CHAPTER X
Clarissahas got my letter! But that is not all. I delivered it myself. I have met Clarissa, have talked with her, have passed that third stage in my journey which an odd week or so ago I would not have credited as possible.
Oh, but you will laugh when you hear the little that I said to her—the little indeed that she said to me. Yet it is the beginning. She still has my letter to read. I find myself gazing into distances which I never knew of, seeking for the answer she will give.
It came about much as I had expected; more easily, too, for the matter of that. And the longer I keep my secret to myself, the more confident am I that Bellwattle knows all about it. Does she speak to her husband, I wonder? Somehow I think not. The days go by. The hope of fish in the river becomes more and more remote. Cruikshank works on solemnly in his garden and never says a word to me questioning why I remain. Perhaps that is because she has told him. Yet is he ever actor enough to keep it so stubbornly to himself? He may be. Possibly I do not know the nature of these gardeners. There may be depths in Cruikshank's mind which I have never fathomed.
Whether that be the case or no, Bellwattle guesses. I am quite sure of that. A thousand times I have been so eager to know the nature of her guessing that I have well-nigh told her all. It has been on the end of my tongue when a sudden timidity has caught it back. And now that I have met Clarissa, the timidity is no less. It is more.
Three nights in succession, Bellwattle and I have been out in a fruitless search upon the cliffs. Not a soul have we seen. I have even begun to wonder whether the Miss Fennells were made suspicious by the questions I had asked, for on each occasion a light was shining in Clarissa's room and not a sign of movement came from within the house.
"I thought," said Bellwattle, on the third evening, "I thought the Miss Fennells said they took their invalid out for a walk when it was dark."
I did not look at her. I knew she was looking at me.
"So they said," I replied.
"I'm rather curious to see that invalid," she went on; "they say in the village here that she's not an invalid at all."
"What then?" I asked.
"Oh—all sorts of stories. Tierney told me the other day—Tierney is our town-councillor and plumber. As a human being he lets the drains get into disorder—as a town-councillor he gives himself the contract to see to them, and as a plumber he partly puts them right. You ought to meet him. But he told me that she was a black from the West Indies."
"How did he know that?" I asked, quickly, and the next moment I saw how my words must imply knowledge to her.
"He doesn't know it," said she. "Why should he? Isn't it when people don't know things that they talk about them?"
I laughed. If she applies that little piece of wisdom to me who say nothing, can there be any doubt but that she guesses at the truth?
"But what makes your friend Tierney suppose anything so extravagant as a black from the West Indies?" I asked.
She raised her eye-brows, which, in its way, is just as expressive as shrugging one's shoulders.
"I think the Miss Fennells have given it out that she comes from America, and if you think of the veil she wears always and the fact that no one in Ballysheen has ever seen her face, you've got enough to make people in a small Irish village say far more extravagant things than that. Mind you, I don't believe what Tierney says. I shouldn't be a bit surprised to find that she is beautiful."
That very nearly drew me; but not quite. I know she is beautiful. Not because I have that young man's word for it. I see her beautiful, as that type nearly always is. Every time the name Clarissa finds its way into my thoughts, there creeps in with it a picture which eludes all description of outline. I see a dim vision of deep dark eyes set in that faint blue-white—the white of old china he called it. God knows I thank him for nothing, unless it be for that. She has an olive skin, so tenderly touched with those southern suns that ivory might match it. Her mouth is sad, for when the God of a Thousand Circumstances takes a woman in His grasp, He lets fall two drops of sorrow in her eyes and moulds her lips to His own making. Then her hair I know is black; but in the blackness of it I can see a light of brown as though it once had caught a sun ray in its net and caged it there for ever.
More clear a vision than this, the picture of Clarissa denies me. I shall know her no better when I see her face than I know her already now; yet something dreads me to think of that first moment when she removes her veil. The dread is not that I shall see her. The look in that little nursery maid's eyes, in many another woman's face as well, comes quickly into my mind and I know it is the dread that she will see me.
Is it from such men as I that women take advice? Sometimes I am afraid she will not listen to me, that she will never go back to her sunny islands; that she will let herself be taken into the heart of that underworld where her lover has the substance of his being, and there will be a still deeper sorrow, a greater trouble than before, which she will never bring to me.
It was a sore temptation then to tell Bellwattle how beautiful I know Clarissa to be. But I resisted it, and we returned that third evening without reward. It was the very next night, however, that our patience bore fruit.
"Are you two always going to go out in the evening?" asked Cruikshank, when we looked into the room to give him a friendly nod of the head.
"Come with us," said Bellwattle.
He shook us a negative, and I thought for the moment, I could not tell you why, that he was not happy; that somewhere in his philosophy, a link was loosened that made the whole chain weak.
"Do come," I said.
But he shook his head again.
"I've got this book to read," said he. "A man's more than a dog in the manger. He's not contented with the sole occupation of his stall; he wants other dogs to sit by and envy him. Out you go."
And out we went, but it was cold that night and, coming back to get a shawl for Bellwattle, I saw Cruikshank through a break in the curtains. His book was laid down upon the table and his face was hidden in his hands.
"There is no sense in disturbing a man when he's like that," I said to myself, but it fell heavily on my mind and I wondered whether any man's philosophy were complete.
When I came back to Bellwattle I said nothing. A man's wife knows more of him than does any outsider, and to ask her questions is only to put one's self further from the truth. Until we came to the Miss Fennell's house, we walked in silence. It was then, when I saw no light in Clarissa's window, that I felt the first intimation of what might soon be accomplished in the progress of my journey, and my hand went to my pocket to see that the letter was there.
"They've gone to bed early this evening," said Bellwattle, whereby I knew that the same thought had crossed her mind as well.
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"The light in that upper window. It's usually lit at this time. P'r'aps they've gone out for their walk."
I agreed that it was possible, but I said no more. She saw from my manner then, no doubt, that it was useless to try and draw me further, wherefore, as a woman will, she shot away at a tangent and talked of London, that I might think the matter no longer interested her. She asked me what I did with my days.
I could not help but laugh at her question.
"Ask me what the days do with me?" said I, "they are my masters, not I theirs."
"You do nothing?"
"Nothing that can be called anything. When a man is situated in life as I am, having been brought up to no profession, supported by a father whose support would be generous were it not that he gives as little as he can, when a man is situated like that, to do nothing is an art which needs the most exhausting study, in which so many are failures that you may count the successes on the fingers of your one hand."
"And you've succeeded?" said she.
"It's the only pride I have," said I. "There are not many men in London who can do nothing so well as I can on fifteen hundred a year."
"And you've no ambition to do anything else?"
"There's only one ambition," I replied, "only one worth the having."
"What's that?"
"To do something for some one else."
"Well?" said she, expectantly.
"Well!" I answered.
"What's to prevent you being ambitious?" she asked.
"The fact," said I, "that there is no one else."
She stopped for a moment, and looked down the cliffside where Dandy was worrying himself with a rabbit hole. Hearing the cessation of our voices he looked up, and his nose was comical with red earth.
She laughed at him and then she said: "Isn't Dandy some one?"
"I'm constrained to find him somebody," said I.
She looked at me queerly for a moment—no, not queerly, for in her eyes, as it were, I felt the touch of her hand and why, I cannot tell you, for she is twenty-seven and I am forty-three, but a thought of my mother in no special sense just passed across my mind. Possibly it was because no woman has looked at me like that since she was alive; or maybe it was a sentimental imagination. The best thoughts we have, the best emotions, so I am told, are only sentimentality.
I could not tell you how long that glance of hers had lasted when out of the silence, which, like a tireless sentinel, stands guard upon those cliffs, there came the sound of nearing voices. They drew closer out of the immense stillness as figures come towards you out of a mist. We turned for an instant in their direction, and then as Dandy, hearing them too, rushed up the cliff and off into the darkness, barking wildly, Bellwattle looked at me and whispered—
"These are the Miss Fennells," and she laid her fingers tight about my wrist.
I knew then that what I had felt in her eyes was true. It had been the touch of her hand.