The Angel of Pain
by E. F. Benson · English · Gutenberg #44210 · 797,399 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Angel of Pain
Author: E. F. Benson
Release date: November 17, 2013 [eBook #44210]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ANGEL OF PAIN ***
Every attempt has been made to replicate the original as printed. Some
typographical errors have been corrected; a list follows the text. The
spellings, knealt, musn't, your's, Your's & her's are consistent with
the printed text. (e-text transcriber's note)
THE ANGEL OF PAIN
THE
ANGEL OF PAIN
BY
E. F. BENSON
AUTHOR OF
"THE CHALLONERS," "DODO," "THE IMAGE IN THE SAND," ETC.
[Illustration: colophon]
PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1906
COPYRIGHT, 1905
BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
[Illustration: text decoration]
THE ANGEL OF PAIN
FIRST
The garden lay dozing in the summer sun, a sun, too, that was really hot
and luminous, worthy of mid-June, and Philip Home had paid his
acknowledgments to its power by twice moving his chair into the shifting
shade of the house, which stood with blinds drawn down, as if blinking
in the brightness. Somewhere on the lawn below him, but hidden by the
flower-beds of the terraced walk, a mowing-machine was making its
clicking journeys to and fro, and the sound of it seemed to him to be
extraordinarily consonant to the still heat of the afternoon. Entirely
in character also with the day was the light hot wind that stirred
fitfully among the garden beds as if it had gone to sleep there, and now
and then turned over and made the flowers rustle and sigh. Huge Oriental
poppies drooped their scarlet heads, late wall-flowers still sent forth
their hot, homely odour, peonies blazed and flaunted, purple irises
rivalled in their fading glories the budding stars of clematis that
swarmed up the stone vases on the terrace, golden rain showered from the
laburnums, lilacs stood thick in fragrant clumps and clusters.
Canterbury bells raised spires of dry, crinkly blue, and
forget-me-nots--nearly over--made a dim blue border to the glorious
carpet of the beds. For the warm weather this year had come late but
determinedly, spring flowers still lingered, and the later blossoms of
early summer had been forced into premature appearance. This fact
occupied Philip at this moment quite enormously. What would the garden
be like in July? There must come a break somewhere, when the precious
summer flowers were over, and before the autumn ones began.
It was not unreasonable of him to be proud of his garden, for any
garden-lover would here have recognised a master-hand. Below, in the
thick clay that bordered the Thames, were the roses kept apart, with no
weed, no other flower to pilfer their rightful monopoly of "richness." A
flight of twelve stone steps led up from this garden to the tennis lawn,
a sheet of velvet turf, unbordered by any flowers to be trampled by
ball-seekers, or to be respected by ball-losers. Above again where he
sat now a deep herbaceous border ran round three sides of the gravelled
space, in the middle of which a bronze fountain cast water over Nereids
and aquatic plants, and behind him rose the dozing house, sun-blinds and
rambler rose, jasmine and red bricks.
Certainly at this moment Philip was more than content with life, a very
rare but a very enviable condition of affairs. The lines seemed to him
to be laid not in pleasant but in ecstatic places, and youth, hard work,
a well-earned holiday, keen sensibilities, and being in love combined to
form a state of mind which might be envied by the happiest man God ever
made. An hour's meditation with a shut book which he had selected at
random from the volumes on the drawing-room table had convinced him of
this, and the interruption that now came to his solitary thoughts was as
delightful in its own way as the thoughts themselves.
Mrs. Home did everything in the way most characteristic of her, and if a
Dresden shepherdess could be conceived as sixty years old she might
possibly rival the clean, precise delicacy of Philip's mother. She
dressed in grey and Quakerish colours, but of an exquisite neatness, and
her clothes smelled faintly but fragrantly of lavender and old-fashioned
herbs. Even at sixty the china-prettiness of her face gave her
pre-eminent charm; and her cheeks, wrinkled with no sharp lines of
sudden shock, but with the long pleasant passage of time, were as pink
and soft as a girl's. Her hair was perfectly white, but still abundant,
and, taken up in rather old-fashioned lines above her temples gave a
roundness and youth to her face which was entirely in keeping with her.
As she stepped out of the drawing-room window she put up her parasol,
and walked quietly over the gravel to where her dark, long-limbed son
was sitting.
"Darling, would it not be wise of you to go for a row on the river?"
she said. "Your holiday is so short. I want you to make the best of it."
Philip turned in his chair.
"Darling, it would be most unwise," he said. "The best holiday is to do
nothing at all. People are so stupid! They think that if your brain, or
what does duty for it, is tired, the remedy is to tire your body also."
"But a little walk, perhaps, Philip," said she. "I can explain to your
guests when they come. Do you know, I am rather frightened of them. That
extraordinary Mr. Merivale, for instance. Will he want to take off all
his clothes, and eat cabbages?"
Philip's grave face slowly relaxed into a smile. He hardly ever laughed,
but his smile was very complete.
"I shall tell him you said that," he remarked.
Mrs. Home sat down with quite a thump at the horror of the thought.
"Dear Philip," she said, "you mustn't--you really mustn't."
He stretched out his hand to her.
"Oh, mother," he said, "what will cure you of being so indiscreet except
threats, and putting those threats into execution if necessary? He will
want to take off all his clothes, as we all shall, if it goes on being
so hot. Only he won't any more than we shall. He will probably be
extremely well-dressed. No, the Hermit is only the Hermit at the
Hermitage. Even there he doesn't take off all his clothes, though he
lives an outdoor life. You never quite have recognised what a remarkable
person he is."
"I should remark him anywhere," said Mrs. Home in self-defence. "And
what age is he, Philip? Is he twenty, or thirty, or what?"
Philip considered.
"He must be a year or two older than me," he said. "Yes, I should say he
was thirty-one. But it's quite true--he doesn't look any age; he looks
ageless. Entirely the result of no clothes and cabbages."
"They always seem to me so tasteless," remarked Mrs. Home. "But they
seem to suit him."
"Dear old Hermit!" said Philip. "I haven't seen him for a whole year. It
becomes harder and harder to get him away from his beloved forest."
"I can never understand what he does with himself, year in, year out,
down there," said Mrs. Home.
"He thinks," said Philip.
"I should call that doing nothing," remarked his mother.
"I know; there is that view of it. At the same time, it must be
extremely difficult to think all day. I have been thinking for an hour,
and I have quite finished. I should have had to begin to read if you
hadn't come out. And whom else are you frightened of out of all these
terrible people?"
Mrs. Home smoothed her grey gown a little nervously.
"I am frightened of Lady Ellington," she said. "She has so very much--so
very much self-possession. She is so practical, too: she always tells me
all sorts of ways of managing the house, and suggests all kinds of
improvements. It is very kind of her, and she is always quite right. And
I think I am a little afraid of Madge."
"Ah, I can't permit that," said Philip, smiling again.
This brought their talk at once into more intimate lands.
"Ah, dear Philip," she said. "I pray God that it may go well with you!"
Philip sat upright in his chair, and the book fell unheeded to the
ground.
"How did you guess?" he said. "I suspect you of being a witch, mother;
and if we had lived a few hundred years ago, instead of now, it would
have been my painful duty to have had you burned. It would have hurt you
far more than me, because the sense of duty would have sustained me. I
never said a word to you about Madge, yet you knew I was in love with
her, I think, almost before I knew it myself."
"Yes, dear. I am sure I did," said Mrs. Home with gentle complacence.
"Well, you dear witch, tell me how you knew."
"Oh, Philip, it was easy to see. You never looked at any girl before
like that. I used to be afraid you would never marry. You used to say
dreadful things, you know, that really frightened me. Even since you
were quite a little boy, you thought women were a bother. You used to
say they couldn't play games, and were always in the way, and had
headaches, and were without any sense of honour."
"All quite true in the main," said the misogynous Philip.
Mrs. Home held up her hands in protest.
"Dear, when have you known me have a headache, or do anything
dishonourable?" she asked pertinently.
"I always excepted you. And I except Madge. She beat me at croquet the
other day, and in the middle of the game volunteered the information
that she had not moved the ball she croquetted."
"She always would," said his mother gently. "Oh, Philip, good luck to
your wooing, my dear!"
There was a long pause; a sparrow in a prodigious bustle alighted on the
edge of the fountain, and drank as if it had been a traveller straight
from Sahara; the wind woke again in the flower-beds and gave a long,
fragrant sigh; the sun-blinds of the drawing-room stirred as it wandered
by them, and the pale purple petals of a grape-bunch cluster of wisteria
fell on the crimson-striped canvas. The exquisiteness of this midsummer
moment struck Philip with a sudden pang of delight, none the less keen
because the love with which his soul was full was not yet certain or
complete: the pause before completion was his.
"Thank you, mother," he said at last. "I shall know very soon, I shall
ask her while she is here."
He got up as he spoke.
"I can't sit still any more," he said. "Speaking of it has made me
restless. I must go and do something violent. Perhaps I will take your
advice and go for a row. They will not be here till nearly seven. Oh,
by-the-way, Evelyn Dundas is coming, too. You will have someone to flirt
with, mother."
"Dear, you say such dreadful things!" said Mrs. Home. "And if you say
them while Lady Ellington is here, I shall feel so awkward."
"Well, Evelyn proposed to elope with you last time he was here," said
Philip. "I think I shall commission him to paint your portrait."
"Who wants the picture of an old woman like me?" said Mrs. Home. "But
get him to do Madge's."
Philip considered this.
"That's an idea," he said. "He could paint her divinely. Really,
mother--if ah! a big 'if.' Do you know, I'm rather uneasy about Evelyn."
"Why? I thought he was getting on so well."
"He is as far as painting goes. They think very highly of him. But the
moment he gets a couple of hundred pounds he buys a motor-car or
something, and next week his watch is in pawn. Now, when you are
twenty-five, it is time to stop doing that."
"I know," said Mrs. Home. "He is dreadful! Last time he was here he gave
me a pearl-brooch that must have cost him fifty pounds."
"That was to induce you to run away with him," remarked Philip. "That
was quite understood, and I think you behaved rather badly in not doing
so."
"Philip, you mustn't!"
"No, nor must you! And now I'm going on the river. If I get drowned it
will be your fault for having suggested it."
"Ah, do be careful in those locks," said Mrs. Home. "I get so nervous
always when the water goes down and down."
"There's more chance of getting drowned when it goes up and up," said
her son, kissing her on the forehead as he passed her chair.
Philip Home at the age of thirty-one was, perhaps, as successful a man
of his age as any in the financial world. His father, the head of one of
the big South African houses, had died some five years before, and since
then the burden of a very large and prosperous house had rested almost
entirely on his shoulders, which physically as well as morally were
broad. But he combined in an extraordinary degree the dash and
initiative of youth with a cool-headedness and sobriety of judgment
which, in general is not achieved until something of the fire of the
other is lost, and his management was both brilliant and safe. Yet, as
must always happen, the habit of mind necessary to the successful
conduct of large financial interests, which among other ingredients is
made up of incessant watchfulness and a certain hardness in judging and
acting, had, it must be confessed, somewhat tinged his whole character,
and the world in general was right in its estimate of him as a man who
was rather brusque and unsympathetic, a man with an iron hand who did
not always even remember to put on the velvet glove. This was a
perfectly just conclusion as far as the world in general, that is to
say, the world of mere acquaintances, was concerned, and Philip's fine
collection of prints was considered to be regarded by him as an
investment rather than a joy. They made the same judgment about his
garden, thinking that the rarity of plants was a quality more
highly-prized by him than their beauty. But where the world in general
did him an injustice was that they did not allow for a circle which,
though small, was far more intimate and vastly more competent to form
the true estimate of the man than they, the circle of friends. These
were four in number--his mother, Madge Ellington, namely--and the two
men to whom allusion has already been made, namely--the Hermit and
Evelyn Dundas. They saw, all four of them, a perfectly different Philip
to him who somewhat elbowed his way through the uninteresting ranks of
acquaintances, or sat, detached from the real essential man, in his
orderly office, harsh-faced, unsmiling and absorbed. And this essential
Philip in his own sanctum, where only these four ever came, was, indeed,
a very lovable and eager personage; and though the world did not know
it, his prints really hung there, and in the windows his flowers
blossomed. But few were admitted there, and those only not on business.
So this very efficient person, if we rate efficiency, as seems to be the
fashion, by the amount of income-tax annually harvested by the State,
left the shade of the house and his mother sitting there, whistled for
the two fox-terriers that lay dozing in the shade and went off towards
the river. The smile which he wore when in his sanctum of intimates
still lingered on his face as he passed down the stone steps to the
croquet lawn below, but then it faded. Nor did the gardener who was
mowing the lawn smile.
"I gave orders it was to be mown yesterday morning," said Philip; "and
it is only half done yet. Did you receive those orders or not?"
The man, a huge young Hercules, touched his cap.
"Yes, sir; at least----"
"There is no 'at least,'" said Philip. "If you can't do as you are told
you will have to go."
And he whistled--that Philip who was a parody of himself--to the dogs,
and went on.
But before he had got down to the river the official Philip had
dispersed, mistlike, in the glorious golden blaze of the summer
afternoon, and the man his mother knew (she would scarcely, indeed, have
recognised the other) had taken his place again, and as he rowed lazily
down the river he gave himself up to mere receptivity of the full-blown
beauty that was shed broadcast on sky and land and water. The spring had
long been backward and wet, but now the pitiless rains of April bore a
glorious and iridescent fruit. Brimful ran the stream from bank to bank,
one sheet of untarnished crystal, reflecting the luminous turquoise of
the sky. To his right stretched meadows all golden with the flowering of
the buttercup; and cattle, knee-deep in the feathery foliage, grazed
contentedly, or stood in the shallows of the river to drink, breathing
out long soft breaths of kine-fragrance. Between the fields stood elms,
stalwart towers of innumerable leaf, and a little way below the red
roofs of Pangbourne nestled among red and white flowering thorns. One
such tree, a cascade of crimson blossom, grew near the river brink, and
Philip paused on his oars a moment as he passed, for the sprays of
colour were outlined by the vivid blue of the sky, and on either side
stretched the incredible gold of the buttercups. No artist dared have
painted that, yet how simple and how triumphantly successful! To the
left the sun was just sinking beneath the high lines of wooded hills,
and already the tide of clear warm shadow was beginning to advance
across the stream. In the woods that covered the hills every shade of
green, from the pale milkiness of young beech to the dark velvet of the
oak, were mingled together, and glowed as if lit from within with the
flakes of sunlight that filtered through the leaves. But that divine
restfulness of various green was, somehow less to Philip's mind than the
shouting colours of the sunlit fields. For the tides of life, the
strong, sweeping currents of vitality, of love, of the work without
which the active brain grows hungry and starves, were dashing in
headstrong race within him, and rest and tranquility and soft brooding
over what has been seemed to him a poor substitute for the eager
harvesting of youth. His sickle was in his hand, and he pressed eagerly
forward through the ripening corn of life that fell in swathes to his
sweeping strokes.
The little party who were assembling at his house that afternoon were to
stay with him a week of Whitsuntide. He would, he expected, be probably
obliged to go up to London for the inside of the last two days of their
stay, but he had managed--chiefly by means of working some sixteen
hours out of the twenty-four during the last week--to secure for himself
five days of complete holiday. Like a wise man, he had refused to pepper
his house with mere acquaintances when friends were there, and with only
one out of his four guests did he, like his mother, not feel on terms of
intimacy. Her presence, however, as Madge's mother, was a matter of
necessity, and Philip did not hide from himself the fact that she
certainly favoured his suit. For Lady Ellington, as Mrs. Home had
already remarked, was a very practical woman, and it seemed to her, in
her own phrasing, that Madge could scarcely "do better." Her practical
sense, it may be remarked, was like an all-fitting handle with a smart
steel spring which grasped whatever was presented to it in firm
tentacles; and the proper way of sweeping carpets, the right board wages
for scullery-maids, the correct lead with doubled no trumps at bridge,
were as clearly defined in her mind as the desirability of wealth in
sons'-in-law. She was, it may be added, extremely generous with advice,
being anxious to lay open to all the world the multifarious discoveries
of her master-mind.
Lady Ellington was certainly a very handsome woman, and the passage of
the glacier of years over her face and her mind had produced hardly any
striations either on the one or the other. Her bodily health was superb,
and she took the utmost care of it; while, since one of her most
constantly applied maxims was to let no sadness or worry weigh on her,
her mind had by this time become something like a very hard, bright,
polished globe which it was impossible to dint or damage. She had
strolled after tea with her hostess and Madge to the croquet lawn,
leaving Evelyn Dundas and Tom Merivale to smoke and await Philip's
return from the river. The gardener there was still engaged in his
belated mowing, and Lady Ellington examined the cutter with a
magisterial air.
"Very old-fashioned and heavy," she said. "You should get the new light
American type. It does far more work, and a boy with it can get through
what it takes a man to do with a heavier machine. How many gardeners do
you keep, Mrs. Home."
The poor lady shook her head.
"I don't really know," she said. "How many are there of you, Hawkins?"
Lady Ellington sniffed rather contemptuously.
"The labour-sheet will tell you," she said. "Why are there no flower
borders on this lawn?"
"Ah, that is Philip's plan," said his mother, delighted to be able to
refer the inquisitor to another source. "He says that they get so
trampled by people looking for balls."
"I should have thought wire-netting would have obviated that," said Lady
Ellington. "Under the north wall there is an excellent aspect.
Personally, I should put bulbs here. And the rose garden is below, is it
not? Certainly Mr. Home keeps his garden in fairly good order."
This concession, though not altogether unqualified, was fully
appreciated by Mrs. Home.
"I'm sure he spends enough on it," she said.
Lady Ellington laughed.
"That is the surest way of getting satisfactory results," she said. "It
is all nonsense to say that flowers do best in the gardens of those that
love them, unless that love takes the practical form of spending money
on them. And in the latter case, they do equally well if you hate them!"
This was in the best Ellingtonian manner, hard and clean-cut and
glittering--there was nothing foggy about it--and it represented very
fairly Lady Ellington's method of dealing with life. Love or hatred did
not seem to her to matter very particularly; the dinner of herbs, at any
rate, in the house of love was markedly less attractive to her than the
well-ordered house of hate, and she could do without friends better than
without a motor-car. She had had rather a hard tussel with life, and
shrewd blows had been given on both sides; she had lost her money and
her husband during the last few years, and, being without a son, the
title and estates had gone to her husband's nephew, a man for whom for
years she had felt, and indeed shown, an extreme dislike. Her jointure
was narrow, and she had only got her motor-car by the simple expedient
of ordering it but not paying for it. But of the two combatants--life
and herself--life was at last beginning to get the worst of it. Certain
speculations she had lately indulged in had brought her in money, and if
once she could marry her daughter to Philip, she felt that this would be
a knock-down blow to life, and her struggles on this side of the grave
would be over. What might happen on the other side concerned her very
little.
Madge meantime, while this short cross-examination had been going on,
strolled a little behind the other two, with a faint smile of amusement
in her eyes. She had inherited all her mother's beauty, and dark violet
eyes glowed beneath her black lashes. Her nose was a little tip-tilted,
as if raised in curiosity about things in general, but her mouth
somewhat contradicted that, for it drooped a little at the corners, as
if to imply that her curiosity when satisfied proved rather
disappointing. Curiosity and a shade of contempt, indeed, were the
emotions most strongly in evidence on her face, and the
observer--allowing that features may represent the character of their
owner rather than that of her ancestry--would perhaps conclude that her
habitual view of the world was of the kind that tends to laugh at rather
than with that admirable comedy. Otherwise her face was strangely
sexless; it was, indeed, more the face of a boy than of a girl. Even
among tall women she was tall, and by her side Mrs. Home looked more
than ever like a figure of Dresden china.
Lady Ellington after her sympathetic remark about flowers, turned to her
daughter.
"Well situated, is it not, Madge?" she said. "And the river is below
there. You will be all day on it, I expect, if Mr. Home is kind enough
to take you. And who else is here, Mrs. Home?"
"Ah, there is no party at all, I am afraid," said she. "Philip said that
acquaintances mix so badly with friends. Only Mr. Dundas and Mr.
Merivale."
Lady Ellington thought this over for a moment, and the conclusion
apparently was most satisfactory.
"That is charming of him!" she said. "It is always a compliment to be
asked to a small party; whereas, if you have a houseful it doesn't
matter who is there. Dear me, those roses should be cut much further
back, if they are to do any good. But it is quite true; if one asks
friends and acquaintances together, the friends always wonder why the
acquaintances have been asked, and the acquaintances are disgusted that
nobody takes any notice of them. And I particularly want your son's
advice on some shares I have lately purchased. Mr. Dundas, too--I am so
glad to meet him. They say his portraits are going up in price so. I
wonder if he could be induced--just a little sketch---- Ah, there is
Mr. Home coming up from the river. I wonder why he wears a dark coat on
so hot a day?"
A little curiosity perhaps lingered in Madge's face when she met Philip,
and certainly the contempt all vanished. She had a great respect and
liking for him, and her whole expression brightened when she saw him.
Then after greetings they strolled on, the two elder ladies in front.
"Mother has a great many questions to ask you," she said to him in a
gentle, slow, but very audible voice. "She wants to know how many
gardeners you have, why you don't cut your roses back and something
about South African mines."
Philip's habit of neatness and instinct of gardening led him to stop a
moment and nip off a couple of ill-localised buds from a rose. In effect
the two others got a little further ahead of them. This may or may not
have been intentional.
"All my information is at her service," he said--"particularly on the
subject of roses, about which I know more than South African mines."
"And care more!" suggested Madge.
"Infinitely more. Are they not clearly more attractive?"
Madge looked at him curiously.
"I believe you really think so," she said. "And that is so odd. Doesn't
the scheming, the calculation, the foresight required in financial
things interest you enormously?"
"Certainly; but I scheme just as much over the roses. Whether this one
is to have--well, a whisky-and-soda, or whether it is rheumatic and
wants a lowering treatment; that is just as interesting in itself as
whether South Africans want lowering or screwing up."
"You mean you can do that? You can send things up or down? You can say
to us, to mother: 'You shall be poorer to-morrow or richer'?"
Philip laughed.
"I suppose so, to some extent. Pray don't let us talk about it. It
sounds rather brutal, and I am afraid it is brutalising. Yet, after all,
a landlord may put up the rent of his houses."
Madge Ellington walked on for a few paces without replying.
"How odd of you," she said at length, "not to feel the fascination of
power. I don't mean to say that one would necessarily want to use it,
but it must be so divine to know it is there. Well, if you wish, I won't
talk about it."
Philip turned to her, his brown thin face looking suddenly eager.
"Ah, I would sooner hear you talk about what you please than about what
I please," he said.
She laughed.
"Can't I manage to combine the two?" she said. "The river, for instance,
I think we both love that. Will you promise to let me live on the river
while I am here?"
"I warn you that you will have a good deal of my company, then," said
he.
She laughed again.
"But as you are my host I can't decently object," she said. "Oh, tell
me, Mr. Home, what is Mr. Dundas like? You are a great friend of his,
are you not? He was at tea, and asked a series of the silliest riddles,
which somehow made me giggle. Giggle hopelessly, do you understand; they
were so stupid. And he is the Mr. Dundas, who paints everybody as if
they were so much more interesting than they are?"
"Yes, evidently the same," said Philip. "And what you say is quite true.
Yet, again, as you say, his conversation is futile beyond words."
Madge walked on again in silence a little.
"I think that combination is rather charming," she said. "People don't
laugh enough, and certainly he makes one laugh. I wish I laughed more,
for instance."
"And has Merivale come?" asked Philip.
"Yes; he was at tea, too. What does he do?"
"He doesn't do anything. He just thinks."
"Good heavens! how frightfully fatiguing. All the time, do you mean?"
"Yes, all the time. Have you never met him before? Yet, how should you?
He lives in the New Forest, and communes with birds and animals. People
think he is mad, but he is the sanest person I know."
"Why?" asked she.
"Because he has had the wit to find out what he likes, and to do it all
the time."
"And what is that?" asked the girl.
"He sits by a stream and looks at the water. Then he lies on his back
and looks at the sky. Then he whistles, chuckles, what you please to
call it, and the thrushes come scudding out of the bushes and chuckle
back at him."
"Is that not rather uncanny?" asked Madge.
"Most uncanny. Some day, as I tell him, he will see Pan. And I shall
then have to attend a funeral."
The girl's eyebrows wrinkled into a frown.
"Pan?" she said.
"Yes; he is the God of 'Go as you please!' And his temple is a lunatic
asylum. But don't be alarmed. The Hermit won't go into a lunatic asylum
yet awhile."
"The Hermit?"
"Yes, the Hermit is Merivale. Because he lives quite alone in the New
Forest. He never reads, he hardly ever sees anybody, he never does
anything. He used to write at one time."
Madge shivered slightly.
"How intensely uncomfortable!" she said. "I think I shall like Mr.
Dundas best."
"You are sure to like him."
"Because everybody does? That is the worst of reasons. I always distrust
very popular people."
"The judgment of the world is usually wrong, you mean. But occasionally
one stumbles on an exception."
The four had turned back towards the house, and as Philip spoke, he and
his companion gained the top step of the gravelled square bordered by
flower-beds, where he had sat two hours ago with his mother. The shadow
of the house had swung over it, and in the gathering dusk the
flower-beds glowed with a dim subaqueous radiance. Philip's mother and
Lady Ellington had already passed into the open French window of the
drawing-room, but on the stout balustrade of the terrace there sat a
young man. One long slim leg rested on the gravel, the other was crooked
round the lead vase at the head of the steps. His face, extraordinarily
boyish, was clean-shaven, or rather so boyish was it, that it looked as
if it was still untouched by razor. He held a cigarette in one hand, and
the other, long-fingered and white as a woman's, grasped his knee.
"Oh, Philip!" he cried; "how are you? Oddly enough, I am quite well. I
always was, like Sydney Smith and his great coat. Isn't there time for
a game of croquet before dinner? Let's all be late, and so we shall all
be punctual; it is only a question of degree. Miss Ellington, do come
and play. Why did the barmaid champagne, and--oh, I asked you that.
Stout, porter is rather good though. I do believe you know it, Philip."
[Illustration: text decoration]
SECOND
Tom Merivale did not, as Mrs. Home had feared he might, appear without
clothes at dinner, nor did he make clamorous demands for cabbage. It is
true that he ate no meat of any kind, but he was not of the preaching
sort of vegetarians, and did not call attention to his abstinence.
Instead, he and Evelyn Dundas between them managed to turn the meal into
a ridiculous piece of gaiety by sheer exuberance of animal spirits, and
even Lady Ellington forgot to examine the dishes with her usual
magisterial air, and really ate and drank without criticising.
There was an extraordinary superficial resemblance in certain ways
between the two men. Both, at any rate, were glorious examples of the
happiness that springs from health, a happiness which is as inimitable
as it is contagious. By health, it must be premised, is not meant the
mere absence of definite ailments, but that perfect poise between an
active mind and an exuberant body which is so rare.
It was on this very subject that Merivale was speaking now.
"Ah, no, Lady Ellington," he was saying, "to be able to get through the
day's work, day after day and year after year, is not health. Perfect
health implies practically perfect happiness."
"But how if you have a definite cause of worry?" she said.
"You can't worry when you are well. One knows, for example, that if one
is definitely unwell, the same cause produces greater worry and
discomfort than if one is not. And my theory is, that if one is
absolutely well, if your mind and soul, that is to say, as well as your
body, are all in accord with each other and with their environment,
worry is impossible."
Lady Ellington, to do her justice, always listened to that were really
new to her. She always assumed, by the way, that they were not.
"My theory exactly," she said. "I could scarcely have lived through
these last years unless I had made up my mind never to let any anxiety
take hold of me."
Evelyn Dundas laughed. Dinner was nearing its end and conversation was
general.
"My mind and my body are not in absolute accord this moment," he said,
"and I am rather anxious. My body demands some more ice-pudding; my mind
tells me it would be extremely unwise. Which am I to listen to, Tom?"
"Give Mr. Dundas some more ice-pudding," remarked Philip to a footman.
"The laws of hospitality compel me to fall in with my host's
suggestions," said Evelyn. "Tom, where you are wrong lies in thinking
that it is worth while spending all your time in keeping well. He lives
in the New Forest, Lady Ellington, and if when you are passing you hear
the puffs of a loud steam-engine somewhere near Brockenhurst you will
know it is Tom doing deep breathing. He expects in time to become a
Ram-jam or something, by breathing himself into Raj-pan-puta."
Tom Merivale laughed.
"No, I don't want to become a Ram-jam," he said, "whatever that may be.
I want to become myself."
"No clothes," murmured Mrs. Home.
"Become yourself?" asked Lady Ellington.
"Yes, most of us are stunted copies of our real selves," he said.
"Imitations of what we might be. And what might one not be?"
The talk had got for him, at any rate, suddenly serious, and he looked
up at Lady Ellington with a sparkling eye.
"Explain," she said.
"Well, it seems to me one cripples oneself in so many ways. One allows
oneself to be nervous, and to be angry, and to be bound by conventions
that are useless and cramping."
"Tall hats, frock-coats?" asked she.
"No, certainly not, because they, at any rate, are perfectly harmless.
But, to take an example of what I mean, it seems to me a ridiculous
convention that we should all consider ourselves obliged to know what is
going on in the world. It does not really do one any good to know that
there is war between China and Japan. What does do us good is not to be
ill-tempered, and never to be sad. Sadness and pessimism are the worst
forms of mental disease I know. And the state will not put sad and
pessimistic people in asylums, or isolate them at any rate so that their
disease should not spread. Such diseases are so frightfully catching,
and they are more fatal than fevers. People die of them, soul and body!"
Lady Ellington felt that Mrs. Home was collecting her eye, and rose.
"What a fascinating theory," she said. "Just what I have always thought.
Ah, I have caught my dress under my chair. You should have castors, Mr.
Home, on your dining-room chairs."
* * * * *
Evelyn moved up next to Tom Merivale after the others had left them.
"Dear old Hermit!" he said. "Now, you've got to give an account of
yourself. Neither Phil nor I have seen you for a year. What have you
been doing?"
Tom let the port pass him.
"I suppose you would call it nothing," said he.
"Ah, but in real life people don't go and live in the New Forest and do
nothing. What have you written in the last year?"
"Not one line. Seriously, I have been doing nothing except a little
gardening and carpentering; just manual labour to keep one sane."'
"Well, it looks as if it suited you. You look well enough, and what is
so odd, you look so much younger."
Tom laughed again.
"Ah, that strikes you, does it?" he said. "I suppose it could not have
been otherwise, though that wasn't my object in going to live there."
"Well, tell us, then!" said Evelyn, rather impatiently. He had begun to
smoke, and smoked in a most characteristic manner; that is to say, that
in little more than a minute his cigarette was consumed down one side,
and was a peninsula of charred paper down the other, while clouds of
smoke ascended from it. Perceiving this, he instantly lit another one.
But Philip rose.
"Tell us afterwards, Tom," he said. "Lady Ellington likes to play
bridge, I know, as soon as dinner is over."
Evelyn rose also.
"Ah, she is like me," he said. "She wants to do things not soon, but
immediately, Philip, how awfully pretty Miss Ellington is. Why wasn't I
told? I should like to paint her."
Philip paused by the door.
"Really, do you mean that?" he said. "And have you got time? I hear you
always have more orders than you can ever get through."
Evelyn tossed his head with a quick, petulant gesture.
"You talk as if I was a tailor," he said. "But you suggest to me the
advisability of my getting apprentices to paint the uninteresting people
for me, and I will sign them. That would satisfy a lot of them. Yes, I
have more than I can do. But I could do Miss Ellington remarkably well.
Shall I ask her to sit for me?"
"That would be rather original, the first time you saw her."
"A good reason for doing it," said Evelyn, hastily drinking another
glass of port.
"But it would certainly give her a good reason for saying 'No,'"
remarked Philip.
Madge, it appeared, did not play bridge; her mother, at any rate, said
she did not, and Evelyn Dundas, rather to his satisfaction, cut out.
That feat happily accomplished, he addressed himself to Madge.
"Fancy a hermit playing bridge!" he said. "Does it not seem to you very
inconsistent? Patience is the furthest he has any right to go."
Madge got up.
"Patience, both in cards and in real life, seems to me a very poor
affair," she said. "How are we going to amuse ourselves while they play?
Will you go out of the room while I think of something, and then you can
come in and guess it?"
An amendment occurred to Evelyn.
"We might both go out," he said. "It is deliciously warm; just out on to
the terrace."
"And when we come in they can guess where we have been," said Madge.
The night, as he had said, was deliciously warm, and the moon, a day or
two only from full, shone with a very clear light. Below them lay the
dim, huddled woods, and beyond, shining like a streak of silver, slept
the Thames. Somewhere far away a train was panting along its iron road,
and to the left scattered lights showed where Pangbourne stood. Odours
of flowers were wafted from the beds, and pale-winged moths now and then
crossed the illuminated spaces of light thrown by the drawing-room
window on to the gravel.
"Ah, what a pity to be indoors!" said the girl as they stepped out. "I
suppose I must be of Gipsy blood; I always want to go somewhere."
"Where particularly?" asked he.
"That doesn't matter; the going is the point. If you asked me to go to
the Black Hole of Calcutta I should probably say 'Yes.' What a pity we
can't go on the river!"
"Ah, let us do that!" said he.
Madge laughed.
"It would be quite unheard-of," she said. "I don't live in the New
Forest like Mr. Merivale, and cast conventions aside. No, we will walk
up and down a little, and then you shall go and play. Do you know, I am
really so pleased to have met you I have admired your pictures so. Do
you find it a bore having that sort of thing said to you?"
Evelyn thought over this for a moment.
"Well, I think my pictures bore me when they are done," he said, "though
the opinion of other people never does. A picture is--is like a cold in
the head. It possesses you while it is there, and you have to throw it
off. And when it is thrown off, one never thinks of it again. At least,
I don't."
They had come to the end of the terrace, and the girl stopped as they
turned.
"And then you do another. Ah, how delightful to know that probably to
the end of your life you will have things to do!"
"I don't think you would say that if you had to do them," said he. "Yet,
I don't know. Of course creating a thing is the biggest fun in the
world. But how one tears one's hair over it!"
Madge looked at his thick black thatch.
"You seem to have got some left," she remarked.
"Yes, but I'm looking thinner. Mrs. Home told me so. Oh, look at the
moon! What a dreadful thing to say, too! But it really is out of
drawing--it is far too big!"
"Perhaps we are far too small," said she.
Evelyn shook his head.
"It is impossible to be small if that occurs to you," he said.
They walked in silence after this for a dozen yards or so, Madge
feeling, somehow, strangely attracted by her companion. There was
nothing, it is true, particularly brilliant about his conversation; it
was boyish rather than brilliant; but she felt, as most people did, that
she was in the presence of a personality that was rather unusual. And
this personality seemed to her to be very faithfully expressed in his
pictures; there was something daringly simple about both him and them.
He evidently said whatever came into his head, and her experience was
that so many people only talked about such things as were supposed to be
of interest. Also, in spite of this moonlight solitude, he evinced not
the smallest tendency to notice the fact that she was a very
good-looking girl; no hint of it appeared in his talk or his attitude to
her. There was not the very slightest suspicion of that even in his
desire to go on the river with her. That ridiculous suggestion she felt,
with unerring instinct, had been made simply from comrade to comrade;
there were two of them together, cut out from a table of bridge, and he
had proposed it just as he might have proposed it to a man, instead of a
girl, of his own age. And to Madge this was something of an exception in
her experience of the other sex, for most unmarried men of her
acquaintance had shown a tendency towards tenderness. Her beauty made it
perhaps excusable in them, but she found it rather trying. It was a
relief, at any rate, to find a young man who took her frankly, who could
say "Look at the moon," only to point out that it was out of drawing.
For in the matter of emotion Madge was strangely unfeeling, or, at any
rate, strangely undeveloped; and if her mother had let any anxiety dwell
upon her hard and polished mind, the doubts about Madge's future would,
perhaps, have pressed as heavily there as any. As a good mother should,
she had brought to her daughter's notice, not to say thrown at her
head, a large variety of young men, to none of whom had Madge responded
at all satisfactorily. And it was almost intensely pleasing to her at
this moment to find someone matrimonially quite impossible to her
mother's mind, who was both so attractive to her personally, and who did
not show the smallest desire to treat her otherwise than a man should
treat a man. He was perfectly natural, in fact, perfectly simple, and
quite an exception to her experience of moonlight walkers. And this
paragon continued his peerless way.
"Have you met Tom Merivale before?" he asked. "No? Of course he would
think it almost profane to say the moon was too large. He takes any fact
in nature and then proceeds to fit himself to it. Whatever untutored
nature does is right, in his view. I wonder what he would make of slugs
eating the faces of pansies slowly away. I shall ask him."
Madge gave a little shriek of horror.
"That is one of the facts of life which I can't get over," she said. "I
can't reconcile myself to wanton destruction of beauty. Oh, there is so
little in the world."
Now, there is a particular mental sensation which corresponds to the
physical sensation of stepping up a step when there is no step there.
Evelyn felt this now.
She had gone suddenly into vacancy, with a thump.
"What do you mean?" he said. "I should have thought there was so much
there that one was bewildered. Surely almost everything is beautiful."
"Do you really think that?" she asked.
"Why, of course. But the trouble is that one has not wits enough to see
it. And all beauty is equal--woman, man, mountain-side, pansy. And
probably slug," he added. "But to appreciate that would require a great
deal of insight. But Sir John Lubbock says that earwigs are excellent
mothers. That opened my eyes to earwigs."
Again Madge walked on in silence for a space.
"Are you ever bored?" she asked at length.
"Bored? No. All that anyone has ever made is at one's disposal to wonder
at. And if one can't do that, one can go and make something oneself. No,
I hope I shall have the grace to commit suicide before I am bored."
Madge stopped and turned to him. That she was being unwise she knew,
but something intimate and indwelling dictated to her.
"I am bored every day of my life!" she said. "And how can I avoid it? Is
it very stupid of me?"
Evelyn did not hesitate in his reply.
"Yes, very!" he said. "Because it is such a waste of time to be bored.
People don't recollect that."
They had come opposite the drawing-room window, and as they passed Lady
Ellington stepped out on to the terrace.
"Is that you, Madge?" she asked.
Even in the darkness Evelyn knew what had happened to Madge's face. The
fall of it was reflected in her voice.
"Yes; have you finished your bridge?" she asked.
"We are waiting for Mr.--Mr. Dundas to cut in," she said. "Mr. Home
thought he was in the smoking-room, and has gone there."
"Oh, I am not in the smoking-room," said Evelyn.
If one judged by definitions given in dictionaries it would probably be
a misuse of language to say that Lady Ellington "played" bridge. Cards
were dealt her, and she dealt with them, embarking on commercial
transactions. She assessed the value of her hand with far more accuracy
than she had ever brought to play on the assessment of her income-tax,
and proceeded to deal with her assets with even more acuteness than she
was accustomed to dispose on the expenditure of her income. Mrs. Home
had silently entreated Philip to allow her to cut out, and Lady
Ellington was left to play with three men. This she always enjoyed,
because she took full advantage of the slight concessions which were
allowed to her sex if no other woman was of the table. But before
embarking on the second rubber she turned to Madge.
"I want to speak to you, dearest," she said, "before you go to bed. We
shall only play a couple more rubbers. Mr. Home, you really ought to
have pneumatic cards; they are a little more expensive, but last so much
longer--yes, two more rubbers--I go no trumps--and I will come to your
room on my way up. No doubling? Thank you, partner; that is the suit I
wanted."
Philip, who was her partner, had exposed two excellent suits, so the
imagination of the others might run riot over which particular suit was
the desire of Lady Ellington. At any rate she scored a little slam, but
was not satisfied, and turned on Evelyn, who, it is idle to remark, had
talked during the play.
"I missed a nine," she said. "Mr. Dundas was saying something very
amusing."
But as her face had been like flint, Mr. Dundas had to draw the
inference that, however amusing, she had not been amused.
Lady Ellington always kept the score herself, and never showed any signs
of moving, if she had won, until accounts had been adjusted and paid.
To-night affairs had gone prosperously for her; she was gracious in her
"good-nights," and even commended the admirable temperature of the hot
water, a glass of which she always sipped before going to bed. Madge had
gone upstairs, but not long before; and her mother, having locked her
winnings into her dressing-case, came to her room and found her sitting
by the open window, still not yet preparing to go to bed.
"Do I understand that you walked on the terrace alone with Mr. Dundas?"
she asked in a peculiarly chilly voice.
Madge showed no surprise; she had known what was coming.
"Yes, we took a turn or two," she said.
Her mother sat down; Madge had not turned from the window and was still
looking out.
"Kindly attend, Madge," she said. "It was very indiscreet, and you know
it. I don't think Mr. Home liked it."
Of the girl who had talked so eagerly and naturally to Evelyn on the
terrace there was hardly a trace; Madge's face had grown nearly as hard
as her mother's.
"I am not bound just yet to do all Mr. Home likes," she said.
"You are bound, if you are a sensible creature, at all events not to run
any risks, especially now."
Madge turned away from the window.
"You mean until the bargain is completed. Supposing I refuse?" she said,
and there was a little tremor in her voice, partly of contempt, partly
of fear.
Lady Ellington, as has been remarked, never let her emotions, however
justifiable, run away with her; she never, above all, got hot or angry.
Causes which in others would produce anger, produced in her only an
additional coldness and dryness, which Madge was, somehow, afraid of
with unreasoning nightmare kind of fear.
"I will not suppose anything so absurd!" said her mother. "You are
twenty-five years old, and you have never yet fallen in love at all. But
as I have pointed out to you before, you will be far happier married
than living on into the loneliness and insignificance of being an old
maid. Lots of girls never fall in love in the silly, sentimental manner
which produces lyrics. You are quite certainly one of them. And as
certainly Mr. Home is in love with you."
"We have been into this before," said the girl.
"It is necessary, apparently, to go into it again. Mr. Home, I feel
certain, is going to propose to you, and you should not do indiscreet
things. With regard to your refusing him, it is out of the question. He
is extremely suitable in every way. And you told me yourself you had
made up your mind to accept him."
"You made up my mind," said Madge; "but it comes to the same thing."
"Precisely. So please promise me not to do anything which a girl in your
position should not do. There is no earthly harm in your walking with
any penniless artist in the moonlight, if you were not situated as you
are. But at the moment it is indiscreet."
"You are wrong if you suppose that Mr. Dundas said anything to me which
could possibly be interpreted into a tender interest," said Madge. "He
called attention to the moon merely in order to remark that it was out
of drawing."
"That never occurred to me," said her mother, "though it would be a
matter of total indifference whether he took a tender interest in you or
not. I merely want your promise that you will not repeat the
indiscretion."
"Oh, certainly," said Madge.
Lady Ellington had put her bedroom candle on Madge's dressing-table. As
soon as she had received the assurance she required, she at once rose
from her chair and took it up. But with it in her hand she stood silent
a moment, then she put it down again.
"You have spoken again of things I thought were settled, Madge," she
said, "and I should like your assurance on one point further. We agreed,
did we not, that it would be far better for you to marry than remain
single. We agreed also that you were not of the sort of nature that
falls passionately in love, and we agreed that you had better marry a
man whom you thoroughly like and esteem. Mr. Home is such a man. Is that
correctly stated?"
"Quite," said Madge. "In fact, I don't know why I suggested that I
should refuse him."
"You agree to it all still?"
Madge considered a moment.
"Yes; things being as they are, I agree."
"What do you mean by that exactly?"
Madge got up, and swept across the room to where her mother stood.
"I have long meant to say this to you, mother," she said, "but I never
have yet. I mean that at my age one's character to some extent certainly
is formed. One has to deal with oneself as that self exists. But my
character was formed by education partly and by my upbringing, for which
you are responsible. I think you have taught me not to feel--to be
hard."
Lady Ellington did not resent this in the slightest; indeed, it was part
of her plan of life never to resent what anybody did or said; for going
back to first principles, resentment was generally so useless.
"I hope I have taught you to be sensible," she remarked.
"It seems to me I am being very sensible now," said Madge, "and you may
certainly take all the credit of that, if you wish. I fully intend to
do, at any rate, exactly what you suggest--to accept, that is to say, a
man whom I both esteem and respect, and who is thoroughly suitable. For
suitable let us say wealthy--because that is what we mean."
Lady Ellington qualified this.
"I should not wish you to marry a cad, however wealthy," she said.
Madge moved softly up and down the room, her dress whispering on the
carpet before she replied.
"And it does not strike you that this is rather a cold-blooded
proceeding?" she asked.
"It would if you were in love with somebody else. In which case I should
not recommend you to marry Mr. Home. But as it is, it is the most
sensible thing you can do. I would go further than that; I should say it
was your duty."
Again Madge walked up and down without replying at once.
"Ah, it is cold-blooded," she said, "and I am doing it because I am
cold-blooded."
Then she stopped opposite her mother.
"Mother, when other girls fall in love, do they only feel like this?"
she asked. "Is this all? Just to feel that for the rest of one's life
one will always have a very pleasant companion in the house, who, I am
sure, will always deserve one's liking and esteem?"
Lady Ellington laughed.
"My dear, I can't say what other girls feel. But, as you remark, it is
all you feel. You are twenty-five years old, and you have never fallen
in love. As you say, you have to take yourself as you are. Good night,
dear. It is very late."
She kissed her, left her, and went down the passage to her own room. She
was a very consistent woman, and it was not in the slightest degree
likely that she should distrust the very sensible train of reasoning
which she had indicated to her daughter, which also she had held for
years, that a sensible marriage is the best policy in which to invest a
daughter's happiness. Lady Ellington's own experience, indeed, supplied
her with evidence to support her view, for she herself was an excellent
case in point, for her husband had been a man with whom she had never
been the least in love, but with whom, on the other hand, she had
managed to be very happy in a cast-iron sort of way. She felt, indeed,
quite sure, in her reasonable mind, that she was acting wisely for
Madge, and it was not in her nature to let an unreasonable doubt trouble
her peace. But an unreasonable doubt was there, and it was this, that
Madge for the first time, as far as she knew, seemed to have
contemplated the possibility of passion coming into her life. There had
been in her mind, so her mother felt sure, an unasked question--"What if
I do fall in love?"
Lady Ellington turned this over in the well-lit chamber of her brain as
she went to bed. But her common-sense came to her aid, and she did not
lie awake thinking of it. She had made up her mind that such a thing was
unlikely to the verge of impossibility, and she never wasted time or
thought over what was impossible. Her imagination, it is true, was
continually busy over likely combinations; there were, however, so many
of these that things unlikely did not concern her.
The men meantime had gone to the smoking-room, and from there had moved
out in general quest of coolness on to the terrace. The moon had risen
nearly to the zenith, and no longer offended Evelyn's sense of
proportion, and the night, dusky and warm, disposed to personal talk.
And since neither Evelyn nor Philip had seen Tom Merivale for a year, it
was he who had first to be brought up to date.
"So go on with what you were saying at dinner, Tom," said Evelyn.
"Really, people who are friends ought to keep a sort of circulating
magazine, in which they write themselves up and send it round to the
circle. In any case, you of the three of us are most in arrears. What
have you done besides growing so much younger?"
"Do you really want to know?" asked he.
"Yes."
Evelyn rose as he spoke and squirted some soda-water into his glass.
They were sitting in the square of light illuminated by the lamps of the
room inside, and what passed was clearly visible to all of them.
"You must sit quiet then," said Tom, in his low, even-toned voice, "or
you will frighten them."
"Them? Whom? Are you going to raise spirits from the vasty deep?" asked
Philip.
"Oh, no; though I fancy it would not be so difficult. No, what I am
going to show you, if you care to see it--it may take ten minutes--is a
thing that requires no confederates. It is not the least exciting
either. Only if you wish to see what I have done, as you call it, though
personally I should say what I have become, I can give you an example
probably. Oh, yes, more than probably, I am sure I can. But please sit
still."
The night was very windless and silent. In the woods below a nightingale
was singing, but the little wind which had stirred before among the
garden beds had completely dropped.
"Have you begun?" asked Evelyn. "Or is that all? Is it that you have
been silent for a year?"
"Ah, don't interrupt," said the other.
Again there was silence, except for the bubbling of the nightingale.
Four notes it sang, four notes of white sound as pure as flame; then it
broke into a liquid bubble of melodious water, all transparent,
translucent, the apotheosis of song. Then a thrill of ecstasy possessed
it, and cadence followed indescribable cadence, as if the unheard voice
of all nature was incarnated. Then quite suddenly the song ceased
altogether.
There was a long pause; both Evelyn and Philip sat in absolute silence,
waiting. Tom Merivale had always been so sober and literal a fellow that
they took his suggestion with the same faith that they took the
statements of an almanack--it was sure to be the day that the almanack
said it was. But for what they waited--what day it was--neither knew nor
guessed.
Then the air was divided by fluttering wings; Tom held his hand out, and
on the forefinger there perched a little brown bird.
"Sing, dear," said he.
The bird threw its head back, for nightingales sing with the open
throat. And from close at hand they all three heard the authentic love
song of the nightingale. The unpremeditated rapture poured from it,
wings quivering, throat throbbing, the whole little brown body was alert
with melody, instinctive, untaught, the melody of happiness, of love
made audible. Then, tired, it stopped.
"Thank you, dear brother," said Tom. "Go home."
Again a flutter of wings whispered in the air, and his forefinger was
untenanted.
"That is what I have done," he said. "But that is only the beginning."
Evelyn gave a long sigh.
"Are you mad, or are we?" he asked. "Or was there a bird there? Or are
you a hypnotist?"
He got up quickly.
"Phil, I swear I saw a bird, and heard it sing," he said excitedly. "It
was sitting there, there on his finger. What has happened? Go on,
Tom--tell us what it means."
"It means you are the son of a monkey, as Darwin proved," said he, "and
the grandson, so to speak, of a potato. That is all. It was a cousin of
a kind that sat on my finger. Philip, with his gold and his Stock
Exchange and his business generally, does much more curious things than
that. But, personally, I do not find them so interesting."
Philip, silent as was his wont when puzzled, instead of rushing into
speech, had said nothing. But now he asked a question.
"Of course, it was not a conjuring trick," he said. "That would be
futility itself. But you used to have extraordinary hypnotic power, Tom.
I only ask--Was that a real nightingale?"
"Quite real."
Evelyn put down his glass untasted.
"I am frightened," he said. "I shall go to bed."
And without more words he bolted into the house.
Philip called good night after him, but there was no response, and he
was left alone with the Hermit.
"I am not frightened," he said. "But what on earth does it all mean?
Have a drink?"
Tom Merivale laughed quietly.
"It means exactly what I have said," he answered. "Come down to my home
sometime, and you shall see. It is all quite simple and quite true. It
is all as old as love and as new as love. It is also perfectly
commonplace. It must be so. I have only taken the trouble to verify it."
Philip's cool business qualities came to his aid, or his undoing.
"You mean you can convey a message to a bird or a beast?" he asked.
"Oh, yes. Why not? The idea is somehow upsetting to you. Pray don't let
it upset you. Nothing that happens can ever be upsetting. It is only the
things that don't happen that are such anxieties, for fear they may. But
when they have happened they are never alarming."
He pushed his chair back and got up.
"Ah, I have learned one thing in this last year," he said, "and that is
to be frightened at nothing. Fear is the one indefensible emotion. You
can do nothing at all if you are afraid. You know that yourself in
business. But whether you embark on business or on--what shall I call
it?--nature-lore, the one thing indispensable is to go ahead. To take
your stand firmly on what you know, and deduce from that. Then to test
your deduction, and as soon as one will bear your weight to stand on
that and deduce again, being quite sure all the time that whatever is
true is right. Perhaps sometime the world in general may see, not
degradation in the origin of man from animals, but the extraordinary
nobility of it. And then perhaps they will go further back--back to
Pagan things, to Pan, the God of nature."
"To see whom meant death," remarked Philip.
"Yes, or life. Death is merely an incident in life. And it seems to me
now to be rather an unimportant one. One can't help it. Whereas the
important events are those which are within one's control; one's powers
of thought, for instance."
Philip rose also.
"And love," he said. "Is that in one's control?"
Tom took a long breath.
"Love?" he said. "It is not exactly in one's control, because it is
oneself. There, the dear bird has got home."
And again from the trees below the bubble of liquid melody sounded.
THIRD
Evelyn Dundas was sitting next morning after breakfast on the terrace,
where what he alluded to as "the nightingale trick" had been performed
the evening before, in company with the conjurer who had performed it.
Philip and Madge Ellington had just gone down to the river, Lady
Ellington who was to have accompanied them having excused herself at the
last moment. But since a mother was in closer and more intimate
connection with a girl than a mere chaperone, she had seen not the
smallest objection to the two going alone. Indeed she had firmly
detained Evelyn by a series of questions which required answers, from
joining them, and, though deep in a discussion about art, she had
dropped it in its most critical state when she judged that the other two
had been given time to get under way. It had required, indeed, all her
maternal solicitude to continue it so long, for she cared less for art
or Evelyn's theories about it than for a week-old paper.
Like most artists, Evelyn had a somewhat egoistic nature, and since his
personality was so graceful and interesting, it followed that many
people found his talk equally so, especially when he talked about
himself. For his egoism he had an admirably probable explanation, and he
was at this moment explaining it to Tom Merivale, who had made the soft
impeachment with regard to its undoubted existence.
"Ah, yes," he was saying, "an artist's business is not to put things
down as they are, but to put them down as they strike him. Actual truth
has nothing to do with the value of a landscape. The point is that the
picture should be beautiful. And the same with portraits, only beauty
there is unnecessary. You have to put down what you think you see, or
what you choose to see."
"That shouldn't lead to egoism," remarked Tom. "It should lead you to
the study of other people."
Evelyn shook his head.
"No, no," he said, "it leads you to devote yourself entirely almost to
the cultivation of your own faculty of seeing. All fine portraits show a
great deal of the artist, and perhaps comparatively little of the
sitter. Why are Rembrandts so unmistakable? Not because the type of his
sitters themselves was almost identical, but because there is lots of
Rembrandt in each. You can't have style unless you are egoistic. In
fact, for an artist style means egoism. I have heaps. I don't say or
pretend it's good, but there it is. Take it or leave it."
Tom Merivale laughed.
"You are perfectly inimitable," he said. "I love your serious, vivid
nonsense. That you are an egoist is quite, quite true. But how much
better an artist you would be if you weren't. What you want is
deepening. You don't like the deeps, you know. You haven't got any. You
don't like what you don't understand; that very simple little affair
last night, for instance, frightened you."
Egoists are invariably truthful--according to their lights--about
themselves. Evelyn was truthful now.
"Yes, that is so," he said. "I don't pretend to wish to seek out the
secrets of the stars. But I know what I like. And I don't like anything
that leads into the heart of things. I don't like interiors and
symbolism. There is quite enough symbol for me on the surface. What I
mean is that the eyebrow itself, the curve of the mouth, will tell you
quite as much as one has any use for about the brain that makes the
eyebrow frown or the mouth smile. Beauty may be skin deep only, but it
is quite deep enough. Skin deep! Why, it is as deep as the sea!"
Tom Merivale was silent a little.
"Do you know, you are an interesting survival of the Pagan spirit?" he
said at length.
Evelyn laughed.
"Erect me an altar then at once, and crown me with roses," he remarked.
"But what have I said just now that makes you think that?"
"Nothing particular this moment," he answered, "though your remarking
that beauty was enough for you is thoroughly Greek in its way. No; what
struck me was that never have I seen in you the smallest rudiment or
embryo of a conscience or of any moral sense."
Evelyn looked up with real interest at this criticism.
"Oh, that is perfectly true," he said. "Certainly I never have remorse;
it must be awful, a sort of moral toothache. All the same, I don't steal
or lie, you know."
"Merely because lying and stealing are very inartistic performances,"
said Tom. "But no idea of morality stands in your way."
Evelyn got up, looking out over the heat-hazed green of the woods below
them with his brilliant glance.
"Is that very shocking?" he asked, with perfectly unassumed _naïvetê_.
"I suppose it is. Personally, I am never shocked at anything. But it
seems to me very dangerous. You ought to wear a semaphore with a red
lamp burning at the end of it."
Evelyn half shut his eyes and put his head on one side.
"I don't think that would compose well," he said.
"That is most consistently spoken," said Tom. "But really, if you are
ever in earnest about anything beside your art, you would be a public
danger."
Evelyn turned round on this.
"You call me a Pagan," he said. "Well, what are you, pray, with your
communings with nature and conjuring tricks with nightingales? You
belong to quite as early a form of man."
"I know. I am primeval. At least I hope to be before I die."
"What's the object?"
"In order to see Pan. I am getting on. Come down to the New Forest
sometime, and you shall see very odd things, I promise you. Really,
Evelyn, I wish you would come. It would do you no end of good."
He got up, and taking the arm of the other man, walked with him down the
terrace.
"You are brilliant, I grant you," he said; "but you are like a mirror,
only reflecting things. What you want is to be lit from within. Who is
it who talks of the royalty of inward happiness? That is such a true
phrase. All happiness from without is not happiness at all; it is only
pleasure. And pleasure is always imperfect. It flickers and goes out, it
has scratching nails----"
Evelyn shook himself free.
"Ah, let me be," he said. "I don't want anything else. Besides, as you
have told me before, you yourself dislike and detest suffering or pain.
But how can you hope to understand Nature at all if you leave all that
aside? Why, man, the whole of Nature is one groan, one continuous
preying of creature on creature. In your life in the New Forest you
leave all that out."
Tom Merivale paused.
"I know I do," he said, "because I want to grasp first, once and for all
the huge joy that pervades Nature, which seems to me much more vital in
itself than pain. It seems to me that pain may be much more rightly
called absence of joy than joy be called absence of pain. What the whole
thing starts from, the essential spring of the world is not pain and
death, but joy and life."
"Ah, there I am with you. But there is so much joy and life on the
surface of things that I don't wish to probe down. Ah, Tom, a day like
this now; woven webs of blue heat, hot scents from the flower beds, the
faces of our friends. Is that not enough? It is for me. And, talking of
faces, Miss Ellington has the most perfectly modelled face I ever saw.
The more I look at it, the more it amazes me. I stared at her all
breakfast. And the charm of it is its consistent irregularity; not a
feature is anything like perfect, but what a whole! I wish I could do
her portrait."
Tom laughed.
"There would not be the slightest difficulty about that, I should say,"
he remarked, "if you promise to present it to her mother."
"Why, of course, I would. How funny it must feel to be hard like that.
She is very bruising; I feel that I am being hit in the eye when she
talks to me. And she knows how many shillings go to a sovereign."
"Twenty," remarked Tom.
"Ah, that is where you are wrong. She gets twenty-one for each of her
sovereigns. And thirteen pence for each of her shillings, and the
portrait of her daughter for nothing at all. Oh, Tom, think of it--with
a background of something blue, cornflower, forget-me-nots, or lilac, to
show how really golden her hair is. There's Mrs. Home."
Evelyn whistled with peculiar shrillness on his fingers to the neat
little figure on the croquet lawn below them. She started, not
violently, for nothing she did was violent, but very completely.
"Ah, it is only you," she said. "I thought it might be an express train
loose. Are you not going on the river, dear Evelyn?"
"I was prevented," he said, jumping down the steps in one flying leap.
"Dear Philippina----"
"What next? What next?" murmured Mrs. Home. "Oh, do behave, Evelyn."
"Well, Philip is your son, so you are Philippina. But why have
prize-fighters in your house?"
"Prize-fighters?"
"Yes. Lady Ellington had my head in Chancery for ten minutes just now.
She delivered a series of quick-firing questions. I know why, too; it
was to prevent my going on the river. She was perfectly successful--I
should think she always was successful; she mowed me down. Now will you
tell me the truth or not?"
"No, dear Evelyn," said Mrs. Home rather hastily, guessing what was
coming.
"Then you are a very wicked woman; but as I now know you are going to
tell an untruth, it will do just as well for my purpose. Now, is Philip
engaged to Miss Ellington?"
"No, dear; indeed he is not," said Mrs. Home.
"Oh, why not lie better than that?" said Evelyn.
Mrs. Home clasped her white, delicate little hands together.
"Ah, but it is true," she said. "It really is literally true, as far as
I know."
Evelyn shook his head at her.
"But they have been gone half an hour," he said. "You mean--I tell you,
you mean that they may be now, for all you know."
Mrs. Home turned her pretty, china-blue eyes on to him, with a sort of
diminutive air of dignity.
"Of course you are at liberty to put any construction you please on
anything I say," she remarked.
"I am," said he, "and I put that. Now, are you pleased at it?"
"She is charming," said Mrs. Home, hopelessly off her guard.
"That is all I wanted to know," said Evelyn. "But what a tangled web
you weave, without deceiving me in the least, you old darling."
Tom Merivale had not joined Evelyn, but strolled along the upper walk
through herbaceous borders. He had not stayed away from his home now for
the past year, and delighted though he was to see these two old friends
of his again, he confessed to himself that he found the call on
sociability which a visit tacitly implied rather trying. More than that,
he found even the presence of other people in the house with whom he was
not on terms of intimacy a thing a little upsetting, for his year of
solitude had given some justification to his nickname. For solitude is a
habit of extraordinary fascination, and very quick to grow on anyone who
has sufficient interest in things not to be bored by the absence of
people. And with Tom Merivale, Nature, the unfolding of flowers, the
lighting of the stars in the sky, the white splendour of the moon, the
hiss of the rain on to cowering shrubs and thirsty grass was much more
than an interest; it was a passion which absorbed and devoured him. For
Nature, to the true devotee, is a mistress far more exacting and far
more infinite in her variety and rewards than was ever human mistress to
her adorer. Tom Merivale, at any rate, was faithful and wholly constant,
and to him now, after a year spent in solitude in which no man had ever
felt less alone, no human tie or affection weighed at all compared to
the patient devotion with which he worshipped this ever young mistress
of his. To some, indeed, as to Mrs. Home, this cutting of himself off
from all other human ties might seem to verge on insanity; to others, as
to Philip, it might equally well be construed into an example of perfect
sanity. For he had left the world, and cast his moorings loose from
society in no embittered or disappointed mood; the severance of his
connection with things of human interest had been deliberate and sanely
made. He believed, in fact, that what his inner essential self demanded
was not to be found among men, or, as he had put it once to Philip, it
was to be found there in such small quantities compared to the mass of
alloy and undesirable material from which it had to be extracted, that
it was false economy to quarry in the world of cities. More than this,
too, he had renounced, though this second renunciation had not been
deliberate, but had followed, so he found, as a sequel to the other; for
he had been a writer of fiction who, though never widely read, had been
prized and pored over by a circle of readers whose appreciation was
probably far more worth having than that of a wider circle could have
been. Then, suddenly, as far as even his most intimate friends knew, he
had left London, establishing himself instead in a cottage, of the more
comfortable sort of cottages, some mile outside Brockenhurst. In the
tea-cup way this had made quite a storm in the set that knew him well,
those, in fact, by whom he was valued as an interpreter and a living
example of the things of which he wrote. These writings had always been
impersonal in note, slightly mystical, and always with the refrain of
Nature running through them. But none, when he disappeared as completely
as Waring, suspected how vital to himself his disappearance had been.
Anything out of the way is labelled, and rightly by the majority, to be
insane. By such a verdict Tom Merivale certainly merited Bedlam. He had
gone away, in fact, to think, while the majority of those who crowd into
the cities do so, not to think, but to be within reach of the
distractions that leave no time for thought. For action is always less
difficult than thought; a man can act for more hours a day than he can
think in a week, and action, being a productive function of the brain,
is thus (rightly, also, from the social point of view) considered the
more respectable employment.
The subject of this difficult doctrine, however, was more than content;
as he had said, he was happy, a state far on the sunward side of the
other. He seemed to himself, indeed, to be sitting very much awake and
alert on some great sunlit slope of the world, untenanted by man, but
peopled with a million natural marvels unconjectured as yet by the
world, but which slowly coming into the ken of his wondering and patient
eyes. For a year now he had consciously and solely devoted himself to
the study and contemplation of life, that eternal and ever-renewed life
of Nature, and the joy manifested therein. He had turned his back with
the same careful deliberation on all that is painful in Nature, all
suffering, all that hinders and mars the fulness of life, on everything,
in fact, which is an evidence of imperfection. In this to a large extent
he was identically minded with Christian Scientists, but having faced
the central idea of Christianity, namely, the suffering which was
necessary as atonement for sin, he had confessed himself unable to
accept, at present at any rate, the possibility of suffering being ever
necessary, and could no longer call himself a Christian. Happiness was
his gospel, and the book in which he studied it was Nature, omitting
always such chapters as dealt with man. For man, so it seemed to him,
had by centuries of evolution built himself into something so widely
different from Nature's original design, that the very contemplation of
and association with man was a thing to be avoided. Absence of serenity,
absence of happiness, seemed the two leading characteristics of the
human race, whereas happiness and serenity were the chief of those
things for which he sought and for which he lived.
This year's solitude and quest for joy had already produced in him
remarkable results. He had been originally himself of a very
high-strung, nervous, and irritable temperament; now, however, he could
not imagine the event which should disturb his equanimity. For this, as
far as it went alone, he was perfectly willing to accept the possible
explanation that a year's life in the open air had wrought its simple
miracle of healing on his nerves, and, as he had said to Lady Ellington,
the perfection of health had eliminated the possibility of discontent.
But other phenomena did not admit of quite so obvious an interpretation;
and it was on these that he based his belief that, though all that
occurred must necessarily be natural, following, that is to say, laws of
nature, he was experiencing the effects of laws which were to the rest
of the world occult or unknown. For in a word, youth, with all its vivid
vigour, its capacity for growth and expansion, had returned to him in a
way unprecedented; his face, as Evelyn had noticed, had grown younger,
and in a hundred merely corporeal ways he had stepped back into early
manhood. Again, and this was more inexplicable, he had somehow
established, without meaning to, a certain communion with birds and
beasts, of which the "nightingale trick" had been a small instance,
which seemed to him must be a direct and hitherto unknown effect of his
conscious absorption of himself in Nature. How far along this unexplored
path he would be able to go he had no idea; he guessed, however, that he
had at present taken only a few halting steps along a road that was lost
in a golden haze of wonder.
He strolled along out through the garden into a solitary upland of
bush-besprinkled turf. Wild flowers of downland, the rock-rose, the
harebell, orchids, and meadow-sweet carpeted the short grass, and
midsummer held festival. But this morning his thoughts were distracted
from the Nature-world in which he lived, and he found himself dwelling
on the human beings among whom for a few days he would pass his time. It
was natural from the attitude of this last year that Evelyn Dundas and
Mrs. Home should be of the party in the house the most congenial to him,
and the simplicity of them both seemed to him far more interesting than
the greater complexity of the others. It would, it is true, be hard to
find two examples of simplicity so utterly unlike each other, but serene
absence of calculation or scheming brought both under one head. They
were both, in a way, children of Nature; Mrs. Home on the one hand
having arrived at her inheritance by cheerful, unswerving patience and
serenity with events external to herself; while in the case of the
other, his huge vitality, coupled with his extreme impressionableness to
beauty, brought him, so it seemed to Tom Merivale, into very close
connection with the essentials of life. But, as he had told his friend,
Evelyn's attitude to life was instinctively Pagan; immoral he was not,
for his fastidiousness labelled such a thing ugly, but he had apparently
no rudiments even of conscience or sense of moral obligation. And
somehow, with that curious sixth sense of prescience, so common in
animals, so rare among civilized human beings who, by means of continued
calculation and reasoned surmise of the future, which has caused it to
wither and atrophize, Tom felt, just as he could feel approaching
storms, a vague sense of coming disaster.
The sensation was very undefined, but distinctly unpleasant, and,
following his invariable rule to divert his mind from all
unpleasantness, he lay down on the short turf and buried his face in a
great bed of thyme which grew there. All summer was in that smell, hot,
redolent, the very breath of life, and with eyes half-closed and
nostrils expanded he breathed it deeply in.
The place he had come to was very remote and solitary, a big clearing in
the middle of trees, well known to him in earlier years. No road crossed
it, no house lay near it, but the air was resonant with the labouring
bees, and the birds called and fluted to each other in the trees. But
suddenly, as he lay there, half lost in a stupor of happiness, he heard
very faintly another noise, to which at first he paid but little
attention. It was the sound apparently of a flute being played at some
great distance off, but what soon arrested his attention was the
extremely piercing character of the notes. Remote as the sound was, and
surrounded as he was by the hundred noises of the summer noon, it yet
seemed to him perfectly clear and distinct through them all. Then
something further struck him, for phrase after phrase of delicious
melody was poured out, yet the same phrase was never repeated, nor did
the melody come to an end; on the top of every climax came another; it
was a tune unending, eternal, and whether it came from earth or heaven,
from above or below, he could not determine, for it seemed to come from
everywhere equally; it was as universal as the humming of the bees.
Then suddenly a thought flashed into his mind; he sprang up, and a
strange look of fear crossed his face. At the same instant the tune
ceased.
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
FOURTH
It was not in Lady Ellington's nature to be enthusiastic, since she
considered enthusiasm to be as great a waste of the emotional fibres as
anger, but she was at least thoroughly satisfied when, two evenings
after this, Madge came to her room before dinner after another punting
expedition with Philip, and gave her news.
"It is quite charming," said her mother, "and you have shown great good
sense. Dear child, I must kiss you. And where is Mr. Home--Philip I must
call him now?"
"He is outside," said Madge. "I said I would go down again for a few
minutes before dinner."
Lady Ellington got up and kissed her daughter conscientiously, first on
one cheek and then on the other.
"I will come down with you," she said, "just to tell him how very much
delighted I am. I shall have to have a long talk to him to-morrow
morning."
There was no reason whatever why the engagement should not be announced
at once, and in consequence congratulations descended within the half
hour. Mrs. Home was a little tearful, with tears of loving happiness on
behalf of her son, which seemed something of a weakness to Lady
Ellington; Tom Merivale was delighted in a sort of faraway manner that
other people should be happy; Evelyn Dundas alone, in spite of his
previous preparation for the news, felt somehow slightly pulled up. For
with his complete and instinctive surrender to every mood of the moment,
he had permitted himself to take great pleasure in the contemplation--it
was really hardly more than that--of Madge's beauty, and he felt
secretly, for no shadow obscured the genuineness of his congratulations,
a certain surprise and sense of being ill-used. He was not the least in
love with Madge, but even in so short a time they had fallen into ways
of comradeship, and her engagement, he felt, curtailed the liberties of
that delightful relationship. And again this evening, having cut out of
a bridge table, he wandered with her in the perfect dusk. Lady Ellington
this time observed their exit, but cheerfully permitted it; no harm
could be done now. It received, in fact, her direct and conscious
sanction, since Philip had suggested to Madge that Evelyn should paint
her portrait. He knew that Evelyn was more than willing to do so, and
left the arrangement of sitting to sitter and artist. In point of fact,
it was this subject that occupied the two as they went out.
"We shall be in London for the next month, Mr. Dundas," Madge was
saying, "and of course I will try to suit your convenience. It is so
good of you to say you will begin it at once."
Evelyn's habitual frankness did not desert him.
"Ah, I must confess, then," he said. "It isn't at all good of me. You
see, I want to paint you, and I believe I can. And I will write
to-morrow to a terrible railway director to say that in consequence of a
subsequent engagement I cannot begin the--the delineation of his
disgusting features for another month."
Madge laughed; as is the way of country-house parties, the advance in
intimacy had been very rapid.
"Oh, that would be foolish," she said. "Delineate his disgusting
features if you have promised. My disgusting features will wait."
"Ah, but that is just what they won't do," said Evelyn.
"Do you mean they will go bad, like meat in hot weather? Thank you so
much."
"My impression will go bad," said he. "No, I must paint you at once.
Besides"--and still he was perfectly frank--"besides Philip is, I
suppose, my oldest friend. He has asked me to do it, and friendship
comes before cheques."
They walked in silence a little while.
"I am rather nervous," said Madge. "I watched you painting this
afternoon for a bit."
"Oh, a silly sketch," said he, "flowers, terrace, woods behind; it was
only a study for a background."
"Well, it seemed to affect you. You frowned and growled, and stared and
bit the ends of your brushes. Am I going to be stuck up on a platform to
be growled at and stared at? I don't think I could stand it; I should
laugh."
Evelyn nodded his head in strong approval.
"That will be what I want," he said. "I will growl to any extent if it
will make you laugh. I shall paint you laughing, laughing at all the ups
and downs of the world. I promise you you shall laugh. With sad eyes,
too," he added. "Did you know you had sad eyes?"
Madge slightly entrenched herself at this.
"I really haven't studied my own expression," she said. "Women are
supposed to use mirrors a good deal, but they use them, I assure you, to
see if their hair is tidy."
"Your's never is quite," said he. "And it suits you admirably."
Again the gravel sounded crisply below their feet, without the overscore
of human voices.
Then he spoke again.
"And please accept my portrait of you as my wedding present to you--and
Philip," he said with boyish abruptness.
Madge for the moment was too utterly surprised to speak.
"But, Mr. Dundas," she said at length, "I can't--I--how can I?"
He laughed.
"Well, I must send it to Philip, then," he said, "if you won't receive
it. But--why should you not? You are going to marry my oldest friend. I
can't send him an ivory toothbrush."
This reassured her.
"It is too kind of you," said she. "I had forgotten that. So send it to
him."
"Certainly. But help me to make it then as good as I can."
"Tell me how?" she asked, feeling inexplicably uneasy.
"Why, laugh," he said. "That is how I see you. You laugh so seldom, and
you might laugh so often. Why don't you laugh oftener?"
Then an impulse of simple honesty came to her.
"Because I am usually bored," she said.
"Ah, you really mustn't be bored while I am painting you," he said. "I
could do nothing with it if you were bored. Besides, it would be so
uncharacteristic."
"How is that, when I am bored so often?" she asked.
"Oh, it isn't the things we do often that are characteristic of us,"
said he. "It is the things we do eagerly, with intention."
She laughed at this.
"Then you are right," she said. "I am never eagerly bored. And to tell
you the truth, I don't think I shall be bored when I sit to you. Ah,
there is Philip. He does not see us; I wonder whether he will?"
Philip's white-fronted figure had appeared at this moment at the French
window leading out of the drawing-room, and his eyes, fresh from the
bright light inside, were not yet focussed to the obscurity of the dusk.
At that moment Madge found herself suddenly wishing that he would go
back again. But as soon as she was conscious she wished that, she
resolutely stifled the wish and called to him.
"Evelyn there, too?" he asked. "Evelyn, you've got to go in and take my
place."
"And you will take mine," said he with just a shade of discontent in his
voice.
"No, my dear fellow," said Philip. "I shall take my own."
He laughed.
"I congratulate you again," he said, and left them.
Philip stood for a moment in silence by the girl, looking at her with a
sort of shy, longing wonder.
"Ah, what luck!" he said at length. "What stupendous and perfect luck."
"What is luck, Philip?" she asked.
"Why, this. You and me. Think of the chances against my meeting you in
this big world, and think of the chances against your saying 'Yes.' But
now--now that it has happened it couldn't have been otherwise."
Some vague, nameless trouble took possession of the girl, and she
shivered slightly.
"You are cold, my darling?" he said quickly.
She had been leaning against the stone balustrade of the terrace, but
stood upright, close to him.
"No, not in the least," she said.
"What is it, then?" he asked.
"It is nothing. Only I suppose I feel it is strange that in a moment the
whole future course of one's life is changed like this."
He took her hands in his, and the authentic fire of love burned in his
eyes.
"Strange?" he said. "Is it not the most wonderful of miracles? I never
knew anything so wonderful could happen. It makes all the rest of my
life seem dim. There is just this one huge beacon of light. All the rest
is in shadow."
She raised her face to him half imploringly.
"Oh, Philip, is it all that to you?" she asked. "I--I am afraid."
"Because you have made me the happiest man alive?"
A sudden, inevitable impulse of honesty prompted Madge to speak out.
"No, but because I have perhaps meddled with great forces about which I
know nothing. I like you immensely; I have never liked anyone so much. I
esteem you and respect you. I am quite willing to lead the rest of my
life with you; I want nothing different. But will that do? Is that
enough? I have never loved as I believe you love me. I do not think it
is possible to me. There, I have told you."
Philip raised her hands to his lips and kissed them.
"Ah, my dearest, you give me all you have and are, and yet you say, 'Is
that enough?'" he whispered. "What more is possible?"
She looked at him a moment, the trouble not yet quite gone from her
face. Then she raised it to his.
"Then take it," she said.
The night was very warm and windless, and for some time longer they
walked up and down, or stood resting against the terrace wall looking
down over the hushed woods. A nightingale, the same perhaps that had
been charmed to Tom's finger two evenings ago, poured out liquid melody,
and the moon began to rise in the East. Gradually their talk veered to
other subjects, and Madge mentioned that Evelyn was willing to do her
portrait.
"He will begin at once," she said, "because it appears his impression of
me isn't a thing that will keep. He is putting off another order for
it."
"That is dreadfully immoral," said Philip, "but I am delighted to hear
it."
"Oh, and another thing. He gives it us--to you and me I think he
said--as a wedding present."
"Ah, I can't have that," said Philip quickly. "That is Evelyn all over.
There never was such an unthinking, generous fellow. But it is quite
impossible. Why, it would mean a sixth part of his year's income."
"I know; I felt that."
Philip laughed rather perplexedly.
"I really don't know what is to be done with him," he said. "Last year
he gave my mother a beautiful pearl brooch. That sort of thing is so
embarrassing. And if she had not accepted it, he would have been quite
capable of throwing it into the Thames. Indeed he threatened to do so.
And he will be equally capable of throwing his cheque into the fire."
"All the same, I like it enormously," she said; "his impulse, I mean."
"I know, but it offends my instincts as a man of business. I might just
as well refuse to charge interest on loans. However, I will see what I
can do."
They went in again soon after this, for it was growing late, and found
Lady Ellington preparing to leave the table of her very complete
conquests. It had fallen to Evelyn to provide her with a no-trump hand
containing four aces, and she was disposed to be gracious. The news,
furthermore, that he would begin her daughter's portrait at once was
gratifying to her, and she was anxious that the sittings should begin at
once. As both they and he would be in town for the next month, the
matter was easily settled, and it was arranged that the thing should be
put in hand immediately.
Philip followed Evelyn to the billiard-room as soon as the women went
upstairs, and found him alone there.
"The Hermit has gone to commune with Nature," he said. "He will die of
natural causes if he doesn't look out. He called me a Pagan this
morning, Philip. Wasn't it rude? And the fact that it is true seems to
me to make it ruder."
Philip lit his cigarette.
"I'm going to be rude too, old chap," said he. "Evelyn, you really
mustn't make a present of the portrait to Madge and me. It is awfully
good of you, and just like you, but I simply couldn't accept it."
Evelyn shrugged his shoulders.
"Then there will be no portrait at all," he said shortly. "I tell you I
won't paint it as an order."
Philip held out his hand.
"I appreciate it tremendously," he said. "It is most awfully good of
you. But it's your profession. Hullo, here's the Hermit back."
Tom Merivale entered at this moment.
"Aren't we going to sit out to-night?" he said.
Evelyn rose.
"Yes, let's go out," he said. "Well, Philip, not a line will I draw
unless you take it. Or I'll give it to Miss Ellington and not you."
"You really musn't," said Philip.
"But don't you see I want to paint her? I said so to you only the other
day. Hang it all, I tell you that I do it for pleasure. I shall also be
the vast gainer artistically. I've got an idea about her, in fact, and
if you don't let me paint her I shall do it from memory, in which case
it will not be so good."
An idea struck Philip.
"Well, paint me as well," he said, "and let me pay you for that."
Evelyn followed Tom out.
"Oh, I can't haggle," he said. "Yes, I'll paint you if you like. But I
will paint Miss Ellington first. In fact, you shall be painted when I've
nothing else to do. Well, Hermit, seen Pan to-day?"
"No, you scoffer," said Tom.
"Call me when you do. I should like to see him, too. Let's see, he was a
man with goat's legs; sort of things you see in Barnum's."
Tom shifted in his chair.
"Some day, perhaps, you may think it serious," he said.
"I daresay; a man with goat's legs is not to be taken lightly," said
Evelyn. "And he sits by the roadside, doesn't he, or so Browning says,
playing the pipes? What pipes, I wonder? Bagpipes, do you suppose?"
Tom laughed; his equanimity was quite undisturbed even by chaff upon
what was to him the most serious subject in the world.
"Ah, who was frightened at a nightingale coming to sit on my finger a
few nights ago? Evelyn, if you are not serious, I'll frighten you
again."
"Well, but is it bagpipes?" asked he.
Tom suddenly got grave.
"No, it sounded more like a glass flute very far off," he said. "No
explanations are forthcoming, because I haven't got any."
Evelyn was silent a moment.
"And when did you hear this glass flute very far off?" he asked.
"Two mornings ago, up above the house in that big clearing in the
woods," he answered. "I know nothing more about it. It frightened me
rather, and then it stopped."
"What did it play?" asked Philip.
"A world-without-end tune," he said. "The catechising is now over. I
shall go to bed, I think. I must leave to-morrow, Philip."
"I hoped you would stop a day or two longer. Must you really go?"
"I must, I find."
"Appointment with Pan in the New Forest," remarked Evelyn, dodging the
cushion that was thrown at him.
Philip had to spend the inside of the next day in London, and left with
Tom Merivale by an early train, leaving Evelyn alone with his mother,
Lady Ellington, and Madge. It came about very naturally that Lady
Ellington gravitated to Mrs. Home, and Evelyn, finishing his background
sketch in front of a great clump of purple clematis, found Madge on the
terrace when he went out, with an unopened book on her lap.
The book had lain there, indeed, in the same state for half an hour
before he came, for Madge had been very fully occupied with her own
thoughts. She had had a talk to her mother the night before, which this
morning seemed to her to be more revealing of herself than even her own
confession to Philip in their stroll on the terrace had been. She had
told her just what she had told him, namely, that she gave him very
willingly all that she knew of herself, liking, esteem, respect, adding
out of Philip's mouth that this more than contented him. But then Lady
Ellington, for the first time perhaps for many years, had made a
strategical error, allowing her emotion, not her reason, to dictate to
her, and had said--
"Ah, Madge, how clever of you."
She had seen her mistake a moment afterwards, and just a moment too
late, for Madge had asked the very simple question "Why?" And the
unsatisfactory nature of her mother's reply had given her food for
thought.
For Lady Ellington had applauded as clever what was to her the very
rudiment of honour, and she had supposed that her mother would say "How
very stupid of you." Clearly, then, while extremely uncalculating to
herself, Madge had succeeded in giving the impression of calculation to
one who, she well knew, calculated. What, then, she asked herself, was
the secret of this love of which she was ignorant, that rendered her
confession of ignorance so satisfactory a reply?
Effusive pleasure on her mother's part at the termination of this
recital had not consoled her. Somehow, according to Lady Ellington's
view, an almost quixotic honesty appeared clever. And it was over this
riddle that she was puzzling when Evelyn appeared, with brilliance, so
to speak, streaming from him. Brilliance certainly streamed from his
half-finished sketch, and brilliance marked his exposition of it.
"Oh, I lead a dog's life," he said, as he planted his easel down on the
gravel. "Do you know Lady Taverner, for whom this is to be a background?
No? I congratulate you. She is pink, simply pink, like a phlox, with
butter-coloured hair, probably acquired. Well, put a pat of butter and a
phlox on a purple plate, and you will see that the phlox is pinker than
ever and the butter more buttery. Therefore, since I really am very
thorough, I make a sketch of clematis to see how the flowers really
grow, and shall plaster her with them--masses behind her, sapphires
round her neck; and a pink Jewess in the middle," he added, in a tone of
extraordinary irritation.
Madge let her book slide to the ground.
"Do you want to be talked to or not?" she asked. "If you don't, say so,
and I will go away."
Evelyn looked up from his purple clematis.
"I lead a dog's life," he said, "but sometimes somebody throws me a
bone. So throw me one."
"You seem to growl over it," said she.
"I know I do. That is because, though I lead a dog's life, nobody shall
take my bone from me."
He bit the end of his brush.
"And the filthy thing casts purple shadows upwards," he said. "At least
the sun shines on the purple, and reflects the purple on leaves that
overhang it. I wish I had been born without any sense of colour. I
should have made such ripping etchings."
Madge had no immediate reply to this, and he painted for some ten
minutes in silence. She had picked up her book again, and read the words
of it--reading it could not be called.
"You haven't given me many bones," said he at length.
Madge looked up.
"I know I haven't," she said; "but seriously I considered if I had got
anything to say, and found I hadn't. So I decided to say nothing."
Evelyn dabbed in a purple star.
"But surely one has always something in one's mind," he said. "One can't
help that, so why not say it? A penny for your thoughts now."
Madge laughed.
"No, they are worth far more. In fact, they are not in the market," she
said.
Evelyn grew portentously grave.
"Mrs. Gummidge," he said.
"Oh, what do you mean?" she asked.
"You've been thinking of the old one," said Evelyn. "Philip."
"Quite true, I was," she said. "He is such a dear."
"So glad you like him," muttered Evelyn, again frowning and biting his
brushes. "Lord love us, what a blue world it is this morning! There, I
can't paint any more just now."
"That's rather sudden, isn't it?"
"Oh, I always stop like that," said Evelyn. "I go on painting and
painting, and then suddenly somebody turns a tap off in my head, and
I've finished. I can't see any more, and I couldn't paint if I did. I
suppose the day will come when the tap will be turned permanently off.
Shortly afterwards I shall be seen to jump off Westminster Bridge. I
only hope nobody will succeed in rescuing me."
"I will try to remember if I happen to be there," said she.
Evelyn put his sketch to dry in the shadow of the terrace wall.
"The law is so ridiculous," he said. "They punish you if you don't
succeed in committing suicide when you try to, and say you are
temporarily insane if you do. Whereas the bungler is probably far more
deranged than the man who does the job properly."
"I shall never commit suicide," said Madge with conviction.
"Ah, wait till you care about anything as much as I care about
painting," said Evelyn, "and then contemplate living without it. Why, I
should cease without it. The world would be no longer possible; it
wouldn't, so to speak, hold water."
"Ah, do you really feel about it like that?" said she. "Tell me what
it's like, that feeling."
Evelyn laughed.
"You ought to know," he said, "because I imagine it's like being
permanently in love."
Here was as random an arrow as was ever let fly; he had been unconscious
of even drawing his bow, but to his unutterable surprise it went full
and straight to its mark. The girl's face went suddenly expressionless,
as if a lamp within had been turned out, and she rose quickly, with a
half-stifled exclamation.
"Ah, what nonsense we are talking," she said quickly.
Evelyn looked at her in genuine distress at having unwittingly caused
her pain.
"Why, of course we are," he said. "How people can talk sense all day
beats me. They must live at such high pressure. Personally I preserve
any precious grains of sense I may have, and put them into my pictures.
Some of my pictures simply bristle with sense."
The startled pain had not died out of Madge's eyes, but she laughed, and
Evelyn, looking at her, gave a little staccato exclamation.
"And what is it now?" she asked.
"Why, you--you laughed with sad eyes. You were extraordinarily like what
my picture will be at that moment."
The girl glanced away. That sudden, unexplained little stab of pain she
had experienced had left her nervous. Her whole nature had winced under
it, and, like a man who feels some sudden moment of internal agony for
the first time, she was frightened; she did not know what it meant.
"I expect that is nonsense, too," she said. "At least, it is either
nonsense or very obvious, for I suppose when anyone laughs, however
fully he laughs, there is always something tragic behind. Ah, how nice
to laugh entirely just once from your hair to your heels."
"Can't you do that ever?" asked Evelyn sympathetically.
"No, never, nor can most people, I think. We are all haunted houses;
there is always a ghost of some kind tapping at the door or lurking in
the dusk. Only a few people have no ghosts. I should think your's were
infinitesimal. You are much to be envied."
Evelyn listened with all his ears to this; partly because he and Madge
were already such good friends, and anything new about her was
interesting; partly because, though, as he had said, surface was enough
for him--it bore so very directly on his coming portrait of her.
"Yes, I expect that is true," he said; "most people certainly have their
ghosts. But it is wise to wall up one's haunted room, is it not?"
Madge shook her head.
"Yes, but it is still there," she said.
She got up from the low chair in which she was sitting with an air of
dismissing the subject of their talk.
"Come, ask me some more of those very silly riddles," she said. "I think
they are admirable in laying ghosts. So, too, are you, Mr. Dundas. I am
sure you will not resent it when I say it is because you are so
frightfully silly. Ghosts cannot stand silliness."
Evelyn laughed.
"It is so recuperative to be silly," he said, "because it requires no
effort to a person of silly disposition, that is to say. One has to be
oneself. How easy!"
She opened her eyes at this.
"That means you find it easy to be natural," she said. "Why, I should
have thought that was almost the most difficult thing in the world to
be. Now a pose is easy; it is like acting; you have got to be somebody
else. But to be oneself! One has to know what one is, first of all, one
has to know what one likes."
Evelyn laughed again.
"Not at all. You just have to shut your eyes, take a long breath, and
begin talking. Whatever you say is you."
The girl shook her head.
"Ah, you don't understand," she said. "You, you, I, everybody, are
really all sorts of people put into one envelope. Am I to say what one
piece of me is prompting me to say or what another is thinking about?
And it's just the same with one's actions; one hardly ever does a thing
which every part of one wants to do; one's actions, just like one's
words, are a sort of compromise between the desires of one's different
components."
She paused a moment, and, with a woman's quickness of intuition provided
against that which might possibly be in his mind.
"Of course, when a big choice comes," she said, "one's whole being has
to consent. But one only has half a dozen of those in one's life, I
expect."
She had guessed quite rightly, for the idea of her marriage had
inevitably suggested itself to Evelyn when she said "one hardly ever
does a thing which every part of one wants to do." But in the addition
she had made to her speech there was even a more direct allusion to it,
which necessarily cancelled from his mind the first impression. He was
bound, in fact, to accept her last word. But he fenced a little longer.
"I don't see that one choice can really be considered bigger than
another," he said. "The smallest choice may have the hugest consequences
which one could never have foretold, because they are completely outside
one's own control. I may, for instance, settle to go up to London
to-morrow by the morning train or the later one. Well, that seems a
small enough choice, but supposing one train has a frightful accident?
What we can control is so infinitesimal compared to what lies outside
us--engine-drivers, bullets, anything that may kill."
The girl shuddered slightly.
"It is all so awful," she said, "that. An ounce of lead, a fall, and one
is extinguished. It is so illogical, too."
"Ah, anything that happens to one's body, or mind either, is that," said
Evelyn.
"How? Surely one is responsible for what happens to one's mind."
"Yes, in the way of learning ancient history, if we choose, or having
drawing-lessons. But all the big things that can happen to one are
outside one's control. Love, hate, falling in love particularly is, I
imagine, completely independent of one's will."
The girl gave a short, rather scornful laugh.
"But one sees a determined effort to marry someone," she said, "often
productive of a very passable imitation of falling in love."
Had she boxed his ears, Evelyn could not have been more astonished. If
this was an example of shutting the eyes; drawing a long breath and
being natural, he felt that there was after all something to be said for
the artificialities in which we are most of us wont to clothe ourselves.
There was a very Marah of bitterness in the girl's tone; he felt, too,
as if all the time she had concealed her hand, so to speak, behind her
back, and suddenly thrown a squib at him, an explosive that cracked and
jumped and jerked in a thoroughly disconcerting manner. And she read the
blankness of his face aright, and hastened to correct the impression she
had made.
"Did you ever get behind a door when you were a child," she asked, "and
jump out calling 'Bo!'? That is what I did just then, and it was a
complete success."
He looked at her a moment with his head on one side, as if studying an
effect.
"But it was you who jumped out?" he asked rather pertinently.
"Ah, I wouldn't even say that," said she. "I think it was only a
turnip-ghost that I had stuck behind the door."
Evelyn gave a sort of triumphant shout of laughter.
"Well, for the moment it took me in," he said. "I really thought it was
you."
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
FIFTH
The season in London this year had been particularly amusing; there had
been a quite unusually large number of balls, the opera had been one
perpetual coruscation of evening stars that sang together, the conduct
of May and early June from a meteorological point of view had been
impeccable, and in consequence when the world in general came back after
Whitsuntide they came for the most part with a pleasurable sense of
returning for the second act of a play of which the first had been
really enchanting. Like taking one's seat again for a play was the sense
that various unfinished situations which had been left in an interesting
stage would now move forward to their dramatic climaxes. One,
however--this was rather unfair--had developed itself to a happy close
in the country, and Madge Ellington's engagement to Philip was generally
pronounced to be very nice indeed. On both sides, indeed, it was very
nice; for it had not been seemly that a millionaire should be unmarried
so long, and on the other hand it had not been seemly that Madge should
be unmarried so long. But now they had both seen the error of their
ways, and had agreed to marry each other.
And above all, it was very nice for Lady Ellington, about whom it was
generally known that she had made a considerable sum in speculation
lately. To do that was universally recognised as being an assured
advance towards the bankruptcy court, but to have captured a wealthy
son-in-law who was a magnate in the South African market turned her
steps, or might be hoped to turn them, away from the direction of the
courts, and point instead towards the waters of comfort and cash.
Another thing that excited to some extent the attention and applause of
the world was a certain change of demeanor in Madge, which was very
noticeable after her return to London from the Whitsuntide holiday. She
had always been rather given to put her head in the air, and appear not
to notice people; but her engagement had brought to her an added
geniality. Hitherto she had been something of "a maid on yonder mountain
height," but the shepherd, Philip Home, had, it appeared, convinced her
that "love was of the valley," and she had quite distinctly come down.
This, at any rate, was the conclusion at which Gladys Ellington, the
present Lady Ellington, arrived within two minutes of the time when she
met Madge next.
She was of about Madge's own age, and the two, in spite of old Lady
Ellington's rooted dislike to her nephew, had always been friends.
Gladys was charmingly pretty, most successful in all she did, and
universally liked. This was only fair, for she took immense trouble to
be liked, and never did an ill-natured thing to anyone, unless it was
quite certain that she would not be found out. She had come to tea on
the afternoon succeeding Madge's return to London, and, though she
professed regrets at the absence of Madge's mother, was really delighted
to find her friend alone. She had a perfect passion for finding things
out, and her method of doing so was to talk with extreme volubility
herself, so that no one could possibly conjecture that she had any
object of the sort in her mind. But her pauses were well calculated, and
her questions few, while with regard to these, she always gave the
appearance of not attending to the answers, which further disarmed
suspicion. She was, however, a little afraid of Madge's mother, who
always gave her the idea of seeing through her. This made her volubility
a little threadbare at times, and consequently she bore her absence with
more than equanimity.
"Darling, I think it is too charming," she was saying, "and I always
hoped that you would do just this. Mr. Home is perfectly adorable, I
think, and though it sounds horribly worldly to say so, it is an
advantage, you know, to marry a very rich man. We're as poor as mice,
you see, and so I know. Yes, please--a cup of tea, though we're told now
that a cup of tea is the most unwholesome thing in the world. And you
had a nice party? Mrs. Home, too, just like a piece of china scented
with lavender. And who else was there?"
"Only two more men," said Madge, "Mr. Merivale and Mr. Evelyn Dundas."
"The Hermit of the New Forest!" cried Gladys, directing her remarks to
him because she wished to hear more of the other. "How too exciting! He
lives on cherry jam and brown bread, does he not, and whistles to the
cows, who lay their heads on his shoulder and purr. I used to know him
in the old days before he was a hermit at all. And Mr. Dundas, too! Do
you like him?"
"Yes, very much, very much indeed," said Madge gravely. "He is such a
child, you know, and he makes one laugh because he is so silly. He is
going to do my portrait, by the way; mine and Philip's."
"How delightful! He ought to make a really wonderful thing of you, dear
Madge. Do tell me, how much does he charge? I'm dying to be painted by
him, but he is so frightfully expensive, is he not? And you liked him;
what a good thing, as you are going to sit to him. It must be awful
being painted by a man who irritates you."
Madge laughed.
"He doesn't irritate me in the slightest," she said. "In fact, I don't
think I ever got to know a man so quickly. I don't know how it is;
somehow he is like clear water. You can see straight to the bottom."
Gladys regarded her rather closely as she nibbled with rather a
bird-like movement at a sugared bun.
"Madge, you've quite changed," she said. "You are actually beginning to
take an interest in your fellow-creatures. That is so wise of you. Of
course Evelyn Dundas is adorable; I'm hopelessly in love with him
myself, but I should have thought he was just the sort of man who would
not have interested you in the least. Nor would he have a few weeks ago.
Dearest, you've stepped down from your pedestal, where you really used
to be rather a statue, you know, like Galatea, and it does improve you
so. I saw it the moment I came into the room. And just falling in love
has done it all."
A sudden look of pain came over Madge's face, and her companion, with a
well-chosen pause, waited for her to express it in words.
"Ah, Gladys, are you sure you are right?" she said. "Because I think I
must tell you this even as I told Philip--I don't feel as if I had
fallen in love. I like him, I esteem and respect him, but--but it isn't
what I expected. I'm not--I hate the word--but I'm not thrilled."
Gladys rustled sympathetically, and Madge went on:
"I had it all out with my mother, too," she said, "who very sensibly
said that as I had lived twenty-five years without falling in love in
that sort of sense, I was very unlikely to begin now. On the other hand,
she said that it was much better that I should be married than remain
single. And so I am going to marry Philip Home."
Again Gladys rustled sympathetically, and gave a murmured "Yes," for
Madge evidently had more to say.
"Anyhow, I have been honest with him," she said, "and I have told him
that. And he seems to think that it can easily form the basis for
happiness, and accepts it. But tell me, am I frightfully cold-blooded?
And have I any right to marry him?"
Gladys' quick little brain had hopped over a dozen aspects of this
question, and pecked, so to speak, at a dozen different fruits, while
Madge was speaking; but with a whirr of wings she was back again, up to
time as usual.
"No, not the least cold-blooded, and you have every right to marry him,"
she said. "For you may be quite sure that you soon will be in love with
him, because I assure you that already it has made an enormous
difference in you. How do I know that? I can't possibly tell you, any
more than you can tell exactly why a person looks ill. You say her face
looks drawn. What's drawn? Why, the same as ill. You've woke up,
dearest; you've come to life. Life! there's nothing in the world so good
as that."
Madge leaned forward, and spoke more eagerly.
"Yes, you're right," she said, "though I don't know that your reason is
right I have somehow come to life. But it puzzles me a little to know
how it has happened, or why."
Gladys nodded her head with an air of wisdom, and got up. At this time
of the year she seldom spent more than an hour in any one place, and
still more seldom with only one person, and both Madge and Madge's house
had now enjoyed their full share of her time.
"Ah, I am very bad at riddles," she said, "and, besides, none of us know
'why' about anything, and, on the whole, reasons and motives matter very
little. Things that happen are so numerous and so interesting that one
has literally not time to probe into them and ask how and why. And after
all, dear, when anything so very nice has happened as your engagement,
which too has brought such a gain to you in yourself, I am more than
content, and so should you be, to accept that as it is. Now, I must
simply fly; I am dining out and going to the opera, and to a dance
afterwards. What a pity there are not forty-eight hours in every day."
This regret was subsequently shared by Madge herself, who found that the
life of a young woman who is going to be married in six weeks' time, for
the wedding had been fixed for the end of July, implies a full
engagement book. And in addition to the ordinary calls on her time,
hours were further claimed from her by Evelyn Dundas, who apparently had
insisted to another sitter on the prior rights of this subsequent
engagement, and announced himself free to begin her portrait at once, to
give her sittings whenever she could sit, and finish it as quickly as
his powers of brush would permit him. His impetuousness, as usual, swept
away all difficulties, and before a fortnight had elapsed, Madge had
already given him four sittings, and the picture itself was beginning to
live and breathe on his canvas.
These sittings, or rather the artist's manners and moods during them,
were strangely various. Sometimes for half-an-hour, as Madge complained,
he would do nothing but stare at her, grunting to himself, and biting
the ends of his brushes. Then in a moment all would be changed, and
instead of staring and grunting with idle hands, he would glance at her
and record, record and glance again, absorbed in the passion of his
creation, whistling sometimes gently to himself, or at other times
silent, but with a smiling mouth. Then that wind of inspiration that
bloweth where it listeth would leave him again, and he would declare
roundly that he did not know what she was like, or what his picture was
like, but that the only thing quite certain was that his picture was not
like her. Then, even while these gloomy announcements were on his lips,
even in the middle of a sentence, he would murmur to himself, "Oh, I
see," and the swish of the happy brush would alone break the silence. At
other times there was no silence to break, and from the time she stepped
up on to the platform till when she left it, he would pour out a perfect
flood of inconsequent nonsense. Or, again, the hours passed in unbroken
conversation between the two, the talk sometimes flitting like a
butterfly over all the open flowers of life, but at other times, as it
had done once or twice at Philip's house, dropping suddenly into the
heart of things, finding sometimes honey there, but sometimes shadows
only.
A sitting of this latter kind had just come to an end, and Evelyn, after
seeing his sitter into her carriage, had returned to his studio, still
palette in hand, meaning to work for an hour at the background.
Certainly in this short space of time he had made admirable progress,
and he knew within himself that this was to be a landmark of his work,
and up to the present, at any rate, his high-water mark. He had drawn
the girl standing very upright, as was her wont, but with head a little
thrown back, and her face, eyes, and mouth alike laughed. It was a
daring conception, but the happiness of the execution was worthy of it,
and the fore-shortening of the face owing to the throw-back of the head,
the drawing, too, of the open mouth and of the half-closed eyes was a
triumph. Her figure was shown in white evening dress, with hands locked
together, carrying a feather fan, and arms at full length in front of
her; over her shoulders, half thrown back, was a scarlet opera cloak,
the one note of high colour in all the scheme. Behind her, on the wall,
he had introduced, by one of those daring feats that were labelled by
detractors as "cheeky," but by any who estimated fairly the excellence
of the execution, a round gilt-framed mirror, with a convex glass in it,
on which was distortedly reflected the room itself and the back of the
girl's figure. It was at this that he had returned to work now.
Evelyn's studio, like all rooms much used by anyone who has at all a
vivid personality, had caught much of the character of its owner. He had
made it out of the top floor in his house in the King's Road, by
throwing all the attics into one big room. Often for a whole day he
would not stir from it till it was too dark to paint, having a tray of
lunch brought him which sometimes he would savagely devour, at other
times leave untouched till he was literally faint with hunger. It was
easy to see, too, how the room had grown, so to speak, how it had picked
up his characteristics. The big divan, for instance, in the window,
piled with brightly-coloured cushions, had evidently been of the early
furniture, a remnant of imperishable childhood; so, too, no doubt, was
the open Dutch-tiled fireplace, the Chippendale table, the few big
chairs that stood about, and the Japanese screen by the door. After
that, however, all sorts of various tastes showed themselves. A heap of
dry modelling clay in one corner recorded a fit of despair, when he had
asserted that the only real form of art was form itself, not colour; a
violin with two strings missing denoted that after hearing Sarasate he
was convinced, for several hours at least, that the music of strings was
alone the flower worth plucking, and showed also a delightful conviction
that it was never too late to learn, though the broken strings might
imply that it was now too late to mend. A set of _Punch_, complete from
the beginning, lay like a heap of morraine stones round the sofa, a bag
of rusty golf-clubs stood in a corner, and behind the Japanese screen
leaned a bicycle on which dust had collected, an evidence of its being,
for the time at any rate, out of date far as its owner was concerned.
But three months before or three months afterwards a visitor might
scarcely have recognised the room again. A portrait might have been
finished, and with disengaged eyes Evelyn would survey what he would
certainly call his pigsty. The bicycle would be sent to the cellar with
the golf clubs slung on to it, the heap of modelling clay be dumped on
the dustheap, the Japanese screen banished to the kitchen, because for
the moment Japanese art was a parody and a profanation, and the violin,
perhaps, have its strings mended. Or again, instead of the Japanese
screen being banished, Japan might have flooded the whole studio as its
armies flood Manchuria, and an equally certain and uncompromising gospel
pronounce that it alone was good.
It was then to this temple of contradictions that Evelyn returned, three
steps to a stride, after seeing Madge off. The figure was right; he felt
sure of that, but the tone of the background somehow was not yet quite
attuned to it. Above all, the mirror must be bright burnished gold, not
dull, for the flame of the cloak, if it was the only note of high colour
in the picture, consumed itself, burned away ineffectually, and it was
with a heart that beat fast, not only from his gallop upstairs, but from
excitement in this creation that was his, that he again stood before the
picture. Yes, that was it; another high light was necessary.
For a moment he looked at the laughing face on his canvas, almost
laughing himself. Then all on a sudden his laughter died, the need of
his picture for another high light died too, for though his eyes were
looking on his own presentment of Madge, it was Madge herself that his
soul saw. And even as his eyes loved the work of his hands, so he knew
in a burning flash of self-revelation that his soul loved her. Up till
now, up till this very moment, he had not known that this was so; that
it was possible he had long since recognised, that the possibility was
reaching its tentacles out into regions of the probable he had
recognised, so to speak, out of the corner of his eye, had recognised,
but cut it, and now came the knowledge.
Evelyn gave a great sigh, raising his hands, one with the palette on the
thumb, the other with the brush it held, to full stretch, and let them
fall again, and stood still in front of his own inimitable portrait,
drinking in no longer with the artist's eye only, but with the eye of
the lover, the incomparable beauty of his beloved. That rush of sudden
knowledge, so impetuous, so overwhelming, for the moment drowned all
else; it did not enter his head to consider "What next?" The present
moment was so blindingly bright that everything that lay outside it was
in impenetrable shadow. The intimate relations into which he was thrown
with the girl, by reason of this portrait; the fact that she was
engaged, and that to his best friend, did not at first have any
existence in his mind; he but looked at this one fact, that he loved her
to the exclusion of all else. Then, as must always happen, came reaction
from the ecstatic moment, and in the train of reaction, like some grey
ghost, thought. But even thought for the time was gilded by the light of
that central sun, and it was long before he could frame the situation in
the bounding lines of life and conduct. For love is a force which is
impatient of opposition, and against opposition it will hurl itself,
like a wild bird against the wires of its cage, careless of whether it
is dashed to pieces, knowing only the overwhelming instinct and need of
liberty, to gain which death is but the snap of a careless finger.
Then, almost with a laugh at himself, came that most important factor
that he had overlooked. For a couple of minutes his egoism had run away
with him, taking the bit in its teeth, and the thought that he loved
her, that he needed her, had not only been uppermost, but alone in his
mind. But what of her? She was engaged to Philip, and shortly to be
married to him, and he himself was merely to be relegated to that
somewhat populous class of "odd man out." That ebb from the full flood
of his passion was swift; it came in a moment, as swiftly as the other
had come. So that was all that was left of him, all that was possible;
that he should just stand aside while the other two went on their way,
not daring even to touch the hem of her garment, for she would most
surely draw it away from him. That clearly was the logical outcome, but
logical as it was, not a single fibre of his inmost self accepted it.
That, the one thing which to the reasonable mind must assuredly happen
was to him the one thing which could not possibly happen. The very
strength of his newly-awakened love was the insuperable bar to it; it
could not be, for what--and the question seemed to himself at that
moment perfectly unanswerable--what on earth was to happen to him in
that case? Here was the Pagan, the interesting survival, as Tom Merivale
had called him, most unmistakably surviving, shouting, as it were, that
its own happiness, its own need, was the one thing which the rest of the
world must accept and respect. And, since the only way in which due
acceptation could be secured for it was conditional on Madge's loving
him, that had to happen also. Yes, nothing else would do; she had to
love him.
This reasoning, if one can call by so deliberate a word these leaping
conclusions, was not any act of reflecting egoism. His emotions, his
whole being, had been suddenly stirred, and there necessarily rose to
the surface the sediment, so to speak, of that which dwelt in its
depths. The whole course and habit of his past life no doubt was
responsible for what was there, but he was no more responsible at this
particular moment for the thoughts and conclusions that leaped in fire
into his mind than is a man who is suddenly startled responsible for
starting; his nerves have acted without the dictation of his brains. But
with Evelyn, as the minutes passed, and he still sat there with
heightened colour and flashing eyes, looking at his unfinished picture,
he ceased to be comparable to a suddenly startled man; the thoughts that
had sprung unbidden to his mind were not put away; they remained there,
and they grew in brightness. His conscious reflections endorsed the
first instinctive impulse.
It so happened that he had arranged to go down that afternoon to spend a
couple of nights in the New Forest with the Hermit, but when this
engagement was again remembered by him, it seemed to him at first
impossible to go. What he had learned in this last hour was a thing so
staggering that he felt as if all the affairs of life, social
intercourse, the discussion of this subject or of that, as if any
subject but one contained even the germ or protoplasm of importance, had
become impossible. But go or stay, everything was impossible except to
win Madge's love. Then another impossibility, bigger perhaps than any,
made its appearance, for the most impossible thing of all was to be
alone, anything was more endurable than that; and side by side with that
rose another, namely, the impossibility of keeping his knowledge to
himself. He must, he felt, tell somebody, and of all people in the world
the Hermit was the person whom it would be most easy to tell.
Then a sort of pale image of Philip came into his mind. He was conscious
of no disloyalty to him, because he was incapable of thinking of him at
all, except as of somebody, a vague somebody, who dwelt among the
shadows outside the light. Mrs. Home was no more, nobody was anything
more than a dweller in these shadows. Nor, indeed, had he been able to
think of Philip directly, concentratedly, would he have accused himself
of disloyalty; either Madge would never love himself, in which case no
harm was done to anyone, or she would do so, in which case her marriage
with Philip was an impossibility--an impossibility, too, the existence
of which had better be found out before it was legally confirmed. Yet
all this but quivered through his mind and was gone again, he caught but
as passing a glimpse of the world of life and conduct as he caught of
the stations that his train thundered through in its westerly course;
they but brushed by his inward eye, and had passed before they had ever
been focussed or seen with anything like clearness.
The Hermit had once told him, it may be remembered, that he wanted
deepening, and Evelyn on that occasion had enunciated the general
principle that he had no use for deeps, the surface being sufficient for
his needs. And even now, though his egotism was so all-embracing, it was
in no sense whatever profound. He did not probe himself, it was of the
glittering surface alone on which shone this sun of love that he was
conscious. Deeps, perhaps, might lie beneath, but they were unexplored;
life like a pleasure boat with shallow-dipping oars went gaily across
him. Indeed it was probable that before the depth--if depths were
there--could be sounded the sun, so to speak, would have to go in, for
with that dazzle on the water it was impossible to see what lay below.
Tom Merivale's cottage, which had begun life as two cottages, stood very
solitary some mile or two outside Brockenhurst, and though the high road
passed within a few hundred yards of it, it was impossible to conceive a
place that more partook of the essential nature of a hermitage. Between
it and the high road lay a field, with only a rough track across it;
beyond that, and nearer to the house, an orchard, while a huge
box-hedge, compact and homogeneous with the growth and careful clipping
of many years, was to any who wished to be shut off from the outer world
a bar as impenetrable as a ring of fire. Immediately beyond this stood
the cottage itself, looking away from the road; in front a strip of
garden led down to the little river Fawn, and across the river lay a
great open expanse of heath, through which, like a wedge, came down a
big triangular wood of beech-trees. It was this way, over the garden and
the open forest, that the cottage looked; not a house of any kind was in
sight, and one might watch, like a ship-wrecked mariner for a sail, for
any sign of human life, and yet in a long summer day perhaps the watcher
would see nothing to tell him that he was not alone as far as humankind
went in this woodland world. Tom had built out a long deep verandah that
ran the whole length of the cottage on the garden front; brick pillars
at the two corners supported a wooden roof, and a couple of steps led
down into the garden. Down the centre of that ran a pergola, over which
climbed in tangled luxuriance the long-limbed tribes of climbing roses.
Ramblers spilt their crimson clusters over it, or lay in streaks and
balls of white and yellow foam, while carmine pillar seemed to struggle
in their embrace, and honeysuckle cast loving tendrils round them both
and kissed them promiscuously. And though a gardener might have deplored
this untended riot of vegetation, yet even the most orderly of his
fraternity could not have failed to admire. Nature and this fruitful
soil and the warm, soft air to which frost was a stranger, had taken
matters into their own hands, and the result, though as fortuitous
apparently as the splashed glories of a sunset, had yet a sunset's
lavishness and generosity of colour. On each side of this pergola lay a
small lawn of well-tended turf, and a shrubbery on one side of lilacs
and syringa and on the other a tall brick wall with a deep garden bed
below it gave a fragrant frame to the whole. The Hermit's avowal,
indeed, that for the last year he had done nothing except carpentering
and gardening implied a good deal of the latter, for the turf, as has
been stated, was beautifully rolled and cut, and the beds showed
evidence of seed-time and weeding, and had that indefinable but
unmistakable air of being zealously cared for. But since such operations
were concerned with plants, no principle was broken.
Evelyn arrived here soon after six, and found himself in undisturbed
possession. Mr. Merivale, so said his servant, had gone off soon after
breakfast that morning and had not yet returned. His guest, however, had
been expected, and he himself would be sure to be in before long. Indeed
in a few minutes his cry of welcome to Evelyn sounded from the lower end
of the garden, and he left his long chair in the verandah and went down
through the pergola to meet him.
"Ah, my dear fellow," said Tom, "it is delightful to see you. You have
come from London, have you not, where there are so many people and so
few things. I have been thinking about London, and you have no idea how
remote it seems. And how is the picture getting on--Miss Ellington's, I
mean?"
Evelyn looked at him with his direct, luminous gaze. Though he had come
down here with the object of telling his friend what had happened, he
found that at this first moment of meeting him, he was incapable of
making his tongue go on its errand.
"Ah, the portrait," he said; "it really is getting on well. Up to this
morning, at any rate, I have put there what I have meant to put there,
and, which is rarer with me, I have not put there anything which I did
not mean. Do you see how vastly more important that is?"
The Hermit had passed his day in the open merely in shirt and trousers,
but his coat was lying in a hammock slung between two pillars of the
pergola, and he put it on.
"Why, of course," he said, "a thing which ought not to be there poisons
the rest; anything put in which should be left out sets the whole thing
jarring. That's exactly why I left the world you live in. There was so
much that shouldn't have been there, from my point of view at least."
Evelyn laughed.
"But if we all left out all that each of us thinks shouldn't be there,
there would be precious little left in the world," he said. "For
instance, I should leave out Lady Ellington without the slightest
question."
He paused a moment.
"And when the portrait is finished she, no doubt, would leave out me,"
he added, with charming candour.
"Quite so," said Merivale; "and since I, not being an uncontrolled
despot, could not 'leave out' people, which I suppose is a soft way of
saying terminate their existence, I went away instead to a place where
they were naturally left out, where for me their existence was
terminated. It is all part of the simplifying process."
They had established themselves in the verandah again, where a
silent-footed man was laying the table for dinner; and it struck Evelyn
for the moment as an inconsistency that the tablecloth should be so fine
and the silver so resplendent.
"But in your simplification," said Evelyn, indicating the table, "you
don't leave out that sort of thing."
"No, because if I once opened the question of whether I should live on
the bare necessities of life, or allow myself, so to speak, a little
dripping on my bread, the rest of my life would be spent in settling
infinitesimal points which I really don't think much matter. I could no
doubt sell my silver and realize a few hundred pounds, and give that
away. But I don't think it matters much."
"All the same, it is inconsistent."
"In details that does not seem to me to matter either," said Merivale.
"For instance, I don't eat meat partly because I think that it is better
not to take life if you can avoid it. But when a midge settles on my
hand and bites me, if possible I kill it."
"Well, anyhow your inconsistencies make up a very charming whole," said
the other, looking round. "It is all charming."
"I'm glad, and you think you can pass a day or two here without missing
the--the complications you live among? I wish Philip could have come
down, too; but he is buried in work, it appears, and we know how his
leisure is occupied just now."
Evelyn moved suddenly in his chair.
"Ah, do you know, I am rather glad Philip isn't here," he said. "I don't
think----" and he broke off again. "And as soon as I've finished this
portrait, I'm going to do his," he added.
He was silent a moment, feeling somehow that he never would do Philip's
portrait. He would not be able to see him, he would not be able to paint
him; something, no shadow, but something so bright would stand between
him and the canvas that he would be unable to see beyond or through it.
But Merivale did not seem to notice the check. His eyes were looking out
over the glowing garden, where all colours were turned to flame in the
almost level rays of the sun as it drew near to its setting. The wall
behind the deep garden bed glowed as if the bricks themselves were
luminous, light seemed to exude from the grass, the flowers were bells
and cups of fire.
"Ah, this is the best moment of all the day," he said, "when sunset
comes like this. The whole of the sunshine of the hours seem distilled
into it, it is the very essence of light."
He rose from his chair, and went to the edge of the verandah, stretching
his arms wide and breathing deeply of the warm, fragrant air. Then he
turned again to his companion.
"That, too, I hope is what death will be like," he said. "All the
sunlight of life will be concentrated into that moment, until one's mere
body can hold no more of the glow that impregnates it, and is shattered.
Look at those clusters of rambler; a little more and they must burst
with the colour."
Evelyn got up too.
"Don't be so uncomfortable, Tom," he cried, in a sort of boyish
petulance. "I could go mad when I think of death. It is horrible,
frightening. I don't want to die, and I don't want to get old. I want to
be young always, to feel as I feel to-day, and never a jot less keenly.
That's what you must tell me while I am here; how am I to remain young?
You seem to have solved it; you are much younger than when I knew you
first."
Tom laughed.
"And another proof of my youth is that I feel as I do about death," he
said. "The more you are conscious of your own life, the more absurd the
notion that one can die becomes. Why, even one's body won't die; it
will make life, it will be grass on one's grave, just as the dead leaves
that fall from the tree make the leaf-mould which feeds that tree or
another tree or the grass. It doesn't in the least matter which, it is
all one, it is all life."
Evelyn shivered slightly.
"Yes, quite true, and not the least consoling," he said; "for what is
the use of being alive if one loses one's individuality? It doesn't make
death the least less terrible to me, even if I know that I am going to
become a piece of groundsel and be pecked at by your canary. I don't
want to be groundsel, I don't want to be pecked at, and I don't want to
become your canary. Great heavens, fancy being a bit of a canary!"
"Ah, but only your body," said the other.
Evelyn got up.
"Yes, and what happens to the rest? You tell me that a piece of me, for
my body is a piece of me, becomes a canary, and you don't know about the
rest. Indeed it is not a cheerful prospect. If some--some bird pecks my
eyes out, is it a consolation to me, who becomes blind, to learn that a
bird has had dinner?"
Merivale looked at him; even as Gladys had seen that some change had
come in Madge, so he saw that something had happened to Evelyn, and he
registered that impression in his mind. But the change, whatever it was,
was not permanent--it was a phase, a mood only, for next moment Evelyn
had broken out into a perfectly natural laugh.
"You shan't make me think of melancholy subjects any more," he cried.
"Indeed you may try, but you won't be able to do it. I have never been
more full of the joy of life than to-day. That was why I was so glad to
come down here, as you are a sort of apostle of joy. But it's true that
I also want to talk to you some time about something quite serious. Not
now though, but after dinner. Also you will have to show me all the bag
of conjuring tricks, the mechanical nightingale, the disappearing
omelette--I could do that, by the way--and the Pan pipes. Now, I'm going
upstairs to change; I've got London things on, and my artistic eye is
offended. Where shall I find you?"
"I shall go down to bathe. Won't you come?" said Merivale.
Evelyn wrinkled up his nose.
"No, I've not been hot enough. Besides, one is inferior to the frog in
the water, which is humiliating. Any frog swims so much better!"
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
SIXTH
Merivale had scooped out a long bathing-pool at the bottom of the
garden, and when Evelyn left him, he took his towel and walked down to
it. A little higher up was a weir, and from this he plunged into a soda
water of vivifying bubble, and floated down as the woven ropes of water
willed to take him till he grounded on the beds of yellow, shining
gravel at the tail of the pool, laughing with joy at the cool touch of
the stream. The day had been very hot, and since breakfast he had been
on the move, now under the shadow of the trees, but as often as not
grilled by the great blaze of the sun on the open heaths, and it was
with an extraordinary sense of renewed life and of kinship with this
beautiful creature that was poured from the weir in never-ending volumes
that he gave himself up to the clean, sensuous thrill of the moment. It
seemed to him that the strong flood that bore him, with waves and eddies
just tipped with the gold and crimson of the sun, entirely
interpenetrated and possessed him. He was not more himself than was the
stream, the stream was not more itself than it was he. The blue vault
overhead with its fleeces of cloud beginning to flush rosily was part of
the same thing, the beech-trees with leaves a-quiver in the evening
breeze were but a hand or an eyebrow of himself.
Then, with the briskness of his renewed vigour, he set himself to swim
against this piece of himself, as if right hand should wrestle with
left, breasting the river with vigorous strokes, yet scarcely moving
against the press of the running stream, while like a frill the water
stood up bubbling round his neck. Then again, with limbs deliciously
tired with the struggle, he turned on his back and floated down again,
with arms widespread, to increase the surface of contact. Though this
sense of unity with the life of Nature was never absent from him, so
that it was his last waking thought at night and stood by him while he
slept, ready to awake him again, water somehow, live, running water
with the sun on its surface, or the rain beating on to it, with its
lucent depths and waving water-weeds that the current combed, gave it
him more than anything else. Nothing else had quite that certainty of
everlasting life about it; it was continually outpoured, yet not
diminished; it mingled with the sea, and sprang to heaven in all the
forms and iridescent colours of mist and cloud, to return again to the
earth in the rain that made the grass to grow and fed the springs. And
this envelopment of himself in it was a sort of outward symbol of his
own absorption in Nature, the outward and visible sign of it. Every day
the mystery and the wonder of it all increased; all cleansing, all
renewal was contained here, for even as the water cleansed and renewed
him, so through the countless ages it cleansed and renewed itself. And
here alone the intermediary step, death, out of which came new life, was
omitted. To water there was no death; it was eternally young, and the
ages brought no abatement of its vigour.
Then in the bright twilight of the sun just set he dressed and walked
back to the house to find that he had been nearly an hour gone, and that
it was close on dinner-time.
During the earlier part, anyhow, of that meal Evelyn showed no return of
his disquietude, but, as was his wont, poured out floods of surprising
stuff. He talked shop quite unashamed, and this evening the drawbacks of
an artist's life supplied his text.
"Yes, everyone is for ever insisting," he said, "that the artist's life
is its own reward, because his work is creative; but there are times
when I would sooner be the man who puts bristles in toothbrushes. Those
folk don't allow for the days when you sit in front of a blank canvas,
or a canvas half-finished, and look at it in an absolute stupor of
helplessness. I suppose they would say 'Go on, put down what you see,'
and they are so wooden-headed as not to realise that on such occasions,
unfortunately numerous, one doesn't see anything, and one couldn't put
it down if one did. There is a blank wall in front of one. And it is
then I say with Mr. Micawber, 'No one is without a friend who is
possessed of shaving materials'--yet I don't kill myself. Oh, hang it,
here we are talking about death again! Give me some more fish."
Merivale performed this hospitable duty.
"Ah, but what do you expect?" he asked. "Surely you can't think it's
possible that a man can live all the time in the full blaze of
imaginative vision? You might as well expect him to run at full speed
from the day he was born to the day of his--well, all the time, as you
dislike the word."
Evelyn drummed the table with his fingers.
"But it's just that I want," he cried. "Whose fault is it that I can't
do what I feel is inside me all the time? If I have what you call the
imaginative vision at all, who has got any business to put a cap like
the cap of a camera lens over it, so that I can see nothing whatever?
Oh, the pity of it! Sitters, too! Sitters can be so antipathetic that I
feel when I look at them that the imaginative vision is oozing out of
me, like sawdust when you clip a doll's leg, and that in another moment
I shall be just a heap of collapsed rags on the floor, with a silly
waxen head and shoulders on the top. If only people would come to me to
paint their caricatures I could do some rippers. The next woman I've got
to paint when these two are finished is a pink young thing of sixty,
with a face that has exactly the expression of a pansy. Lord! Lord!"
This was so completely the normal Evelyn Dundas that Merivale, if not
reassured, for there was no need for that, at any rate thought that he
had been mistaken in his idea that some change had come to him. He was
just the same vivid, eager boy that he had always been, blessed with one
supreme talent, which, vampire-like, seemed to suck the blood out of all
the other possibilities and dormant energies of his nature, and suck,
too, all sense of responsibility from him.
"Refuse them then," he said; "say 'I won't paint you; you sap my
faculties.'"
Evelyn burst out into a great shout of laughter.
"'Mr. Dundas presents his compliments to Lady What's-hername,'" he said,
"'and regrets, on inspection, that he is unable to paint her portrait,
owing to the fact that a prolonged contemplation of her charms would sap
his artistic powers, which he feels himself unwilling to part with.'
What would be this rising young painter's position in a year's time, eh?
His studio would be as empty as the New Forest. You might then come and
live there, Tom."
Evelyn finished his wine and lit a cigarette all in one breath.
"Now, strange though it may seem to you," he said, "I feel that I've
talked enough about myself for the moment, though I propose to go on
afterwards. So, by way of transition, we will talk about you. As I
dressed a number of frightful posers came into my head about you, and I
want categorical answers. Now you've been here how long? More than a
year, isn't it? What can you show for it? Number two: What's it all
about? Number three: How can you call yourself a student of Nature when
you deliberately shut your eyes to all the suffering, all the death, all
the sacrifice that goes on eternally in Nature? I might as well call
myself an artist and refuse to use blue and red in my pictures. I
remember asking you something of this sort before, and your answer was
eminently unsatisfactory. Besides, I have forgotten it."
Merivale moved sideways to the table, and crossed one leg over the
other.
"Does it really at all interest you?" he said.
"It does, or I should not ask. Another thing, too: I have been looking
at you all dinner, and I could swear you look much younger than you did
five years ago. Indeed, if I saw you now for the first time I should say
you were not much more than twenty. Also you used to be a touchy,
irritable sort of devil, and you look now as if nothing in the world had
the power to make you cease smiling. Did you know, by the way, that you
are always smiling a little?"
Tom laughed.
"No, not consciously," he said; "but now you mention it, it seems
impossible that I should not."
"Well, begin," said Evelyn, with his usual impatience. "Tell me all
about it, and attempt to answer all those very pertinent questions.
Smoke, too; I listen better to a person who is smoking, because I feel
that he is more comfortable."
A sudden wind stirred in the garden, blowing towards them in the
verandah the sleeping fragrance of the beds and the wandering noises of
the night, which, all together make up what we call the silence of the
night, even as the mixture of primary colours makes white.
"Smoke? No, I don't smoke now," said Merivale; "but if you really want
to know, I will tell you all I can tell you. The conjuring tricks, as
you call them, I suppose you will take for granted?"
Evelyn, comfortable with his coffee and liqueur, assented.
"Yes, leave them out," he said. "Here beginneth the gospel."
He tried in these words to be slightly offensive; the offensiveness,
however, went wide of the mark, and he was sorry. For the Hermit, as he
had known him in the world, was singularly liable to take offence, to be
irritable, impatient, to be stamping and speechifying on an extremely
human platform. But no vibration of any such impatience was in
Merivale's voice, and in his words there was no backhander to answer it.
So the gospel began.
"It is all so simple," he said, "yet I suppose that to complicated
people simplicity is as difficult to understand as is complexity to
simple people. But here it is, anyhow, and make the best or the worst of
it; that is entirely your concern."
"There is God," he said, "there is also Nature, which I take to be the
visible, tangible, audible expression of Him. There is also man--of
which you and I are specimens, and whether we are above or below the
average doesn't matter in the least--and man by a dreadful process
called civilisation has worked himself back into a correspondingly
dreadful condition. If he were either fish, flesh, or fowl one would
know where to put him, but he is none of those. He seems, at any rate to
me, to be a peculiar product of his own making, and instead of being a
creature compounded of life and joy, which should be his ingredients and
also his study, he has become a creature who is mated with sorrow and at
the end with death. He has become rotten without ever being ripe, the
flower to which he should have attained has been cankered in the bud.
Now, all this it has been my deliberate aim to leave behind me and to
forget, and to go straight back to that huge expression of the joy of
God, which man has been unable to spoil or render sorrowful, to the
great hymn of Nature. Listen to that for a moment--and for the more
moments you listen to it the more unmistakable will its tenour be--and
you will hear that the whole impression is one of life and of joy. There
is, it is true, throughout Nature the sound of death, of cruelty, and of
one creature preying on another; but the net result is not death, it is
ever-increasing life. And so when I went to Nature I shut my ears and
eyes to that minor undercurrent of sound. Of the result I was sure; day
after day there is more life in the world, in spite of the death that
day after day goes on. All the death goes to form fresh life. In the
same way with the joy and sorrow of Nature; for every animal that
suffers there are two that are glad, for every tree that dies there are
two in the full vigour of the joy of life. And that joy and that life is
my constant study. I soak myself in it, and shall so do until I am
utterly impregnated with it. And when that day comes, when there is no
tiny or obscure fibre in my being that does not completely realise it,
then, with a flash of revelation, so I take it, I shall 'grasp the
scheme of things entire.' Whether by life or by death, I shall truly
realise that I and that moth flitting by, and the odours of the garden
and the river are indivisibly one, just an expression of the spirit of
life, which is God."
He paused a moment.
"There were two other questions you asked me," he said. "What have I got
to show for the years I have spent here? I shrug my shoulders at that;
it is I who am being shown. The second concerns my personal appearance,
for you say I look younger. That is probably quite true and quite
inevitable, for the contemplation of the eternal youth of the world I
suppose must make one younger, body and soul alike. And that is all, I
think."
Evelyn was listening with extreme attention; he did not look in the
least uninterested.
"My word, you've got a perfectly sober plan at the bottom of it all," he
said, "and I thought half of it was moonshine and the other half
imagination. There is one more question--two more. What if the whole of
the suffering and the cruelty and the death in Nature is made clear to
you in a flash, if it is that which will come to make you grasp the
scheme of things entire?"
Merivale smiled still, rocking forward in his chair with his hands
clasped round his knee.
"That is possible," he said, "and I recognise that. But I don't think I
am frightened at it If it is to be so, it is to be so. Though I suppose
one won't live after it. Well?"
"And the second question. You think, then, it is our duty to seek
happiness and joy and forget the sorrow of the world?"
"I think it is so for me," said he, "though I do think that there are
many people, most, I suppose, that realise themselves through sorrow and
suffering. I can only say that I believe I am not one of those. The way
does not lie for me there."
Evelyn got up, and stood leaning on the balustrade of the verandah. This
was beginning to touch him more closely now; his own threads were
beginning to interweave in the scheme Merivale drew.
"And for me," he said. "What is your diagnosis of me? Am I one of those
who will find themselves through sorrow or through joy?"
Merivale turned to him with almost the same eagerness in his face as
Evelyn himself showed.
"Ah, how can I tell you that?" he said, "beyond telling you at least
that in my opinion, which after all is only my opinion, it is in joy
that you, almost above everyone I know, will ripen and bear fruit.
Sorrow, asceticism is the road by which some approach happiness, but I
do not see you on that road. Renunciation for you----"
Evelyn got up and came a step closer.
"Yes? Yes?" he cried.
Merivale answered him by another question.
"Something has happened to you," he said. "What is it?"
"I have fallen in love," said the other. "I only knew it to-day. Yes,
her, Madge Ellington. Good God, man, I love her! And I am painting
her--I see her nearly daily alone; it is my business to study her face
and get to know her----"
His voice dropped suddenly.
"What am I to do?" he said after a moment. "Philip, the whole thing----"
"Ah, you can't go on," said Merivale quickly. "You must see that.
Wherever our paths lie, there is honour----"
"Honour?" cried Evelyn almost savagely. "Have I not as good a right to
love her as Philip has? You can't tie one down like that! Besides, how
can I help loving her? Night and day are not less in my control.
Besides, I have no reason to suppose that she loves me, so what harm is
done? But if she does or should----"
Again he stopped, for there was no need to go on; the conclusion of the
sentence was not less clear because it was unspoken. After a moment he
continued.
"And what was your view just now about renunciation for me?" he asked.
Merivale got up.
"I don't know what to say to you," he said. "What do you propose, you
yourself?"
"I propose to tell her what I know--that I love her," said he.
There was a long pause; Merivale was looking out over the dusky garden,
and his lips moved as if he was trying to frame some sentence, yet no
words came. In the East the moon was soon to rise behind the wedge of
beech-wood which came diagonally across the heath, and though it was not
yet visible, the sky was changing from the dark velvet blue which had
succeeded sunset to the mysterious dove colour which heralds the moon. A
night breeze stirred among the shrubs, and the scent of the stocks was
wafted into the verandah, twined, as it were, with the swooning
fragrance of the syringa. But for once Merivale was unconscious of the
witchery of the hour; in spite of himself, the interests, the problems,
the suffering and renunciation of human life, from which he had thought
he had weaned himself, claimed him again. He had tried, and in great
measure succeeded, in detaching himself from them, but he had not
completely broken away from them yet. He had enlisted under the banner
of joy, but now from the opposing hosts there came a cry to him, and he
could not shut his ears to it. Here was the necessity for suffering, it
could not but be that of these two friends of his, suffering poignant
and cruel lay before one of them, though which that one should be he did
not know. But the necessity was dragged before his notice.
Then from the garden his eyes rested on Evelyn again, as he stood close
to him with his keen, beautiful face, his eyes in which burned the
wonder of his love, his long, slim limbs and hands that trembled, all so
astonishingly alive, and all so instinct with the raptures and the
rewards of living, and he could not say "Your duty lies here," even had
he been certain that it was so, so grey and toneless, so utterly at
variance with the whole gospel of his own life would the advice have
been. Yet neither, for his detachment from human affairs was not, nor
could it be, complete, could he say to him "Yes, all the joy you can lay
hands on is yours," for on the other side stood Philip. But his
sympathies were not there.
He spread out his hands with a sort of hopeless gesture.
"I don't know what to say: I don't even know what I think," he said. "It
is one of those things that is without solution, or rather there are two
solutions, both of which are inevitably right, and utterly opposed. But
you have as yet no reason to think that she loves you; all goes to show
otherwise."
"Yes, all," said Evelyn softly, "but somehow I don't believe it. I can't
help that either."
Then suddenly he took hold of Merivale's shoulders with both hands.
"Ah, you don't understand," he said. "You were saying just now that you
and the river were indivisibly one. That is a mere figure of speech,
though I understand what you mean by it. But with me it is sober truth;
I am Madge. I have no existence apart from her. Some door has been
opened, I have passed through it into her. Half oneself! Someone says
man alone is only half himself. What nonsense! Till he loves he is
complete in himself, but then he ceases to be himself at all."
Wild as were his words, so utterly was he in the grip of his
newly-awakened passion that possessed him, there was something
convincing to Merivale about it. He might as well have tied a piece of
string across a line to stop a runaway locomotive as hope to influence
Evelyn by words or advice, especially since he at heart pulled in the
opposite way to the advice he might thus give. The matter was beyond
control; it must work itself out to its inevitable end.
"And when will you tell her?" he asked.
"I don't know. The moment I see she loves me, if that moment comes."
"And if it does not?"
Again his passion shook him like some great wave combing the weeds of
the sea.
"It must," he said.
That clearly was the last word on the subject, and even as he spoke the
rim of the moon a week from full topped the beech-wood, and flooded the
garden with silver, and both watched in silence till the three-quarter
circle swung clear of the trees. Just a month ago Evelyn had watched it
rising with Madge on the terrace of Philip's house, and the sight of it
now made the last month pass in review before him like some scene that
moved behind the actors, as in the first act in _Parsifal_. The light it
shed to-day seemed to flash back and illumine the whole of those weeks,
and showed him how in darkness that plant had grown which to-day had
flowered rose-coloured and perfect. Every day since then, when the seed
had first been planted in his soul, had it shot up towards the light;
there had been no day, so he felt now, on which the growth had stood
still; it had been uninterrupted from the first germination to this its
full flower. But the last word had been spoken, and when the moon had
cleared the tree-tops, Merivale turned to him.
"I seldom sleep in the house," he said, "and I certainly shall not
to-night."
"Where then?" asked the other.
"Oh, anywhere, often in several places. In fact, I seldom wake in the
morning where I go to bed in the evening."
"Sleep-walking?" suggested Evelyn.
"Oh, dear no! But you know all animals wake in the night and turn over,
or get up for a few moments and take a mouthful of grass. Well, the same
thing happens to me. I always wake about three in the morning, and walk
about a little, and, as I say, usually go to sleep again somewhere else.
But I suppose the dignity of man asserts itself, and I often go further
than animals. For instance, I shall probably go to sleep in the hammock
in the garden, and walk up into the beech-wood when I wake for the first
time."
"Ah, that does sound rather nice," said Evelyn appreciatively.
"Well, come and sleep out too. It will do you all the good in the world.
You can have the hammock; I'll lie on the grass. I always have a rug."
But Evelyn's appreciation was not of the practical sort.
"Heaven forbid!" he said. "My bedroom is good enough for me."
It was already late, and he took a candle and went upstairs, Merivale
following him to see he had all he wanted. His servant, however, had
arranged the utmost requirements in the most convenient way, and the
sight suddenly suggested a new criticism to Evelyn.
"Keeping a servant, too," he said. "Is not that frightfully
inconsistent?"
Merivale laughed.
"You don't suppose I keep a servant when I am alone?" he asked. "But I
find I am so bad at looking after the requirements of my guests that I
hire one if anyone happens to be here. He is a man from the hotel at
Brockenhurst."
"I apologise," said the other. "But do dismiss him to-morrow. For I
didn't want to come to an hotel; I wanted to see how the Hermit really
lived."
"Stop over to-morrow then, and you will see," said Merivale. "But I keep
a woman in the house, who cooks."
"That also is inconsistent."
"No, I don't think so. It takes longer than you would imagine to do all
the housework yourself. I tried it last winter and found it not worth
while. Besides, dusting and cleaning are so absorbing. I could think of
nothing else."
"But doesn't she find it absorbing?"
Merivale laughed.
"I feel sure she doesn't," he said, "or she would do it better. But when
I dusted for myself, nothing short of perfection would content me. I was
dusting all day long."
Evelyn looked doubtfully at his bed.
"Shall I have to make it--whatever 'making' means?" he asked, "if I
sleep in it? If so, I really don't think it would be worth while.
Besides, I know I shan't sleep, and if I don't sleep I am a wreck."
Merivale raised his eyebrows.
"Surely you sleep when you want sleep just as you eat when you are
hungry," he said, "or is that an exploded superstition?"
"Quite exploded. I shan't sleep a wink," said Evelyn, beginning to
undress. "Oh, how can I?" he cried.
"And you really want to?"
"Why, of course. I'm as cross as two sticks if I don't."
Merivale shook his head.
"I'll make you sleep if you wish," he said. "Get into bed. I must go and
turn out the lights. I'll be back in two minutes."
He left the room, and Evelyn undressed quickly.
All that had happened to-day ran like a mill-race in his head, and,
arguing from previous experience, he knew perhaps the tithe of what
awaited him when the light was out. For often before, when a picture,
not as now the original of it, occupied him, misshapen parodies of rest
had been his till cock-crow. First of all would come a sense of
satisfaction at being alone, at being able to let his thoughts take
their natural course uninterrupted; he would feast his eyes on the
untenanted blackness, letting his imagination paint there all that it
had been so intensely occupied with during the day. But then as the
brain wearied, in place of the ideal he had been striving for would come
distorted reflections of it, seen as if in some bloated mirror, and
still awake he would see his thoughts translated into some horrible
grotesque that would startle him into sitting-up in bed, just for the
grasping of the bed-post, or the feeling of the wall, to bring himself
back into the realm of concrete things. Otherwise the grotesques would
grow into dancing, shapeless horrors, and in a moment he would have to
wrench himself free from the clutches of nightmare and start up, with
dripping brow and quivering throat that could not scream, into reality
again. But to-night he feared no nightmare; he knew simply that sleep
could not come to him, his excitement had invaded and conquered the
drowsy lands, and though he felt now that he would be content to think
and think and love till morning, morning, he knew, would, like an
obsequious waiter, present the bill for the sleepless night.
Consequently, when Merivale again entered, he welcomed him.
"I demand a conjuring-trick," he said, "I know I shan't sleep at all,
unless you have some charm for me. Good God, how can I sleep? And, after
all, why should I want to? Isn't waking good enough?"
Merivale paused; waking and sleeping seemed to him no more matters for
concern than they seem to an animal which sleeps when it is sleepy, and
wakes when its sleepiness has gone.
"That is entirely for you to settle," he said. "If you want to sleep I
can make you; if you don't, I shall go to sleep myself. I shall do that
in any case," he added.
Evelyn was already overwrought with the events of the day, and he spoke
petulantly.
"Oh, make me sleep, then!" he said. "There is to-morrow coming. I can
do nothing to-night, so let's get it over."
"Lie down, then," said the Hermit, "and look at me, look at my eyes, I
mean."
He sat down on the edge of Evelyn's bed, and spoke low and slow.
"The wind is asleep," he said, "it sleeps among the trees of the forest,
for the time of sleep has come, and everything sleeps, your love sleeps
too. Lie still;" he said, as Evelyn moved, "the trees of the forest
sleep; and their leaves sleep, and high in the branches the birds sleep.
Everything sleeps, the tired even and the weary sleep, and those who are
strong sleep, and those who are weak."
Evelyn's eyelids quivered, shut a moment, then half-opened again.
"The flowers sleep," said Merivale, "and the eyelids of their petals are
closed, as your eyelids are closing. Sleep, the black soft wing, has
shut over them, as the wings of birds shut over their heads. The earth
sleeps, the very stones of her sleep; she will not stir till morning, or
if she stirs it will be but to sleep again. The sad and the happy sleep,
the very sea sleeps and is hushed, and the tides of the sea are asleep.
Sleep, too," he said, slightly raising his voice, "sleep till they
wake--sleep till I wake you."
He waited a moment, but Evelyn's eyelids did not even quiver again. Then
he blew out the light and left the room.
Merivale stepped softly down the stairs, and went out on to the
verandah, where they had dined a few hours before. At the touch of the
soft night-air all the trouble that during this evening had been his was
evaporated and vanished. The sum of his consciousness was contained in
the bracket, that he was alive, and that he was part of life. It was
like stepping into an ocean that received him and bore him on its
surface, or took him to its depths; which mattered not at all--the thing
embraced and encompassed him. He went back again to it from the fretful
trivialities that had arrested him as the midge on his wrist could for
the moment arrest him, trivially and momentarily causing him some
infinitesimal annoyance. But that was over; the huge sky was above him,
the world was asleep, and was his possession. It--the material part of
it--was but a dream, the spirit of it all suffused him. There was life
everywhere, life in its myriad forms, its myriad beauties. The sleepy
voice of the river was part of him, the moon was he, the utmost twinkle
of a star was he also. Yet no less the smallest blade of grass was he;
there was no atom of the universe with which he did not claim identity.
Yes, there was one, the fretting of the human spirit, whereas his own
did not fret. What he could interpret existence into was to him
satisfying. For himself he longed and wished for nothing, except to hold
himself open, as he indeed held himself, for the moods of Nature to play
upon. Yet in that bedroom upstairs he had left one, asleep indeed by the
mere exercise of a stronger will on his, who would to-morrow awake and
combat and perhaps succumb to forces that were stronger than he. For
himself, he combatted with no force; he but yielded in welcome to what
to him was irresistible. But Evelyn, who slept now, would awake to try
his strength against another. Which was right?
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
SEVENTH
Gladys Ellington, as has been remarked, was not in the least
ill-natured, and never even hinted ill-natured things against anybody
unless she was certain to be undiscovered. So, as all the world knew,
since she was not "quite devoted," a phrase of her's, to her
mother-in-law, the merest elements of wisdom demanded of her that she
should be unreserved in her commendation of Madge's engagement.
Unreserved, in consequence, she was, even to her own husband. He also
was quite unreserved, but his unreserve was whiskered and red-faced like
himself, and bore not the slightest resemblance to his wife's voluble
raptures.
"Seems to me," he said, "that Madge has married him for his money. Don't
believe she loves him. Cold-blooded fish like that. Don't tell me. Hate
a girl marrying for money. American and so on. Good love match, like you
and me, Gladys. I hadn't a sou, you hadn't a penny. Same sort of thing,
eh?"
Lord Ellington usually ended his sentences with "Eh?" If he did not end
them with "Eh?" he ended them with "What?" The effect in either case was
the same, for, like Pilate, he did not wait for an answer. "Eh" or
"what," in fact, meant that he had not finished; if he had finished, he
ended up his period with "Don't tell me." As a consequence, perhaps,
nobody told him anything. All worked together for good here, because he
would not have understood it if they had. He was fond of his wife, and
slightly fonder of his dinner. Why she had married him was a mystery;
but there are so many mysteries of this kind that it is best to leave
them alone.
Gladys, on this occasion (a speech which had given rise to his, in so
far as any speech or connected thought would account for what Lord
Ellington would say next), had merely remarked that the engagement was
very, very nice.
"You seem to object to him," she said, "because he is rich. That is very
feeble. I never knew riches to be a bar to anything except the kingdom
of heaven, with which you, Ellington, are not immediately concerned. But
you are much more immediately concerned with South African mines. Now,
he is dining here to-night, and so is Madge. If you can't get something
out of him between the time we leave the room and you join us, I really
shall despair of you."
A heavy, jocular look came into Lord Ellington's face.
"You don't despair of me yet, Gladys?" he said.
"No, not quite. Very nearly, but not quite. Oh, Ellington, do wake up
for once to-night! Philip Home moves a finger in that dreadful office of
his in the City, somewhere E.C., and you and I are beggars, even worse
than now, or comparatively opulent. Ask him which finger he moves. If
only I were you, I could do it in two minutes. So I'll allow you ten.
Not more than that, because we've got the Reeves' box at the opera, and
Melba is singing."
"Lot of squawking," said he. "Why not sit at home? Who wants to hear
squawking? All in Italian too. Don't understand a word, nor do you. And
you don't know one note from another, nor do I. Don't tell me."
Gladys required all her tact, which is the polite word for evasion,
sometimes, in getting her way with her husband, and all her diplomacy,
which is the polite word for lying. If he got a notion into his head it
required something like the Lisbon earthquake to get it out; if, on the
other hand, a thing commoner with him, he had not a notion in his head,
it required a flash of lightning, followed by the steady application of
a steam-hammer to get it in. Also in talking to him it was almost as
difficult to concentrate one's own attention as it was to command his,
for the fact that he was being talked to produced in him, unless he was
dining, an irresistible tendency to make a quarter-deck of the room he
was in, up and down which he shuffled. When this became intolerable,
Gladys told him not to quarter-deck, but this she only did as a last
resort, because he attended rather more when he was quarter-decking than
when not.
"Never mind about the opera then," she said, "you needn't go unless you
like. But what is important is that since Madge is going to marry Philip
Home, we should reap all the advantages we can. Perhaps there is only
one, apart from having another very comfortable house to stay in, but
that is a big one. He can make some money for us."
This was only the second time she had mentioned this, and in consequence
she was rather agreeably surprised to find that her husband grasped it.
He even appeared to think about it, and suggested an amendment, though
the process required, it seemed to Gladys, miles of quarter-decking.
"Eh, what?" he said. "Something South African? Put in twopence and get
out fourpence, with a dividend in the interim? By Gad, yes! But you'd
better get it out of him, Gladys, not I. Lovely woman, you know; a man
tells everything to lovely woman. Don't tell me."
This had never occurred to Gladys, and she always respected anyone to
whom things occurred before they occurred to her.
"How very simple," she said, "and much better than my suggestion. I
suppose it was so simple that it never occurred to me."
Ellington chuckled, and as the conversation was over, sat down again to
read the evening paper, which had just come in. He read the morning
paper all the morning, and talked of it at lunch, and the evening paper
all evening, and talked of it at dinner; these two supplied him with his
mental daily bread. All the same, he never seemed well-informed even
about current events; he managed somehow to miss the point of all the
news he read, and could never distinguish between Kuroki and Kuropatkin.
Three days had passed since Madge had had her last sitting for her
portrait, and those three days had passed for her in a sort of dream of
disquietude which was not wholly pain. She had not seen Evelyn since,
and scarcely Philip, for he had been harder worked than usual, and last
night, when he was to have dined with them, had sent word that he could
not possibly get there in time. They were to go to the theatre
afterwards, and he said he would join them there. She had upbraided him
laughingly for his desertion of them, telling him that he put the
pleasure of business higher than the pleasure of her society. For retort
he had the fact that when he was not at work he was never anywhere else
but in her society, whereas two days ago, when he was free one morning,
she refused to ride with him because she was to give a sitting to
Evelyn. But the moment he had said this he was sorry for it, for Madge
had flushed, and turned from him, biting her lip. But though he was
sorry for the undesigned pain he had apparently given her, his heart
could not but sing to him. She could not bear such a word from him even
in jest.
But this had not been the cause of Madge's disquietude; Philip's remark
indeed had, so far as it alone was concerned, gone in at one ear but to
come out at the other. In its passage through it had touched something
that made her wince with sudden pain. But the pain passed, and a warmth,
a glow of some secret kind, remained. Disquieting it was, but not
painful, except that at intervals a sort of pity and remorse would stab
her, and at other times her heart, like Philip's, could not but sing to
her for the splendour of love which was beginning to dawn. She could not
help that dawn coming, and she could not help glorying in its light.
Of what should be the practical issue she did not at once think. It was
but three weeks ago that she had promised to marry Philip, and then her
honesty had made her tell him that she gave him liking, esteem,
affection, all that she was conscious that it was in her power to give.
And now, when she knew that she was possessed of more than these, and
that the new possession was not hers to give him, a long day of
indecision, this day on which in the evening they were to dine together
with Gladys Ellington, had been hers. But gradually, slowly, with
painful gropings after light, she had made up her mind.
She had no choice--her choice was already made, and all duty, all
obedience, all honour, called her to fulfil the promise she had made, to
fulfil it, too, in no niggardly lip-service sense of the word, but to
fulfil it loyally. She must turn her back to the dawn which had come too
late, she must never look there, she must for ever avert her eyes from
it. Above all, she must do all that lay in her power to prevent that
brightness growing. She must, in fact, not see Evelyn again of her own
free will.
Then the difficulties, each to be met and overcome, began to swarm thick
about her. First and foremost there was the portrait, for which she was
engaged to give him a sitting to-morrow. That, at any rate, as far as
this particular sitting was concerned, was easily managed, a note of
three lines expressing regret did that. This, however, was only a
temporary measure, it but put off for this one occasion the necessity of
meeting what lay before her. For she knew she must not sit to him again;
she dared not risk that, she must not give this strange new rapture in
her heart the food that would make it grow. Yet, again, she must not act
like a mad-woman, and what reasonable cause could she give for so
strange a freak? Perhaps if she went there with Philip, or if she took
her mother with her.
Yet that did not dispose of the question. Evelyn was one of her future
husband's warmest friends. In the ordinary course of things they must
often meet, but till she had conquered herself, made sure of herself,
such meetings were impossible. And how could she ever be sure of
herself, to whom had come this utterly unlooked for thing, a thing so
unlooked for that only a few weeks before she had consented to its being
dismissed as a practical impossibility?
Then came a thought which, for the very shame of it, was bracing. Not by
word or look or sign had Evelyn ever showed that he regarded her with
the faintest feeling that answered hers. She remembered well the rise of
the full moon on the terrace of Philip's house above Pangbourne, how he
had called attention to it, merely to point out that it was not in
drawing, how she herself on that occasion had noticed how different he
was to the ordinary moonlight-walker. No hint of sentiment, no sign of
the vaguest desire towards the most harmless flirtation had appeared in
him then, nor had any appeared since. While she was sitting to him, half
the time he scowled at her, the other half he bubbled with boyish
nonsense. For very shame she must turn her back on the dawn.
Dinner was to be early to-night, as the objective was Melba and the
opera, and her maid came in to tell her that dressing-time was already
overstepped. She got up, but paused for a moment at the window, looking
out from Buckingham Gate over the blue haze that overhung St. James'
Park, driving her resolution home. She half-pitied, half-spurned
herself, telling herself at one moment that it was hard that she had to
suffer thus, at another that she was despicable for thinking of
suffering when her road was so clearly marked for her. If what had
happened was not her fault, still less should there be any fault of hers
in what should happen. Clearly the future was in her own control; of
the future she could make what she would.
Her mother was not coming with her to-night; indeed, she seldom wasted
the golden evening hours at the opera, when there was a rubber of bridge
so certainly at her command, and Madge went into the drawing-room to
wish her good-night before she set off. Prosperity--and the last three
weeks seemed to Lady Ellington to be most prosperous--had always a
softening effect on her, and she was particularly gracious to her
daughter, since Madge was responsible for so large a part of these
auspicious events.
"So you're just off, dear," she said. "Dear me, you are rather late, and
I mustn't keep you. But give my love to Philip, and let him see you
home, and if I am in--you can ask them at the door--bring him in for a
few minutes. And don't forget your sitting with Mr. Dundas to-morrow."
"Ah, I have put that off," said Madge, "I am rather busy!"
"A pity, surely."
"Well, I have sent the note, I am afraid. Good-night, mother, in case I
am in first."
Philip had already arrived when she got to her cousin's house, and they
went down to dinner. Lord Ellington had got the news of the evening
feverishly mixed up in his head, and was disposed to mingle fragments of
Stock Exchange with it, forgetful, apparently, that this had been
relegated to his wife. But his natural incoherence redeemed the
situation, and when dinner was over it was already time to start for the
opera. While Gladys got her cloak, however, the two lovers had a few
private minutes, as the master of the house remained in the dining-room
when they went out. Philip had sent her that day a diamond pendant which
she was wearing now.
"It is too good of you, Philip," she said, "and I can't tell you how I
value it. It is most beautiful. But why should you always be sending me
things?"
Philip was usually serious, and always sincere.
"Because I can't help it," he said. "I must give you signs of what I
feel, and even these clumsy, material signs are something."
That sincerity touched the girl.
"I know what you feel," she said. "I want to have it never absent from
my mind. I want to think of nothing else but that."
This was sincere too, the outcome of this long day of thought. But
Philip came a little closer to her, and his voice vibrated as he spoke.
"That contents me utterly," he said--"that and the gift of yourself that
you made me."
She gave a long sigh.
"Oh, Philip!" she began. But the voice of Gladys called to her from the
passage outside the drawing-room.
"Come, Madge. Come, Mr. Home," she cried. "We are already so late, and I
can't bear to miss a note of _Bohême_."
Apparently to be present in the opera-house when _Bohême_ was going on
was sufficient for Gladys, and constituted not missing a note, for she
spent that small portion of the first act which still remained to be
performed after their arrival in an absorbed examination of the
occupants of the other boxes, and whispered communications as to the
result of her investigations to Madge. The fall of the curtain had the
effect of rendering these more audible.
"Yes, absolutely everybody is here; so good of you, dear Mr. Home, to
ask us to-night. Of course, it is the last night Melba sings, is it not?
How wonderful, is she not? That long last note quite thrilled me. So
sad, too, the last act, it always makes me cry! Oh! there is Madame
Odintseff, dearest Madge, did you ever see such ropes of pearls--cables
you might call them. Who is that she is talking to? I know her face
quite well. That's her daughter, yes, the sandy-coloured thing, rather
like a rabbit. They say she's engaged to Lord Hitchin, but I don't
believe it. Dear Madge, is it not brilliant? You look so well, dear,
to-night. If only Mr. Dundas could paint you as you are looking now! By
the way, how is the portrait getting on?"
Philip also had risen when the act ended, and was looking out over the
house. Here he joined in.
"Evelyn was absolutely jubilant when I saw him a few days ago," he said.
"And though he is usually jubilant over the last thing, I saw he thought
there was something extra-special about this. By-the-way, Madge, you are
sitting to him to-morrow afternoon, are you not? I shall try to look in;
my spate of work is over, I hope."
"Oh! I'm afraid I have had to put it off," said she. "I couldn't manage
it to-morrow."
She fingered her fan nervously for a moment.
"In fact, Philip," she said, "I am so dreadfully full of engagements for
the next week or two that I don't see how I can squeeze in another
sitting. I am so ashamed of myself, but I can't help it. I wish you
would go down to Mr. Dundas' studio to-morrow and tell him so."
Philip looked at her a moment in blank surprise.
"Ah, but you can't do that," he said; "a painter isn't like a tailor to
whom you say, 'I am not coming to try on; send it home as it is.'"
Madge lost her head a little; the burden of the hours of this day
pressed heavily on her.
"Ah! but that is what I want him to do," she cried. "It is a wonderful
portrait; he said so himself. There is a little background that must be
put in, but I needn't be there for that."
Gladys Ellington had turned her attention again to the house, and, with
her opera-glasses glued to her eyes, was spying and observing in all
directions. Philip cast one glance at her, and rightly considered
himself alone with Madge, for the other was blind and deaf to them.
"Madge, is anything wrong?" he asked gently.
"No, nothing is wrong," she said, recovering herself a little. "But I
ask you to do as I say. I can't bear sitting for that portrait any more,
and Mr. Dundas--he bores me."
That got said, also she managed to smile at him naturally.
"That is all, dear Philip," she added. "Pray don't let us talk of it any
more."
"And you wish me to tell Evelyn what you say?" he asked.
"Yes, anything, anything," she said. "I don't want to sit to him again.
But make it natural, if you can. Look at the portrait; tell him you
don't want it touched any more. Believe me, that is best."
She paused a moment.
"I am excited and rather overwrought to-night somehow," she said, "and
you mustn't indeed think that there is anything the matter. Indeed,
there is nothing. Tell me you believe that?"
"Why, dear, of course, if you tell me so," he said.
"I do tell you so."
As has been mentioned before, there were two Philips; one known only to
the four people who knew him best, the other the Philip who showed a
sterner and harder face to the world. And though, since he was with
Madge, the Philip of the inner sanctum, where only the intimates were
admitted, was in possession, yet the door of the sanctum, as it were,
opened for a moment, and the other Philip, quick as a lizard, glanced
in. His appearance was of the most momentary duration, but he did look
in.
She laid her hand on his arm as she said these last words, then left the
back of the box, where they had been standing, and took a chair next
Lady Ellington.
"How full it is!" she said. "Look at the stalls too; they are like an
ant-heap, covered with brilliant, crawling ants. How hard it is to
recognise people if one is above them. I'm sure there are a hundred
people I know, but the tops of heads are like nothing except the tops of
heads. How many bald heads too! What a blessing we don't go bald like
men. Who is that walking up the gangway now? I'm sure I know him. Ah!
it's Mr. Dundas."
The sudden stream of her talk stopped, as if a tap had been turned on.
Her eyes left the stalls and gazed vacantly over the boxes opposite. She
was conscious of wondering what would happen next--whether she would
speak, or her companion, or whether Philip would say something. Then it
seemed to her nobody would say anything any more; there was to be this
dreadful silence for ever. That possibility, at any rate, was soon
averted, for Gladys signalled violently to Evelyn, and spoke.
"Yes, he sees us," she said. "Mr. Home, do put the door of the box open,
it is so stuffy. And Mr. Dundas I am sure is coming up. He's such a
darling, isn't he?"
The greater part of her speech was justified by realities. Evelyn had
seen them; the heat was undeniable; also, in answer to the violent
signalling he had received, mere politeness, to say nothing of
inclination, would have made him come. But he had seen too who sat in
profile by Lady Ellington, and he took two and three steps in the stride
as he mounted the staircases. And before Madge had time to put into
execution her very unwise idea of asking Philip not to let him in, he
was at the door of the box.
"You lordly box-holder," he said to him, "just let me in. How are you,
Lady Ellington? Yes, I'm just back from the Hermitage, to-night only,
from three days in the forest with Merivale. How are you, Miss
Ellington? I had to come up to-night, or I shouldn't have been able to
keep the appointment to-morrow."
A sense of utter helplessness seized Madge; she could not even respond
by a word to his greeting, for his presence merely was the only thing
that mattered, the only thing she loved and dreaded. And he continued:
"Half-past two, isn't it?" he said. "I could have come up to-morrow, of
course, but it was necessary for me to have a morning's work at the
background before I troubled you again."
Then Gladys broke in.
"Too wonderful, isn't it?" she said, "the portrait, I mean. But, Mr.
Dundas, who is that just opposite with rubies? I'm sure you've painted
her. That great pink thing there, who must have come from the west coast
of Asia Minor. How naughty of me!"
But Evelyn apparently condoned the naughtiness; he mentioned the name of
the great pink thing, and turned to Madge again.
"But by half-past two I shall be ready," he said. "Please, if it is not
an impossible request, please be punctual. Art takes so long, you know.
Not that life is short. Nobody ever died too soon."
She turned to him, the diamond pendant that Philip had sent her that day
glittering on the smooth whiteness of her bosom.
"I am so sorry," she said, "and I know I ought to have let you know
before, Mr. Dundas. But I can't come to-morrow. I wrote you this evening
only, I did not know you were out of town, explaining--at least
saying--I could not come."
Philip--the real, intimate Philip--heard this. And it was he only, the
lover of this girl, who spoke in reply.
"We have settled that I shall come instead," he said. "So your time
won't be wasted, Evelyn. You have to paint me too, you know, and if you
want it to be characteristic, make a study of a telephone and a
tape-machine. Half-past two, I think you said."
There came a sudden hush over the crowded house as the lights went down.
Philip laid his hand on Evelyn's shoulder, as he sat in the front of the
box between the two ladies.
"Half-past two, then, to-morrow," he repeated.
The hint was plain enough, and Evelyn took it, and stumbled his way out
of the box to regain his seat in the stalls. What had happened, what
this all meant, he did not and could not know; he knew only what he was
left with, namely, that Madge for some reason would not sit to him
to-morrow. In his eager way he searched for a hundred motives, yet none
satisfied him, and he was forced to fall back on the obvious and simple
one, that she was busy. Nothing in the world could be more likely, his
whole practical self assured him of that; but he felt somehow as if
someone had leaned out of the window when he called at a house and had
shouted stentoriously to the servant who opened the door, "I am not at
home." He was bound to accept a thing which he did not believe.
Then he questioned himself as to whether the fault was his. Yet that was
scarcely possible, for it was not till after he had last seen her that
the knowledge of his love for her had dawned on him. It was impossible
that he could have made that betrayal of himself, for until she had gone
he had not known that there was anything to betray. He and she had
always been on terms of the frankest comradeship, yet to-night her
manner had somehow been subtly yet essentially different. All the good
comradeship had gone from it, the indefinable feeling of "being friends"
was no longer there. Was it that the "being friends" was no longer
sufficient for him, and did the change really lie in himself? He felt
sure it did not; Madge was different.
Evelyn was not of an analytical mind; his inferences were based usually
on instinct rather than reason, and reason was powerless to help him
here and his instinct drew no inference whatever. However, Philip was
coming to take her hour to-morrow, and he would try to find out
something about this. Indeed, perhaps there was nothing to find, for he
knew that now and for ever his own view of Madge would be coloured by
the super-sensitiveness of love. Then a suspicion altogether unworthy
crossed his mind. Was it possible that Philip had.... But, to do him
justice, he instantly dismissed it.
Gladys, like the stag at e
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