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Beyond

by John Galsworthy · English · Gutenberg #2453 · 655,546 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Beyond

Author: John Galsworthy


        
Release date: June 14, 2006 [eBook #2453]
                Most recently updated: February 22, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2453

Credits: Produced by Donald Lainson; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEYOND ***




Produced by Donald Lainson; David Widger




BEYOND


By John Galsworthy





“Che faro senza—!” To Thomas Hardy





    CONTENTS


    Part I

    Part II

    Part III

    Part IV





BEYOND



Part I

I

At the door of St. George’s registry office, Charles Clare Winton
strolled forward in the wake of the taxi-cab that was bearing his
daughter away with “the fiddler fellow” she had married. His sense of
decorum forbade his walking with Nurse Betty—the only other witness of
the wedding. A stout woman in a highly emotional condition would have
been an incongruous companion to his slim, upright figure, moving with
just that unexaggerated swing and balance becoming to a lancer of the
old school, even if he has been on the retired list for sixteen years.

Poor Betty! He thought of her with irritated sympathy—she need not have
given way to tears on the door-step. She might well feel lost now Gyp
was gone, but not so lost as himself! His pale-gloved hand—the one real
hand he had, for his right hand had been amputated at the wrist—twisted
vexedly at the small, grizzling moustache lifting itself from the
corners of his firm lips. On this grey February day he wore no overcoat;
faithful to the absolute, almost shamefaced quietness of that wedding,
he had not even donned black coat and silk hat, but wore a blue suit and
a hard black felt. The instinct of a soldier and hunting man to exhibit
no sign whatever of emotion did not desert him this dark day of his
life; but his grey-hazel eyes kept contracting, staring fiercely,
contracting again; and, at moments, as if overpowered by some deep
feeling, they darkened and seemed to draw back in his head. His face was
narrow and weathered and thin-cheeked, with a clean-cut jaw, small
ears, hair darker than the moustache, but touched at the side wings with
grey—the face of a man of action, self-reliant, resourceful. And his
bearing was that of one who has always been a bit of a dandy, and paid
attention to “form,” yet been conscious sometimes that there were things
beyond. A man, who, preserving all the precision of a type, yet had in
him a streak of something that was not typical. Such often have tragedy
in their pasts.

Making his way towards the park, he turned into Mount Street. There
was the house still, though the street had been very different then—the
house he had passed, up and down, up and down in the fog, like a ghost,
that November afternoon, like a cast-out dog, in such awful, unutterable
agony of mind, twenty-three years ago, when Gyp was born. And then to be
told at the door—he, with no right to enter, he, loving as he believed
man never loved woman—to be told at the door that SHE was dead—dead in
bearing what he and she alone knew was their child! Up and down in the
fog, hour after hour, knowing her time was upon her; and at last to be
told that! Of all fates that befall man, surely the most awful is to
love too much.

Queer that his route should take him past the very house to-day, after
this new bereavement! Accursed luck—that gout which had sent him to
Wiesbaden, last September! Accursed luck that Gyp had ever set eyes on
this fellow Fiorsen, with his fatal fiddle! Certainly not since Gyp had
come to live with him, fifteen years ago, had he felt so forlorn and fit
for nothing. To-morrow he would get back to Mildenham and see what hard
riding would do. Without Gyp—to be without Gyp! A fiddler! A chap who
had never been on a horse in his life! And with his crutch-handled cane
he switched viciously at the air, as though carving a man in two.

His club, near Hyde Park Corner, had never seemed to him so desolate.
From sheer force of habit he went into the card-room. The afternoon had
so darkened that electric light already burned, and there were the usual
dozen of players seated among the shaded gleams falling decorously on
dark-wood tables, on the backs of chairs, on cards and tumblers, the
little gilded coffee-cups, the polished nails of fingers holding
cigars. A crony challenged him to piquet. He sat down listless. That
three-legged whist—bridge—had always offended his fastidiousness—a
mangled short cut of a game! Poker had something blatant in it. Piquet,
though out of fashion, remained for him the only game worth playing—the
only game which still had style. He held good cards and rose the winner
of five pounds that he would willingly have paid to escape the boredom
of the bout. Where would they be by now? Past Newbury; Gyp sitting
opposite that Swedish fellow with his greenish wildcat’s eyes. Something
furtive, and so foreign, about him! A mess—if he were any judge of horse
or man! Thank God he had tied Gyp’s money up—every farthing! And
an emotion that was almost jealousy swept him at the thought of the
fellow’s arms round his soft-haired, dark-eyed daughter—that pretty,
willowy creature, so like in face and limb to her whom he had loved so
desperately.

Eyes followed him when he left the card-room, for he was one who
inspired in other men a kind of admiration—none could say exactly why.
Many quite as noted for general good sportsmanship attracted no such
attention. Was it “style,” or was it the streak of something not quite
typical—the brand left on him by the past?

Abandoning the club, he walked slowly along the railings of Piccadilly
towards home, that house in Bury Street, St. James’s, which had been his
London abode since he was quite young—one of the few in the street that
had been left untouched by the general passion for puffing down and
building up, which had spoiled half London in his opinion.

A man, more silent than anything on earth, with the soft, quick, dark
eyes of a woodcock and a long, greenish, knitted waistcoat, black
cutaway, and tight trousers strapped over his boots, opened the door.

“I shan’t go out again, Markey. Mrs. Markey must give me some dinner.
Anything’ll do.”

Markey signalled that he had heard, and those brown eyes under eyebrows
meeting and forming one long, dark line, took his master in from head
to heel. He had already nodded last night, when his wife had said the
gov’nor would take it hard. Retiring to the back premises, he jerked his
head toward the street and made a motion upward with his hand, by which
Mrs. Markey, an astute woman, understood that she had to go out and shop
because the gov’nor was dining in. When she had gone, Markey sat down
opposite Betty, Gyp’s old nurse. The stout woman was still crying in a
quiet way. It gave him the fair hump, for he felt inclined to howl like
a dog himself. After watching her broad, rosy, tearful face in silence
for some minutes, he shook his head, and, with a gulp and a tremor of
her comfortable body, Betty desisted. One paid attention to Markey.

Winton went first into his daughter’s bedroom, and gazed at its emptied
silken order, its deserted silver mirror, twisting viciously at his
little moustache. Then, in his sanctum, he sat down before the fire,
without turning up the light. Anyone looking in, would have thought he
was asleep; but the drowsy influence of that deep chair and cosy fire
had drawn him back into the long-ago. What unhappy chance had made him
pass HER house to-day!

Some say there is no such thing as an affinity, no case—of a man, at
least—made bankrupt of passion by a single love. In theory, it may
be so; in fact, there are such men—neck-or-nothing men, quiet and
self-contained, the last to expect that nature will play them such a
trick, the last to desire such surrender of themselves, the last to
know when their fate is on them. Who could have seemed to himself, and,
indeed, to others, less likely than Charles Clare Winton to fall over
head and ears in love when he stepped into the Belvoir Hunt ballroom at
Grantham that December evening, twenty-four years ago? A keen soldier,
a dandy, a first-rate man to hounds, already almost a proverb in his
regiment for coolness and for a sort of courteous disregard of women
as among the minor things of life—he had stood there by the door, in no
hurry to dance, taking a survey with an air that just did not give an
impression of “side” because it was not at all put on. And—behold!—SHE
had walked past him, and his world was changed for ever. Was it an
illusion of light that made her whole spirit seem to shine through a
half-startled glance? Or a little trick of gait, a swaying, seductive
balance of body; was it the way her hair waved back, or a subtle scent,
as of a flower? What was it? The wife of a squire of those parts, with
a house in London. Her name? It doesn’t matter—she has been long enough
dead. There was no excuse—not an ill-treated woman; an ordinary, humdrum
marriage, of three years standing; no children. An amiable good fellow
of a husband, fifteen years older than herself, inclined already to be
an invalid. No excuse! Yet, in one month from that night, Winton and she
were lovers, not only in thought but in deed. A thing so utterly beyond
“good form” and his sense of what was honourable and becoming in an
officer and gentleman that it was simply never a question of weighing
pro and con, the cons had it so completely. And yet from that first
evening, he was hers, she his. For each of them the one thought was how
to be with the other. If so—why did they not at least go off together?
Not for want of his beseeching. And no doubt, if she had survived Gyp’s
birth, they would have gone. But to face the prospect of ruining
two men, as it looked to her, had till then been too much for that
soft-hearted creature. Death stilled her struggle before it was decided.
There are women in whom utter devotion can still go hand in hand with a
doubting soul. Such are generally the most fascinating; for the power of
hard and prompt decision robs women of mystery, of the subtle atmosphere
of change and chance. Though she had but one part in four of foreign
blood, she was not at all English. But Winton was English to his
back-bone, English in his sense of form, and in that curious streak of
whole-hearted desperation that will break form to smithereens in one
department and leave it untouched in every other of its owner’s life.
To have called Winton a “crank” would never have occurred to any one—his
hair was always perfectly parted; his boots glowed; he was hard and
reticent, accepting and observing every canon of well-bred existence.
Yet, in that, his one infatuation, he was as lost to the world and its
opinion as the longest-haired lentil-eater of us all. Though at any
moment during that one year of their love he would have risked his life
and sacrificed his career for a whole day in her company, he never, by
word or look, compromised her. He had carried his punctilious observance
of her “honour” to a point more bitter than death, consenting, even,
to her covering up the tracks of their child’s coming. Paying that
gambler’s debt was by far the bravest deed of his life, and even now its
memory festered.

To this very room he had come back after hearing she was dead; this very
room which he had refurnished to her taste, so that even now, with
its satinwood chairs, little dainty Jacobean bureau, shaded old brass
candelabra, divan, it still had an air exotic to bachelordom. There, on
the table, had been a letter recalling him to his regiment, ordered on
active service. If he had realized what he would go through before
he had the chance of trying to lose his life out there, he would
undoubtedly have taken that life, sitting in this very chair before the
fire—the chair sacred to her and memory. He had not the luck he wished
for in that little war—men who don’t care whether they live or die
seldom have. He secured nothing but distinction. When it was over, he
went on, with a few more lines in his face, a few more wrinkles in his
heart, soldiering, shooting tigers, pig-sticking, playing polo, riding
to hounds harder than ever; giving nothing away to the world; winning
steadily the curious, uneasy admiration that men feel for those who
combine reckless daring with an ice-cool manner. Since he was less of a
talker even than most of his kind, and had never in his life talked of
women, he did not gain the reputation of a woman-hater, though he so
manifestly avoided them. After six years’ service in India and Egypt, he
lost his right hand in a charge against dervishes, and had, perforce, to
retire, with the rank of major, aged thirty-four. For a long time he had
hated the very thought of the child—his child, in giving birth to whom
the woman he loved had died. Then came a curious change of feeling; and
for three years before his return to England, he had been in the habit
of sending home odds and ends picked up in the bazaars, to serve as
toys. In return, he had received, twice annually at least, a letter
from the man who thought himself Gyp’s father. These letters he read and
answered. The squire was likable, and had been fond of HER; and though
never once had it seemed possible to Winton to have acted otherwise than
he did, he had all the time preserved a just and formal sense of the
wrong he had done this man. He did not experience remorse, but he had
always an irksome feeling as of a debt unpaid, mitigated by knowledge
that no one had ever suspected, and discounted by memory of the awful
torture he had endured to make sure against suspicion.

When, plus distinction and minus his hand, he was at last back in
England, the squire had come to see him. The poor man was failing fast
from Bright’s disease. Winton entered again that house in Mount Street
with an emotion, to stifle which required more courage than any cavalry
charge. But one whose heart, as he would have put it, is “in the right
place” does not indulge the quaverings of his nerves, and he faced those
rooms where he had last seen her, faced that lonely little dinner with
her husband, without sign of feeling. He did not see little Ghita, or
Gyp, as she had nicknamed herself, for she was already in her bed; and
it was a whole month before he brought himself to go there at an hour
when he could see the child if he would. The fact is, he was afraid.
What would the sight of this little creature stir in him? When Betty,
the nurse, brought her in to see the soldier gentleman with “the leather
hand,” who had sent her those funny toys, she stood calmly staring with
her large, deep-brown eyes. Being seven, her little brown-velvet frock
barely reached the knees of her thin, brown-stockinged legs planted one
just in front of the other, as might be the legs of a small brown bird;
the oval of her gravely wondering face was warm cream colour without red
in it, except that of the lips, which were neither full nor thin, and
had a little tuck, the tiniest possible dimple at one corner. Her hair
of warm dark brown had been specially brushed and tied with a narrow red
ribbon back from her forehead, which was broad and rather low, and this
added to her gravity. Her eyebrows were thin and dark and perfectly
arched; her little nose was perfectly straight, her little chin in
perfect balance between round and point. She stood and stared till
Winton smiled. Then the gravity of her face broke, her lips parted,
her eyes seemed to fly a little. And Winton’s heart turned over within
him—she was the very child of her that he had lost! And he said, in a
voice that seemed to him to tremble:

“Well, Gyp?”

“Thank you for my toys; I like them.”

He held out his hand, and she gravely put her small hand into it. A
sense of solace, as if some one had slipped a finger in and smoothed his
heart, came over Winton. Gently, so as not to startle her, he raised her
hand a little, bent, and kissed it. It may have been from his instant
recognition that here was one as sensitive as child could be, or the way
many soldiers acquire from dealing with their men—those simple, shrewd
children—or some deeper instinctive sense of ownership between them;
whatever it was, from that moment, Gyp conceived for him a rushing
admiration, one of those headlong affections children will sometimes
take for the most unlikely persons.

He used to go there at an hour when he knew the squire would be asleep,
between two and five. After he had been with Gyp, walking in the park,
riding with her in the Row, or on wet days sitting in her lonely nursery
telling stories, while stout Betty looked on half hypnotized, a rather
queer and doubting look on her comfortable face—after such hours, he
found it difficult to go to the squire’s study and sit opposite him,
smoking. Those interviews reminded him too much of past days, when he
had kept such desperate check on himself—too much of the old inward
chafing against the other man’s legal ownership—too much of the debt
owing. But Winton was triple-proofed against betrayal of feeling. The
squire welcomed him eagerly, saw nothing, felt nothing, was grateful
for his goodness to the child. Well, well! He had died in the following
spring. And Winton found that he had been made Gyp’s guardian and
trustee. Since his wife’s death, the squire had muddled his affairs, his
estate was heavily mortgaged; but Winton accepted the position with an
almost savage satisfaction, and, from that moment, schemed deeply to get
Gyp all to himself. The Mount Street house was sold; the Lincolnshire
place let. She and Nurse Betty were installed at his own hunting-box,
Mildenham. In this effort to get her away from all the squire’s
relations, he did not scruple to employ to the utmost the power he
undoubtedly had of making people feel him unapproachable. He was never
impolite to any of them; he simply froze them out. Having plenty of
money himself, his motives could not be called in question. In one year
he had isolated her from all except stout Betty. He had no qualms, for
Gyp was no more happy away from him than he from her. He had but one bad
half-hour. It came when he had at last decided that she should be called
by his name, if not legally at least by custom, round Mildenham. It was
to Markey he had given the order that Gyp was to be little Miss Winton
for the future. When he came in from hunting that day, Betty was waiting
in his study. She stood in the centre of the emptiest part of that
rather dingy room, as far as possible away from any good or chattel. How
long she had been standing there, heaven only knew; but her round, rosy
face was confused between awe and resolution, and she had made a sad
mess of her white apron. Her blue eyes met Winton’s with a sort of
desperation.

“About what Markey told me, sir. My old master wouldn’t have liked it,
sir.”

Touched on the raw by this reminder that before the world he had been
nothing to the loved one, that before the world the squire, who had been
nothing to her, had been everything, Winton said icily:

“Indeed! You will be good enough to comply with my wish, all the same.”

The stout woman’s face grew very red. She burst out, breathless:

“Yes, sir; but I’ve seen what I’ve seen. I never said anything, but I’ve
got eyes. If Miss Gyp’s to take your name, sir, then tongues’ll wag, and
my dear, dead mistress—”

But at the look on his face she stopped, with her mouth open.

“You will be kind enough to keep your thoughts to yourself. If any word
or deed of yours gives the slightest excuse for talk—you go. Understand
me, you go, and you never see Gyp again! In the meantime you will do
what I ask. Gyp is my adopted daughter.”

She had always been a little afraid of him, but she had never seen that
look in his eyes or heard him speak in that voice. And she bent her
full moon of a face and went, with her apron crumpled as apron had never
been, and tears in her eyes. And Winton, at the window, watching the
darkness gather, the leaves flying by on a sou’-westerly wind, drank to
the dregs a cup of bitter triumph. He had never had the right to that
dead, forever-loved mother of his child. He meant to have the child.
If tongues must wag, let them! This was a defeat of all his previous
precaution, a deep victory of natural instinct. And his eyes narrowed
and stared into the darkness.

II

In spite of his victory over all human rivals in the heart of Gyp,
Winton had a rival whose strength he fully realized perhaps for the
first time now that she was gone, and he, before the fire, was brooding
over her departure and the past. Not likely that one of his decisive
type, whose life had so long been bound up with swords and horses,
would grasp what music might mean to a little girl. Such ones, he knew,
required to be taught scales, and “In a Cottage near a Wood” with other
melodies. He took care not to go within sound of them, so that he had
no conception of the avidity with which Gyp had mopped up all, and more
than all, her governess could teach her. He was blind to the rapture
with which she listened to any stray music that came its way to
Mildenham—to carols in the Christmas dark, to certain hymns, and one
special “Nunc Dimittis” in the village church, attended with a hopeless
regularity; to the horn of the hunter far out in the quivering, dripping
coverts; even to Markey’s whistling, which was full and strangely sweet.

He could share her love of dogs and horses, take an anxious interest
in her way of catching bumblebees in the hollow of her hand and putting
them to her small, delicate ears to hear them buzz, sympathize with her
continual ravages among the flowerbeds, in the old-fashioned garden,
full of lilacs and laburnums in spring, pinks, roses, cornflowers in
summer, dahlias and sunflowers in autumn, and always a little neglected
and overgrown, a little squeezed in, and elbowed by the more important
surrounding paddocks. He could sympathize with her attempts to draw
his attention to the song of birds; but it was simply not in him to
understand how she loved and craved for music. She was a cloudy little
creature, up and down in mood—rather like a brown lady spaniel that
she had, now gay as a butterfly, now brooding as night. Any touch of
harshness she took to heart fearfully. She was the strangest compound
of pride and sell-disparagement; the qualities seemed mixed in her so
deeply that neither she nor any one knew of which her cloudy fits were
the result. Being so sensitive, she “fancied” things terribly. Things
that others did to her, and thought nothing of, often seemed to her
conclusive evidence that she was not loved by anybody, which was
dreadfully unjust, because she wanted to love everyone—nearly. Then
suddenly she would feel: “If they don’t love me, I don’t care. I don’t
want anything of anybody!” Presently, all would blow away just like a
cloud, and she would love and be gay, until something fresh, perhaps not
at all meant to hurt her, would again hurt her horribly. In reality,
the whole household loved and admired her. But she was one of those
delicate-treading beings, born with a skin too few, who—and especially
in childhood—suffer from themselves in a world born with a skin too
many.

To Winton’s extreme delight, she took to riding as a duck to water, and
knew no fear on horseback. She had the best governess he could get her,
the daughter of an admiral, and, therefore, in distressed circumstances;
and later on, a tutor for her music, who came twice a week all the
way from London—a sardonic man who cherished for her even more secret
admiration than she for him. In fact, every male thing fell in love
with her at least a little. Unlike most girls, she never had an epoch
of awkward plainness, but grew like a flower, evenly, steadily. Winton
often gazed at her with a sort of intoxication; the turn of her head,
the way those perfectly shaped, wonderfully clear brown eyes would
“fly,” the set of her straight, round neck, the very shaping of her
limbs were all such poignant reminders of what he had so loved. And yet,
for all that likeness to her mother, there was a difference, both in
form and character. Gyp had, as it were, an extra touch of “breeding,”
more chiselling in body, more fastidiousness in soul, a little more
poise, a little more sheer grace; in mood, more variance, in mind, more
clarity and, mixed with her sweetness, a distinct spice of scepticism
which her mother had lacked.

In modern times there are no longer “toasts,” or she would have been one
with both the hunts. Though delicate in build, she was not frail, and
when her blood was up would “go” all day, and come in so bone-tired that
she would drop on to the tiger skin before the fire, rather than face
the stairs. Life at Mildenham was lonely, save for Winton’s hunting
cronies, and they but few, for his spiritual dandyism did not gladly
suffer the average country gentleman and his frigid courtesy frightened
women.

Besides, as Betty had foreseen, tongues did wag—those tongues of the
countryside, avid of anything that might spice the tedium of dull lives
and brains. And, though no breath of gossip came to Winton’s ears,
no women visited at Mildenham. Save for the friendly casual
acquaintanceships of churchyard, hunting-field, and local race-meetings,
Gyp grew up knowing hardly any of her own sex. This dearth developed
her reserve, kept her backward in sex-perception, gave her a faint,
unconscious contempt for men—creatures always at the beck and call of
her smile, and so easily disquieted by a little frown—gave her also a
secret yearning for companions of her own gender. Any girl or woman that
she did chance to meet always took a fancy to her, because she was so
nice to them, which made the transitory nature of these friendships
tantalizing. She was incapable of jealousies or backbiting. Let men
beware of such—there is coiled in their fibre a secret fascination!

Gyp’s moral and spiritual growth was not the sort of subject that Winton
could pay much attention to. It was pre-eminently a matter one did not
talk about. Outward forms, such as going to church, should be preserved;
manners should be taught her by his own example as much as possible;
beyond this, nature must look after things. His view had much real
wisdom. She was a quick and voracious reader, bad at remembering what
she read; and though she had soon devoured all the books in Winton’s
meagre library, including Byron, Whyte-Melville, and Humboldt’s
“Cosmos,” they had not left too much on her mind. The attempts of her
little governess to impart religion were somewhat arid of result, and
the interest of the vicar, Gyp, with her instinctive spice of scepticism
soon put into the same category as the interest of all the other males
she knew. She felt that he enjoyed calling her “my dear” and patting her
shoulder, and that this enjoyment was enough reward for his exertions.

Tucked away in that little old dark manor house, whose stables alone
were up to date—three hours from London, and some thirty miles from The
Wash, it must be confessed that her upbringing lacked modernity. About
twice a year, Winton took her up to town to stay with his unmarried
sister Rosamund in Curzon Street. Those weeks, if they did nothing else,
increased her natural taste for charming clothes, fortified her teeth,
and fostered her passion for music and the theatre. But the two main
nourishments of the modern girl—discussion and games—she lacked utterly.
Moreover, those years of her life from fifteen to nineteen were before
the social resurrection of 1906, and the world still crawled like a
winter fly on a window-pane. Winton was a Tory, Aunt Rosamund a Tory,
everybody round her a Tory. The only spiritual development she underwent
all those years of her girlhood was through her headlong love for her
father. After all, was there any other way in which she could really
have developed? Only love makes fruitful the soul. The sense of form
that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but
to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with
perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or
speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice, to dislike the clothes
and voices of other men—all this was precious to her beyond everything.
If she inherited from him that fastidious sense of form, she also
inherited his capacity for putting all her eggs in one basket. And since
her company alone gave him real happiness, the current of love flowed
over her heart all the time. Though she never realized it, abundant love
FOR somebody was as necessary to her as water running up the stems of
flowers, abundant love FROM somebody as needful as sunshine on
their petals. And Winton’s somewhat frequent little runs to town, to
Newmarket, or where not, were always marked in her by a fall of the
barometer, which recovered as his return grew near.

One part of her education, at all events, was not neglected—cultivation
of an habitual sympathy with her poorer neighbours. Without concerning
himself in the least with problems of sociology, Winton had by nature
an open hand and heart for cottagers, and abominated interference with
their lives. And so it came about that Gyp, who, by nature also never
set foot anywhere without invitation, was always hearing the words:
“Step in, Miss Gyp”; “Step in, and sit down, lovey,” and a good many
words besides from even the boldest and baddest characters. There
is nothing like a soft and pretty face and sympathetic listening for
seducing the hearts of “the people.”

So passed the eleven years till she was nineteen and Winton forty-six.
Then, under the wing of her little governess, she went to the hunt-ball.
She had revolted against appearing a “fluffy miss,” wanting to be
considered at once full-fledged; so that her dress, perfect in fit, was
not white but palest maize-colour, as if she had already been to dances.
She had all Winton’s dandyism, and just so much more as was appropriate
to her sex. With her dark hair, wonderfully fluffed and coiled, waving
across her forehead, her neck bare for the first time, her eyes really
“flying,” and a demeanour perfectly cool—as though she knew that light
and movement, covetous looks, soft speeches, and admiration were her
birthright—she was more beautiful than even Winton had thought her. At
her breast she wore some sprigs of yellow jasmine procured by him from
town—a flower of whose scent she was very fond, and that he had never
seen worn in ballrooms. That swaying, delicate creature, warmed by
excitement, reminded him, in every movement and by every glance of her
eyes, of her whom he had first met at just such a ball as this. And by
the carriage of his head, the twist of his little moustache, he conveyed
to the world the pride he was feeling.

That evening held many sensations for Gyp—some delightful, one confused,
one unpleasant. She revelled in her success. Admiration was very dear
to her. She passionately enjoyed dancing, loved feeling that she was
dancing well and giving pleasure. But, twice over, she sent away her
partners, smitten with compassion for her little governess sitting there
against the wall—all alone, with no one to take notice of her, because
she was elderly, and roundabout, poor darling! And, to that loyal
person’s horror, she insisted on sitting beside her all through two
dances. Nor would she go in to supper with anyone but Winton. Returning
to the ballroom on his arm, she overheard an elderly woman say: “Oh,
don’t you know? Of course he really IS her father!” and an elderly man
answer: “Ah, that accounts for it—quite so!” With those eyes at the
back of the head which the very sensitive possess, she could see their
inquisitive, cold, slightly malicious glances, and knew they were
speaking of her. And just then her partner came for her.

“Really IS her father!” The words meant TOO much to be grasped this
evening of full sensations. They left a little bruise somewhere, but
softened and anointed, just a sense of confusion at the back of her
mind. And very soon came that other sensation, so disillusioning, that
all else was crowded out. It was after a dance—a splendid dance with
a good-looking man quite twice her age. They were sitting behind some
palms, he murmuring in his mellow, flown voice admiration for her dress,
when suddenly he bent his flushed face and kissed her bare arm above the
elbow. If he had hit her he could not have astonished or hurt her more.
It seemed to her innocence that he would never have done such a thing if
she had not said something dreadful to encourage him. Without a word she
got up, gazed at him a moment with eyes dark from pain, shivered, and
slipped away. She went straight to Winton. From her face, all closed up,
tightened lips, and the familiar little droop at their corners, he knew
something dire had happened, and his eyes boded ill for the person who
had hurt her; but she would say nothing except that she was tired and
wanted to go home. And so, with the little faithful governess, who,
having been silent perforce nearly all the evening, was now full of
conversation, they drove out into the frosty night. Winton sat beside
the chauffeur, smoking viciously, his fur collar turned up over his
ears, his eyes stabbing the darkness, under his round, low-drawn fur
cap. Who had dared upset his darling? And, within the car, the little
governess chattered softly, and Gyp, shrouded in lace, in her dark
corner sat silent, seeing nothing but the vision of that insult. Sad end
to a lovely night!

She lay awake long hours in the darkness, while a sort of coherence was
forming in her mind. Those words: “Really IS her father!” and that
man’s kissing of her bare arm were a sort of revelation of sex-mystery,
hardening the consciousness that there was something at the back of her
life. A child so sensitive had not, of course, quite failed to feel the
spiritual draughts around her; but instinctively she had recoiled
from more definite perceptions. The time before Winton came was all
so faint—Betty, toys, short glimpses of a kind, invalidish man called
“Papa.” As in that word there was no depth compared with the word “Dad”
bestowed on Winton, so there had been no depth in her feelings towards
the squire. When a girl has no memory of her mother, how dark are many
things! None, except Betty, had ever talked of her mother. There was
nothing sacred in Gyp’s associations, no faiths to be broken by any
knowledge that might come to her; isolated from other girls, she
had little realisation even of the conventions. Still, she suffered
horribly, lying there in the dark—from bewilderment, from thorns dragged
over her skin, rather than from a stab in the heart. The knowledge of
something about her conspicuous, doubtful, provocative of insult, as she
thought, grievously hurt her delicacy. Those few wakeful hours made a
heavy mark. She fell asleep at last, still all in confusion, and woke up
with a passionate desire to KNOW. All that morning she sat at her piano,
playing, refusing to go out, frigid to Betty and the little governess,
till the former was reduced to tears and the latter to Wordsworth. After
tea she went to Winton’s study, that dingy little room where he never
studied anything, with leather chairs and books which—except “Mr.
Jorrocks,” Byron, those on the care of horses, and the novels of
Whyte-Melville—were never read; with prints of superequine celebrities,
his sword, and photographs of Gyp and of brother officers on the walls.
Two bright spots there were indeed—the fire, and the little bowl that
Gyp always kept filled with flowers.

When she came gliding in like that, a slender, rounded figure, her
creamy, dark-eyed, oval face all cloudy, she seemed to Winton to have
grown up of a sudden. He had known all day that something was coming,
and had been cudgelling his brains finely. From the fervour of his
love for her, he felt an anxiety that was almost fear. What could
have happened last night—that first night of her entrance into
society—meddlesome, gossiping society! She slid down to the floor
against his knee. He could not see her face, could not even touch her;
for she had settled down on his right side. He mastered his tremors and
said:

“Well, Gyp—tired?”

“No.”

“A little bit?”

“No.”

“Was it up to what you thought, last night?”

“Yes.”

The logs hissed and crackled; the long flames ruffled in the
chimney-draught; the wind roared outside—then, so suddenly that it took
his breath away:

“Dad, are you really and truly my father?”

When that which one has always known might happen at last does happen,
how little one is prepared! In the few seconds before an answer that
could in no way be evaded, Winton had time for a tumult of reflection.
A less resolute character would have been caught by utter mental
blankness, then flung itself in panic on “Yes” or “No.” But Winton was
incapable of losing his head; he would not answer without having faced
the consequences of his reply. To be her father was the most warming
thing in his life; but if he avowed it, how far would he injure her love
for him? What did a girl know? How make her understand? What would her
feeling be about her dead mother? How would that dead loved one feel?
What would she have wished?

It was a cruel moment. And the girl, pressed against his knee, with face
hidden, gave him no help. Impossible to keep it from her, now that her
instinct was roused! Silence, too, would answer for him. And clenching
his hand on the arm of his chair, he said:

“Yes, Gyp; your mother and I loved each other.” He felt a quiver go
through her, would have given much to see her face. What, even now, did
she understand? Well, it must be gone through with, and he said:

“What made you ask?”

She shook her head and murmured:

“I’m glad.”

Grief, shock, even surprise would have roused all his loyalty to the
dead, all the old stubborn bitterness, and he would have frozen up
against her. But this acquiescent murmur made him long to smooth it
down.

“Nobody has ever known. She died when you were born. It was a fearful
grief to me. If you’ve heard anything, it’s just gossip, because you go
by my name. Your mother was never talked about. But it’s best you should
know, now you’re grown up. People don’t often love as she and I loved.
You needn’t be ashamed.”

She had not moved, and her face was still turned from him. She said
quietly:

“I’m not ashamed. Am I very like her?”

“Yes; more than I could ever have hoped.”

Very low she said:

“Then you don’t love me for myself?”

Winton was but dimly conscious of how that question revealed her
nature, its power of piercing instinctively to the heart of things, its
sensitive pride, and demand for utter and exclusive love. To things that
go too deep, one opposes the bulwark of obtuseness. And, smiling, he
simply said:

“What do you think?”

Then, to his dismay, he perceived that she was crying—struggling against
it so that her shoulder shook against his knee. He had hardly ever
known her cry, not in all the disasters of unstable youth, and she had
received her full meed of knocks and tumbles. He could only stroke that
shoulder, and say:

“Don’t cry, Gyp; don’t cry!”

She ceased as suddenly as she had begun, got up, and, before he too
could rise, was gone.

That evening, at dinner, she was just as usual. He could not detect the
slightest difference in her voice or manner, or in her good-night kiss.
And so a moment that he had dreaded for years was over, leaving only the
faint shame which follows a breach of reticence on the spirits of those
who worship it. While the old secret had been quite undisclosed, it had
not troubled him. Disclosed, it hurt him. But Gyp, in those twenty-four
hours, had left childhood behind for good; her feeling toward men had
hardened. If she did not hurt them a little, they would hurt her! The
sex-instinct had come to life. To Winton she gave as much love as ever,
even more, perhaps; but the dew was off.

III

The next two years were much less solitary, passed in more or less
constant gaiety. His confession spurred Winton on to the fortification
of his daughter’s position. He would stand no nonsense, would not have
her looked on askance. There is nothing like “style” for carrying the
defences of society—only, it must be the genuine thing. Whether at
Mildenham, or in London under the wing of his sister, there was no
difficulty. Gyp was too pretty, Winton too cool, his quietness too
formidable. She had every advantage. Society only troubles itself to
make front against the visibly weak.

The happiest time of a girl’s life is that when all appreciate and covet
her, and she herself is free as air—a queen of hearts, for none of which
she hankers; or, if not the happiest, at all events it is the gayest
time. What did Gyp care whether hearts ached for her—she knew not
love as yet, perhaps would never know the pains of unrequited love.
Intoxicated with life, she led her many admirers a pretty dance,
treating them with a sort of bravura. She did not want them to be
unhappy, but she simply could not take them seriously. Never was any
girl so heart-free. She was a queer mixture in those days, would give
up any pleasure for Winton, and most for Betty or her aunt—her little
governess was gone—but of nobody else did she seem to take account,
accepting all that was laid at her feet as the due of her looks, her
dainty frocks, her music, her good riding and dancing, her talent for
amateur theatricals and mimicry. Winton, whom at least she never failed,
watched that glorious fluttering with quiet pride and satisfaction. He
was getting to those years when a man of action dislikes interruption of
the grooves into which his activity has fallen. He pursued his hunting,
racing, card-playing, and his very stealthy alms and services to lame
ducks of his old regiment, their families, and other unfortunates—happy
in knowing that Gyp was always as glad to be with him as he to be with
her. Hereditary gout, too, had begun to bother him.

The day that she came of age they were up in town, and he summoned her
to the room, in which he now sat by the fire recalling all these things,
to receive an account of his stewardship. He had nursed her greatly
embarrassed inheritance very carefully till it amounted to some twenty
thousand pounds. He had never told her of it—the subject was dangerous,
and, since his own means were ample, she had not wanted for anything.
When he had explained exactly what she owned, shown her how it was
invested, and told her that she must now open her own banking account,
she stood gazing at the sheets of paper, whose items she had been
supposed to understand, and her face gathered the look which meant that
she was troubled. Without lifting her eyes she asked:

“Does it all come from—him?”

He had not expected that, and flushed under his tan.

“No; eight thousand of it was your mother’s.”

Gyp looked at him, and said:

“Then I won’t take the rest—please, Dad.”

Winton felt a sort of crabbed pleasure. What should be done with that
money if she did not take it, he did not in the least know. But not to
take it was like her, made her more than ever his daughter—a kind of
final victory. He turned away to the window from which he had so often
watched for her mother. There was the corner she used to turn! In
one minute, surely she would be standing there, colour glowing in her
cheeks, her eyes soft behind her veil, her breast heaving a little with
her haste, waiting for his embrace. There she would stand, drawing up
her veil. He turned round. Difficult to believe it was not she! And he
said:

“Very well, my love. But you will take the equivalent from me instead.
The other can be put by; some one will benefit some day!”

At those unaccustomed words, “My love,” from his undemonstrative lips,
the colour mounted in her cheeks and her eyes shone. She threw her arms
round his neck.

She had her fill of music in those days, taking piano lessons from a
Monsieur Harmost, a grey-haired native of Liege, with mahogany cheeks
and the touch of an angel, who kept her hard at it and called her his
“little friend.” There was scarcely a concert of merit that she did not
attend or a musician of mark whose playing she did not know, and, though
fastidiousness saved her from squirming in adoration round the feet of
those prodigious performers, she perched them all on pedestals, men and
women alike, and now and then met them at her aunt’s house in Curzon
Street.

Aunt Rosamund, also musical, so far as breeding would allow, stood for
a good deal to Gyp, who had built up about her a romantic story of love
wrecked by pride from a few words she had once let drop. She was a tall
and handsome woman, a year older than Winton, with a long, aristocratic
face, deep-blue, rather shining eyes, a gentlemanly manner, warm heart,
and one of those indescribable, not unmelodious drawls that one connects
with an unshakable sense of privilege. She, in turn, was very fond of
Gyp; and what passed within her mind, by no means devoid of shrewdness,
as to their real relationship, remained ever discreetly hidden. She was,
so far again as breeding would allow, something of a humanitarian and
rebel, loving horses and dogs, and hating cats, except when they had
four legs. The girl had just that softness which fascinates women who
perhaps might have been happier if they had been born men. Not that
Rosamund Winton was of an aggressive type—she merely had the resolute
“catch hold of your tail, old fellow” spirit so often found in
Englishwomen of the upper classes. A cheery soul, given to long coats
and waistcoats, stocks, and a crutch-handled stick, she—like her
brother—had “style,” but more sense of humour—valuable in musical
circles! At her house, the girl was practically compelled to see fun
as well as merit in all those prodigies, haloed with hair and filled to
overflowing with music and themselves. And, since Gyp’s natural sense
of the ludicrous was extreme, she and her aunt could rarely talk about
anything without going into fits of laughter.

Winton had his first really bad attack of gout when Gyp was twenty-two,
and, terrified lest he might not be able to sit a horse in time for the
opening meets, he went off with her and Markey to Wiesbaden. They had
rooms in the Wilhelmstrasse, overlooking the gardens, where leaves
were already turning, that gorgeous September. The cure was long and
obstinate, and Winton badly bored. Gyp fared much better. Attended
by the silent Markey, she rode daily on the Neroberg, chafing at
regulations which reduced her to specified tracks in that majestic
wood where the beeches glowed. Once or even twice a day she went to the
concerts in the Kurhaus, either with her father or alone.

The first time she heard Fiorsen play she was alone. Unlike most
violinists, he was tall and thin, with great pliancy of body and swift
sway of movement. His face was pale, and went strangely with hair and
moustache of a sort of dirt-gold colour, and his thin cheeks with very
broad high cheek-bones had little narrow scraps of whisker. Those
little whiskers seemed to Gyp awful—indeed, he seemed rather awful
altogether—but his playing stirred and swept her in the most uncanny
way. He had evidently remarkable technique; and the emotion, the intense
wayward feeling of his playing was chiselled by that technique, as if
a flame were being frozen in its swaying. When he stopped, she did not
join in the tornado of applause, but sat motionless, looking up at him.
Quite unconstrained by all those people, he passed the back of his hand
across his hot brow, shoving up a wave or two of that queer-coloured
hair; then, with a rather disagreeable smile, he made a short supple bow
or two. And she thought, “What strange eyes he has—like a great cat’s!”
Surely they were green; fierce, yet shy, almost furtive—mesmeric!
Certainly the strangest man she had ever seen, and the most frightening.
He seemed looking straight at her; and, dropping her gaze, she clapped.
When she looked again, his face had lost that smile for a kind of
wistfulness. He made another of those little supple bows straight at
her—it seemed to Gyp—and jerked his violin up to his shoulder.
“He’s going to play to me,” she thought absurdly. He played without
accompaniment a little tune that seemed to twitch the heart. When he
finished, this time she did not look up, but was conscious that he gave
one impatient bow and walked off.

That evening at dinner she said to Winton:

“I heard a violinist to-day, Dad, the most wonderful playing—Gustav
Fiorsen. Is that Swedish, do you think—or what?”

Winton answered:

“Very likely. What sort of a bounder was he to look at? I used to know a
Swede in the Turkish army—nice fellow, too.”

“Tall and thin and white-faced, with bumpy cheek-bones, and hollows
under them, and queer green eyes. Oh, and little goldy side-whiskers.”

“By Jove! It sounds the limit.”

Gyp murmured, with a smile:

“Yes; I think perhaps he is.”

She saw him next day in the gardens. They were sitting close to the
Schiller statue, Winton reading The Times, to whose advent he looked
forward more than he admitted, for he was loath by confessions of
boredom to disturb Gyp’s manifest enjoyment of her stay. While perusing
the customary comforting animadversions on the conduct of those
“rascally Radicals” who had just come into power, and the account of a
Newmarket meeting, he kept stealing sidelong glances at his daughter.

Certainly she had never looked prettier, daintier, shown more breeding
than she did out here among these Germans with their thick pasterns, and
all the cosmopolitan hairy-heeled crowd in this God-forsaken place! The
girl, unconscious of his stealthy regalement, was letting her clear eyes
rest, in turn, on each figure that passed, on the movements of birds
and dogs, watching the sunlight glisten on the grass, burnish the copper
beeches, the lime-trees, and those tall poplars down there by the water.
The doctor at Mildenham, once consulted on a bout of headache, had
called her eyes “perfect organs,” and certainly no eyes could take
things in more swiftly or completely. She was attractive to dogs, and
every now and then one would stop, in two minds whether or no to put
his nose into this foreign girl’s hand. From a flirtation of eyes with
a great Dane, she looked up and saw Fiorsen passing, in company with
a shorter, square man, having very fashionable trousers and a corseted
waist. The violinist’s tall, thin, loping figure was tightly buttoned
into a brownish-grey frock-coat suit; he wore a rather broad-brimmed,
grey, velvety hat; in his buttonhole was a white flower; his
cloth-topped boots were of patent leather; his tie was bunched out at
the ends over a soft white-linen shirt—altogether quite a dandy! His
most strange eyes suddenly swept down on hers, and he made a movement as
if to put his hand to his hat.

’Why, he remembers me,’ thought Gyp. That thin-waisted figure with head
set just a little forward between rather high shoulders, and its long
stride, curiously suggested a leopard or some lithe creature. He touched
his short companion’s arm, muttered something, turned round, and came
back. She could see him staring her way, and knew he was coming simply
to look at her. She knew, too, that her father was watching. And she
felt that those greenish eyes would waver before his stare—that stare
of the Englishman of a certain class, which never condescends to
be inquisitive. They passed; Gyp saw Fiorsen turn to his companion,
slightly tossing back his head in their direction, and heard the
companion laugh. A little flame shot up in her.

Winton said:

“Rum-looking Johnnies one sees here!”

“That was the violinist I told you of—Fiorsen.”

“Oh! Ah!” But he had evidently forgotten.

The thought that Fiorsen should have picked her out of all that audience
for remembrance subtly flattered her vanity. She lost her ruffled
feeling. Though her father thought his dress awful, it was really rather
becoming. He would not have looked as well in proper English clothes.
Once, at least, during the next two days, she noticed the short, square
young man who had been walking with him, and was conscious that he
followed her with his eyes.

And then a certain Baroness von Maisen, a cosmopolitan friend of Aunt
Rosamund’s, German by marriage, half-Dutch, half-French by birth, asked
her if she had heard the Swedish violinist, Fiorsen. He would be, she
said, the best violinist of the day, if—and she shook her head. Finding
that expressive shake unquestioned, the baroness pursued her thoughts:

“Ah, these musicians! He wants saving from himself. If he does not halt
soon, he will be lost. Pity! A great talent!”

Gyp looked at her steadily and asked:

“Does he drink, then?”

“Pas mal! But there are things besides drink, ma chere.”

Instinct and so much life with Winton made the girl regard it as beneath
her to be shocked. She did not seek knowledge of life, but refused to
shy away from it or be discomfited; and the baroness, to whom innocence
was piquant, went on:

“Des femmes—toujours des femmes! C’est grand dommage. It will spoil his
spirit. His sole chance is to find one woman, but I pity her; sapristi,
quelle vie pour elle!”

Gyp said calmly:

“Would a man like that ever love?”

The baroness goggled her eyes.

“I have known such a man become a slave. I have known him running after
a woman like a lamb while she was deceiving him here and there. On ne
peut jamais dire. Ma belle, il y a des choses que vous ne savez pas
encore.” She took Gyp’s hand. “And yet, one thing is certain. With those
eyes and those lips and that figure, YOU have a time before you!”

Gyp withdrew her hand, smiled, and shook her head; she did not believe
in love.

“Ah, but you will turn some heads! No fear! as you English say. There is
fatality in those pretty brown eyes!”

A girl may be pardoned who takes as a compliment the saying that her
eyes are fatal. The words warmed Gyp, uncontrollably light-hearted in
these days, just as she was warmed when people turned to stare at her.
The soft air, the mellowness of this gay place, much music, a sense of
being a rara avis among people who, by their heavier type, enhanced her
own, had produced in her a kind of intoxication, making her what the
baroness called “un peu folle.” She was always breaking into laughter,
having that precious feeling of twisting the world round her thumb,
which does not come too often in the life of one who is sensitive.
Everything to her just then was either “funny” or “lovely.” And the
baroness, conscious of the girl’s chic, genuinely attracted by one so
pretty, took care that she saw all the people, perhaps more than all,
that were desirable.

To women and artists, between whom there is ever a certain kinship,
curiosity is a vivid emotion. Besides, the more a man has conquered, the
more precious field he is for a woman’s conquest. To attract a man who
has attracted many, what is it but a proof that one’s charm is superior
to that of all those others? The words of the baroness deepened in Gyp
the impression that Fiorsen was “impossible,” but secretly fortified the
faint excitement she felt that he should have remembered her out of all
that audience. Later on, they bore more fruit than that. But first came
that queer incident of the flowers.

Coming in from a ride, a week after she had sat with Winton under the
Schiller statue, Gyp found on her dressing-table a bunch of Gloire de
Dijon and La France roses. Plunging her nose into them, she thought:
“How lovely! Who sent me these?” There was no card. All that the German
maid could say was that a boy had brought them from a flower shop “fur
Fraulein Vinton”; it was surmised that they came from the baroness. In
her bodice at dinner, and to the concert after, Gyp wore one La France
and one Gloire de Dijon—a daring mixture of pink and orange against
her oyster-coloured frock, which delighted her, who had a passion for
experiments in colour. They had bought no programme, all music being
the same to Winton, and Gyp not needing any. When she saw Fiorsen come
forward, her cheeks began to colour from sheer anticipation.

He played first a minuet by Mozart; then the Cesar Franck sonata; and
when he came back to make his bow, he was holding in his hand a Gloire
de Dijon and a La France rose. Involuntarily, Gyp raised her hand to her
own roses. His eyes met hers; he bowed just a little lower. Then, quite
naturally, put the roses to his lips as he was walking off the platform.
Gyp dropped her hand, as if it had been stung. Then, with the swift
thought: “Oh, that’s schoolgirlish!” she contrived a little smile. But
her cheeks were flushing. Should she take out those roses and let them
fall? Her father might see, might notice Fiorsen’s—put two and two
together! He would consider she had been insulted. Had she? She could
not bring herself to think so. It was too pretty a compliment, as if
he wished to tell her that he was playing to her alone. The baroness’s
words flashed through her mind: “He wants saving from himself. Pity!
A great talent!” It WAS a great talent. There must be something worth
saving in one who could play like that! They left after his last solo.
Gyp put the two roses carefully back among the others.

Three days later, she went to an afternoon “at home” at the Baroness von
Maisen’s. She saw him at once, over by the piano, with his short, square
companion, listening to a voluble lady, and looking very bored and
restless. All that overcast afternoon, still and with queer lights in
the sky, as if rain were coming, Gyp had been feeling out of mood,
a little homesick. Now she felt excited. She saw the short companion
detach himself and go up to the baroness; a minute later, he was brought
up to her and introduced—Count Rosek. Gyp did not like his face; there
were dark rings under the eyes, and he was too perfectly self-possessed,
with a kind of cold sweetness; but he was very agreeable and polite, and
spoke English well. He was—it seemed—a Pole, who lived in London, and
seemed to know all that was to be known about music. Miss Winton—he
believed—had heard his friend Fiorsen play; but not in London? No? That
was odd; he had been there some months last season. Faintly annoyed at
her ignorance, Gyp answered:

“Yes; but I was in the country nearly all last summer.”

“He had a great success. I shall take him back; it is best for his
future. What do you think of his playing?”

In spite of herself, for she did not like expanding to this sphinxlike
little man, Gyp murmured:

“Oh, simply wonderful, of course!”

He nodded, and then rather suddenly said, with a peculiar little smile:

“May I introduce him? Gustav—Miss Winton!”

Gyp turned. There he was, just behind her, bowing; and his eyes had a
look of humble adoration which he made no attempt whatever to conceal.
Gyp saw another smile slide over the Pole’s lips; and she was alone
in the bay window with Fiorsen. The moment might well have fluttered a
girl’s nerves after his recognition of her by the Schiller statue, after
that episode of the flowers, and what she had heard of him. But life had
not yet touched either her nerves or spirit; she only felt amused and
a little excited. Close to, he had not so much that look of an animal
behind bars, and he certainly was in his way a dandy, beautifully
washed—always an important thing—and having some pleasant essence on his
handkerchief or hair, of which Gyp would have disapproved if he had been
English. He wore a diamond ring also, which did not somehow seem
bad form on that particular little finger. His height, his broad
cheek-bones, thick but not long hair, the hungry vitality of his face,
figure, movements, annulled those evidences of femininity. He was male
enough, rather too male. Speaking with a queer, crisp accent, he said:

“Miss Winton, you are my audience here. I play to you—only to you.”

Gyp laughed.

“You laugh at me; but you need not. I play for you because I admire you.
I admire you terribly. If I sent you those flowers, it was not to be
rude. It was my gratitude for the pleasure of your face.” His voice
actually trembled. And, looking down, Gyp answered:

“Thank you. It was very kind of you. I want to thank you for your
playing. It is beautiful—really beautiful!”

He made her another little bow.

“When I go back to London, will you come and hear me?”

“I should think any one would go to hear you, if they had the chance.”

He gave a short laugh.

“Bah! Here, I do it for money; I hate this place. It bores me—bores me!
Was that your father sitting with you under the statue?”

Gyp nodded, suddenly grave. She had not forgotten the slighting turn of
his head.

He passed his hand over his face, as if to wipe off its expression.

“He is very English. But you—of no country—you belong to all!”

Gyp made him an ironical little bow.

“No; I should not know your country—you are neither of the North nor of
the South. You are just Woman, made to be adored. I came here hoping
to meet you; I am extremely happy. Miss Winton, I am your very devoted
servant.”

He was speaking very fast, very low, with an agitated earnestness that
surely could not be put on. But suddenly muttering: “These people!”
he made her another of his little bows and abruptly slipped away. The
baroness was bringing up another man. The chief thought left by that
meeting was: “Is that how he begins to everyone?” She could not quite
believe it. The stammering earnestness of his voice, those humbly
adoring looks! Then she remembered the smile on the lips of the little
Pole, and thought: “But he must know I’m not silly enough just to be
taken in by vulgar flattery!”

Too sensitive to confide in anyone, she had no chance to ventilate the
curious sensations of attraction and repulsion that began fermenting in
her, feelings defying analysis, mingling and quarrelling deep down in
her heart. It was certainly not love, not even the beginning of that;
but it was the kind of dangerous interest children feel in things
mysterious, out of reach, yet within reach, if only they dared! And the
tug of music was there, and the tug of those words of the baroness about
salvation—the thought of achieving the impossible, reserved only for the
woman of supreme charm, for the true victress. But all these thoughts
and feelings were as yet in embryo. She might never see him again! And
she certainly did not know whether she even wanted to.

IV

Gyp was in the habit of walking with Winton to the Kochbrunnen, where,
with other patient-folk, he was required to drink slowly for twenty
minutes every morning. While he was imbibing she would sit in a remote
corner of the garden, and read a novel in the Reclam edition, as a daily
German lesson.

She was sitting there, the morning after the “at-home” at the Baroness
von Maisen’s, reading Turgenev’s “Torrents of Spring,” when she saw
Count Rosek sauntering down the path with a glass of the waters in his
hand. Instant memory of the smile with which he had introduced
Fiorsen made her take cover beneath her sunshade. She could see his
patent-leathered feet, and well-turned, peg-top-trousered legs go by
with the gait of a man whose waist is corseted. The certainty that he
wore those prerogatives of womanhood increased her dislike. How dare men
be so effeminate? Yet someone had told her that he was a good rider, a
good fencer, and very strong. She drew a breath of relief when he was
past, and, for fear he might turn and come back, closed her little
book and slipped away. But her figure and her springing step were more
unmistakable than she knew.

Next morning, on the same bench, she was reading breathlessly the scene
between Gemma and Sanin at the window, when she heard Fiorsen’s voice,
behind her, say:

“Miss Winton!”

He, too, held a glass of the waters in one hand, and his hat in the
other.

“I have just made your father’s acquaintance. May I sit down a minute?”

Gyp drew to one side on the bench, and he sat down.

“What are you reading?”

“A story called ’Torrents of Spring.’”

“Ah, the finest ever written! Where are you?”

“Gemma and Sanin in the thunderstorm.”

“Wait! You have Madame Polozov to come! What a creation! How old are
you, Miss Winton?”

“Twenty-two.”

“You would be too young to appreciate that story if you were not YOU.
But you know much—by instinct. What is your Christian name—forgive me!”

“Ghita.”

“Ghita? Not soft enough.”

“I am always called Gyp.”

“Gyp—ah, Gyp! Yes; Gyp!”

He repeated her name so impersonally that she could not be angry.

“I told your father I have had the pleasure of meeting you. He was very
polite.”

Gyp said coldly:

“My father is always polite.”

“Like the ice in which they put champagne.”

Gyp smiled; she could not help it.

And suddenly he said:

“I suppose they have told you that I am a mauvais sujet.” Gyp inclined
her head. He looked at her steadily, and said: “It is true. But I could
be better—much.”

She wanted to look at him, but could not. A queer sort of exultation had
seized on her. This man had power; yet she had power over him. If she
wished she could make him her slave, her dog, chain him to her. She had
but to hold out her hand, and he would go on his knees to kiss it. She
had but to say, “Come,” and he would come from wherever he might be.
She had but to say, “Be good,” and he would be good. It was her first
experience of power; and it was intoxicating. But—but! Gyp could never
be self-confident for long; over her most victorious moments brooded the
shadow of distrust. As if he read her thought, Fiorsen said:

“Tell me to do something—anything; I will do it, Miss Winton.”

“Then—go back to London at once. You are wasting yourself here, you
know. You said so!”

He looked at her, bewildered and upset, and muttered:

“You have asked me the one thing I can’t do, Miss—Miss Gyp!”

“Please—not that; it’s like a servant!”

“I AM your servant!”

“Is that why you won’t do what I ask you?”

“You are cruel.”

Gyp laughed.

He got up and said, with sudden fierceness:

“I am not going away from you; do not think it.” Bending with the utmost
swiftness, he took her hand, put his lips to it, and turned on his heel.

Gyp, uneasy and astonished, stared at her hand, still tingling from the
pressure of his bristly moustache. Then she laughed again—it was just
“foreign” to have your hand kissed—and went back to her book, without
taking in the words.

Was ever courtship more strange than that which followed? It is said
that the cat fascinates the bird it desires to eat; here the bird
fascinated the cat, but the bird too was fascinated. Gyp never lost
the sense of having the whip-hand, always felt like one giving alms, or
extending favour, yet had a feeling of being unable to get away, which
seemed to come from the very strength of the spell she laid on him.
The magnetism with which she held him reacted on herself. Thoroughly
sceptical at first, she could not remain so. He was too utterly morose
and unhappy if she did not smile on him, too alive and excited and
grateful if she did. The change in his eyes from their ordinary
restless, fierce, and furtive expression to humble adoration or wistful
hunger when they looked at her could never have been simulated. And
she had no lack of chance to see that metamorphosis. Wherever she went,
there he was. If to a concert, he would be a few paces from the door,
waiting for her entrance. If to a confectioner’s for tea, as likely as
not he would come in. Every afternoon he walked where she must pass,
riding to the Neroberg.

Except in the gardens of the Kochbrunnen, when he would come up humbly
and ask to sit with her five minutes, he never forced his company, or
tried in any way to compromise her. Experience, no doubt, served him
there; but he must have had an instinct that it was dangerous with one
so sensitive. There were other moths, too, round that bright candle, and
they served to keep his attentions from being too conspicuous. Did she
comprehend what was going on, understand how her defences were being
sapped, grasp the danger to retreat that lay in permitting him to
hover round her? Not really. It all served to swell the triumphant
intoxication of days when she was ever more and more in love with
living, more and more conscious that the world appreciated and admired
her, that she had power to do what others couldn’t.

Was not Fiorsen, with his great talent, and his dubious reputation,
proof of that? And he excited her. Whatever else one might be in his
moody, vivid company, one would not be dull. One morning, he told her
something of his life. His father had been a small Swedish landowner, a
very strong man and a very hard drinker; his mother, the daughter of a
painter. She had taught him the violin, but died while he was still a
boy. When he was seventeen he had quarrelled with his father, and had to
play his violin for a living in the streets of Stockholm. A well-known
violinist, hearing him one day, took him in hand. Then his father had
drunk himself to death, and he had inherited the little estate. He had
sold it at once—“for follies,” as he put it crudely. “Yes, Miss Winton;
I have committed many follies, but they are nothing to those I shall
commit the day I do not see you any more!” And, with that disturbing
remark, he got up and left her. She had smiled at his words, but within
herself she felt excitement, scepticism, compassion, and something she
did not understand at all. In those days, she understood herself very
little.

But how far did Winton understand, how far see what was going on? He
was a stoic; but that did not prevent jealousy from taking alarm, and
causing him twinges more acute than those he still felt in his left
foot. He was afraid of showing disquiet by any dramatic change, or he
would have carried her off a fortnight at least before his cure was
over. He knew too well the signs of passion. That long, loping, wolfish
fiddling fellow with the broad cheekbones and little side-whiskers (Good
God!) and greenish eyes whose looks at Gyp he secretly marked down,
roused his complete distrust. Perhaps his inbred English contempt for
foreigners and artists kept him from direct action. He COULD not take
it quite seriously. Gyp, his fastidious perfect Gyp, succumbing, even a
little to a fellow like that! Never! His jealous affection, too,
could not admit that she would neglect to consult him in any doubt or
difficulty. He forgot the sensitive secrecy of girls, forgot that his
love for her had ever shunned words, her love for him never indulged in
confidences. Nor did he see more than a little of what there was to see,
and that little was doctored by Fiorsen for his eyes, shrewd though
they were. Nor was there in all so very much, except one episode the day
before they left, and of that he knew nothing.

That last afternoon was very still, a little mournful. It had rained the
night before, and the soaked tree-trunks, the soaked fallen leaves gave
off a faint liquorice-like perfume. In Gyp there was a feeling, as if
her spirit had been suddenly emptied of excitement and delight. Was it
the day, or the thought of leaving this place where she had so enjoyed
herself? After lunch, when Winton was settling his accounts, she
wandered out through the long park stretching up the valley. The sky was
brooding-grey, the trees were still and melancholy. It was all a little
melancholy, and she went on and on, across the stream, round into a
muddy lane that led up through the outskirts of a village, on to the
higher ground whence she could return by the main road. Why must things
come to an end? For the first time in her life, she thought of Mildenham
and hunting without enthusiasm. She would rather stay in London. There
she would not be cut off from music, from dancing, from people, and
all the exhilaration of being appreciated. On the air came the shrilly,
hollow droning of a thresher, and the sound seemed exactly to express
her feelings. A pigeon flew over, white against the leaden sky; some
birch-trees that had gone golden shivered and let fall a shower of
drops. It was lonely here! And, suddenly, two little boys bolted out of
the hedge, nearly upsetting her, and scurried down the road. Something
had startled them. Gyp, putting up her face to see, felt on it soft
pin-points of rain. Her frock would be spoiled, and it was one she was
fond of—dove-coloured, velvety, not meant for weather. She turned for
refuge to the birch-trees. It would be over directly, perhaps. Muffled
in distance, the whining drone of that thresher still came travelling,
deepening her discomfort. Then in the hedge, whence the boys had bolted
down, a man reared himself above the lane, and came striding along
toward her. He jumped down the bank, among the birch-trees. And she
saw it was Fiorsen—panting, dishevelled, pale with heat. He must have
followed her, and climbed straight up the hillside from the path she
had come along in the bottom, before crossing the stream. His artistic
dandyism had been harshly treated by that scramble. She might have
laughed; but, instead, she felt excited, a little scared by the look on
his hot, pale face. He said, breathlessly:

“I have caught you. So you are going to-morrow, and never told me! You
thought you would slip away—not a word for me! Are you always so cruel?
Well, I will not spare you, either!”

Crouching suddenly, he took hold of her broad ribbon sash, and buried
his face in it. Gyp stood trembling—the action had not stirred her sense
of the ridiculous. He circled her knees with his arms.

“Oh, Gyp, I love you—I love you—don’t send me away—let me be with you! I
am your dog—your slave. Oh, Gyp, I love you!”

His voice moved and terrified her. Men had said “I love you” several
times during those last two years, but never with that lost-soul ring of
passion, never with that look in the eyes at once fiercely hungry and so
supplicating, never with that restless, eager, timid touch of hands. She
could only murmur:

“Please get up!”

But he went on:

“Love me a little, only a little—love me! Oh, Gyp!”

The thought flashed through Gyp: ’To how many has he knelt, I wonder?’
His face had a kind of beauty in its abandonment—the beauty that comes
from yearning—and she lost her frightened feeling. He went on, with his
stammering murmur: “I am a prodigal, I know; but if you love me, I will
no longer be. I will do great things for you. Oh, Gyp, if you will some
day marry me! Not now. When I have proved. Oh, Gyp, you are so sweet—so
wonderful!”

His arms crept up till he had buried his face against her waist. Without
quite knowing what she did, Gyp touched his hair, and said again:

“No; please get up.”

He got up then, and standing near, with his hands hard clenched at his
sides, whispered:

“Have mercy! Speak to me!”

She could not. All was strange and mazed and quivering in her, her
spirit straining away, drawn to him, fantastically confused. She could
only look into his face with her troubled, dark eyes. And suddenly she
was seized and crushed to him. She shrank away, pushing him back with
all her strength. He hung his head, abashed, suffering, with eyes shut,
lips trembling; and her heart felt again that quiver of compassion. She
murmured:

“I don’t know. I will tell you later—later—in England.”

He bowed, folding his arms, as if to make her feel safe from him. And
when, regardless of the rain, she began to move on, he walked beside
her, a yard or so away, humbly, as though he had never poured out those
words or hurt her lips with the violence of his kiss.

Back in her room, taking off her wet dress, Gyp tried to remember what
he had said and what she had answered. She had not promised anything.
But she had given him her address, both in London and the country.
Unless she resolutely thought of other things, she still felt the
restless touch of his hands, the grip of his arms, and saw his eyes as
they were when he was kissing her; and once more she felt frightened and
excited.

He was playing at the concert that evening—her last concert. And surely
he had never played like that—with a despairing beauty, a sort of
frenzied rapture. Listening, there came to her a feeling—a feeling of
fatality—that, whether she would or no, she could not free herself from
him.

V

Once back in England, Gyp lost that feeling, or very nearly. Her
scepticism told her that Fiorsen would soon see someone else who seemed
all he had said she was! How ridiculous to suppose that he would stop
his follies for her, that she had any real power over him! But, deep
down, she did not quite believe this. It would have wounded her belief
in herself too much—a belief so subtle and intimate that she was not
conscious of it; belief in that something about her which had inspired
the baroness to use the word “fatality.”

Winton, who breathed again, hurried her off to Mildenham. He had bought
her a new horse. They were in time for the last of the cubbing. And, for
a week at least, the passion for riding and the sight of hounds carried
all before it. Then, just as the real business of the season was
beginning, she began to feel dull and restless. Mildenham was dark; the
autumn winds made dreary noises. Her little brown spaniel, very old,
who seemed only to have held on to life just for her return, died. She
accused herself terribly for having left it so long when it was failing.
Thinking of all the days Lass had been watching for her to come home—as
Betty, with that love of woeful recital so dear to simple hearts, took
good care to make plain—she felt as if she had been cruel. For events
such as these, Gyp was both too tender-hearted and too hard on herself.
She was quite ill for several days. The moment she was better, Winton,
in dismay, whisked her back to Aunt Rosamund, in town. He would lose her
company, but if it did her good, took her out of herself, he would be
content. Running up for the week-end, three days later, he was relieved
to find her decidedly perked-up, and left her again with the easier
heart.

It was on the day after he went back to Mildenham that she received a
letter from Fiorsen, forwarded from Bury Street. He was—it said—just
returning to London; he had not forgotten any look she had ever given
him, or any word she had spoken. He should not rest till he could see
her again. “For a long time,” the letter ended, “before I first saw you,
I was like the dead—lost. All was bitter apples to me. Now I am a ship
that comes from the whirlpools to a warm blue sea; now I see again
the evening star. I kiss your hands, and am your faithful slave—Gustav
Fiorsen.” These words, which from any other man would have excited
her derision, renewed in Gyp that fluttered feeling, the pleasurable,
frightened sense that she could not get away from his pursuit.

She wrote in answer to the address he gave her in London, to say that
she was staying for a few days in Curzon Street with her aunt, who would
be glad to see him if he cared to come in any afternoon between five and
six, and signed herself “Ghita Winton.” She was long over that little
note. Its curt formality gave her satisfaction. Was she really mistress
of herself—and him; able to dispose as she wished? Yes; and surely the
note showed it.

It was never easy to tell Gyp’s feelings from her face; even Winton was
often baffled. Her preparation of Aunt Rosamund for the reception of
Fiorsen was a masterpiece of casualness. When he duly came, he, too,
seemed doubly alive to the need for caution, only gazing at Gyp when
he could not be seen doing so. But, going out, he whispered: “Not like
this—not like this; I must see you alone—I must!” She smiled and shook
her head. But bubbles had come back to the wine in her cup.

That evening she said quietly to Aunt Rosamund:

“Dad doesn’t like Mr. Fiorsen—can’t appreciate his playing, of course.”

And this most discreet remark caused Aunt Rosamund, avid—in a well-bred
way—of music, to omit mention of the intruder when writing to her
brother. The next two weeks he came almost every day, always bringing
his violin, Gyp playing his accompaniments, and though his hungry stare
sometimes made her feel hot, she would have missed it.

But when Winton next came up to Bury Street, she was in a quandary. To
confess that Fiorsen was here, having omitted to speak of him in
her letters? Not to confess, and leave him to find it out from Aunt
Rosamund? Which was worse? Seized with panic, she did neither, but
told her father she was dying for a gallop. Hailing that as the best
of signs, he took her forthwith back to Mildenham. And curious were her
feelings—light-hearted, compunctious, as of one who escapes yet knows
she will soon be seeking to return. The meet was rather far next day,
but she insisted on riding to it, since old Pettance, the superannuated
jockey, charitably employed as extra stable help at Mildenham, was to
bring on her second horse. There was a good scenting-wind, with rain
in the offing, and outside the covert they had a corner to
themselves—Winton knowing a trick worth two of the field’s at-large.
They had slipped there, luckily unseen, for the knowing were given to
following the one-handed horseman in faded pink, who, on his bang-tailed
black mare, had a knack of getting so well away. One of the whips, a
little dark fellow with smouldery eyes and sucked-in weathered cheeks,
dashed out of covert, rode past, saluting, and dashed in again. A jay
came out with a screech, dived, and doubled back; a hare made off across
the fallow—the light-brown lopping creature was barely visible against
the brownish soil. Pigeons, very high up, flew over and away to the next
wood. The shrilling voices of the whips rose from the covert-depths,
and just a whimper now and then from the hounds, swiftly wheeling their
noses among the fern and briers.

Gyp, crisping her fingers on the reins, drew-in deep breaths. It smelled
so sweet and soft and fresh under that sky, pied of blue, and of white
and light-grey swift-moving clouds—not half the wind down here that
there was up there, just enough to be carrying off the beech and oak
leaves, loosened by frost two days before. If only a fox would break
this side, and they could have the first fields to themselves! It was so
lovely to be alone with hounds! One of these came trotting out, a pretty
young creature, busy and unconcerned, raising its tan-and-white head,
its mild reproachful deep-brown eyes, at Winton’s, “Loo-in Trix!” What
a darling! A burst of music from the covert, and the darling vanished
among the briers.

Gyp’s new brown horse pricked its ears. A young man in a grey cutaway,
buff cords, and jack-boots, on a low chestnut mare, came slipping round
the covert. Oh—did that mean they were all coming? Impatiently she
glanced at this intruder, who raised his hat a little and smiled. That
smile, faintly impudent, was so infectious, that Gyp was melted to
a slight response. Then she frowned. He had spoiled their lovely
loneliness. Who was he? He looked unpardonably serene and happy sitting
there. She did not remember his face at all, yet there was something
familiar about it. He had taken his hat off—a broad face, very well
cut, and clean-shaved, with dark curly hair, extraordinary clear eyes, a
bold, cool, merry look. Where had she seen somebody like him?

A tiny sound from Winton made her turn her head. The fox—stealing out
beyond those further bushes! Breathless, she fixed her eyes on her
father’s face. It was hard as steel, watching. Not a sound, not a
quiver, as if horse and man had turned to metal. Was he never going to
give the view-halloo? Then his lips writhed, and out it came. Gyp cast a
swift smile of gratitude at the young man for having had taste and sense
to leave that to her father, and again he smiled at her. There were
the first hounds streaming out—one on the other—music and feather! Why
didn’t Dad go? They would all be round this way in a minute!

Then the black mare slid past her, and, with a bound, her horse
followed. The young man on the chestnut was away on the left. Only the
hunts-man and one whip—beside their three selves! Glorious! The brown
horse went too fast at that first fence and Winton called back: “Steady,
Gyp! Steady him!” But she couldn’t; and it didn’t matter. Grass, three
fields of grass! Oh, what a lovely fox—going so straight! And each
time the brown horse rose, she thought: “Perfect! I CAN ride! Oh, I am
happy!” And she hoped her father and the young man were looking. There
was no feeling in the world like this, with a leader like Dad, hounds
moving free, good going, and the field distanced. Better than dancing;
better—yes, better than listening to music. If one could spend one’s
life galloping, sailing over fences; if it would never stop! The new
horse was a darling, though he DID pull.

She crossed the next fence level with the young man, whose low chestnut
mare moved with a stealthy action. His hat was crammed down now, and his
face very determined, but his lips still had something of that smile.
Gyp thought: “He’s got a good seat—very strong, only he looks like
’thrusting.’ Nobody rides like Dad—so beautifully quiet!” Indeed,
Winton’s seat on a horse was perfection, all done with such a minimum
expenditure. The hounds swung round in a curve. Now she was with them,
really with them! What a pace—cracking! No fox could stand this long!

And suddenly she caught sight of him, barely a field ahead, scurrying
desperately, brush down; and the thought flashed through her: ’Oh! don’t
let’s catch you. Go on, fox; go on! Get away!’ Were they really all
after that little hunted red thing—a hundred great creatures, horses
and men and women and dogs, and only that one little fox! But then came
another fence, and quickly another, and she lost feelings of shame and
pity in the exultation of flying over them. A minute later the fox went
to earth within a few hundred yards of the leading hound, and she was
glad. She had been in at deaths before—horrid! But it had been a lovely
gallop. And, breathless, smiling rapturously, she wondered whether she
could mop her face before the field came up, without that young man
noticing.

She could see him talking to her father, and taking out a wisp of a
handkerchief that smelled of cyclamen, she had a good scrub round. When
she rode up, the young man raised his hat, and looking full at her
said: “You did go!” His voice, rather high-pitched, had in it a spice
of pleasant laziness. Gyp made him an ironical little bow, and murmured:
“My new horse, you mean.” He broke again into that irrepressible smile,
but, all the same, she knew that he admired her. And she kept thinking:
’Where HAVE I seen someone like him?’

They had two more runs, but nothing like that first gallop. Nor did she
again see the young man, whose name—it seemed—was Summerhay, son of a
certain Lady Summerhay at Widrington, ten miles from Mildenham.

All that long, silent jog home with Winton in fading daylight, she felt
very happy—saturated with air and elation. The trees and fields, the
hay-stacks, gates, and ponds beside the lanes grew dim; lights came up
in the cottage windows; the air smelled sweet of wood smoke. And, for
the first time all day, she thought of Fiorsen, thought of him almost
longingly. If he could be there in the cosy old drawing-room, to play
to her while she lay back—drowsing, dreaming by the fire in the scent of
burning cedar logs—the Mozart minuet, or that little heart-catching tune
of Poise, played the first time she heard him, or a dozen other of the
things he played unaccompanied! That would be the most lovely ending
to this lovely day. Just the glow and warmth wanting, to make all
perfect—the glow and warmth of music and adoration!

And touching the mare with her heel, she sighed. To indulge fancies
about music and Fiorsen was safe here, far away from him; she even
thought she would not mind if he were to behave again as he had under
the birch-trees in the rain at Wiesbaden. It was so good to be adored.
Her old mare, ridden now six years, began the series of contented
snuffles that signified she smelt home. Here was the last turn, and the
loom of the short beech-tree avenue to the house—the old manor-house,
comfortable, roomy, rather dark, with wide shallow stairs. Ah, she was
tired; and it was drizzling now. She would be nicely stiff to-morrow. In
the light coming from the open door she saw Markey standing; and while
fishing from her pocket the usual lumps of sugar, heard him say: “Mr.
Fiorsen, sir—gentleman from Wiesbaden—to see you.”

Her heart thumped. What did this mean? Why had he come? How had he
dared? How could he have been so treacherous to her? Ah, but he was
ignorant, of course, that she had not told her father. A veritable
judgment on her! She ran straight in and up the stairs. The voice of
Betty, “Your bath’s ready, Miss Gyp,” roused her. And crying, “Oh, Betty
darling, bring me up my tea!” she ran into the bathroom. She was safe
there; and in the delicious heat of the bath faced the situation better.

There could be only one meaning. He had come to ask for her. And,
suddenly, she took comfort. Better so; there would be no more secrecy
from Dad! And he would stand between her and Fiorsen if—if she decided
not to marry him. The thought staggered her. Had she, without knowing
it, got so far as this? Yes, and further. It was all no good; Fiorsen
would never accept refusal, even if she gave it! But, did she want to
refuse?

She loved hot baths, but had never stayed in one so long. Life was so
easy there, and so difficult outside. Betty’s knock forced her to get
out at last, and let her in with tea and the message. Would Miss Gyp
please to go down when she was ready?

VI

Winton was staggered. With a glance at Gyp’s vanishing figure, he said
curtly to Markey, “Where have you put this gentleman?” But the use of
the word “this” was the only trace he showed of his emotions. In that
little journey across the hall he entertained many extravagant thoughts.
Arrived at the study, he inclined his head courteously enough, waiting
for Fiorsen to speak. The “fiddler,” still in his fur-lined coat, was
twisting a squash hat in his hands. In his own peculiar style he was
impressive. But why couldn’t he look you in the face; or, if he did, why
did he seem about to eat you?

“You knew I was returned to London, Major Winton?”

Then Gyp had been seeing the fellow without letting him know! The
thought was chill and bitter to Winton. He must not give her away,
however, and he simply bowed. He felt that his visitor was afraid of
his frigid courtesy; and he did not mean to help him over that fear.
He could not, of course, realize that this ascendancy would not prevent
Fiorsen from laughing at him behind his back and acting as if he did not
exist. No real contest, in fact, was possible between men moving on such
different planes, neither having the slightest respect for the other’s
standards or beliefs.

Fiorsen, who had begun to pace the room, stopped, and said with
agitation:

“Major Winton, your daughter is the most beautiful thing on earth. I
love her desperately. I am a man with a future, though you may not think
it. I have what future I like in my art if only I can marry her. I have
a little money, too—not much; but in my violin there is all the fortune
she can want.”

Winton’s face expressed nothing but cold contempt. That this fellow
should take him for one who would consider money in connection with his
daughter simply affronted him.

Fiorsen went on:

“You do not like me—that is clear. I saw it the first moment. You are
an English gentleman”—he pronounced the words with a sort of irony—“I
am nothing to you. Yet, in MY world, I am something. I am not an
adventurer. Will you permit me to beg your daughter to be my wife?” He
raised his hands that still held the hat; involuntarily they had assumed
the attitude of prayer.

For a second, Winton realized that he was suffering. That weakness went
in a flash, and he said frigidly:

“I am obliged to you, sir, for coming to me first. You are in my house,
and I don’t want to be discourteous, but I should be glad if you would
be good enough to withdraw and take it that I shall certainly oppose
your wish as best I can.”

The almost childish disappointment and trouble in Fiorsen’s face changed
quickly to an expression fierce, furtive, mocking; and then shifted to
despair.

“Major Winton, you have loved; you must have loved her mother. I
suffer!”

Winton, who had turned abruptly to the fire, faced round again.

“I don’t control my daughter’s affections, sir; she will do as she
wishes. I merely say it will be against my hopes and judgment if she
marries you. I imagine you’ve not altogether waited for my leave. I was
not blind to the way you hung about her at Wiesbaden, Mr. Fiorsen.”

Fiorsen answered with a twisted, miserable smile:

“Poor wretches do what they can. May I see her? Let me just see her.”

Was it any good to refuse? She had been seeing the fellow already
without his knowledge, keeping from him—HIM—all her feelings, whatever
they were. And he said:

“I’ll send for her. In the meantime, perhaps you’ll have some
refreshment?”

Fiorsen shook his head, and there followed half an hour of acute
discomfort. Winton, in his mud-stained clothes before the fire,
supported it better than his visitor. That child of nature, after
endeavouring to emulate his host’s quietude, renounced all such efforts
with an expressive gesture, fidgeted here, fidgeted there, tramped the
room, went to the window, drew aside the curtains and stared out into
the dark; came back as if resolved again to confront Winton; then,
baffled by that figure so motionless before the fire, flung himself down
in an armchair, and turned his face to the wall. Winton was not cruel by
nature, but he enjoyed the writhings of this fellow who was endangering
Gyp’s happiness. Endangering? Surely not possible that she would accept
him! Yet, if not, why had she not told him? And he, too, suffered.

Then she came. He had expected her to be pale and nervous; but Gyp never
admitted being naughty till she had been forgiven. Her smiling face had
in it a kind of warning closeness. She went up to Fiorsen, and holding
out her hand, said calmly:

“How nice of you to come!”

Winton had the bitter feeling that he—he—was the outsider. Well, he
would speak plainly; there had been too much underhand doing.

“Mr. Fiorsen has done us the honour to wish to marry you. I’ve told him
that you decide such things for yourself. If you accept him, it will be
against my wish, naturally.”

While he was speaking, the glow in her cheeks deepened; she looked
neither at him nor at Fiorsen. Winton noted the rise and fall of the
lace on her breast. She was smiling, and gave the tiniest shrug of her
shoulders. And, suddenly smitten to the heart, he walked stiffly to the
door. It was evident that she had no use for his guidance. If her
love for him was not worth to her more than this fellow! But there his
resentment stopped. He knew that he could not afford wounded feelings;
could not get on without her. Married to the greatest rascal on earth,
he would still be standing by her, wanting her companionship and love.
She represented too much in the present and—the past. With sore heart,
indeed, he went down to dinner.

Fiorsen was gone when he came down again. What the fellow had said, or
she had answered, he would not for the world have asked. Gulfs
between the proud are not lightly bridged. And when she came up to say
good-night, both their faces were as though coated with wax.

In the days that followed, she gave no sign, uttered no word in any way
suggesting that she meant to go against his wishes. Fiorsen might not
have existed, for any mention made of him. But Winton knew well that
she was moping, and cherishing some feeling against himself. And this he
could not bear. So, one evening, after dinner, he said quietly:

“Tell me frankly, Gyp; do you care for that chap?”

She answered as quietly:

“In a way—yes.”

“Is that enough?”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

Her lips had quivered; and Winton’s heart softened, as it always did
when he saw her moved. He put his hand out, covered one of hers, and
said:

“I shall never stand in the way of your happiness, Gyp. But it must BE
happiness. Can it possibly be that? I don’t think so. You know what they
said of him out there?”

“Yes.”

He had not thought she knew. And his heart sank.

“That’s pretty bad, you know. And is he of our world at all?”

Gyp looked up.

“Do you think I belong to ’our world,’ Dad?”

Winton turned away. She followed, slipping her hand under his arm.

“I didn’t mean to hurt. But it’s true, isn’t it? I don’t belong among
society people. They wouldn’t have me, you know—if they knew about
what you told me. Ever since that I’ve felt I don’t belong to them. I’m
nearer him. Music means more to me than anything!”

Winton gave her hand a convulsive grip. A sense of coming defeat and
bereavement was on him.

“If your happiness went wrong, Gyp, I should be most awfully cut up.”

“But why shouldn’t I be happy, Dad?”

“If you were, I could put up with anyone. But, I tell you, I can’t
believe you would be. I beg you, my dear—for God’s sake, make sure. I’ll
put a bullet into the man who treats you badly.”

Gyp laughed, then kissed him. But they were silent. At bedtime he said:

“We’ll go up to town to-morrow.”

Whether from a feeling of the inevitable, or from the forlorn hope that
seeing more of the fellow might be the only chance of curing her—he put
no more obstacles in the way.

And the queer courtship began again. By Christmas she had consented,
still under the impression that she was the mistress, not the slave—the
cat, not the bird. Once or twice, when Fiorsen let passion out of hand
and his overbold caresses affronted her, she recoiled almost with dread
from what she was going toward. But, in general, she lived elated,
intoxicated by music and his adoration, withal remorseful that she was
making her father sad. She was but little at Mildenham, and he, in
his unhappiness, was there nearly all the time, riding extra hard, and
leaving Gyp with his sister. Aunt Rosamund, though under the spell
of Fiorsen’s music, had agreed with her brother that Fiorsen was
“impossible.” But nothing she said made any effect on Gyp. It was new
and startling to discover in this soft, sensitive girl such a vein of
stubbornness. Opposition seemed to harden her resolution. And the good
lady’s natural optimism began to persuade her that Gyp would make a silk
purse out of that sow’s ear yet. After all, the man was a celebrity in
his way!

It was settled for February. A house with a garden was taken in St.
John’s Wood. The last month went, as all such last months go, in those
intoxicating pastimes, the buying of furniture and clothes. If it were
not for that, who knows how many engagement knots would slip!

And to-day they had been married. To the last, Winton had hardly
believed it would come to that. He had shaken the hand of her husband
and kept pain and disappointment out of his face, knowing well that
he deceived no one. Thank heaven, there had been no church, no
wedding-cake, invitations, congratulations, fal-lals of any kind—he
could never have stood them. Not even Rosamund—who had influenza—to put
up with!

Lying back in the recesses of that old chair, he stared into the fire.

They would be just about at Torquay by now—just about. Music! Who would
have thought noises made out of string and wood could have stolen her
away from him? Yes, they would be at Torquay by now, at their hotel. And
the first prayer Winton had uttered for years escaped his lips:

“Let her be happy! Let her be happy!”

Then, hearing Markey open the door, he closed his eyes and feigned
sleep.





Part II

I

When a girl first sits opposite the man she has married, of what does
she think? Not of the issues and emotions that lie in wait. They are
too overwhelming; she would avoid them while she can. Gyp thought of her
frock, a mushroom-coloured velvet cord. Not many girls of her class are
married without “fal-lals,” as Winton had called them. Not many girls
sit in the corner of their reserved first-class compartments without
the excitement of having been supreme centre of the world for some
flattering hours to buoy them up on that train journey, with no memories
of friends’ behaviour, speech, appearance, to chat of with her husband,
so as to keep thought away. For Gyp, her dress, first worn that day,
Betty’s breakdown, the faces, blank as hats, of the registrar and clerk,
were about all she had to distract her. She stole a look at her husband,
clothed in blue serge, just opposite. Her husband! Mrs. Gustav Fiorsen!
No! People might call her that; to herself, she was Ghita Winton. Ghita
Fiorsen would never seem right. And, not confessing that she was afraid
to meet his eyes, but afraid all the same, she looked out of the window.
A dull, bleak, dismal day; no warmth, no sun, no music in it—the Thames
as grey as lead, the willows on its banks forlorn.

Suddenly she felt his hand on hers. She had not seen his face like that
before—yes; once or twice when he was playing—a spirit shining though.
She felt suddenly secure. If it stayed like that, then!—His hand rested
on her knee; his face changed just a little; the spirit seemed to waver,
to be fading; his lips grew fuller. He crossed over and sat beside her.
Instantly she began to talk about their house, where they were going to
put certain things—presents and all that. He, too, talked of the house;
but every now and then he glanced at the corridor, and muttered. It
was pleasant to feel that the thought of her possessed him through
and through, but she was tremulously glad of that corridor. Life is
mercifully made up of little things! And Gyp was always able to live in
the moment. In the hours they had spent together, up to now, he had been
like a starved man snatching hasty meals; now that he had her to himself
for good, he was another creature altogether—like a boy out of school,
and kept her laughing nearly all the time.

Presently he got down his practise violin, and putting on the mute,
played, looking at her over his shoulder with a droll smile. She felt
happy, much warmer at heart, now. And when his face was turned away, she
looked at him. He was so much better looking now than when he had those
little whiskers. One day she had touched one of them and said: “Ah! if
only these wings could fly!” Next morning they had flown. His face was
not one to be easily got used to; she was not used to it yet, any more
than she was used to his touch. When it grew dark, and he wanted to draw
down the blinds, she caught him by the sleeve, and said:

“No, no; they’ll know we’re honeymooners!”

“Well, my Gyp, and are we not?”

But he obeyed; only, as the hours went on, his eyes seemed never to let
her alone.

At Torquay, the sky was clear and starry; the wind brought whiffs of
sea-scent into their cab; lights winked far out on a headland; and in
the little harbour, all bluish dark, many little boats floated like tame
birds. He had put his arm round her, and she could feel his hand resting
on her heart. She was grateful that he kept so still. When the cab
stopped and they entered the hall of the hotel, she whispered:

“Don’t let’s let them see!”

Still, mercifully, little things! Inspecting the three rooms, getting
the luggage divided between dressing-room and bedroom, unpacking,
wondering which dress to put on for dinner, stopping to look out over
the dark rocks and the sea, where the moon was coming up, wondering if
she dared lock the door while she was dressing, deciding that it would
be silly; dressing so quickly, fluttering when she found him suddenly
there close behind her, beginning to do up her hooks. Those fingers were
too skilful! It was the first time she had thought of his past with a
sort of hurt pride and fastidiousness. When he had finished, he twisted
her round, held her away, looked at her from head to foot, and said
below his breath:

“Mine!”

Her heart beat fast then; but suddenly he laughed, slipped his arm about
her, and danced her twice round the room. He let her go demurely down
the stairs in front of him, saying:

“They shan’t see—my Gyp. Oh, they shan’t see! We are old married people,
tired of each other—very!”

At dinner it amused him at first—her too, a little—to keep up this farce
of indifference. But every now and then he turned and stared at some
inoffensive visitor who was taking interest in them, with such fierce
and genuine contempt that Gyp took alarm; whereon he laughed. When
she had drunk a little wine and he had drunk a good deal, the farce
of indifference came to its end. He talked at a great rate now, slying
nicknaming the waiters and mimicking the people around—happy thrusts
that made her smile but shiver a little, lest they should be heard or
seen. Their heads were close together across the little table. They went
out into the lounge. Coffee came, and he wanted her to smoke with him.
She had never smoked in a public room. But it seemed stiff and “missish”
to refuse—she must do now as his world did. And it was another little
thing; she wanted little things, all the time wanted them. She drew back
a window-curtain, and they stood there side by side. The sea was deep
blue beneath bright stars, and the moon shone through a ragged pine-tree
on a little headland. Though she stood five feet six in her shoes, she
was only up to his mouth. He sighed and said: “Beautiful night, my Gyp!”
And suddenly it struck her that she knew nothing of what was in him, and
yet he was her husband! “Husband”—funny word, not pretty! She felt as a
child opening the door of a dark room, and, clutching his arm, said:

“Look! There’s a sailing-boat. What’s it doing out there at night?”
Another little thing! Any little thing!

Presently he said:

“Come up-stairs! I’ll play to you.”

Up in their sitting-room was a piano, but—not possible; to-morrow they
would have to get another. To-morrow! The fire was hot, and he took
off his coat to play. In one of his shirt-sleeves there was a rent. She
thought, with a sort of triumph: ’I shall mend that!’ It was something
definite, actual—a little thing. There were lilies in the room that gave
a strong, sweet scent. He brought them up to her to sniff, and, while
she was sniffing, stooped suddenly and kissed her neck. She shut her
eyes with a shiver. He took the flowers away at once, and when she
opened her eyes again, his violin was at his shoulder. For a whole hour
he played, and Gyp, in her cream-coloured frock, lay back, listening.
She was tired, not sleepy. It would have been nice to have been sleepy.
Her mouth had its little sad tuck or dimple at the corner; her eyes were
deep and dark—a cloudy child. His gaze never left her face; he played
and played, and his own fitful face grew clouded. At last he put away
the violin, and said:

“Go to bed, Gyp; you’re tired.”

Obediently she got up and went into the bedroom. With a sick feeling
in her heart, and as near the fire as she could get, she undressed
with desperate haste, and got to bed. An age—it seemed—she lay there
shivering in her flimsy lawn against the cold sheets, her eyes not quite
closed, watching the flicker of the firelight. She did not think—could
not—just lay stiller than the dead. The door creaked. She shut her eyes.
Had she a heart at all? It did not seem to beat. She lay thus, with eyes
shut, till she could bear it no longer. By the firelight she saw him
crouching at the foot of the bed; could just see his face—like a face—a
face—where seen? Ah yes!—a picture—of a wild man crouching at the feet
of Iphigenia—so humble, so hungry—so lost in gazing. She gave a little
smothered sob and held out her hand.

II

Gyp was too proud to give by halves. And in those early days she gave
Fiorsen everything except—her heart. She earnestly desired to give that
too; but hearts only give themselves. Perhaps if the wild man in him,
maddened by beauty in its power, had not so ousted the spirit man, her
heart might have gone with her lips and the rest of her. He knew he was
not getting her heart, and it made him, in the wildness of his nature
and the perversity of a man, go just the wrong way to work, trying to
conquer her by the senses, not the soul.

Yet she was not unhappy—it cannot be said she was unhappy, except for a
sort of lost feeling sometimes, as if she were trying to grasp something
that kept slipping, slipping away. She was glad to give him pleasure.
She felt no repulsion—this was man’s nature. Only there was always
that feeling that she was not close. When he was playing, with the
spirit-look on his face, she would feel: ’Now, now, surely I shall get
close to him!’ But the look would go; how to keep it there she did not
know, and when it went, her feeling went too.

Their little suite of rooms was at the very end of the hotel, so that he
might play as much as he wished. While he practised in the mornings she
would go into the garden, which sloped in rock-terraces down to the
sea. Wrapped in fur, she would sit there with a book. She soon knew each
evergreen, or flower that was coming out—aubretia, and laurustinus, a
little white flower whose name was uncertain, and one star-periwinkle.
The air was often soft; the birds sang already and were busy with their
weddings, and twice, at least, spring came in her heart—that wonderful
feeling when first the whole being scents new life preparing in the
earth and the wind—the feeling that only comes when spring is not yet,
and one aches and rejoices all at once. Seagulls often came over her,
craning down their greedy bills and uttering cries like a kitten’s
mewing.

Out here she had feelings, that she did not get with him, of being at
one with everything. She did not realize how tremendously she had grown
up in these few days, how the ground bass had already come into the
light music of her life. Living with Fiorsen was opening her eyes to
much beside mere knowledge of “man’s nature”; with her perhaps
fatal receptivity, she was already soaking up the atmosphere of his
philosophy. He was always in revolt against accepting things because he
was expected to; but, like most executant artists, he was no reasoner,
just a mere instinctive kicker against the pricks. He would lose himself
in delight with a sunset, a scent, a tune, a new caress, in a rush of
pity for a beggar or a blind man, a rush of aversion from a man with
large feet or a long nose, of hatred for a woman with a flat chest or an
expression of sanctimony. He would swing along when he was walking, or
dawdle, dawdle; he would sing and laugh, and make her laugh too till
she ached, and half an hour later would sit staring into some pit of
darkness in a sort of powerful brooding of his whole being. Insensibly
she shared in this deep drinking of sensation, but always gracefully,
fastidiously, never losing sense of other people’s feelings.

In his love-raptures, he just avoided setting her nerves on edge,
because he never failed to make her feel his enjoyment of her beauty;
that perpetual consciousness, too, of not belonging to the proper and
respectable, which she had tried to explain to her father, made her set
her teeth against feeling shocked. But in other ways he did shock her.
She could not get used to his utter oblivion of people’s feelings, to
the ferocious contempt with which he would look at those who got on his
nerves, and make half-audible comments, just as he had commented on her
own father when he and Count Rosek passed them, by the Schiller statue.
She would visibly shrink at those remarks, though they were sometimes
so excruciatingly funny that she had to laugh, and feel dreadful
immediately after. She saw that he resented her shrinking; it seemed to
excite him to run amuck the more. But she could not help it. Once she
got up and walked away. He followed her, sat on the floor beside her
knees, and thrust his head, like a great cat, under her hand.

“Forgive me, my Gyp; but they are such brutes. Who could help it? Now
tell me—who could, except my Gyp?” And she had to forgive him. But, one
evening, when he had been really outrageous during dinner, she answered:

“No; I can’t. It’s you that are the brute. You WERE a brute to them!”

He leaped up with a face of furious gloom and went out of the room. It
was the first time he had given way to anger with her. Gyp sat by the
fire, very disturbed; chiefly because she was not really upset at having
hurt him. Surely she ought to be feeling miserable at that!

But when, at ten o’clock, he had not come back, she began to flutter in
earnest. She had said a dreadful thing! And yet, in her heart, she did
not take back her judgment. He really HAD been a brute. She would have
liked to soothe herself by playing, but it was too late to disturb
people, and going to the window, she looked out over the sea, feeling
beaten and confused. This was the first time she had given free rein to
her feeling against what Winton would have called his “bounderism.”
If he had been English, she would never have been attracted by one who
could trample so on other people’s feelings. What, then, had attracted
her? His strangeness, wildness, the mesmeric pull of his passion for
her, his music! Nothing could spoil that in him. The sweep, the
surge, and sigh in his playing was like the sea out there, dark, and
surf-edged, beating on the rocks; or the sea deep-coloured in daylight,
with white gulls over it; or the sea with those sinuous paths made by
the wandering currents, the subtle, smiling, silent sea, holding in
suspense its unfathomable restlessness, waiting to surge and spring
again. That was what she wanted from him—not his embraces, not even
his adoration, his wit, or his queer, lithe comeliness touched with
felinity; no, only that in his soul which escaped through his fingers
into the air and dragged at her soul. If, when he came in, she were to
run to him, throw her arms round his neck, make herself feel close, lose
herself in him! Why not? It was her duty; why not her delight, too? But
she shivered. Some instinct too deep for analysis, something in the very
heart of her nerves made her recoil, as if she were afraid, literally
scared of letting herself go, of loving—the subtlest instinct of
self-preservation against something fatal; against being led on
beyond—yes, it was like that curious, instinctive sinking which some
feel at the mere sight of a precipice, a dread of going near, lest they
should be drawn on and over by resistless attraction.

She passed into their bedroom and began slowly to undress. To go to bed
without knowing where he was, what doing, thinking, seemed already a
little odd; and she sat brushing her hair slowly with the silver-backed
brushes, staring at her own pale face, whose eyes looked so very large
and dark. At last there came to her the feeling: “I can’t help it! I
don’t care!” And, getting into bed, she turned out the light. It seemed
queer and lonely; there was no fire. And then, without more ado, she
slept.

She had a dream of being between Fiorsen and her father in a
railway-carriage out at sea, with the water rising higher and higher,
swishing and sighing. Awakening always, like a dog, to perfect presence
of mind, she knew that he was playing in the sitting-room, playing—at
what time of night? She lay listening to a quivering, gibbering tune
that she did not know. Should she be first to make it up, or should she
wait for him? Twice she half slipped out of bed, but both times, as if
fate meant her not to move, he chose that moment to swell out the sound,
and each time she thought: ’No, I can’t. It’s just the same now; he
doesn’t care how many people he wakes up. He does just what he likes,
and cares nothing for anyone.’ And covering her ears with her hands, she
continued to lie motionless.

When she withdrew her hands at last, he had stopped. Then she heard
him coming, and feigned sleep. But he did not spare even sleep. She
submitted to his kisses without a word, her heart hardening within
her—surely he smelled of brandy! Next morning he seemed to have
forgotten it all. But Gyp had not. She wanted badly to know what he had
felt, where he had gone, but was too proud to ask.

She wrote twice to her father in the first week, but afterwards, except
for a postcard now and then, she never could. Why tell him what she was
doing, in company of one whom he could not bear to think of? Had he been
right? To confess that would hurt her pride too much. But she began to
long for London. The thought of her little house was a green spot
to dwell on. When they were settled in, and could do what they liked
without anxiety about people’s feelings, it would be all right perhaps.
When he could start again really working, and she helping him, all would
be different. Her new house, and so much to do; her new garden, and
fruit-trees coming into blossom! She would have dogs and cats, would
ride when Dad was in town. Aunt Rosamund would come, friends, evenings
of music, dances still, perhaps—he danced beautifully, and loved it,
as she did. And his concerts—the elation of being identified with his
success! But, above all, the excitement of making her home as dainty as
she could, with daring experiments in form and colour. And yet, at heart
she knew that to be already looking forward, banning the present, was a
bad sign.

One thing, at all events, she enjoyed—sailing. They had blue days when
even the March sun was warm, and there was just breeze enough. He got on
excellently well with the old salt whose boat they used, for he was at
his best with simple folk, whose lingo he could understand about as much
as they could understand his.

In those hours, Gyp had some real sensations of romance. The sea was so
blue, the rocks and wooded spurs of that Southern coast so dreamy in
the bright land-haze. Oblivious of “the old salt,” he would put his arm
round her; out there, she could swallow down her sense of form, and be
grateful for feeling nearer to him in spirit. She made loyal efforts
to understand him in these weeks that were bringing a certain
disillusionment. The elemental part of marriage was not the trouble; if
she did not herself feel passion, she did not resent his. When, after
one of those embraces, his mouth curled with a little bitter smile, as
if to say, “Yes, much you care for me,” she would feel compunctious and
yet aggrieved. But the trouble lay deeper—the sense of an insuperable
barrier; and always that deep, instinctive recoil from letting herself
go. She could not let herself be known, and she could not know him. Why
did his eyes often fix her with a stare that did not seem to see her?
What made him, in the midst of serious playing, break into some furious
or desolate little tune, or drop his violin? What gave him those long
hours of dejection, following the maddest gaiety? Above all, what dreams
had he in those rare moments when music transformed his strange pale
face? Or was it a mere physical illusion—had he any dreams? “The heart
of another is a dark forest”—to all but the one who loves.

One morning, he held up a letter.

“Ah, ha! Paul Rosek went to see our house. ’A pretty dove’s nest!’ he
calls it.”

The memory of the Pole’s sphinxlike, sweetish face, and eyes that seemed
to know so many secrets, always affected Gyp unpleasantly. She said
quietly:

“Why do you like him, Gustav?”

“Like him? Oh, he is useful. A good judge of music, and—many things.”

“I think he is hateful.”

Fiorsen laughed.

“Hateful? Why hateful, my Gyp? He is a good friend. And he admires
you—oh, he admires you very much! He has success with women. He always
says, ’J’ai une technique merveilleuse pour seduire une femme.’”

Gyp laughed.

“Ugh! He’s like a toad, I think.”

“Ah, I shall tell him that! He will be flattered.”

“If you do; if you give me away—I—”

He jumped up and caught her in his arms; his face was so comically
compunctious that she calmed down at once. She thought over her words
afterwards and regretted them. All the same, Rosek was a sneak and a
cold sensualist, she was sure. And the thought that he had been spying
at their little house tarnished her anticipations of homecoming.

They went to Town three days later. While the taxi was skirting Lord’s
Cricket-ground, Gyp slipped her hand into Fiorsen’s. She was brimful of
excitement. The trees were budding in the gardens that they passed; the
almond-blossom coming—yes, really coming! They were in the road now.
Five, seven, nine—thirteen! Two more! There it was, nineteen, in white
figures on the leaf-green railings, under the small green lilac buds;
yes, and their almond-blossom was out, too! She could just catch a
glimpse over those tall railings of the low white house with its green
outside shutters. She jumped out almost into the arms of Betty, who
stood smiling all over her broad, flushed face, while, from under each
arm peered forth the head of a black devil, with pricked ears and eyes
as bright as diamonds.

“Betty! What darlings!”

“Major Winton’s present, my dear—ma’am!”

Giving the stout shoulders a hug, Gyp seized the black devils, and ran
up the path under the trellis, while the Scotch-terrier pups, squeezed
against her breast, made confused small noises and licked her nose
and ears. Through the square hall she ran into the drawing-room, which
opened out on to the lawn; and there, in the French window, stood spying
back at the spick-and-span room, where everything was, of course, placed
just wrong. The colouring, white, ebony, and satinwood, looked nicer
even than she had hoped. Out in the garden—her own garden—the pear-trees
were thickening, but not in blossom yet; a few daffodils were in bloom
along the walls, and a magnolia had one bud opened. And all the time she
kept squeezing the puppies to her, enjoying their young, warm, fluffy
savour, and letting them kiss her. She ran out of the drawing-room,
up the stairs. Her bedroom, the dressing-room, the spare room, the
bathroom—she dashed into them all. Oh, it was nice to be in your own
place, to be—Suddenly she felt herself lifted off the ground from
behind, and in that undignified position, her eyes flying, she turned
her face till he could reach her lips.

III

To wake, and hear the birds at early practise, and feel that winter is
over—is there any pleasanter moment?

That first morning in her new house, Gyp woke with the sparrow, or
whatever the bird which utters the first cheeps and twitters, soon
eclipsed by so much that is more important in bird-song. It seemed as if
all the feathered creatures in London must be assembled in her garden;
and the old verse came into her head:

     “All dear Nature’s children sweet
      Lie at bride and bridegroom’s feet,
      Blessing their sense.
      Not a creature of the air,
      Bird melodious or bird fair,
      Be absent hence!”


She turned and looked at her husband. He lay with his head snoozled down
into the pillow, so that she could only see his thick, rumpled hair. And
a shiver went through her, exactly as if a strange man were lying there.
Did he really belong to her, and she to him—for good? And was this
their house—together? It all seemed somehow different, more serious and
troubling, in this strange bed, of this strange room, that was to be so
permanent. Careful not to wake him, she slipped out and stood between
the curtains and the window. Light was all in confusion yet; away low
down behind the trees, the rose of dawn still clung. One might almost
have been in the country, but for the faint, rumorous noises of the town
beginning to wake, and that film of ground-mist which veils the feet
of London mornings. She thought: “I am mistress in this house, have to
direct it all—see to everything! And my pups! Oh, what do they eat?”

That was the first of many hours of anxiety, for she was very
conscientious. Her fastidiousness desired perfection, but her
sensitiveness refused to demand it of others—especially servants. Why
should she harry them?

Fiorsen had not the faintest notion of regularity. She found that he
could not even begin to appreciate her struggles in housekeeping. And
she was much too proud to ask his help, or perhaps too wise, since he
was obviously unfit to give it. To live like the birds of the air was
his motto. Gyp would have liked nothing better; but, for that, one must
not have a house with three servants, several meals, two puppy-dogs, and
no great experience of how to deal with any of them.

She spoke of her difficulties to no one and suffered the more. With
Betty—who, bone-conservative, admitted Fiorsen as hardly as she had once
admitted Winton—she had to be very careful. But her great trouble was
with her father. Though she longed to see him, she literally dreaded
their meeting. He first came—as he had been wont to come when she was
a tiny girl—at the hour when he thought the fellow to whom she now
belonged would most likely be out. Her heart beat, when she saw him
under the trellis. She opened the door herself, and hung about him so
that his shrewd eyes should not see her face. And she began at once to
talk of the puppies, whom she had named Don and Doff. They were perfect
darlings; nothing was safe from them; her slippers were completely
done for; they had already got into her china-cabinet and gone to sleep
there! He must come and see all over.

Hooking her arm into his, and talking all the time, she took him
up-stairs and down, and out into the garden, to the studio, or
music-room, at the end, which had an entrance to itself on to a back
lane. This room had been the great attraction. Fiorsen could practice
there in peace. Winton went along with her very quietly, making a shrewd
comment now and then. At the far end of the garden, looking over the
wall, down into that narrow passage which lay between it and the back of
another garden he squeezed her arm suddenly and said:

“Well, Gyp, what sort of a time?”

The question had come at last.

“Oh, rather lovely—in some ways.” But she did not look at him, nor he at
her. “See, Dad! The cats have made quite a path there!”

Winton bit his lips and turned from the wall. The thought of that fellow
was bitter within him. She meant to tell him nothing, meant to keep up
that lighthearted look—which didn’t deceive him a bit!

“Look at my crocuses! It’s really spring today!”

It was. Even a bee or two had come. The tiny leaves had a transparent
look, too thin as yet to keep the sunlight from passing through them.
The purple, delicate-veined crocuses, with little flames of orange
blowing from their centres, seemed to hold the light as in cups. A wind,
without harshness, swung the boughs; a dry leaf or two still rustled
round here and there. And on the grass, and in the blue sky, and on the
almond-blossom was the first spring brilliance. Gyp clasped her hands
behind her head.

“Lovely—to feel the spring!”

And Winton thought: ’She’s changed!’ She had softened, quickened—more
depth of colour in her, more gravity, more sway in her body, more
sweetness in her smile. But—was she happy?

A voice said:

“Ah, what a pleasure!”

The fellow had slunk up like the great cat he was. And it seemed to
Winton that Gyp had winced.

“Dad thinks we ought to have dark curtains in the music-room, Gustav.”

Fiorsen made a bow.

“Yes, yes—like a London club.”

Winton, watching, was sure of supplication in her face. And, forcing a
smile, he said:

“You seem very snug here. Glad to see you again. Gyp looks splendid.”

Another of those bows he so detested! Mountebank! Never, never would he
be able to stand the fellow! But he must not, would not, show it.
And, as soon as he decently could, he went, taking his lonely way back
through this region, of which his knowledge was almost limited to Lord’s
Cricket-ground, with a sense of doubt and desolation, an irritation
more than ever mixed with the resolve to be always at hand if the child
wanted him.

He had not been gone ten minutes before Aunt Rosamund appeared, with a
crutch-handled stick and a gentlemanly limp, for she, too, indulged her
ancestors in gout. A desire for exclusive possession of their friends is
natural to some people, and the good lady had not known how fond she
was of her niece till the girl had slipped off into this marriage. She
wanted her back, to go about with and make much of, as before. And her
well-bred drawl did not quite disguise this feeling.

Gyp could detect Fiorsen subtly mimicking that drawl; and her ears began
to burn. The puppies afforded a diversion—their points, noses, boldness,
and food, held the danger in abeyance for some minutes. Then the mimicry
began again. When Aunt Rosamund had taken a somewhat sudden leave, Gyp
stood at the window of her drawing-room with the mask off her face.
Fiorsen came up, put his arm round her from behind, and said with a
fierce sigh:

“Are they coming often—these excellent people?”

Gyp drew back from him against the wall.

“If you love me, why do you try to hurt the people who love me too?”

“Because I am jealous. I am jealous even of those puppies.”

“And shall you try to hurt them?”

“If I see them too much near you, perhaps I shall.”

“Do you think I can be happy if you hurt things because they love me?”

He sat down and drew her on to his knee. She did not resist, but made
not the faintest return to his caresses. The first time—the very first
friend to come into her own new home! It was too much!

Fiorsen said hoarsely:

“You do not love me. If you loved me, I should feel it through your
lips. I should see it in your eyes. Oh, love me, Gyp! You shall!”

But to say to Love: “Stand and deliver!” was not the way to touch Gyp.
It seemed to her mere ill-bred stupidity. She froze against him in soul,
all the more that she yielded her body. When a woman refuses nothing to
one whom she does not really love, shadows are already falling on the
bride-house. And Fiorsen knew it; but his self-control about equalled
that of the two puppies.

Yet, on the whole, these first weeks in her new home were happy, too
busy to allow much room for doubting or regret. Several important
concerts were fixed for May. She looked forward to these with intense
eagerness, and pushed everything that interfered with preparation into
the background. As though to make up for that instinctive recoil from
giving her heart, of which she was always subconscious, she gave him all
her activities, without calculation or reserve. She was ready to play
for him all day and every day, just as from the first she had held
herself at the disposal of his passion. To fail him in these ways would
have tarnished her opinion of herself. But she had some free hours in
the morning, for he had the habit of lying in bed till eleven, and was
never ready for practise before twelve. In those early hours she got
through her orders and her shopping—that pursuit which to so many women
is the only real “sport”—a chase of the ideal; a pitting of one’s taste
and knowledge against that of the world at large; a secret passion, even
in the beautiful, for making oneself and one’s house more beautiful. Gyp
never went shopping without that faint thrill running up and down her
nerves. She hated to be touched by strange fingers, but not even that
stopped her pleasure in turning and turning before long mirrors, while
the saleswoman or man, with admiration at first crocodilic and then
genuine, ran the tips of fingers over those curves, smoothing and
pinning, and uttering the word, “moddam.”

On other mornings, she would ride with Winton, who would come for her,
leaving her again at her door after their outings. One day, after a
ride in Richmond Park, where the horse-chestnuts were just coming
into flower, they had late breakfast on the veranda of a hotel before
starting for home. Some fruit-trees were still in blossom just below
them, and the sunlight showering down from a blue sky brightened to
silver the windings of the river, and to gold the budding leaves of the
oak-trees. Winton, smoking his after-breakfast cigar, stared down across
the tops of those trees toward the river and the wooded fields beyond.
Stealing a glance at him, Gyp said very softly:

“Did you ever ride with my mother, Dad?”

“Only once—the very ride we’ve been to-day. She was on a black mare; I
had a chestnut—” Yes, in that grove on the little hill, which they had
ridden through that morning, he had dismounted and stood beside her.

Gyp stretched her hand across the table and laid it on his.

“Tell me about her, dear. Was she beautiful?”

“Yes.”

“Dark? Tall?”

“Very like you, Gyp. A little—a little”—he did not know how to describe
that difference—“a little more foreign-looking perhaps. One of her
grandmothers was Italian, you know.”

“How did you come to love her? Suddenly?”

“As suddenly as”—he drew his hand away and laid it on the veranda
rail—“as that sun came on my hand.”

Gyp said quietly, as if to herself:

“Yes; I don’t think I understand that—yet.”

Winton drew breath through his teeth with a subdued hiss.

“Did she love you at first sight, too?”

He blew out a long puff of smoke.

“One easily believes what one wants to—but I think she did. She used to
say so.”

“And how long?”

“Only a year.”

Gyp said very softly:

“Poor darling Dad.” And suddenly she added: “I can’t bear to think I
killed her—I can’t bear it!”

Winton got up in the discomfort of these sudden confidences; a
blackbird, startled by the movement, ceased his song. Gyp said in a hard
voice:

“No; I don’t want to have any children.”

“Without that, I shouldn’t have had you, Gyp.”

“No; but I don’t want to have them. And I don’t—I don’t want to love
like that. I should be afraid.”

Winton looked at her for a long time without speaking, his brows drawn
down, frowning, puzzled, as though over his own past.

“Love,” he said, “it catches you, and you’re gone. When it comes, you
welcome it, whether it’s to kill you or not. Shall we start back, my
child?”

When she got home, it was not quite noon. She hurried over her bath and
dressing, and ran out to the music-room. Its walls had been hung with
Willesden scrim gilded over; the curtains were silver-grey; there was a
divan covered with silver-and-gold stuff, and a beaten brass fireplace.
It was a study in silver, and gold, save for two touches of fantasy—a
screen round the piano-head, covered with brilliantly painted peacocks’
tails, and a blue Persian vase, in which were flowers of various hues of
red.

Fiorsen was standing at the window in a fume of cigarette smoke. He did
not turn round. Gyp put her hand within his arm, and said:

“So sorry, dear. But it’s only just half-past twelve.”

His face was as if the whole world had injured him.

“Pity you came back! Very nice, riding, I’m sure!”

Could she not go riding with her own father? What insensate jealousy and
egomania! She turned away, without a word, and sat down at the piano.
She was not good at standing injustice—not good at all! The scent of
brandy, too, was mixed with the fumes of his cigarette. Drink in the
morning was so ugly—really horrid! She sat at the piano, waiting. He
would be like this till he had played away the fumes of his ill mood,
and then he would come and paw her shoulders and put his lips to her
neck. Yes; but it was not the way to behave, not the way to make her
love him. And she said suddenly:

“Gustav; what exactly have I done that you dislike?”

“You have had a father.”

Gyp sat quite still for a few seconds, and then began to laugh. He
looked so like a sulky child, standing there. He turned swiftly on her
and put his hand over her mouth. She looked up over that hand which
smelled of tobacco. Her heart was doing the grand ecart within her, this
way in compunction, that way in resentment. His eyes fell before hers;
he dropped his hand.

“Well, shall we begin?” she said.

He answered roughly: “No,” and went out into the garden.

Gyp was left dismayed, disgusted. Was it possible that she could have
taken part in such a horrid little scene? She remained sitting at the
piano, playing over and over a single passage, without heeding what it
was.

IV

So far, they had seen nothing of Rosek at the little house. She wondered
if Fiorsen had passed on to him her remark, though if he had, he would
surely say he hadn’t; she had learned that her husband spoke the truth
when convenient, not when it caused him pain. About music, or any
art, however, he could be implicitly relied on; and his frankness was
appalling when his nerves were ruffled.

But at the first concert she saw Rosek’s unwelcome figure on the other
side of the gangway, two rows back. He was talking to a young girl,
whose face, short and beautifully formed, had the opaque transparency
of alabaster. With her round blue eyes fixed on him, and her lips just
parted, she had a slightly vacant look. Her laugh, too, was just a
little vacant. And yet her features were so beautiful, her hair so
smooth and fair, her colouring so pale and fine, her neck so white and
round, the poise of her body so perfect that Gyp found it difficult to
take her glance away. She had refused her aunt’s companionship. It might
irritate Fiorsen and affect his playing to see her with “that stiff
English creature.” She wanted, too, to feel again the sensations of
Wiesbaden. There would be a kind of sacred pleasure in knowing that she
had helped to perfect sounds which touched the hearts and senses of so
many listeners. She had looked forward to this concert so long. And she
sat scarcely breathing, abstracted from consciousness of those about
her, soft and still, radiating warmth and eagerness.

Fiorsen looked his worst, as ever, when first coming before an
audience—cold, furtive, defensive, defiant, half turned away, with those
long fingers tightening the screws, touching the strings. It seemed
queer to think that only six hours ago she had stolen out of bed from
beside him. Wiesbaden! No; this was not like Wiesbaden! And when he
played she had not the same emotions. She had heard him now too often,
knew too exactly how he produced those sounds; knew that their fire
and sweetness and nobility sprang from fingers, ear, brain—not from his
soul. Nor was it possible any longer to drift off on those currents of
sound into new worlds, to hear bells at dawn, and the dews of evening
as they fell, to feel the divinity of wind and sunlight. The romance and
ecstasy that at Wiesbaden had soaked her spirit came no more. She was
watching for the weak spots, the passages with which he had struggled
and she had struggled; she was distracted by memories of petulance,
black moods, and sudden caresses. And then she caught his eye. The
look was like, yet how unlike, those looks at Wiesbaden. It had the old
love-hunger, but had lost the adoration, its spiritual essence. And she
thought: ’Is it my fault, or is it only because he has me now to do what
he likes with?’ It was all another disillusionment, perhaps the greatest
yet. But she kindled and flushed at the applause, and lost herself in
pleasure at his success. At the interval, she slipped out at once, for
her first visit to the artist’s room, the mysterious enchantment of a
peep behind the scenes. He was coming down from his last recall; and at
sight of her his look of bored contempt vanished; lifting her hand, he
kissed it. Gyp felt happier than she had since her marriage. Her eyes
shone, and she whispered:

“Beautiful!”

He whispered back:

“So! Do you love me, Gyp?”

She nodded. And at that moment she did, or thought so.

Then people began to come; amongst them her old music-master, Monsieur
Harmost, grey and mahogany as ever, who, after a “Merveilleux,” “Tres
fort” or two to Fiorsen, turned his back on him to talk to his old
pupil.

So she had married Fiorsen—dear, dear! That was extraordinary, but
extraordinary! And what was it like, to be always with him—a little
funny—not so? And how was her music? It would be spoiled now. Ah, what
a pity! No? She must come to him, then; yes, come again. All the time he
patted her arm, as if playing the piano, and his fingers, that had the
touch of an angel, felt the firmness of her flesh, as though debating
whether she were letting it deteriorate. He seemed really to have missed
“his little friend,” to be glad at seeing her again; and Gyp, who never
could withstand appreciation, smiled at him. More people came. She saw
Rosek talking to her husband, and the young alabaster girl standing
silent, her lips still a little parted, gazing up at Fiorsen. A perfect
figure, though rather short; a dovelike face, whose exquisitely shaped,
just-opened lips seemed to be demanding sugar-plums. She could not be
more than nineteen. Who was she?

A voice said almost in her ear:

“How do you do, Mrs. Fiorsen? I am fortunate to see you again at last.”

She was obliged to turn. If Gustav had given her away, one would never
know it from this velvet-masked creature, with his suave watchfulness
and ready composure, who talked away so smoothly. What was it that she
so disliked in him? Gyp had acute instincts, the natural intelligence
deep in certain natures not over intellectual, but whose “feelers” are
too delicate to be deceived. And, for something to say, she asked:

“Who is the girl you were talking to, Count Rosek? Her face is so
lovely.”

He smiled, exactly the smile she had so disliked at Wiesbaden; following
his glance, she saw her husband talking to the girl, whose lips at that
moment seemed more than ever to ask for sugar-plums.

“A young dancer, Daphne Wing—she will make a name. A dove flying! So you
admire her, Madame Gyp?”

Gyp said, smiling:

“She’s very pretty—I can imagine her dancing beautifully.”

“Will you come one day and see her? She has still to make her debut.”

Gyp answered:

“Thank you. I don’t know. I love dancing, of course.”

“Good! I will arrange it.”

And Gyp thought: “No, no! I don’t want to have anything to do with you!
Why do I not speak the truth? Why didn’t I say I hate dancing?”

Just then a bell sounded; people began hurrying away. The girl came up
to Rosek.

“Miss Daphne Wing—Mrs. Fiorsen.”

Gyp put out her hand with a smile—this girl was certainly a picture.
Miss Daphne Wing smiled, too, and said, with the intonation of those who
have been carefully corrected of an accent:

“Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, how beautifully your husband plays—doesn’t he?”

It was not merely the careful speech but something lacking when the
perfect mouth moved—spirit, sensibility, who could say? And Gyp felt
sorry, as at blight on a perfect flower. With a friendly nod, she turned
away to Fiorsen, who was waiting to go up on to the platform. Was it at
her or at the girl he had been looking? She smiled at him and slid away.
In the corridor, Rosek, in attendance, said:

“Why not this evening? Come with Gustav to my rooms. She shall dance to
us, and we will all have supper. She admires you, Madame Gyp. She will
love to dance for you.”

Gyp longed for the simple brutality to say: “I don’t want to come. I
don’t like you!” But all she could manage was:

“Thank you. I—I will ask Gustav.”

Once in her seat again, she rubbed the cheek that his breath had
touched. A girl was singing now—one of those faces that Gyp always
admired, reddish-gold hair, blue eyes—the very antithesis of herself—and
the song was “The Bens of Jura,” that strange outpouring from a heart
broken by love:

     “And my heart reft of its own sun—”


Tears rose in her eyes, and the shiver of some very deep response passed
through her. What was it Dad had said: “Love catches you, and you’re
gone!”

She, who was the result of love like that, did not want to love!

The girl finished singing. There was little applause. Yet she had sung
beautifully; and what more wonderful song in the world? Was it too
tragic, too painful, too strange—not “pretty” enough? Gyp felt sorry for
her. Her head ached now. She would so have liked to slip away when it
was all over. But she had not the needful rudeness. She would have to go
through with this evening at Rosek’s and be gay. And why not? Why this
shadow over everything? But it was no new sensation, that of having
entered by her own free will on a life which, for all effort, would
not give her a feeling of anchorage or home. Of her own accord she had
stepped into the cage!

On the way to Rosek’s rooms, she disguised from Fiorsen her headache
and depression. He was in one of his boy-out-of-school moods, elated by
applause, mimicking her old master, the idolatries of his worshippers,
Rosek, the girl dancer’s upturned expectant lips. And he slipped his arm
round Gyp in the cab, crushing her against him and sniffing at her cheek
as if she had been a flower.

Rosek had the first floor of an old-time mansion in Russell Square. The
smell of incense or some kindred perfume was at once about one; and, on
the walls of the dark hall, electric light burned, in jars of alabaster
picked up in the East. The whole place was in fact a sanctum of the
collector’s spirit. Its owner had a passion for black—the walls, divans,
picture-frames, even some of the tilings were black, with glimmerings of
gold, ivory, and moonlight. On a round black table there stood a golden
bowl filled with moonlight-coloured velvety “palm” and “honesty”; from
a black wall gleamed out the ivory mask of a faun’s face; from a dark
niche the little silver figure of a dancing girl. It was beautiful, but
deathly. And Gyp, though excited always by anything new, keenly alive
to every sort of beauty, felt a longing for air and sunlight. It was a
relief to get close to one of the black-curtained windows, and see
the westering sun shower warmth and light on the trees of the Square
gardens. She was introduced to a Mr. and Mrs. Gallant, a dark-faced,
cynical-looking man with clever, malicious eyes, and one of those large
cornucopias of women with avid blue stares. The little dancer was not
there. She had “gone to put on nothing,” Rosek informed them.

He took Gyp the round of his treasures, scarabs, Rops drawings,
death-masks, Chinese pictures, and queer old flutes, with an air of
displaying them for the first time to one who could truly appreciate.
And she kept thinking of that saying, “Une technique merveilleuse.” Her
instinct apprehended the refined bone-viciousness of this place, where
nothing, save perhaps taste, would be sacred. It was her first glimpse
into that gilt-edged bohemia, whence the generosities, the elans,
the struggles of the true bohemia are as rigidly excluded as from the
spheres where bishops moved. But she talked and smiled; and no one could
have told that her nerves were crisping as if at contact with a corpse.
While showing her those alabaster jars, her host had laid his hand
softly on her wrist, and in taking it away, he let his fingers, with a
touch softer than a kitten’s paw, ripple over the skin, then put them
to his lips. Ah, there it was—the—the TECHNIQUE! A desperate desire
to laugh seized her. And he saw it—oh, yes, he saw it! He gave her one
look, passed that same hand over his smooth face, and—behold!—it showed
as before, unmortified, unconscious. A deadly little man!

When they returned to the salon, as it was called, Miss Daphne Wing in a
black kimono, whence her face and arms emerged more like alabaster than
ever, was sitting on a divan beside Fiorsen. She rose at once and came
across to Gyp.

“Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen”—why did everything she said begin with “Oh”—“isn’t
this room lovely? It’s perfect for dancing. I only brought cream, and
flame-colour; they go so beautifully with black.”

She threw back her kimono for Gyp to inspect her dress—a girdled
cream-coloured shift, which made her ivory arms and neck seem more than
ever dazzling; and her mouth opened, as if for a sugar-plum of praise.
Then, lowering her voice, she murmured:

“Do you know, I’m rather afraid of Count Rosek.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know; he’s so critical, and smooth, and he comes up so
quietly. I do think your husband plays wonderfully. Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen,
you are beautiful, aren’t you?” Gyp laughed. “What would you like me to
dance first? A waltz of Chopin’s?”

“Yes; I love Chopin.”

“Then I shall. I shall dance exactly what you like, because I do admire
you, and I’m sure you’re awfully sweet. Oh, yes; you are; I can see
that! And I think your husband’s awfully in love with you. I should be,
if I were a man. You know, I’ve been studying five years, and I haven’t
come out yet. But now Count Rosek’s going to back me, I expect it’ll be
very soon. Will you come to my first night? Mother says I’ve got to
be awfully careful. She only let me come this evening because you were
going to be here. Would you like me to begin?”

She slid across to Rosek, and Gyp heard her say:

“Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen wants me to begin; a Chopin waltz, please. The one
that goes like this.”

Rosek went to the piano, the little dancer to the centre of the room.
Gyp sat down beside Fiorsen.

Rosek began playing, his eyes fixed on the girl, and his mouth loosened
from compression in a sweetish smile. Miss Daphne Wing was standing
with her finger-tips joined at her breast—a perfect statue of ebony and
palest wax. Suddenly she flung away the black kimono. A thrill swept
Gyp from head to foot. She COULD dance—that common little girl! Every
movement of her round, sinuous body, of her bare limbs, had the ecstasy
of natural genius, controlled by the quivering balance of a really fine
training. “A dove flying!” So she was. Her face had lost its vacancy, or
rather its vacancy had become divine, having that look—not lost but gone
before—which dance demands. Yes, she was a gem, even if she had a common
soul. Tears came up in Gyp’s eyes. It was so lovely—like a dove, when
it flings itself up in the wind, breasting on up, up—wings bent back,
poised. Abandonment, freedom—chastened, shaped, controlled!

When, after the dance, the girl came and sat down beside her, she
squeezed her hot little hand, but the caress was for her art, not for
this moist little person with the lips avid of sugar-plums.

“Oh, did you like it? I’m so glad. Shall I go and put on my
flame-colour, now?”

The moment she was gone, comment broke out freely. The dark and cynical
Gallant thought the girl’s dancing like a certain Napierkowska whom he
had seen in Moscow, without her fire—the touch of passion would have
to be supplied. She wanted love! Love! And suddenly Gyp was back in the
concert-hall, listening to that other girl singing the song of a broken
heart.

     “Thy kiss, dear love—
     Like watercress gathered fresh from cool streams.”


Love! in this abode—of fauns’ heads, deep cushions, silver dancing
girls! Love! She had a sudden sense of deep abasement. What was she,
herself, but just a feast for a man’s senses? Her home, what but a place
like this? Miss Daphne Wing was back again. Gyp looked at her husband’s
face while she was dancing. His lips! How was it that she could see that
disturbance in him, and not care? If she had really loved him, to see
his lips like that would have hurt her, but she might have understood
perhaps, and forgiven. Now she neither quite understood nor quite
forgave.

And that night, when he kissed her, she murmured:

“Would you rather it were that girl—not me?”

“That girl! I could swallow her at a draft. But you, my Gyp—I want to
drink for ever!”

Was that true? IF she had loved him—how good to hear!

V

After this, Gyp was daily more and more in contact with high bohemia,
that curious composite section of society which embraces the neck of
music, poetry, and the drama. She was a success, but secretly she felt
that she did not belong to it, nor, in truth, did Fiorsen, who was much
too genuine a bohemian, and artist, and mocked at the Gallants and even
the Roseks of this life, as he mocked at Winton, Aunt Rosamund, and
their world. Life with him had certainly one effect on Gyp; it made her
feel less and less a part of that old orthodox, well-bred world which
she had known before she married him; but to which she had confessed to
Winton she had never felt that she belonged, since she knew the secret
of her birth. She was, in truth, much too impressionable, too avid of
beauty, and perhaps too naturally critical to accept the dictates of
their fact-and-form-governed routine; only, of her own accord, she would
never have had initiative enough to step out of its circle. Loosened
from those roots, unable to attach herself to this new soil, and not
spiritually leagued with her husband, she was more and more lonely. Her
only truly happy hours were those spent with Winton or at her piano or
with her puppies. She was always wondering at what she had done, longing
to find the deep, the sufficient reason for having done it. But the more
she sought and longed, the deeper grew her bewilderment, her feeling of
being in a cage. Of late, too, another and more definite uneasiness had
come to her.

She spent much time in her garden, where the blossoms had all dropped,
lilac was over, acacias coming into bloom, and blackbirds silent.

Winton, who, by careful experiment, had found that from half-past three
to six there was little or no chance of stumbling across his son-in-law,
came in nearly every day for tea and a quiet cigar on the lawn. He
was sitting there with Gyp one afternoon, when Betty, who usurped the
functions of parlour-maid whenever the whim moved her, brought out a
card on which were printed the words, “Miss Daphne Wing.”

“Bring her out, please, Betty dear, and some fresh tea, and buttered
toast—plenty of buttered toast; yes, and the chocolates, and any other
sweets there are, Betty darling.”

Betty, with that expression which always came over her when she was
called “darling,” withdrew across the grass, and Gyp said to her father:

“It’s the little dancer I told you of, Dad. Now you’ll see something
perfect. Only, she’ll be dressed. It’s a pity.”

She was. The occasion had evidently exercised her spirit. In warm ivory,
shrouded by leaf-green chiffon, with a girdle of tiny artificial leaves,
and a lightly covered head encircled by other green leaves, she was
somewhat like a nymph peering from a bower. If rather too arresting, it
was charming, and, after all, no frock could quite disguise the beauty
of her figure. She was evidently nervous.

“Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, I thought you wouldn’t mind my coming. I did so want
to see you again. Count Rosek said he thought I might. It’s all fixed
for my coming-out. Oh, how do you do?” And with lips and eyes opening at
Winton, she sat down in the chair he placed for her. Gyp, watching his
expression, felt inclined to laugh. Dad, and Daphne Wing! And the poor
girl so evidently anxious to make a good impression! Presently she
asked:

“Have you been dancing at Count Rosek’s again lately?”

“Oh, yes, haven’t you—didn’t you—I—” And she stopped.

The thought flashed through Gyp, ’So Gustav’s been seeing her, and
hasn’t told me!’ But she said at once:

“Ah, yes, of course; I forgot. When is the night of your coming-out?”

“Next Friday week. Fancy! The Octagon. Isn’t it splendid? They’ve given
me such a good engagement. I do so want you and Mr. Fiorsen to come,
though!”

Gyp, smiling, murmured:

“Of course we will. My father loves dancing, too; don’t you, Dad?”

Winton took his cigar from his mouth.

“When it’s good,” he said, urbanely.

“Oh, mine IS good; isn’t it, Mrs. Fiorsen? I mean, I HAVE worked—ever
since I was thirteen, you know. I simply love it. I think YOU would
dance beautifully, Mrs. Fiorsen. You’ve got such a perfect figure. I
simply love to see you walk.”

Gyp flushed, and said:

“Do have one of these, Miss Wing—they’ve got whole raspberries inside.”

The little dancer put one in her mouth.

“Oh, but please don’t call me Miss Wing! I wish you’d call me Daphne.
Mr. Fior—everybody does.”

Conscious of her father’s face, Gyp murmured:

“It’s a lovely name. Won’t you have another? These are apricot.”

“They’re perfect. You know, my first dress is going to be all
orange-blossom; Mr. Fiorsen suggested that. But I expect he told you.
Perhaps you suggested it really; did you?” Gyp shook her head. “Count
Rosek says the world is waiting for me—” She paused with a sugar-plum
halfway to her lips, and added doubtfully: “Do you think that’s true?”

Gyp answered with a soft: “I hope so.”

“He says I’m something new. It would be nice to think that. He has great
taste; so has Mr. Fiorsen, hasn’t he?”

Conscious of the compression in the lips behind the smoke of her
father’s cigar, and with a sudden longing to get up and walk away, Gyp
nodded.

The little dancer placed the sweet in her mouth, and said complacently:

“Of course he has; because he married you.”

Then, seeming to grow conscious of Winton’s eyes fixed so intently on
her, she became confused, swallowed hastily, and said:

“Oh, isn’t it lovely here—like the country! I’m afraid I must go; it’s
my practice-time. It’s so important for me not to miss any now, isn’t
it?” And she rose.

Winton got up, too. Gyp saw the girl’s eyes, lighting on his rigid
hand, grow round and rounder; and from her, walking past the side of the
house, the careful voice floated back:

“Oh, I do hope—” But what, could not be heard.

Sinking back in her chair, Gyp sat motionless. Bees were murmurous among
her flowers, pigeons murmurous among the trees; the sunlight warmed her
knees, and her stretched-out feet through the openwork of her stockings.
The maid’s laughter, the delicious growling of the puppies at play in
the kitchen came drifting down the garden, with the distant cry of a
milkman up the road. All was very peaceful. But in her heart were such
curious, baffled emotions, such strange, tangled feelings. This moment
of enlightenment regarding the measure of her husband’s frankness came
close on the heels of the moment fate had chosen for another revelation,
for clinching within her a fear felt for weeks past. She had said to
Winton that she did not want to have a child. In those conscious that
their birth has caused death or even too great suffering, there is
sometimes this hostile instinct. She had not even the consolation that
Fiorsen wanted children; she knew that he did not. And now she was sure
one was coming. But it was more than that. She had not reached, and
knew she could not reach, that point of spirit-union which alone makes
marriage sacred, and the sacrifices demanded by motherhood a joy. She
was fairly caught in the web of her foolish and presumptuous mistake!
So few months of marriage—and so sure that it was a failure, so hopeless
for the future! In the light of this new certainty, it was terrifying.
A hard, natural fact is needed to bring a yearning and bewildered spirit
to knowledge of the truth. Disillusionment is not welcome to a woman’s
heart; the less welcome when it is disillusionment with self as much
as with another. Her great dedication—her scheme of life! She had been
going to—what?—save Fiorsen from himself! It was laughable. She had only
lost herself. Already she felt in prison, and by a child would be all
the more bound. To some women, the knowledge that a thing must be brings
assuagement of the nerves. Gyp was the opposite of those. To force her
was the way to stiver up every contrary emotion. She might will herself
to acquiesce, but—one cannot change one’s nature.

And so, while the pigeons cooed and the sunlight warmed her feet, she
spent the bitterest moments of her life—so far. Pride came to her help.
She had made a miserable mess of it, but no one must know—certainly not
her father, who had warned her so desperately! She had made her bed, and
she would have to lie on it.

When Winton came back, he found her smiling, and said:

“I don’t see the fascination, Gyp.”

“Don’t you think her face really rather perfect?”

“Common.”

“Yes; but that drops off when she’s dancing.”

Winton looked at her from under half-closed eyelids.

“With her clothes? What does Fiorsen think of her?”

Gyp smiled.

“Does he think of her? I don’t know.”

She could feel the watchful tightening of his face. And suddenly he
said:

“Daphne Wing! By George!”

The words were a masterpiece of resentment and distrust. His daughter in
peril from—such as that!

After he was gone Gyp sat on till the sun had quite vanished and the
dew was stealing through her thin frock. She would think of anything,
anybody except herself! To make others happy was the way to be happy—or
so they said. She would try—must try. Betty—so stout, and with that
rheumatism in her leg—did she ever think of herself? Or Aunt Rosamund,
with her perpetual rescuings of lost dogs, lame horses, and penniless
musicians? And Dad, for all his man-of-the-world ways, was he not always
doing little things for the men of his old regiment, always thinking of
her, too, and what he could do to give her pleasure? To love everybody,
and bring them happiness! Was it not possible? Only, people were hard to
love, different from birds and beasts and flowers, to love which seemed
natural and easy.

She went up to her room and began to dress for dinner. Which of her
frocks did he like best? The pale, low-cut amber, or that white,
soft one, with the coffee-dipped lace? She decided on the latter.
Scrutinizing her supple, slender image in the glass, a shudder went
through her. That would all go; she would be like those women taking
careful exercise in the streets, who made her wonder at their hardihood
in showing themselves. It wasn’t fair that one must become unsightly,
offensive to the eye, in order to bring life into the world. Some women
seemed proud to be like that. How was that possible? She would never
dare to show herself in the days coming.

She finished dressing and went downstairs. It was nearly eight, and
Fiorsen had not come in. When the gong was struck, she turned from the
window with a sigh, and went in to dinner. That sigh had been relief.
She ate her dinner with the two pups beside her, sent them off, and
sat down at her piano. She played Chopin—studies, waltzes, mazurkas,
preludes, a polonaise or two. And Betty, who had a weakness for that
composer, sat on a chair by the door which partitioned off the back
premises, having opened it a little. She wished she could go and take a
peep at her “pretty” in her white frock, with the candle-flames on each
side, and those lovely lilies in the vase close by, smelling beautiful.
And one of the maids coming too near, she shooed her angrily away.

It grew late. The tray had been brought up; the maids had gone to bed.
Gyp had long stopped playing, had turned out, ready to go up, and, by
the French window, stood gazing out into the dark. How warm it was—warm
enough to draw forth the scent of the jessamine along the garden wall!
Not a star. There always seemed so few stars in London. A sound made her
swing round. Something tall was over there in the darkness, by the open
door. She heard a sigh, and called out, frightened:

“Is that you, Gustav?”

He spoke some words that she could not understand. Shutting the window
quickly, she went toward him. Light from the hall lit up one side of his
face and figure. He was pale; his eyes shone strangely; his sleeve was
all white. He said thickly:

“Little ghost!” and then some words that must be Swedish. It was the
first time Gyp had ever come to close quarters with drunkenness. And her
thought was simply: ’How awful if anybody were to see—how awful!’ She
made a rush to get into the hall and lock the door leading to the back
regions, but he caught her frock, ripping the lace from her neck, and
his entangled fingers clutched her shoulder. She stopped dead, fearing
to make a noise or pull him over, and his other hand clutched her other
shoulder, so that he stood steadying himself by her. Why was she not
shocked, smitten to the ground with grief and shame and rage? She only
felt: “What am I to do? How get him upstairs without anyone knowing?”
And she looked up into his face—it seemed to her so pathetic with its
shining eyes and its staring whiteness that she could have burst into
tears. She said gently:

“Gustav, it’s all right. Lean on me; we’ll go up.”

His hands, that seemed to have no power or purpose, touched her cheeks,
mechanically caressing. More than disgust, she felt that awful pity.
Putting her arm round his waist, she moved with him toward the stairs.
If only no one heard; if only she could get him quietly up! And she
murmured:

“Don’t talk; you’re not well. Lean on me hard.”

He seemed to make a big effort; his lips puffed out, and with an
expression of pride that would have been comic if not so tragic, he
muttered something.

Holding him close with all her strength, as she might have held one
desperately loved, she began to mount. It was easier than she had
thought. Only across the landing now, into the bedroom, and then the
danger would be over. Done! He was lying across the bed, and the door
shut. Then, for a moment, she gave way to a fit of shivering so violent
that she could hear her teeth chattering yet could not stop them. She
caught sight of herself in the big mirror. Her pretty lace was all torn;
her shoulders were red where his hands had gripped her, holding himself
up. She threw off her dress, put on a wrapper, and went up to him. He
was lying in a sort of stupor, and with difficulty she got him to sit up
and lean against the bed-rail. Taking off his tie and collar, she racked
her brains for what to give him. Sal volatile! Surely that must be
right. It brought him to himself, so that he even tried to kiss her. At
last he was in bed, and she stood looking at him. His eyes were closed;
he would not see if she gave way now. But she would not cry—she would
not. One sob came—but that was all. Well, there was nothing to be done
now but get into bed too. She undressed, and turned out the light. He
was in a stertorous sleep. And lying there, with eyes wide open, staring
into the dark, a smile came on her lips—a very strange smile! She was
thinking of all those preposterous young wives she had read of, who,
blushing, trembling, murmur into the ears of their young husbands that
they “have something—something to tell them!”

VI

Looking at Fiorsen, next morning, still sunk in heavy sleep, her first
thought was: ’He looks exactly the same.’ And, suddenly, it seemed queer
to her that she had not been, and still was not, disgusted. It was
all too deep for disgust, and somehow, too natural. She took this new
revelation of his unbridled ways without resentment. Besides, she had
long known of this taste of his—one cannot drink brandy and not betray
it.

She stole noiselessly from bed, noiselessly gathered up his boots
and clothes all tumbled on to a chair, and took them forth to the
dressing-room. There she held the garments up to the early light and
brushed them, then, noiseless, stole back to bed, with needle and thread
and her lace. No one must know; not even he must know. For the moment
she had forgotten that other thing so terrifically important. It came
back to her, very sudden, very sickening. So long as she could keep it
secret, no one should know that either—he least of all.

The morning passed as usual; but when she came to the music-room at
noon, she found that he had gone out. She was just sitting down to lunch
when Betty, with the broad smile which prevailed on her moon-face when
someone had tickled the right side of her, announced:

“Count Rosek.”

Gyp got up, startled.

“Say that Mr. Fiorsen is not in, Betty. But—but ask if he will come and
have some lunch, and get a bottle of hock up, please.”

In the few seconds before her visitor appeared, Gyp experienced the sort
of excitement one has entering a field where a bull is grazing.

But not even his severest critics could accuse Rosek of want of tact. He
had hoped to see Gustav, but it was charming of her to give him lunch—a
great delight!

He seemed to have put off, as if for her benefit, his corsets, and some,
at all events, of his offending looks—seemed simpler, more genuine. His
face was slightly browned, as if, for once, he had been taking his
due of air and sun. He talked without cynical submeanings, was most
appreciative of her “charming little house,” and even showed some warmth
in his sayings about art and music. Gyp had never disliked him less. But
her instincts were on the watch. After lunch, they went out across the
garden to see the music-room, and he sat down at the piano. He had the
deep, caressing touch that lies in fingers of steel worked by a real
passion for tone. Gyp sat on the divan and listened. She was out of his
sight there; and she looked at him, wondering. He was playing Schumann’s
Child Music. How could one who produced such fresh idyllic sounds have
sinister intentions? And presently she said:

“Count Rosek!”

“Madame?”

“Will you please tell me why you sent Daphne Wing here yesterday?”

“I send her?”

“Yes.”

But instantly she regretted having asked that question. He had swung
round on the music-stool and was looking full at her. His face had
changed.

“Since you ask me, I thought you should know that Gustav is seeing a
good deal of her.”

He had given the exact answer she had divined.

“Do you think I mind that?”

A flicker passed over his face. He got up and said quietly:

“I am glad that you do not.”

“Why glad?”

She, too, had risen. Though he was little taller than herself, she was
conscious suddenly of how thick and steely he was beneath his dapper
garments, and of a kind of snaky will-power in his face. Her heart beat
faster.

He came toward her and said:

“I am glad you understand that it is over with Gustav—finished—” He
stopped dead, seeing at once that he had gone wrong, and not knowing
quite where. Gyp had simply smiled. A flush coloured his cheeks, and he
said:

“He is a volcano soon extinguished. You see, I know him. Better you
should know him, too. Why do you smile?”

“Why is it better I should know?”

He went very pale, and said between his teeth:

“That you may not waste your time; there is love waiting for you.”

But Gyp still smiled.

“Was it from love of me that you made him drunk last night?”

His lips quivered.

“Gyp!” Gyp turned. But with the merest change of front, he had put
himself between her and the door. “You never loved him. That is my
excuse. You have given him too much already—more than he is worth. Ah!
God! I am tortured by you; I am possessed.”

He had gone white through and through like a flame, save for his
smouldering eyes. She was afraid, and because she was afraid, she stood
her ground. Should she make a dash for the door that opened into the
little lane and escape that way? Then suddenly he seemed to regain
control; but she could feel that he was trying to break through her
defences by the sheer intensity of his gaze—by a kind of mesmerism,
knowing that he had frightened her.

Under the strain of this duel of eyes, she felt herself beginning to
sway, to get dizzy. Whether or no he really moved his feet, he seemed
coming closer inch by inch. She had a horrible feeling—as if his arms
were already round her.

With an effort, she wrenched her gaze from his, and suddenly his crisp
hair caught her eyes. Surely—surely it was curled with tongs! A kind of
spasm of amusement was set free in her heart, and, almost inaudibly, the
words escaped her lips: “Une technique merveilleuse!” His eyes wavered;
he uttered a little gasp; his lips fell apart. Gyp walked across the
room and put her hand on the bell. She had lost her fear. Without a
word, he turned, and went out into the garden. She watched him cross
the lawn. Gone! She had beaten him by the one thing not even violent
passions can withstand—ridicule, almost unconscious ridicule. Then she
gave way and pulled the bell with nervous violence. The sight of the
maid, in her trim black dress and spotless white apron, coming from the
house completed her restoration. Was it possible that she had really
been frightened, nearly failing in that encounter, nearly dominated by
that man—in her own house, with her own maids down there at hand? And
she said quietly:

“I want the puppies, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Over the garden, the day brooded in the first-gathered warmth of summer.
Mid-June of a fine year. The air was drowsy with hum and scent.

And Gyp, sitting in the shade, while the puppies rolled and snapped,
searched her little world for comfort and some sense of safety, and
could not find it; as if there were all round her a hot heavy fog in
which things lurked, and where she kept erect only by pride and the will
not to cry out that she was struggling and afraid.

Fiorsen, leaving his house that morning, had walked till he saw a
taxi-cab. Leaning back therein, with hat thrown off, he caused himself
to be driven rapidly, at random. This was one of his habits when his
mind was not at ease—an expensive idiosyncrasy, ill-afforded by a pocket
that had holes. The swift motion and titillation by the perpetual close
shaving of other vehicles were sedative to him. He needed sedatives this
morning. To wake in his own bed without the least remembering how he
had got there was no more new to him than to many another man of
twenty-eight, but it was new since his marriage. If he had remembered
even less he would have been more at ease. But he could just recollect
standing in the dark drawing-room, seeing and touching a ghostly
Gyp quite close to him. And, somehow, he was afraid. And when he was
afraid—like most people—he was at his worst.

If she had been like all the other women in whose company he had eaten
passion-fruit, he would not have felt this carking humiliation. If she
had been like them, at the pace he had been going since he obtained
possession of her, he would already have “finished,” as Rosek had said.
And he knew well enough that he had not “finished.” He might get drunk,
might be loose-ended in every way, but Gyp was hooked into his senses,
and, for all that he could not get near her, into his spirit. Her very
passivity was her strength, the secret of her magnetism. In her, he felt
some of that mysterious sentiency of nature, which, even in yielding to
man’s fevers, lies apart with a faint smile—the uncapturable smile of
the woods and fields by day or night, that makes one ache with longing.
He felt in her some of the unfathomable, soft, vibrating indifference of
the flowers and trees and streams, of the rocks, of birdsongs, and the
eternal hum, under sunshine or star-shine. Her dark, half-smiling eyes
enticed him, inspired an unquenchable thirst. And his was one of those
natures which, encountering spiritual difficulty, at once jib off, seek
anodynes, try to bandage wounded egoism with excess—a spoiled child,
with the desperations and the inherent pathos, the something repulsive
and the something lovable that belong to all such. Having wished for
this moon, and got her, he now did not know what to do with her, kept
taking great bites at her, with a feeling all the time of getting
further and further away. At moments, he desired revenge for his failure
to get near her spiritually, and was ready to commit follies of all
kinds. He was only kept in control at all by his work. For he did
work hard; though, even there, something was lacking. He had all
the qualities of making good, except the moral backbone holding
them together, which alone could give him his rightful—as he
thought—pre-eminence. It often surprised and vexed him to find that some
contemporary held higher rank than himself.

Threading the streets in his cab, he mused:

“Did I do anything that really shocked her last night? Why didn’t I
wait for her this morning and find out the worst?” And his lips twisted
awry—for to find out the worst was not his forte. Meditation, seeking
as usual a scapegoat, lighted on Rosek. Like most egoists addicted to
women, he had not many friends. Rosek was the most constant. But even
for him, Fiorsen had at once the contempt and fear that a man naturally
uncontrolled and yet of greater scope has for one of less talent but
stronger will-power. He had for him, too, the feeling of a wayward
child for its nurse, mixed with the need that an artist, especially an
executant artist, feels for a connoisseur and patron with well-lined
pockets.

’Curse Paul!’ he thought. ’He must know—he does know—that brandy of his
goes down like water. Trust him, he saw I was getting silly! He had some
game on. Where did I go after? How did I get home?’ And again: ’Did I
hurt Gyp?’ If the servants had seen—that would be the worst; that would
upset her fearfully! And he laughed. Then he had a fresh access of fear.
He didn’t know her, never knew what she was thinking or feeling, never
knew anything about her. And he thought angrily: ’That’s not fair!
I don’t hide myself from her. I am as free as nature; I let her see
everything. What did I do? That maid looked very queerly at me this
morning!’ And suddenly he said to the driver: “Bury Street, St.
James’s.” He could find out, at all events, whether Gyp had been to her
father’s. The thought of Winton ever afflicted him; and he changed his
mind several times before the cab reached that little street, but so
swiftly that he had not time to alter his instructions to the driver. A
light sweat broke out on his forehead while he was waiting for the door
to be opened.

“Mrs. Fiorsen here?”

“No, sir.”

“Not been here this morning?”

“No, sir.”

He shrugged away the thought that he ought to give some explanation of
his question, and got into the cab again, telling the man to drive to
Curzon Street. If she had not been to “that Aunt Rosamund” either it
would be all right. She had not. There was no one else she would go
to. And, with a sigh of relief, he began to feel hungry, having had no
breakfast. He would go to Rosek’s, borrow the money to pay his cab, and
lunch there. But Rosek was not in. He would have to go home to get the
cab paid. The driver seemed to eye him queerly now, as though conceiving
doubts about the fare.

Going in under the trellis, Fiorsen passed a man coming out, who held in
his hand a long envelope and eyed him askance.

Gyp, who was sitting at her bureau, seemed to be adding up the
counterfoils in her cheque-book. She did not turn round, and Fiorsen
paused. How was she going to receive him?

“Is there any lunch?” he said.

She reached out and rang the bell. He felt sorry for himself. He had
been quite ready to take her in his arms and say: “Forgive me, little
Gyp; I’m sorry!”

Betty answered the bell.

“Please bring up some lunch for Mr. Fiorsen.”

He heard the stout woman sniff as she went out. She was a part of his
ostracism. And, with sudden rage, he said:

“What do you want for a husband—a bourgeois who would die if he missed
his lunch?”

Gyp turned round to him and held out her cheque-book.

“I don’t in the least mind about meals; but I do about this.” He read on
the counterfoil:

“Messrs. Travers & Sanborn, Tailors, Account rendered: L54 35s. 7d.”
“Are there many of these, Gustav?”

Fiorsen had turned the peculiar white that marked deep injury to his
sell-esteem. He said violently:

“Well, what of that? A bill! Did you pay it? You have no business to pay
my bills.”

“The man said if it wasn’t paid this time, he’d sue you.” Her lips
quivered. “I think owing money is horrible. It’s undignified. Are there
many others? Please tell me!”

“I shall not tell you. What is it to you?”

“It is a lot to me. I have to keep this house and pay the maids and
everything, and I want to know how I stand. I am not going to make
debts. That’s hateful.”

Her face had a hardness that he did not know. He perceived dimly that
she was different from the Gyp of this hour yesterday—the last time
when, in possession of his senses, he had seen or spoken to her.
The novelty of her revolt stirred him in strange ways, wounded his
self-conceit, inspired a curious fear, and yet excited his senses. He
came up to her, said softly:

“Money! Curse money! Kiss me!” With a certain amazement at the sheer
distaste in her face, he heard her say:

“It’s childish to curse money. I will spend all the income I have; but I
will not spend more, and I will not ask Dad.”

He flung himself down in a chair.

“Ho! Ho! Virtue!”

“No—pride.”

He said gloomily:

“So you don’t believe in me. You don’t believe I can earn as much as I
want—more than you have—any time? You never have believed in me.”

“I think you earn now as much as you are ever likely to earn.”

“That is what you think! I don’t want money—your money! I can live on
nothing, any time. I have done it—often.”

“Hssh!”

He looked round and saw the maid in the doorway.

“Please, sir, the driver says can he have his fare, or do you want him
again? Twelve shillings.”

Fiorsen stared at her a moment in the way that—as the maid often
said—made you feel like a silly.

“No. Pay him.”

The girl glanced at Gyp, answered: “Yes, sir,” and went out.

Fiorsen laughed; he laughed, holding his sides. It was droll coming on
the top of his assertion, too droll! And, looking up at her, he said:

“That was good, wasn’t it, Gyp?”

But her face had not abated its gravity; and, knowing that she was even
more easily tickled by the incongruous than himself, he felt again
that catch of fear. Something was different. Yes; something was really
different.

“Did I hurt you last night?”

She shrugged her shoulders and went to the window. He looked at her
darkly, jumped up, and swung out past her into the garden. And, almost
at once, the sound of his violin, furiously played in the music-room,
came across the lawn.

Gyp listened with a bitter smile. Money, too! But what did it matter?
She could not get out of what she had done. She could never get out.
Tonight he would kiss her; and she would pretend it was all right. And
so it would go on and on! Well, it was her own fault. Taking twelve
shillings from her purse, she put them aside on the bureau to give the
maid. And suddenly she thought: ’Perhaps he’ll get tired of me. If only
he would get tired!’ That was a long way the furthest she had yet gone.

VII

They who have known the doldrums—how the sails of the listless ship
droop, and the hope of escape dies day by day—may understand something
of the life Gyp began living now. On a ship, even doldrums come to an
end. But a young woman of twenty-three, who has made a mistake in her
marriage, and has only herself to blame, looks forward to no end, unless
she be the new woman, which Gyp was not. Having settled that she would
not admit failure, and clenched her teeth on the knowledge that she was
going to have a child, she went on keeping things sealed up even from
Winton. To Fiorsen, she managed to behave as usual, making material life
easy and pleasant for him—playing for him, feeding him well, indulging
his amorousness. It did not matter; she loved no one else. To count
herself a martyr would be silly! Her malaise, successfully concealed,
was deeper—of the spirit; the subtle utter discouragement of one who has
done for herself, clipped her own wings.

As for Rosek, she treated him as if that little scene had never taken
place. The idea of appealing to her husband in a difficulty was gone for
ever since the night he came home drunk. And she did not dare to tell
her father. He would—what would he not do? But she was always on
her guard, knowing that Rosek would not forgive her for that dart of
ridicule. His insinuations about Daphne Wing she put out of mind, as she
never could have if she had loved Fiorsen. She set up for herself the
idol of pride, and became its faithful worshipper. Only Winton, and
perhaps Betty, could tell she was not happy. Fiorsen’s debts and
irresponsibility about money did not worry her much, for she paid
everything in the house—rent, wages, food, and her own dress—and had
so far made ends meet; and what he did outside the house she could not
help.

So the summer wore on till concerts were over, and it was supposed to be
impossible to stay in London. But she dreaded going away. She wanted
to be left quiet in her little house. It was this which made her tell
Fiorsen her secret one night, after the theatre. He had begun to talk of
a holiday, sitting on the edge of the settee, with a glass in his hand
and a cigarette between his lips. His cheeks, white and hollow from too
much London, went a curious dull red; he got up and stared at her. Gyp
made an involuntary movement with her hands.

“You needn’t look at me. It’s true.”

He put down glass and cigarette and began to tramp the room. And Gyp
stood with a little smile, not even watching him. Suddenly he clasped
his forehead and broke out:

“But I don’t want it; I won’t have it—spoiling my Gyp.” Then quickly
going up to her with a scared face: “I don’t want it; I’m afraid of it.
Don’t have it.”

In Gyp’s heart came the same feeling as when he had stood there drunk,
against the wall—compassion, rather than contempt of his childishness.
And taking his hand she said:

“All right, Gustav. It shan’t bother you. When I begin to get ugly, I’ll
go away with Betty till it’s over.”

He went down on his knees.

“Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no! My beautiful Gyp!”

And Gyp sat like a sphinx, for fear that she too might let slip those
words: “Oh, no!”

The windows were open, and moths had come in. One had settled on the
hydrangea plant that filled the hearth. Gyp looked at the soft, white,
downy thing, whose head was like a tiny owl’s against the bluish petals;
looked at the purple-grey tiles down there, and the stuff of her own
frock, in the shaded gleam of the lamps. And all her love of beauty
rebelled, called up by his: “Oh, no!” She would be unsightly soon, and
suffer pain, and perhaps die of it, as her own mother had died. She set
her teeth, listening to that grown-up child revolting against what he
had brought on her, and touched his hand, protectingly.

It interested, even amused her this night and next day to watch his
treatment of the disconcerting piece of knowledge. For when at last he
realized that he had to acquiesce in nature, he began, as she had known
he would, to jib away from all reminder of it. She was careful not to
suggest that he should go away without her, knowing his perversity. But
when he proposed that she should come to Ostend with him and Rosek, she
answered, after seeming deliberation, that she thought she had better
not—she would rather stay at home quite quietly; but he must certainly
go and get a good holiday.

When he was really gone, peace fell on Gyp—peace such as one feels,
having no longer the tight, banded sensations of a fever. To be without
that strange, disorderly presence in the house! When she woke in the
sultry silence of the next morning, she utterly failed to persuade
herself that she was missing him, missing the sound of his breathing,
the sight of his rumpled hair on the pillow, the outline of his long
form under the sheet. Her heart was devoid of any emptiness or ache; she
only felt how pleasant and cool and tranquil it was to lie there alone.
She stayed quite late in bed. It was delicious, with window and door
wide open and the puppies running in and out, to lie and doze off, or
listen to the pigeons’ cooing, and the distant sounds of traffic, and
feel in command once more of herself, body and soul. Now that she had
told Fiorsen, she had no longer any desire to keep her condition secret.
Feeling that it would hurt her father to learn of it from anyone but
herself, she telephoned to tell him she was alone, and asked if she
might come to Bury Street and dine with him.

Winton had not gone away, because, between Goodwood and Doncaster there
was no racing that he cared for; one could not ride at this time of
year, so might just as well be in London. In fact, August was perhaps
the pleasantest of all months in town; the club was empty, and he could
sit there without some old bore buttonholing him. Little Boncarte, the
fencing-master, was always free for a bout—Winton had long learned to
make his left hand what his right hand used to be; the Turkish baths in
Jermyn Street were nearly void of their fat clients; he could saunter
over to Covent Garden, buy a melon, and carry it home without meeting
any but the most inferior duchesses in Piccadilly; on warm nights he
could stroll the streets or the parks, smoking his cigar, his hat pushed
back to cool his forehead, thinking vague thoughts, recalling vague
memories. He received the news that his daughter was alone and free from
that fellow with something like delight. Where should he dine her? Mrs.
Markey was on her holiday. Why not Blafard’s? Quiet—-small rooms—not too
respectable—quite fairly cool—good things to eat. Yes; Blafard’s!

When she drove up, he was ready in the doorway, his thin brown face
with its keen, half-veiled eyes the picture of composure, but feeling
at heart like a schoolboy off for an exeat. How pretty she was
looking—though pale from London—her dark eyes, her smile! And stepping
quickly to the cab, he said:

“No; I’m getting in—dining at Blafard’s, Gyp—a night out!”

It gave him a thrill to walk into that little restaurant behind her; and
passing through its low red rooms to mark the diners turn and stare with
envy—taking him, perhaps, for a different sort of relation. He settled
her into a far corner by a window, where she could see the people and
be seen. He wanted her to be seen; while he himself turned to the world
only the short back wings of his glossy greyish hair. He had no
notion of being disturbed in his enjoyment by the sight of Hivites and
Amorites, or whatever they might be, lapping champagne and shining in
the heat. For, secretly, he was living not only in this evening but in
a certain evening of the past, when, in this very corner, he had dined
with her mother. HIS face then had borne the brunt; hers had been turned
away from inquisition. But he did not speak of this to Gyp.

She drank two full glasses of wine before she told him her news. He took
it with the expression she knew so well—tightening his lips and staring
a little upward. Then he said quietly:

“When?”

“November, Dad.”

A shudder, not to be repressed, went through Winton. The very month!
And stretching his hand across the table, he took hers and pressed it
tightly.

“It’ll be all right, child; I’m glad.”

Clinging to his hand, Gyp murmured:

“I’m not; but I won’t be frightened—I promise.”

Each was trying to deceive the other; and neither was deceived. But both
were good at putting a calm face on things. Besides, this was “a night
out”—for her, the first since her marriage—of freedom, of feeling
somewhat as she used to feel with all before her in a ballroom of a
world; for him, the unfettered resumption of a dear companionship and a
stealthy revel in the past. After his, “So he’s gone to Ostend?” and
his thought: ’He would!’ they never alluded to Fiorsen, but talked of
horses, of Mildenham—it seemed to Gyp years since she had been there—of
her childish escapades. And, looking at him quizzically, she asked:

“What were you like as a boy, Dad? Aunt Rosamund says that you used to
get into white rages when nobody could go near you. She says you were
always climbing trees, or shooting with a catapult, or stalking things,
and that you never told anybody what you didn’t want to tell them. And
weren’t you desperately in love with your nursery-governess?”

Winton smiled. How long since he had thought of that first affection.
Miss Huntley! Helena Huntley—with crinkly brown hair, and blue eyes, and
fascinating frocks! He remembered with what grief and sense of bitter
injury he heard in his first school-holidays that she was gone. And he
said:

“Yes, yes. By Jove, what a time ago! And my father’s going off to India.
He never came back; killed in that first Afghan business. When I
was fond, I WAS fond. But I didn’t feel things like you—not half so
sensitive. No; not a bit like you, Gyp.”

And watching her unconscious eyes following the movements of the
waiters, never staring, but taking in all that was going on, he thought:
’Prettiest creature in the world!’

“Well,” he said: “What would you like to do now—drop into a theatre or
music-hall, or what?”

Gyp shook her head. It was so hot. Could they just drive, and then
perhaps sit in the park? That would be lovely. It had gone dark, and
the air was not quite so exhausted—a little freshness of scent from
the trees in the squares and parks mingled with the fumes of dung and
petrol. Winton gave the same order he had given that long past evening:
“Knightsbridge Gate.” It had been a hansom then, and the night air had
blown in their faces, instead of as now in these infernal taxis, down
the back of one’s neck. They left the cab and crossed the Row; passed
the end of the Long Water, up among the trees. There, on two chairs
covered by Winton’s coat, they sat side by side. No dew was falling
yet; the heavy leaves hung unstirring; the air was warm, sweet-smelling.
Blotted against trees or on the grass were other couples darker than the
darkness, very silent. All was quiet save for the never-ceasing hum of
traffic. From Winton’s lips, the cigar smoke wreathed and curled. He
was dreaming. The cigar between his teeth trembled; a long ash fell.
Mechanically he raised his hand to brush it off—his right hand! A voice
said softly in his ear:

“Isn’t it delicious, and warm, and gloomy black?”

Winton shivered, as one shivers recalled from dreams; and, carefully
brushing off the ash with his left hand, he answered:

“Yes; very jolly. My cigar’s out, though, and I haven’t a match.”

Gyp’s hand slipped through his arm.

“All these people in love, and so dark and whispery—it makes a sort of
strangeness in the air. Don’t you feel it?”

Winton murmured:

“No moon to-night!”

Again they were silent. A puff of wind ruffled the leaves; the night,
for a moment, seemed full of whispering; then the sound of a giggle
jarred out and a girl’s voice:

“Oh! Chuck it, ’Arry.”

Gyp rose.

“I feel the dew now, Dad. Can we walk on?”

They went along paths, so as not to wet her feet in her thin shoes. And
they talked. The spell was over; the night again but a common London
night; the park a space of parching grass and gravel; the people just
clerks and shop-girls walking out.

VIII

Fiorsen’s letters were the source of one long smile to Gyp. He missed
her horribly; if only she were there!—and so forth—blended in
the queerest way with the impression that he was enjoying himself
uncommonly. There were requests for money, and careful omission of any
real account of what he was doing. Out of a balance running rather
low, she sent him remittances; this was her holiday, too, and she could
afford to pay for it. She even sought out a shop where she could sell
jewelry, and, with a certain malicious joy, forwarded him the proceeds.
It would give him and herself another week.

One night she went with Winton to the Octagon, where Daphne Wing was
still performing. Remembering the girl’s squeaks of rapture at her
garden, she wrote next day, asking her to lunch and spend a lazy
afternoon under the trees.

The little dancer came with avidity. She was pale, and droopy from the
heat, but happily dressed in Liberty silk, with a plain turn-down straw
hat. They lunched off sweetbreads, ices, and fruit, and then, with
coffee, cigarettes, and plenty of sugar-plums, settled down in the
deepest shade of the garden, Gyp in a low wicker chair, Daphne Wing on
cushions and the grass. Once past the exclamatory stage, she seemed a
great talker, laying bare her little soul with perfect liberality.
And Gyp—excellent listener—enjoyed it, as one enjoys all confidential
revelations of existences very different from one’s own, especially when
regarded as a superior being.

“Of course I don’t mean to stay at home any longer than I can help; only
it’s no good going out into life”—this phrase she often used—“till
you know where you are. In my profession, one has to be so careful. Of
course, people think it’s worse than it is; father gets fits sometimes.
But you know, Mrs. Fiorsen, home’s awful. We have mutton—you know what
mutton is—it’s really awful in your bedroom in hot weather. And there’s
nowhere to practise. What I should like would be a studio. It would be
lovely, somewhere down by the river, or up here near you. That WOULD
be lovely. You know, I’m putting by. As soon as ever I have two hundred
pounds, I shall skip. What I think would be perfectly lovely would be
to inspire painters and musicians. I don’t want to be just a common
’turn’—ballet business year after year, and that; I want to be something
rather special. But mother’s so silly about me; she thinks I oughtn’t to
take any risks at all. I shall never get on that way. It IS so nice to
talk to you, Mrs. Fiorsen, because you’re young enough to know what I
feel; and I’m sure you’d never be shocked at anything. You see, about
men: Ought one to marry, or ought one to take a lover? They say you
can’t be a perfect artist till you’ve felt passion. But, then, if you
marry, that means mutton over again, and perhaps babies, and perhaps the
wrong man after all. Ugh! But then, on the other hand, I don’t want to
be raffish. I hate raffish people—I simply hate them. What do you think?
It’s awfully difficult, isn’t it?”

Gyp, perfectly grave, answered:

“That sort of thing settles itself. I shouldn’t bother beforehand.”

Miss Daphne Wing buried her perfect chin deeper in her hands, and said
meditatively:

“Yes; I rather thought that, too; of course I could do either now. But,
you see, I really don’t care for men who are not distinguished. I’m sure
I shall only fall in love with a really distinguished man. That’s
what you did—isn’t it?—so you MUST understand. I think Mr. Fiorsen is
wonderfully distinguished.”

Sunlight, piercing the shade, suddenly fell warm on Gyp’s neck where
her blouse ceased, and fortunately stilled the medley of emotion and
laughter a little lower down. She continued to look gravely at Daphne
Wing, who resumed:

“Of course, Mother would have fits if I asked her such a question, and I
don’t know what Father would do. Only it is important, isn’t it? One may
go all wrong from the start; and I do really want to get on. I simply
adore my work. I don’t mean to let love stand in its way; I want to make
it help, you know. Count Rosek says my dancing lacks passion. I wish
you’d tell me if you think it does. I should believe YOU.”

Gyp shook her head.

“I’m not a judge.”

Daphne Wing looked up reproachfully.

“Oh, I’m sure you are! If I were a man, I should be passionately in love
with you. I’ve got a new dance where I’m supposed to be a nymph pursued
by a faun; it’s so difficult to feel like a nymph when you know it’s
only the ballet-master. Do you think I ought to put passion into that?
You see, I’m supposed to be flying all the time; but it would be much
more subtle, wouldn’t it, if I could give the impression that I wanted
to be caught. Don’t you think so?”

Gyp said suddenly:

“Yes, I think it WOULD do you good to be in love.”

Miss Daphne’s mouth fell a little open; her eyes grew round. She said:

“You frightened me when you said that. You looked so
different—so—intense.”

A flame indeed had leaped up in Gyp. This fluffy, flabby talk of love
set her instincts in revolt. She did not want to love; she had failed
to fall in love. But, whatever love was like, it did not bear talking
about. How was it that this little suburban girl, when she once got on
her toes, could twirl one’s emotions as she did?

“D’you know what I should simply revel in?” Daphne Wing went on: “To
dance to you here in the garden some night. It must be wonderful to
dance out of doors; and the grass is nice and hard now. Only, I suppose
it would shock the servants. Do they look out this way?” Gyp shook her
head. “I could dance over there in front of the drawin

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