XXX.
KATE CLEPHANE was wakened by the slant of Riviera sun across her bed.
The hotel was different; it was several rungs higher on the ladder than the Minorque et l’Univers, as its name—the Petit Palais—plainly indicated. The bedroom, too, was bigger, more modern, more freshly painted; and the corner window of the tiny adjoiningsalonactually clipped a wedge of sea in its narrow frame.
So much was changed for the better in Mrs. Clephane’s condition; in other respects, she had the feeling of having simply turned back a chapter, and begun again at the top of the same dull page.
Her maid, Aline, was obviously of the same opinion; in spite of the more commodious room, and the sitting-room with its costly inset of sea, Mrs. Clephane had not recovered her lost prestige in Aline’s estimation. “What was the good of all the fuss if it was to end inthis?” Aline’s look seemed to say, every morning when she brought in the breakfast-tray. Even the fact that letters now lay on it more frequently, and that telegrams were no longer considered epoch-making, did not compensate for the general collapse of Aline’s plans and ambitions.When one had had a good roof over one’s head, and a good motor at one’s door, what was the sense of bolting away from them at a moment’s notice and coming back to second-rate hotels and rattling taxis, with all the loss of consequence implied? Aline remained icily silent when her mistress, after a few weeks at the Petit Palais, mentioned that she had written to enquire about prices at Dinard for the summer.
Kate Clephane, on the whole, took the change more philosophically. To begin with, it had been her own choice to fly as she had; and that in itself was a help—at times; and then—well, yes,—already, after the first weeks, she had begun to be aware that she was slipping back without too much discomfort into the old groove.
The first month after her arrival wouldn’t yet bear thinking about; but it was well behind her now, and habit was working its usual miracle. She had been touched by the welcome her old friends and acquaintances had given her, and exquisitely relieved—after the first plunge—to find herself again among people who asked no questions about her absence, betrayed no curiosity about it, and probably felt none. They were all very much occupied with each other’s doings when they were together, but the group was so continually breaking up and reshaping itself, with the addition of new elements, and the departing scattered in so many differentdirections, and toward destinations so unguessable, that once out of sight they seemed to have no more substance or permanence than figures twitching by on a film.
This sense of unsubstantiality had eased Kate Clephane’s taut nerves, and helped her to sink back almost unaware into her old way of life. Enough was known of her own existence in the interval—a shadowy glimpse of New York opulence, an Opera box, a massive and important family, a beautiful daughter married to a War Hero—to add considerably to her standing in the group; but her Riviera friends were all pleasantly incurious as to details. In most of their lives there were episodes to be bridged over by verbal acrobatics, and they were all accustomed to taking each other’s fibs at their face-value. Of Mrs. Clephane they did not even ask any: she came back handsomer, better dressed—yes, my dear, actuallysables!—and she offered them cock-tails and Mah-Jongg in her own sitting-room (with a view of the sea thrown in). They were glad of so useful a recruit, and the distance between her social state and theirs was not wide enough to awaken acrimony or envy.
“Aline!”
The maid’s door was just across the passage now; she appeared almost at once, bearing a breakfast-tray on which were several letters.
“Violets!” she announced with a smile; Aline’sseverity had of late been tempered by an occasional smile. But Mrs. Clephane did not turn her head; her colour did not change. These violets were not from the little lame boy whose bouquet had flushed her with mysterious hopes on the day when her daughter’s cable had called her home; the boy she had set up for life (it had been her first thought after landing) because of that happy coincidence. Today’s violets embodied neither hope nor mystery. She knew from whom they came, and what stage in what game they represented; and lifting them from the tray after a brief sniff, she poured out her chocolate with a steady hand. Aline, perceptibly rebuffed, but not defeated, put the flowers into a glass on her mistress’s dressing-table. “There,” the gesture said, “she can’t help seeing them.”
Mrs. Clephane leaned back against her pink-lined pillows, and sipped her chocolate with deliberation. She had not yet opened the letters, or done more than briefly muster their superscriptions. None from her daughter: Anne, at the moment, was half-way across the Red Sea, on her way to India, and there would be no news of her for several weeks to come. None of the letters was interesting enough to be worth a glance. Mrs. Clephane went over them once or twice, as if looking for one that was missing; then she pushed them aside and took up the local newspaper.
She had got back into her old habit of lingeringon every little daily act, making the most of it, spreading it out over as many minutes as possible, in the effort to cram her hours so full that there should be no time for introspection or remembrance; and she read the paper carefully, from the grandiloquent leading article on the wonders of the approaching Carnival to the column in which the doings of the local and foreign society were glowingly recorded.
“The flower of the American colony and the most distinguished French and foreign notabilities of the Riviera will meet this afternoon at the brilliant reception which Mrs. Parley Plush has organized at her magnificent Villa Mimosa in honour of the Bishop of the American Episcopal churches in Europe.”
Ah—to be sure; it was today! Kate Clephane laid down the newspaper with a smile. She was recalling Mrs. Minity’s wrath when it had been announced that the reception for the new Bishop was to be given by Mrs. Parley Plush—Mrs. Plush, of all people! Mrs. Minity was not an active member of the Reverend Mr. Merriman’s parochial committees; her bodily inertia, and the haunting fear of what might happen if her coachman tried to turn the horses in the narrow street in which the Rectory stood, debarred her from such participation; but she was nevertheless a pillar of the church, by reason of a small but regular donation to itsfund and a large and equally regular commentary on its affairs. Mr. Merriman gave her opinions almost the importance she thought they deserved; and a dozen times in the season Mrs. Merriman was expected to bear the brunt of her criticisms, and persuade her not to give up her pew and stop her subscription. “That woman,” Mrs. Minity would cry, “whom I have taken regularly for a drive once a fortnight all winter, and supplied with brandy-peaches when I had to go without myself!”
Mrs. Minity, on the occasion of the last drive, had not failed to tell Mrs. Merriman what she thought of the idea—put forward, of course, by Mrs. Plush herself—of that lady’s being chosen to entertain the new Bishop on his first tour of his diocese. The scandal was bad enough: did Mrs. Merriman want Mrs. Minity to tell her what the woman had been, what her reputation was? No; Mrs. Merriman would rather not. She probably knew well enough herself, if she had chosen to admit it ... but for Mrs. Minity the real bitterness of the situation lay in the fact that she herself could not eclipse Mrs. Plush by giving the reception because she lived in a small flat instead of a large—a vulgarly large—villa.
“No; don’t try to explain it away, my dear”; (this to Kate Clephane, the day after Mrs. Merriman had been taken on the latest of her penitential drives); “don’t try to put me off with that Rectoryhumbug. Everybody at home knows that Mrs. Parley Plush came from Anaconda, Georgia, and everybody in Anaconda knowswhatshe came from. And now, because she has a big showy villa (at least, so they tell me—for naturally I’ve never set foot in it, and never shall); now that she’s been white-washed by those poor simple-minded Merrimans, who have lived in this place for twenty years as if it were a Quaker colony, the woman dares to put herself forward as the proper person—Mrs. Parley Plushproper!—to welcome our new Bishop in the name of the American Colony! Well,” said Mrs. Minity in the voice of Cassandra, “if the Bishop knew a quarter of what I do about her—and what I daresay it is my duty, as a member of this diocese, to tell him.... But there: what am I to do, my dear, with a doctor whoabsolutely forbidsall agitating discussions, and warns me that if anybody should say anything disagreeable to me I might be snuffed out on the spot?”
Kate Clephane had smiled; these little rivalries were beginning to amuse her again. And the amusement of seeing Mrs. Minity appear (as of course she would) at Mrs. Plush’s that afternoon made it seem almost worth while to go there. Mrs. Clephane reached out for her engagement-book, scrutinized the day’s page, and found—with another smile, this one at herself—that she had already noted down: “Plush”. Yes; it was true; she knewit herself: she still had to go on cramming things into her days, things good, bad or indifferent, it hardly mattered which as long as they were crammed tight enough to leave no chinks for backward glances. Her old training in the art of taking things easily—all the narcotic tricks of evasion and ignoring—had come gradually to her help in the struggle to remake her life. Of course she would go to Mrs. Plush’s ... just as surely as Mrs. Minity would.
The day was glorious; exactly the kind of day, all the ladies said, on which one would want the dear Bishop to have his first sight of his new diocese. The whole strength of the Anglo-American colony was assembled on Mrs. Plush’s flowery terraces, among the beds of cineraria and cyclamen, and the giant blue china frogs which, as Mrs. Plush said, made the garden look “more natural”. Mrs. Plush herself sailed majestically from group to group, keeping one eye on the loggia through which the Bishop and Mr. Merriman were to arrive.
“Ah, dear Lord Charles—this is kind! You’ll findallyour friends here. Yes, Mrs. Clephane is over there at the other end of the terrace,” Mrs. Plush beamed, waving a tall disenchanted-looking man in the direction of a palm-tree emerging from a cushion of pansies.
Mrs. Clephane, from under the palm, had seen themanœuvre, and smiled at that also. She knew she was Lord Charles’s pretext for coming to the reception, but she knew, also, that he was glad to have a pretext, because if he hadn’t come he wouldn’t have known any more than she did what to do with the afternoon. There was nothing, she sometimes felt, that she didn’t know about Lord Charles, though they had met only three months ago. He was so exactly what medical men call “a typical case,” and she had had such unlimited time and opportunity for the study of his particular type. The only difference was that he was a gentleman—a gentleman still; while the others, most of them, never had been, or else had long since abdicated that with the rest.
As he moved over the sunlit gravel in her direction she asked herself for the hundredth time what she meant to do about it. Marry him? God forbid! Even if she had been sure—and in her heart of hearts she wasn’t—that he intended to give her the chance. Fall in love with him? That too she shrugged away. Let him make love to her? Well a little ... perhaps ... when one was too lonely ... and because he was the only man at all “possible” in their set.... But what she most wanted of him was simply to fill certain empty hours; to know that when she came home at five he would be waiting there, half the days of the week, by her tea-table; that when she dined out, people would be sure toinvite him and put him next to her; that when there was no bridge or Mah-Jongg going he would always be ready for a tour of the antiquity shops, and so sharp at picking up bargains for the little flat she had in view.
That was all she wanted of him; perhaps all he wanted of her. But the possibility of his wanting more (at which the violets seemed to hint) produced an uncertainty not wholly disagreeable, especially when he and she met in company, and she guessed the other women’s envy. “One has to have something to help one out—” It was the old argument of the drug-takers: well, call Lord Charles her drug! Why not, when she was so visibly his?
She settled herself in a garden-chair and watched his approach. It was a skilful bit of manœuvring: she knew he intended to “eliminate the bores” and join her only when there was no danger of their being disturbed. She could imagine how, in old days, he would have stalked contemptuously through such a company, without a glance to right or left. But not now. He had reached a phase in his decline when it became prudent to pause and admire the view at Mrs. Plush’s side, exchange affabilities with the Consul’s wife, nod familiarly to Mr. Paly, and even suffer himself to be boisterously hailed by Mrs. Horace Betterly, who came clinking down the loggia steps to shout out a reminder that they counted on him for dinner that evening. It wasthe fate of those who had to stuff their days full, and could no longer be particular about the quality of the stuffing. Kate could almost see the time when Lord Charles, very lean and wizened, would be collecting china frogs for Mrs. Plush.
He was half-way across the terrace when a sudden expanding and agitating of Mrs. Plush’s plumes seemed to forerun the approach of the Bishop. An impressive black figure appeared under the central arch of the loggia. Mrs. Plush surged forward, every fold of her draperies swelling: but the new arrival was not the Bishop—it was only Mrs. Minity who, clothed in black cashmere and majesty, paused and looked about her.
Mrs. Plush, checked in her forward plunge, stood an instant rigid, almost tilted backward; her right hand sketched the gesture of two barely extended fingers; then her just resentment of Mrs. Minity’s strictures was swept away in the triumph of having her there at last, and Mrs. Plush swept on full sail, welcoming her unexpected guest as obsequiously as if Mrs. Minity had been the Bishop.
Kate Clephane looked on with lazy amusement. She could enjoy the humours of her little world now that her mind was more at leisure. She hoped the scene between Mrs. Plush and Mrs. Minity would prolong itself, and was getting up to move within ear-shot when the Bishop, supported by Mr. and Mrs. Merriman, at length appeared.
Mrs. Clephane stopped short half-way across the terrace. She had never dreamed of this—never once thought it possible. Yet now she remembered that Dr. Arklow had been spoken of at the Drovers’ as one of the candidates for this new diocese; and there he stood, on the steps just above her, benignant and impressive as when she had last seen him, at St. Stephen’s, placing Anne’s hand in Chris Fenno’s....
Mrs. Clephane’s first impulse was to turn and lose herself in the crowd. The sight of that figure brought with it too many banished scenes and obliterated memories. Back they all rushed on her, fiercely importunate; she felt their cruel fingers at her throat. For a moment she stood irresolute, detached in the middle of the terrace; then, just as she was turning, she heard Mrs. Plush’s trumpet-call: “Mrs. Clephane? Yes, of course; there she is! Dear Mrs. Clephane, the Bishop has spied you out already!”
He seemed to reach her in a stride, so completely did his approach span distances and wipe out time. She saw herself sitting again in a deep leather armchair, under the photogravure of Salisbury Cathedral, while he paced the worn rug before the hearth, and his preacher’s voice broke on the words: “Sterile pain....”
“Shall we walk a little way? The garden seems very beautiful,” the Bishop suggested.
They stood by a white balustrade under mimosa boughs, and exchanged futilities about the blueness of the sea and the heat of the sun. “A New York February ... brr....” “Yes, don’t you envy us? Day after day of this.... Oh, of course a puff ofmistralnow and then ... but then that’s healthy ... and the flowers!”
He laid his large hand deliberately on hers. “My dear—when are you coming home to New York?” She felt her face just brushed by the understanding look she had caught twice before in his eyes.
“To New York? Never.”
He waited as if to weigh the answer, and then turned his eyes on the Mediterranean.
“Never is a long word. There is some one there who would be very happy if you did.”
She answered precipitately: “It would never have been what he imagines....”
“Isn’t he the best judge of that? He thinks you ought to have given him the chance.”
She dropped her voice to say: “I wonder he can ask me to think of ever living in New York again.”
“He doesn’t ask it of you; I’m charged to say so. He understands fully.... He would be prepared to begin his life again anywhere.... It lies with you....”
There was a silence. At length she mastered her voice enough to say: “Yes; I know. I’m very grateful. It’s a comfort to me....”
“No more?”
She waited again, and then, lifting her eyes, caught once more the understanding look in his.
“I don’t know how to tell you—how to explain. It seems to me ... my refusing ...” she lowered her voice still more ... “the one thing that keeps me from being too hopeless, too unhappy.”
She saw the first tinge of perplexity in his gaze. “The fact of refusing?”
“The fact of refusing.”
Ah, it was useless; he would never understand! How could she have imagined that he would?
“But is this really your last word; the very last?” he questioned mildly.
“Oh, it has to be—it has to be. It’s what I live by,” she almost sobbed.
No; he would never understand. His face had once more become blank and benedictory. He pressed her hand, said: “My dear child, I must see you again—we must talk of this!” and passed on, urbane and unperceiving.
Her eyes filled; for a moment her loneliness came down on her like a pall. It was always so whenever she tried to explain, not only to others but even to herself. Yet deep down in her, deeper far than her poor understanding could reach, there was something that said “No” whenever that particular temptation stirred in her. Something that told her that, as Fred Lander’s pity had been the most preciousthing he had to give her, so her refusal to accept it, her precipitate flight from it, was the most precious thing she could give him in return. He had overcome his strongest feelings, his most deep-rooted repugnance; he had held out his hand to her, in the extremity of her need, across the whole width of his traditions and his convictions; and she had blessed him for it, and stood fast on her own side. And this afternoon, when she returned home and found his weekly letter—as she was sure she would, since it had not come with that morning’s post—she would bless him again, bless him both for writing the letter, and for giving her the strength to hold out against its pleadings.
Perhaps no one else would ever understand; assuredly he would never understand himself. But there it was. Nothing on earth would ever again help her—help to blot out the old horrors and the new loneliness—as much as the fact of being able to take her stand on that resolve, of being able to say to herself, whenever she began to drift toward new uncertainties and fresh concessions, that once at least she had stood fast, shutting away in a little space of peace and light the best thing that had ever happened to her.
THE END