remained true to what he had said was his ideal, or whether he proved false to it and showed himself such a man as Fritz, as a thousand others.
She sickened with anxiety as the moments passed.
Now, leaning upon the wall, she began to scan the lake. Presently she saw the steamer approaching the landing-stage of Carate on the opposite bank. The train from Rome had arrived. But Robin would doubtless come by boat. There was at least another hour to wait. She left the wall and walked quickly up and down, moving her hands and her lips. Now she almost wished he were not coming. She recalled the whole story of her acquaintance with Robin—his adoration of her when she was a girl, his wish to marry her, his melancholy when she refused him, his persistent affection for her after she had married Fritz, his persistent belief that there was that within her which Fritz did not understand and could never satisfy, his persistent obstinacy in asserting that he had the capacity to understand and content this hidden want. Was that true?
Fritz had cared for nothing but the body, yet she had loved Fritz. She did not love Robin. Yet there was a feeling in her that if he proved true to his ideal now she might love him in the end. If only he would love her—after he knew.
She heard a sound of oars. The blood rushed to her face. She drew back from the wall and hurried into her house. All the morning she had been making up her mind to go to meet Robin at once in the sunlight, to let him know all at once. But now, in terror, she went to her room. With trembling hands she pinned on a hat; she took out of a drawer the thick veil she wore when travelling and tied it tightly over her face. Panic seized her.
There was a knock at the door, the announcement that a signore was waiting in the drawing-room for the signora.
Lady Holme felt an almost ungovernable sensation of physical nausea. She went to her dressing-case and drank one or two burning drops of eau de Cologne. Then she pulled down the veil under her chin and stood in the middle of the room for several minutes without moving. Then she went downstairs quickly and went quickly into the drawing-room.
Robin was there, standing by the window. He looked excited, with an excitement of happiness, and this gave to him an aspect of almost boyish youth. His long black eyes shone with eagerness when she came into the room. But when he saw the veil his face changed.
“You don’t trust me!” he said, without any greeting.
She went up to him and put out her hand.
“Robin!” she said.
“You don’t trust me,” he repeated.
He took her hand. His was hot.
“Robin—I’m a coward,” she said.
Her voice quivered.
“Oh, my dearest!” he exclaimed, melted in a moment.
He took her other hand, and she felt his hands throbbing. His clasp was so ardent that it startled her into forgetting everything for one instant, everything that except these clasping hands loved her hands, loved her. That instant was exquisitely sweet to her. There was a stinging sweetness in it, a mystery of sweetness, as if their four hands were four souls longing to be lost in one another.
“Now you’ll trust me,” he said.
She released her hands and immediately her terror of doubt returned.
“Let us go into the garden,” she answered.
He followed her to the path beside the wall.
“I looked for you from here,” she said.
“I did not see you.”
“No. When I heard the boat I—Robin, I’m afraid—I’m afraid.”
“Of me, Viola?”
He laughed joyously.
“Take off your veil,” he said.
“No, no—not yet. I want to tell you first—”
“To tell me what?”
“That my—that my—Robin, I’m not beautiful now.”
Her voice quivered again.
“You tell me so,” he answered.
“It’s true.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“But,” she began, almost desperately, “it’s true, Robin, oh, it’s true! When Fritz—”
She stopped. She was choking.
“Oh—Fritz!” he said with scathing contempt.
“No, no, listen! You’ve got to listen.” She put her hand on his arm. “When Fritz saw me—afterwards he—he was afraid of me. He couldn’t speak to me. He just looked and said—and said—”
Tears were running down behind the veil. He put up his hand to hers, which still touched his arm.
“Don’t tell me what he said. What do I care? Viola, you know I’ve almost longed for this—no, not that, but—can’t you understand that when one loves a woman one loves something hidden, something mystical? It’s so much more than a face that one loves. One doesn’t want to live in a house merely because it’s got a nice front door.”
He laughed again as if he were half ashamed of his own feeling.
“Is that true, Robin?”
The sound of her voice told him that he need not be afraid to be passionate.
“Sit down here,” he said.
They had reached an old stone bench at the end of the garden where the woods began. Two cypresses towered behind it, sad-looking sentinels. There was a gap in the wall here through which the lake could be seen as one sat upon the bench.
“I want to make you understand, to make you trust me.”
She sat down without speaking, and he sat beside her.
“Viola,” he said, “there are many men who love only what they can see, and never think of the spirit behind it. They care only for a woman’s body. For them the woman’s body is the woman. I put it rather brutally. What they can touch, what they can kiss, what they can hold in their arms is all to them. They are unconscious of the distant, untameable woman, the lawless woman who may be free in the body that is captive, who may be unknown in the body that is familiar, who may even be pure in the body that is defiled as she is immortal though her body is mortal. These men love the flesh only. But there are at least some men who love the spirit. They love the flesh, too, because it manifests the spirit, but to them the spirit is the real thing. They are always stretching out their arms to that. The hearth can’t satisfy them. They demand the fire. The fire, the fire!” he repeated, as if the word warmed him. “I’ve so often thought of this, imagined this. It’s as if I’d actually foreseen it.”
He spoke with gathering excitement.
“What?” she murmured.
“That some day the woman men—those men I’ve spoken of—loved would be struck down, and the real woman, the woman of the true beauty, the mystic, the spirit woman, would be set free. If this had not happened you could perhaps never have known who was the man that really loved you—that loved the real you, the you that lies so far beyond the flesh, the you that has sung and suffered—”
“Ah, suffered!” she said.
But there was a note of something that was not sorrow in her voice.
“If you want to know the man I mean,” Robin said, “lift up your veil, Viola.”
She sat quite still for a moment, a moment that seemed very long. Then she put up both hands to her head, untied the veil and let it fall into her lap. He looked at her, and there was silence. They heard the bees humming. There were many among the roses on the wall. She had turned her face fully towards him, but she kept her eyes on the veil that lay in her lap. It was covered with little raised black spots. She began to count them. As the number mounted she felt her body turning gradually cold.
“Fifteen—sixteen-seventeen”—she formed the words with her lips, striving to concentrate her whole soul upon this useless triviality—“eighteen—nineteen—twenty.”
Little drops of moisture came out upon her temples. Still the silence continued. She knew that all this time Robin was looking into her face. She felt his eyes like two knives piercing her face.
“Twenty-one—twenty-two—”
“Viola!”
He spoke at last and his voice was extraordinary. It was husky, and sounded desperate and guilty.
“Well?” she said, still looking at the spots.
“Now you know the man I spoke of.”
Yes, it was a desperate voice and hard in its desperation.
“You mean that you are the man?”
Still she did not look up. After a pause she heard him say:
“Yes, that I am the man.”
Then she looked up. His face was scarlet, like a face flushed with guilt. His eyes met hers with a staring glance, yet they were furtive. His hands were clenched on his knees. When she looked at him he began to smile.
“Viola,” he said, “Viola.”
He unclenched his hands and put them out towards her, as if to take her hands. She did not move.
“Poor Robin!” she said.
“Poor—but—what do you mean?” he stammered.
He never turned his eyes from her face.
“Poor Robin!—but it isn’t your fault.”
Then she put out her hand and touched his gently.
“My fault?
“That it was all a fancy, all a weaving of words. You want to be what you thought you were, but you can’t be.”
“You’re wrong, Viola, you’re utterly wrong—”
“Hush, Robin! That woman you spoke of—that woman knows.”
He cleared his throat, got up, went over to the wall, leaned his arms upon it and hid his face on them. There were tears in his eyes. At that moment he was suffering more than she was. His soul was rent by an abject sense of loss, an abject sense of guilty impotence and shame. It was frightful that he could not be what he wished to be, what he had thought he was. He longed to comfort her and could not do anything but plunge a sword into her heart. He longed to surround her with tenderness—yes, he was sure he longed—but he could only hold up to her in the sun her loneliness. And he had lost—what had he not lost? A dream of years, an imagination that had been his inseparable and dearest companion. His loneliness was intense in that moment as was hers. The tears seemed to scald his eyes. In his heart he cursed God for not permitting him to be what he longed to be, to feel what he longed to feel. It seemed to him monstrous, intolerable, that even our emotions are arranged for us as are arranged the events of our lives. He felt like a doll, a horrible puppet.
“Poor old Robin!”
She was standing beside him, and in her voice there was, just for a moment, the sound that sometimes comes into a mother’s voice when she speaks to her little child in the dark.
At the moment when he knew he did not love the white angel she stood beside him.
And she thought that she was only a wretched woman.