CHAPTER VIII
A WEEK later Kingslake was sitting in his study, before a table littered with papers, doing nothing. It was nearly twelve o’clock. At half-past one Philippa Burton was coming to lunch.
He had not seen her now for eight days, a period which, he impatiently admitted to himself, had seemed more like eight weeks, and the morning had appeared interminable.
She was to have gone to the rooms his wife had taken for her in the village, the day after Mayne’s arrival, but she had written to Cecily that a piece of work—a commission—must keep her longer in town.
He thought of her incessantly—and confusedly. She was the most wonderful woman he had ever met; the cleverest, the most elusive, the purest-minded. That was so touching, so adorable in Philippa, yet at unguarded moments he wondered if it could be cured. Philippa as a friend, an inspirer, a twin soul!How exquisite she had been—wouldbe. But Philippa as a mistress? The thought would obtrude. He took it from its depths, and caressed it at furtive moments, thinking with rapture of her eyes, her mysterious hair—then thrust it hastily back, piling lilies of thought above its hiding-place. It would have surprised him to know he was thinking at second hand, but Robert seldom dug to the depths. It was characteristic of him that he never saw the roots of his own motives and actions,—it was merely their interlacing leaves and flowers to which he directed his attention.
A voice outside in the garden broke in upon his musing—his wife’s voice, followed by a man’s laugh. He got up, and glanced under the sun-blind which shielded the window. Cecily was picking the flowers for the lunch-table, and Mayne, seated on a bench before a rustic table, was tying flies for fishing. For a moment Robert experienced a curious, uneasy sensation. It was almost like shame, and he dismissed it with a decided recognition of its idiocy. Mayne had settled down very well. It was a splendid thing for Cecily to have some one fresh to talk to. It was pitiful to think how selfish most men were to their wives—how jealous.... It was only ten minutespast twelve. The morning seemed endless, and he was unable to do a stroke of work. It was dreadful to have days like that. Somewhere in the distance he heard Diana calling.
“Coming,” answered Cecily in response, and presently he saw her moving towards the house.
Mayne continued to occupy himself with his fishing-tackle, as, during his restless pacing to and fro in his study, Kingslake could see. Presently he opened the French window and stepped out onto the grass. Mayne looked up from his work. The bench on which he was sitting was flanked by a wall of yew, which made part of a formal enclosure framed on three sides by yew hedges, and open, on the fourth, to the rest of the garden only by a narrow archway cut out of the living green. It was a charming, sheltered little spot, where Cecily’s white lilies flourished; a sort of dedication, she said, to the larger garden outside.
“Holloa!” observed Mayne, as Kingslake came nearer. “Knocked off for the day? Is the muse coy?”
“Yes,” returned Robert, rather irritably. “I’m not getting on. Change of place, I suppose. Anything like that affects me.” He took out his cigarette-case.
“Delicate machinery you writing people must have. Something’s always going wrong with the works, isn’t it?”
“Oh, more or less,” Robert returned, passing his hand through his hair with a gesture habitual to him.
“You’ve been working in town lately, haven’t you?”
“Yes, getting up stuff for this book. But that’s finished. Now there’s only the writing.”
“Good Lord!” ejaculated Mayne, with a groan. “Only the writing! The mere thought of it makes me gasp.”
Robert smiled. “Ican’t tie flies,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of Mayne’s litter of silk and tinsel.
“No, but you land your fish with the best of us.... That last book of yours caught on, didn’t it?”
“Oh, it brought me in something, I’m glad to say.”
Mayne leaned back against the yew hedge, stretching out his long legs contentedly. He tilted up his face towards the serene blue sky, then glanced round him, his look taking in the flowers, the dancing butterflies above them, the delicate shadows on the grass.
“What do you want money for in Arcadia?” he asked.
“To get out of it,” returned Robert, with a sort of impatient bitterness.
Mayne glanced sharply at him as he half turned away to light the cigarette he held.
“You are really going to town in the autumn? But I thought you were so keen on this?” He waved his hand comprehensively.
“Oh, my dear fellow!” exclaimed Kingslake, irritably. “It’s all right, but one can’t live on lilies and roses, you know.” He broke off abruptly. “Listen! Was that the bell?”
“I don’t think so,” returned Dick, composedly. “Why? Expecting any one?”
“Oh, no—no!” There was quite an elaborate unconcern in his tone. “That is, a friend of Cecily’s—a Miss Burton—is coming to lunch, I believe.”
Mayne had resumed his work. For the fraction of a second his deft fingers stopped in their movement. Robert was walking backwards and forwards across the little strip of turf in front of the seat. When he spoke again, it was abruptly.
“You don’t think Cecily’s looking well, do you?”
“Not at all well,” returned Mayne, quietly.
“No—no,” said her husband, the second negation indicating that he was giving the matter his full attention. “I don’t think she is. She took the baby’s death to heart.” He threw a quick glance at his companion. “She—she wants rousing. I think you’ll do her a lot of good, Mayne. I’m glad you’re able to stay a little while; it’s what she wants—an interest for her. An old friend, and that sort of thing. You must come and look us up when we’re in town.”
“Thanks,” returned Mayne, laconically. There was a pause. Robert took out his handkerchief, and wiped his forehead.
“Doesn’t get any cooler, does it?” he remarked.
“I’m glad on your wife’s account that you’re going to live in town,” Mayne said presently.
Robert looked, as he felt, genuinely surprised. “For Cecily? Why?”
“Don’t you think she’s rather thrown away here?” The quietness of his tone irritated Robert. He reminded himself that he had never really liked Mayne. He was rather an unfriendly brute.
“Thrown away?” he repeated; “oh, I don’t know. Why? A woman has herhouse—and the neighbors; and she’s very fond of the garden, and that sort of thing.”
“That sort of thing used not to be very much in her line.”
“Oh, yes, I know!” exclaimed Kingslake, impatiently, as he balanced himself on the arm of the bench. “All girls—especially the rather spoilt sort of girl that Cecily was—get ideas into their heads. But, my dear fellow, a woman nearly always settles down after she’s married.”
“Some of your most striking novels are founded on a contrary opinion,” observed Mayne, with a laugh. “You see you are read—even in the wilds.”
“You flatter me,” said Robert, dryly. He moved again, and began his restless pacing. “Cecily, I suppose, has been complaining—telling you that it was my wish to come into the country, and so forth?” he broke out at last with some resentment.
Mayne lifted his head. “She has never mentioned the subject to me,” he answered, shortly. “I was only thinking of her as I knew her, five or six years ago. She was considered—well—rather brilliant, in those days. Does she write now?” The question was put suddenly.
“Not that I know of,” Kingslake answered, absently. Mayne glanced at him with a curious expression. He wondered whether he was aware of the illuminating quality of his indifferent reply. Did he know what a milestone he had pointed out in the matrimonial road?
“Women don’t really care a snap of the fingers about art,” Robert went on, with confidential fluency. “Matrimony is the goal of their ambition; that once attained, they sit ever afterwards serenely on the shore, watching the struggles of the rest of their sex towards the same haven.”
A magazine was lying on the bench—one of the Quarterlies. Mayne fluttered the leaves with a smile.
“Mrs. Kingslake left this here,” he said. “I envy you your power of detachment when you write articles, Kingslake.A Vindication of Woman’s Claim in Art, by Fergus Macdonald. That’s your writing name, isn’t it? I seem to be turning your own weapons against you with horrid frequency. I’m sorry,” he laughed again.
“You misunderstand me!” protested Robert. “Didn’t I say ‘the women who marry’? I meant to. What I said doesn’t apply to thewomen nowadays who don’t marry—have no wish to marry. That such women may be artists, actual or potential, I have no doubt. When a woman is not preoccupied with the affairs of sex——”
“She’s generally wanting to be.”
Kingslake stopped short in his harangue, and looked at the other man doubtfully. “You take a cynical view,” he said.
“No. Merely a natural one.”
“You don’t believe that some women deliberately put love out of their lives?” asked Robert, tentatively.
“My dear chap, love never gives some women a chance to be so rude.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean the sort of woman whohasa chance.”
“She’d take it.”
Kingslake regarded him with a curious expression for a moment; there was a look of dawning hope in his face, a half smile of pleased expectancy. Then it faded, and he resumed his former slightly sententious manner. “My dear Mayne,” he replied, “you’ve been out in the wilds for some years. You can’t be expected to know the spirit of the times. You don’t understand the modern woman.”
“My dear Kingslake,” returned Mayne,with great deliberation, “if I’d been out in the wilds, as you say, for fifty instead of five years, I should still disbelieve in her existence. There’s no such thing as a modern woman. She’s exactly as old as Eve. She doesn’t shake her curls nowadays, nor have hysterics. She writes for theDaily Mail, and plays hockey. But do you seriously think these trifling differences affect the eternal feminine? Not a bit of it.”
Robert looked at his watch. “I say, I’ve stopped, surely. It must be more than half-past twelve. What do you make it?”
Dick slowly drew out his watch. “Five-and-twenty past.” Kingslake threw away his half-smoked cigarette, and began to light another one. Mayne watched him.
“Do you know this lady who is coming to lunch?” he asked, carelessly.
The match burnt Kingslake’s fingers as he raised his head, and he uttered a hasty observation.
“I met her the other day in town,” he added, as a pendant.
“Isshea modern woman?” asked Mayne. The casualness of his tone reassured Robert.
“Yes,” he returned, emphatically. “At least I should imagine so. She’s an artist.Has a studio of her own, and so forth. She’s had a hard time of it, poor girl....” He looked meditatively at the glowing end of his cigarette. “There’sa woman now,” he broke out, “who has an absolute, a perfectly disinterested love of art for its own sake. She’s a case in point.”
“Did she tell you so?”
“Yes,” returned Robert, unguardedly, warming to his subject. “She doesn’t think of love; she doesn’t want it. She looks upon it as unnecessary—a hindrance—a barrier to her intellectual life.”
“Rather a communicative young lady, eh?” was Mayne’s comment.
Robert flushed. “Oh, in the course of conversation....” he began, hurriedly. He was cut short by Diana, who emerged from the porch with a tray of cut flowers.
“I’m going to do them out here,” she began. “It’s too boiling for anything in the house. Robert!” as her eyes fell upon him, “why are you idling here? Out for five minutes’ play, I suppose. That’s right. Get back to your work like a good little fellow, and see what an industrious boy you can be. It’s not nearly lunch-time yet.”
Robert smiled indulgently. “Quite right.I’m frightfully slack to-day somehow,” he said, as he turned towards the study. “This beastly heat, I suppose.”
Diana gave a mischievous chuckle as he disappeared.
“I do love to watch the celebrity at home,” she said in a low voice, choked with laughter. “Robert’s not done astrokeof work this morning. He’s been looking out of the window with a yearning gaze, like this.” She made one of her inimitable faces.
Mayne grinned. “As a sister-in-law, Diana, you are a treasure.”
“There’s the bell!” exclaimed the girl. “That means the History-Book, I expect. I wonder whether Cecily’s ready. I hope she’s putting on her blue muslin. I told her to. Come along! We must go and see her, I suppose.”
Within, Cecily was going forward to meet her guest.
The women exchanged a swift glance of mutual interest, while Philippa impulsively put out both hands. Cecily took one of them, and ignored the inclination of Philippa’s face towards hers.
“How do you do? I hope you are not very tired?” she began.
“Cecily!” cried Philippa, rapturously. “After all these years!”
“Yes, but they had to pass, did they not?” returned her hostess in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’m so sorry you’ve been ill. But you are better, surely? If you hate looking ill as much as I do, I’m sure you’ll like to be told that it doesn’t show.”
Philippa smiled, a little sadly. “Oh, it’s nothing. I’m not very robust, that’s all,” she returned, patiently. “Is this Diana—the baby Diana I used to hear about when we were schoolgirls?”
Diana, who had entered the hall with Mayne, shook hands with the brusqueness which characterizes the young girl when she is at the same time shy and aggressive. “Affected fool,” was her brief mental verdict, as she glared at Philippa’s artless, unfashionable hat and brown sandals.
“Mr. Mayne—Miss Burton,” murmured Cecily.
“We have met before—at Lady Wilmot’s, haven’t we?” smiled Philippa, as they shook hands.
The door opened at the moment to admit Robert.
“Ah, I thought I heard voices!” heexclaimed, genially. “How do you do, Miss Burton?”
Diana giggled as she retired with Mayne to the window-seat.
“Robert’s up and down like a dog in a fair,” she whispered, irreverently. “He’ll get on splendidly with the History-Book. What an idiot she looks in that Twopenny Tube dress, doesn’t she? ... and then you and I and Cis can play about and amuse ourselves, and have a lovely time. What are you staring at, Dick? Don’t. She’ll think you’re admiring her; and she’s just as conceited as a peacock already.”