For good luck’s sake smile, Ruthita,” said my grandmother. “There you’ve sat all through breakfast lookin’ like a week o’ Sundays, with your face as long as a yard o’ pump water. What’s the matter with you, child? Ain’t you well?”
I saw the brightness come into Ruthita’s eyes and the lashes tremble. I knew by the signs that directly she heard her own voice she would begin to cry, so I answered for her.
“I can tell you what’s the matter. I upset her last night. It was nearly twelve when I got home from my walk with Mrs. Carpenter. Ruthie’d got herself all worked up. Thought we’d been getting drowned again or something, didn’t you, Ruthie? It was too bad of me to keep her sitting up so late.”
A heavy silence fell. Ruthita dropped her eyes, trying to recover her composure. My grandmother’s face masked itself in a non-committal stare. She gazed past me out of the window, and seemed to hold her breath; only the faint tinkling of the gold chain against the jet of her bodice, told how her breath came and went. She had placed her hand on the coffee-pot as I began to speak. When I ended, it stayed there motionless. From the bake-house across the courtyard came the bump, bang, bump of the bakers pounding the dough into bread.
“So you stayed out with Mrs. Carpenter till nearly twelve?”
My grandmother never used dialect when she wished to be impressive. Her tones were icily refined and haughty—
I recognized them as belonging to her company manners. She could be crushingly aloof and dignified when her sense of the moralities was offended. She had practised her talent for “settin’ folks down and makin’ ’em feel like three penn’orth o’ happence” to some purpose on grizzled sea-captains.
“Yes, till nearly twelve. It was pretty late, wasn’t it? We met some interesting people camping on the marshlands—old friends of mine and Ruthita’s.”
“Indeed! And you walked back from the Broads about midnight with a married woman.”
“Oh, no. It wasn’t much after ten when we started back. Time passed quickly; we didn’t realize how late it was getting. It didn’t matter, except for Ruthita. It was bright moonlight. The country looked perfect.”
“It must ha’ done,” said my grandmother sarcastically.
“It did. Some day we must try it all together.”
“And who were your interesting friends? Respectable people, no doubt, to be camping on the marshlands.”
“They weren’t respectable. They were gipsies.” Then, turning to Ruthita, “It was Lilith that we met. You remember Lilith of Epping Forest—that time we ran away to get married. Fancy meeting her after all these years! And just as I left, I saw G’liath drive up. I could swear it was the same old caravan, Ruthie.”
Curiosity and love of romance melted my grandmother’s reserve.
“G’liath! Why, that’s the gipsy family to which Sir Charles’s mother belonged. They must be kind o’ relatives o’ yours.”
“I suppose they must. I never thought of that. I’ll have to ask Lilith about it. They were on their way to Yarminster Fair. We’ll run over and see them.”
Just then the errand boy, who was minding the shop, tapped at the keeping-room door and handed in a note for me. I saw that it was unstamped and addressed in a handwriting that I did not recognize.
“Where did this come from?”
“It war left jist nar acrost the counter by a sarvant-gal.”
“All right.”
Ruthita was telling my grandmother all that she could remember of Lilith. I ripped open the envelope and read:
Something has happened. Must see you at once. Come as soon as you can. Vi.
“Who’s your letter from?”
“From Mrs. Carpenter.”
“Mrs. Carpenter again! What does she want? It’s not more’n nine hours since you saw her.”
“She wants my advice on—on a business matter.”
“Humph! I ’ope she may profit by it.”
As I was sauntering out of the shop Ruthita called after me in her high clear voice, “Going to take me to Yarminster to-day, Dante?”
“Don’t know yet. I’ll tell you later.”
Until I reached the top of the street I strolled jauntily; I was sure I was being watched. I had left an atmosphere of jealous annoyance and baffled suspicion behind. It was absurd to be nursed and guarded by affectionate relatives in the way I was.
I was puzzled by Vi’s note. I worked out all kinds of conjectures as I jostled my way through fisher-girls and sailors up the High Street.
I was shown into the room at the back of the black flint house, which overlooked the sea. The windows were open wide; wind fluttered the curtains. Breakfast things were only partially cleared from the table. Upstairs I could hear Dorrie’s piping voice and, now and then, could catch a phrase of what she was saying.
“Let me thee him too, Vi. Oh, pleath. No, I don’t want to play wiv Annie. I want to play wiv Dante.”
Then I heard the thump, thump, thump of Dorrie stumping from stair to stair by way of protest, and the heavy step of Annie taking her forcibly to the kitchen.
Vi descended a moment later. She entered without eagerness, shutting the door carefully behind her. There was never anything of hurry or neglect in her appearance; she always looked fresh and trimly attired. The high color in her usually pale cheeks was the only sign of perturbation.
She crossed the room towards me with a slow, swaying motion, and halted a foot away, holding out her hand. I took it in mine, pressing it gently. Her mouth was quivering. She was making an effort to be formally polite and was not succeeding. The soft rustling of her skirts, the slow rise and fall of her bosom, her delicate fragrance and timid beauty—everything about her was bewilderingly feminine. What arguments, I wondered, what campaigns of caution, what capitulations of wild desires to duty were going on behind that smooth white forehead? My grip on her hand tightened; I drew her to me. Her cold remoteness added to my yearning.
“What is it? Why did you send for me? You’ve changed since last night.”
She drew her hand free from mine. I saw that, for the first time since I had known her, she was wearing a band of gold upon her wedding-finger.
“It’s all over, Dante.”
She whispered the words, wringing her hands and staring away from me out to sea. I slipped my arm about her shoulder. “It can never be all over, dearest.”
For answer she handed me a letter. It bore a United States stamp and was addressed to her in a bold, emphatic, perpendicular hand which revealed the writer’s vigorous determination of character.
“From my husband. Read it.”
Standing a little apart from her at the window, I drew out a carefully folded letter. It was dated from Sheba, Massachusetts, nine days previous to its arrival. While I read it, I watched her stealthily, how she stood charmingly irresolute, twisting the gold-band off and on her finger.
My dearest Vi:
I have written you many times, asking you to fix definitely the day of your return. You’ve put me off with all kinds of excuses. Latterly you have not even referred to my question. My dear child, don’t think I blame you; you probably have your own reasons for what you are doing. But people are beginning to talk about us here. For your own sake you ought to return. We’ve always tried to play fair by one another. You were always game, Vi; and now it’s up to you.
I’m lonely. I want my little Dorrie. Most of all I want my wife. I can’t stand this absence much longer. On receipt of this send me a cable “Coming,” followed by the date of your sailing. If I don’t receive such a cable within ten days of mailing this letter, I shall jump on a boat and come over. I don’t distrust you, but I’m worn out with waiting. Can’t you understand how I want you? Nothing in the world matters to me, my child, except you.
Your affectionate husband,
Randall.
I re-folded it methodically and returned it to the envelope. I tried to picture this man who had sent it. He was manifestly elderly. Probably he was portly, a trifle pompous and genially paternal in his manners. What volumes his trick of calling her “my child” revealed concerning their relations. I contrasted him with Vi. Vi with her eager youth, her passion to taste life’s rapture, her slim white body so alluring and so gracious, her physical fineness, her possibilities for bestowing and receiving natural joy. If I let her go, she would slowly lose her zest for life. She would forget that she was a woman and would sink prematurely into stolid middle-age. Her possibilities of motherhood would slip from her untaken and never to be renewed. The little rascals, with golden hair and features which should perpetuate her beauty, would never be born to her. Those children should be hers and mine. Hers and mine. How the words beat upon my brain! They were like the fists of little children, battering against the closed doors of existence. It was monstrous that the justice of this husband’s claim to her should be based on his injustice in having married her.
Again I formed my mental picture of him, formed it with the cruel sarcasm of youth. His body was deteriorated; his skin puckered and yellow; the fine lines of suppleness and straightness gone; the muscles flabby and jaded. Then I looked at her: gold and ivory, with poppies for a mouth. Sweet and nobly chaste. A woman to set a man on fire—to drive him to the extremes of sorrow or gladness. A woman to sin for.
I turned from the window and took one step towards her. I could feel her body throbbing against mine. The fierce sweet ecstasy of my delight hurt her. I saw nothing but her eyes. All else in the world was darkness.
“Let me go,” she panted.
“Do you want to go?” I whispered.
She sank her head on my shoulder. Her arms were about my neck. I could only see her golden hair. Her answer came to me broken and muffled. “No, no, no.”
I carried her to the sofa and knelt beside her.
“You won’t ever despise me, will you?”
How absurd her question sounded.
Without any reference to our ultimate purpose, we set about making our plans. We must get away from Ransby. We must not be seen together any more that day. We would meet at the station that evening, and travel up to London together by the train leaving Ransby at six-thirty-eight. Our plans went no further.
Now that all had been arranged, a new embarrassment arose between us—a sweet shamefulness. She clung to me, yet she cast down her eyes, her cheeks encrimsoned, not daring to look me in the face. We touched one another shyly and shuddered at the contact. Our hearts were too full for words, our thoughts too primitively intimate to be expressed. The veils had dropped from our eyes. The mystery of mysteries lay exposed. We saw one another, natural in our passions—exiles from society. No artificial restraints stood between us; in our conduct with one another we were free to be governed by our own desires.
A scurry of little feet in the passage. The sound of heavier ones pursuing. We sprang apart. Dorrie entered, running with her arms stretched out towards me. “Catch me, Dante. Don’t let her get me.”
The rueful face of Annie appeared in the doorway; her plump arms covered to the elbows with flour. “If ’ee please, mum,” she said, “it warn’t no fault o’ mine. She nipped out afore I could get a-holt o’ her, while I war a-makin’ o’ the pudden.”
“You’re juth horwid,” cried Dorrie. “Go ’way. I want to thpeak to Dante.”
She scrambled on my knee, clutching tightly to my coat till Annie had vanished. Then she tossed her curls out of her eyes, and told me all that she and Ruthita had done together on the previous evening. While she was talking, I watched Vi, trying to realize the seemingly impossible truth that she had promised herself to me, and would soon be mine. A host of bewildering images rushed through my mind as I gazed into the future. I was amazed at myself that I should feel no fear of the step which we contemplated.
“Old thtupid,” cried Dorrie in an aggrieved voice, “you weren’t lithening.”
She smoothed her baby fingers up and down my face, coaxing me to give her my attention.
“Sorry, little lady, but I must be going. You must tell me all about it some other time.”
“All wite,” she acquiesced contentedly; “it’s a pwomith,”
Vi accompanied me to the door.
“To-night.”
“To-night.”
“What wath you thaying?” asked Dorrie.
“Nothing, my darling.”
My grandmother was sitting behind her counter, knitting, when I entered. She sank her chin and looked at me humorously over her spectacles. “Well, my man of business, did she take your advice?”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t she? She’s seen my grannie, and knows how she’s profited by it.”
“Clever boy,” she retorted. “Who made your shirt? When a man of business is born among the Cardovers, pears’ll grow on pines. Look at your father. Look at the Spuffler. Look at yourself. I hope she won’t act on it. What was it?”
“Can’t tell you now. I find I’ve got to run up to London to-night and I’ve promised to take Ruthie to Yarminster. There’s only just time.”
“What’s takin’ you to London? You didn’t say anythin’ about it this marnin’.” She dropped her knitting in her lap. “Dante, is it anythin’ to do with her?”
“Partly.”
She beckoned me nearer to her. I leant over the counter. She glanced meaningly towards the door of the keeping-room. I stooped lower till our heads nearly touched. “You’d better stay there, laddie,” she whispered. “I’ve been thinkin’ and usin’ me eyes. This ain’t no place fur you at present. She’s gettin’ too fond of you and you of her. I know.” She nodded. “I’ve been through it. I watched your pa at it.”
“At what?”
“At what you and Mrs. Carpenter are doin’. Don’t pretend you’re a fool, Dante, ’cause you’re not—and neither is your old grannie.”
Just then Ruthita looked out of the keeping-room. I was glad of the excuse to cut this dangerous conversation short. “Hurry up, Ruthie; get on your togs. I’m going to drive you over to Yarminster.”
When she had gone, my grandmother turned to me again. “And there’s another of ’em. Lovers can’t keep their secrets to theirselves nohow—they give theirselves away with every breath. Did ye see the way she flushed wi’ pleasure? She’s a tender little maid. If you made her unhappy, though she’s none o’ my body, I’d never forgive ye, Dante. If you don’t intend to marry ’er, be careful.”
“Rubbish,” I exclaimed and went out into the street to fetch round a dog-cart from the livery-stables.
“Aye, rubbish is well enough,” was my grandmother’s final retort; “but broken eggs can’t be mended. No more can broken hearts.”
There was just room enough on the front-seat to take the two of us. As I drove down the street I saw Ruthita come out of the shop and stand waiting on the pavement. She looked modest and pretty as a sprig of lavender. There was always something quaintly virginal about her, as though she had stepped out of an old English love-song. Her eyes were unusually bright this morning with the pleasure of anticipation. With subtle flattery, she had put on one of the gowns I had bought her. It was her way of saying, “This day is to be mine and yours.”
“Don’t I do you proud?” she laughed, using one of Vi’s Americanisms.
“No, you don’t,” I said, with pretended harshness, “I can’t think where you got such a dunducketty old dress from.”
“A man gave it me. Didn’t he show bad taste?”
“He showed himself a perfect ass. Now, if I were to buy you a dress, Ruthie, which of course I shan’t——”
“Here, get off with you, you rascals. What’re you a-doin’, blockin’ up my pavement?”
Grandmother Cardover stood in the doorway, her hands folded beneath her black satin apron, her keys jangling. The gray cork-screw curls from under her cap were wobbling; her plump little body was shaking with enjoyment. All her crossness and caution on Vi’s account were gone at seeing Ruthita and myself together. We started up at a smart trot. As we turned the corner into the High Street, we looked back. She was still there, gazing after us.
By the road which follows the coast, Yarminster is eight miles from Ransby. I turned inland by a roundabout route; I wanted to pass through Woadley.
My spirits ran high with the thought of what was to happen shortly. I was in a mood to be gay. Clouds were flying high. The country lay windswept and golden in the sunshine. The air had the sharp tang of autumn—the acrid fragrance which foretells the decay of foliage. A pleasant melancholy lurked in the reds and yellows of woods and hedges. Tops of trees were already growing thin of leaves where the gales had harried them. Pasturing in harvested fields, flocks of sheep lent a touch of grayness to the landscape. Here and there overhead gulls hovered, or slid down the sky on poised wings, as though brooding on the summer that was gone.
Ruthita and I spoke of Lilith, recalling childhood’s days. We laughed over our amazement at discovering that her back was no longer humpy—that her baby had left her. Then we fell to wondering whether she had ever been married and what was her story. Our conversation became intimate and confessional. I had never known much of Ruthita’s secret thoughts.
“Dante,” she cried, “why did they leave us to find out everything?”
I slowed the horse down to a walk. “I know what you mean, Ruthie. They brought us up on fables. They left us to fight with all kinds of fantastic imaginings. They allowed us to infer that so many things were shameful. D’you remember what a fuss they made when they found that the Bantam had kissed you?”
She nodded, casting down her eyes. “I’ve never got over it. It’s made me awkward with men—self-conscious and afraid of...”
“And yet they were kind to us, Ruthie.”
“But they never treated us honestly,” she said sadly.
That same intense look, a look almost of hunger, which transformed her, came into her face—the look which the flash-light had revealed to me that night on the denes. Sudden fear of what we might say next made me shake up the horse. The jolting of the wheels prevented us from conversing save by raising our voices.
We passed a man on the road. He shouted after us.
At first I thought he was chaffing. He kept on shouting.
“Why don’t you stop?” said Ruthita. “We may have dropped something.”
We had turned a bend. I looked back, but could not see him. I halted until he should come up. A big-framed man in a shooting-jacket, gaiters, and knickerbockers came swinging round the corner. I was surprised to recognize in him Lord Halloway.
“Halloa,” he shouted, “you’re going in my direction. Would you mind giving me a lift as far as Woadley?”
“Not at all,” I said. “This horse is restive. I can’t leave the reins. I suppose you can lower the back-seat without help.”
He drew level on the far-side from me and stood with his hand resting on the splashboard, gazing at Ruthita. “My sister,” I said shortly. .
While he lowered the back and drew but the seat, he explained himself. “I’m going to Woadley to look after some farms my father owns round there.” What he was really saying was, “I’m not going to try to cut you out with Sir Charles, so you needn’t fear me.”
His manner was friendly. He had gained a high color with his walking. He looked brilliantly handsome and manly, with just that touch of indolence about him that gave him his charm. Without being warned, no one would have guessed that he was a rake. In his presence even I disbelieved half the wild tales of dissipation I had heard narrated of him. Yet, when my distrust of him was almost at rest, he would arouse it with his inane, high-pitched laugh.
When he had clambered in and we had started, I began to tell him, for the sake of conversation, where we were traveling. At the mention of Lilith, he interrupted.
“Lilith! Lilith! Seem to remember the name. Was she ever in these parts before? There was a little girl named Lilith, who used to camp with the Goliaths, the gipsies, on Woadley Ham. They haven’t been there for years. I recall her distinctly. She was wild and dark. I used to watch her breaking in ponies when I was a boy stopping with Sir Charles.”
“She must be the same.”
“You might tell her that you met me, when you see her,” he said. “She was the pluckiest little horsewoman for her age I ever saw. She could ride anything. I can see her now, gripping a young hunter I had with her brown bare legs, fighting his head off. It’s odd that you should have mentioned her.”
He tailed off into his giggling girlish laugh.
Little by little he commenced to address his remarks exclusively to Ruthita. This was natural, for I could not turn round to converse with him because of attending to the horse. I observed him out of the corner of my eye, and began to understand the secret of his power over women. For one thing he talked entirely to a woman, bestowing on her an intensity of attention which many would consider flattering. Then again he put a woman at her ease, drawing her out and speaking of things which were within her depth. Most of the topics which he drifted into were personal. When he mentioned himself, he lowered his voice as if he were confessing. When he mentioned her, his tones became earnest.
I was surprised to see how Ruthita, usually so reticent, lowered her guard to his attack. She twisted round on her seat, that she might watch him. Her face grew merry and her eyes twinkled with fun and laughter. She was being, what she had declared she never was—natural with a man.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw one thing which displeased me immensely. With apparent unconsciousness, Halloway’s arm was slipping farther and farther along the back of the seat against which Ruthita rested. A little more, and it would have encircled her. But before that was accomplished, he stopped short, leaving nothing to complain of. He was simply steadying himself in a jolting dog-cart.
We entered Woadley and passed the tall gates of the Park. I had a glimpse of the Hall through the trees, and the peacocks strutting where the gardens began and the meadowland left off. I smiled to myself as I wondered what would happen if Sir Charles should meet Halloway and myself together. Two miles out of Woadley Ruthita and my cousin were still industriously chatting. I had my suspicions as to the urgency of his errand. Then the arm slid an inch further along the back-rail of the seat. That inch made his attitude barely pardonable. I reined in.
“Didn’t you say you were going to Woadley?”
“Why, yes,” he laughed. “I have to get out at the next cross-road and walk. The farms are over in that direction.”
He swept a belt of woodland vaguely. He lied consummately. His face told me nothing.
“Well, here’s the next cross-road.”
My manner was churlish. He refused to acknowledge anything hostile in my tones.
“I’m awfully grateful to you,” he said; “you’ve saved me a long walk and I’ve enjoyed your company immensely.” As he spoke the last words he smiled directly into the eyes of Ruthita. “I shall hope to meet Miss Cardover again—perhaps at Oxford.”
I did not think it necessary to tell him that Ruthita’s surname was not Cardover but Favart. We watched him stride away, clean-limbed and splendid—a man who had sinned discreetly and bore no physical marks of his shortcomings.
At last Ruthita spoke. “I don’t think I like him.”
“You didn’t let him know it.”
“He made me forget. He made me remember I was a woman. No man’s ever spoken to me as he spoke.”
“He’s a clever fellow to make you forget the esplanade and Lottie.”
“Now you’re angry,” she laughed, and snuggled closer.
We entered the old marketplace of Yarminster where the Fair was being held. Leaving our horse at The Anchor to be baited, we threaded our way between booths and whirligo-rounds. Presently I heard a familiar cry, “Two shies a penny. Two shies a penny. Every ball ’its a cocoanut. Down she goes. Walk up. Walk up. Two shies a penny.”
Dodging up and down behind the pitch, was G’liath, not much altered. The gaudy woman was absent; it was Lilith who was serving out the balls to the country bumpkins.
“Here’s Ruthita,” I said. “You remember the little girl in the Forest?”
She went on catching the wooden balls which G’liath returned to her. Trade was busy. Between reiterating his call, she conversed with us.
“I remember. (Two shies a penny). It doesn’t seem long ago. (Every ball ’its a cocoanut. Walk up). How long is it?”
“The best part of fourteen years.”
It was difficult to carry on a conversation under the circumstances.
“I wanted to ask you about last night,” I whispered. “When’ll you be free?”
“Not until midnight.”
I saw Ruthita listening, so I changed the subject. “By the way, we met someone who knew you when you were a girl at Woadley. He wanted to be remembered to you.”
Her handsome face darkened. “A man?” she asked.
“My cousin, Lord Halloway.”
She halted and looked round on me in proud astonishment. “Oh!” she gasped, and renewed her calling.
Ruthita broke in to tell her of my good fortune. She did not pay much attention at first. Then it seemed to dawn on her. “So he’s out of it, and you’ll be master at Woadley Hall?”
“Yes.” I lowered my voice. “And then you must come back to Woadley Ham. You were good to me once, Lilith.”
“I never forget.” There was a look of the old kindness in her eyes as she said it. “When you need me, I shall come.”
The crowd pressed about us, curious to overhear, surprised at seeing gentlefolks so chatty with a gipsy hussy. She signed to us to go. We drew off a few paces, looking on, recalling that night at Epping, when we fled from Dot-and-Carry-One and came to G’liath’s encampment.
Shortly after that the clock of St. Nicholas boomed three, and we departed.
Ruthita was anxious to accompany me to the station.
“I don’t want you,” I told her. “Women always make a fuss over partings.”
“But not sensible women,” she protested, smiling. “Let me come. There’s a dear.”
“You’ll try to kiss me. You’ll make a grab at my neck just as the train is moving. I shall feel embarrassed. You’ll probably slip off the platform and get both your legs cut off. A nice memory to take with me to London! No, thank you.”
“But I won’t try to kiss you, and I won’t grab at your neck. I’ll be most careful about my legs. And I don’t think it’s nice of you to mention them so callously, Dante.”
“I always tell folks,” put in my grandmother, “that, if there wer’n’t no partin’s, there’d be no meetin’s. It’s just come and go in this life. If he don’t want you, my dear, don’t bother ’im.”
“But he does want me,” Ruthita persisted. “I’ve always seen him off. I used to run beside the trap till I was ready to drop when Uncle Obad drove him away to the Red House. He’s only making fun.”
“No, really, Ruthie, I’d much rather say good-by to you here in the shop.”
“If you’re going to catch the six-thirty-eight, you’ll have to run,” said my grandmother.
Ruthita looked hurt. She could not understand me. She felt that something was wrong. I picked up my bag. They hurriedly embraced and followed me out on to the pavement to watch me down the road. I looked back.
There they stood waving and crying after me, “Good-by. God bless you. Good-by.”
In passing the chemist’s shop I glanced in at the clock. It was five minutes faster than my watch. I turned into the High Street at something between a trot and a walk.
On entering the station I saw that the London train was ready to depart. The guard had the flag in his hand and the whistle to his lips, about to give the signal. The porters were banging the doors of the carriages. I had yet to buy my ticket. Rushing to the office, I pushed my money through. “’Fraid you won’t get the six-thirty-eight,” said the clerk.
I reached the barrier, where the collector was standing, just as the guard blew his whistle.
“Too late,” growled the collector, closing the gate in my face with all the impersonal incivility of a man whose action is supported by law.
“There’s a lady and a little girl on board,” I panted; “they’re expecting me.”
“Sorry,” said the man; “should ’ave got ’ere sooner.”
Just then the train began to move and I recognized the uselessness of further argument. As the tail of it vanished out of the station, the collector slid back the gate. Now that there was no danger of my disobeying him, he could afford to be human. “It’s h’orders, yer know, sir, else I wouldn’t ha’ done it.”
Friends who had been seeing their travelers off came laughing and chatting toward the barrier. As the crowd thinned, half way down the platform I caught sight of Vi. She was standing apart, with her hand-baggage scattered beside her in disorder. Dorrie was hanging to her skirts, looking up into her face, asking questions. Neither of them saw me.
“Hulloa!”
When I spoke to her, Vi started. Her eyes brimmed. There shone through her tears a doubtful gladness. “I thought—I thought you wer’n’t coming. I thought——”
“Vi dearest! Was that likely?”
Her fingers closed about my arm warningly as I called her dearest. She cast a scared look at Dorrie. “Not before her,” she whispered.
I shrugged my shoulders. The position was queer. For a man and a woman in our situation there was no readymade standard of conduct. I began to feel lost in the freedom we were making for ourselves. There were no landmarks. Even now we were beyond the conventional walls of right and wrong which divide society from the outcast. We were running away to seek our happiness—and we were taking Dorrie!
I began to explain hurriedly how I happened to miss the train.
“Ruthita wanted to come to the station. I lost time in dissuading her. When I got away, I discovered that my watch was slow by five minutes. And then to crown all, when I could have caught the train, the man at the gate...”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said generously. “How long before the next train starts?”
“About half-an-hour.”
“That’ll do nearly as well. My boxes have gone on, but I can claim them in London.”
“We don’t want to stand in this stuffy station,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
She began to speak, and then stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Shan’t—shan’t we be recognized?”
“Not if we go round the harbor. We shan’t be likely to meet anyone there who knows us.”
It was odd, this keeping up of respectable appearances to the last. Ruthita, Grandmother Cardover, Sir Charles, my father—all the world would know to-morrow. They would spread their hands before their faces and look shocked, and peek out at us through their fingers.
“No one ever thpeaks to me.” Dorrie was reproachfully calling our attention to her presence.
“We’ll both thpeak to you now,” I said. “Give me your hand, Dorrie.”
Leaving our baggage with a porter, we went out of the station to the harbor, which lay just across the station-yard. Vi manouvered herself to the other side of me, so that the child walked between us.
The heavy autumn dusk was falling. Lanterns were being run up the masts. The town shone hospitably with street-lamps. Groping their way round the pier-head came a part of the Scotch herring fleet. We could see how their prows danced and nodded by the way the light from their lamps lengthened and shortened across the water. Soon the ripple against the piles near to where we were standing quickened with the disturbance caused by their advance. Then we heard the creaking of ropes against blocks as sails were lowered.
Leaning against the wall of the quay we watched them, casting furtive glances now and then at the illumined face of the station-clock.
Dorrie asked questions, to which we returned indifferent answers. It had begun to dawn on her that I was going up to London with them. She construed our secretiveness to mean that our plot was for her special benefit; people only acted like that with her when they were concealing something pleasant. Her innocent curiosity embarrassed us.
Why were we going to London? she asked us. We had not dared to answer that question even to one another. For my part I tried not to hear her; she roused doubts—phantoms of future consequence. I pictured the scene of long ago, when Ransby was rather more than twenty years younger, and another man and woman had slipped away unnoticed, daring the world for their love’s preservation. Had they had these same thoughts—these hesitations and misgivings? Or had they gone out bravely to meet their destiny, reckless in their certainty of one another?
Behind us, as we bent above the water, rose the shuffling clamor of numberless feet. Up and down the harbor groups of fisher-girls were sauntering abreast, in rows of three and four. Now and then we caught phrases in broad Scotch dialect.. They had been brought down from their homes in the north, many hundreds of them, for the kippering. They paraded bareheaded, with rough woolen shawls across their shoulders, knitting as they walked. I was thankful for them; they distracted attention from ourselves. Vi and I said nothing to one another; our hearts were too full for small-talk. The child was a barrier between us.
A man halted near us. He had a heavy box on his back, covered with American-cloth. He set it down and became busy. In a short time he had lighted a lantern and hung it on a pole. He mounted a stool, from which he could command the crowd, raising the lamp aloft. Fisher-girls, still knitting, stopped in their sauntering and gathered round him. Several smacksmen and sailors, with pipes in their mouths, and hands deep in pockets, loitered up.
The man began to talk, at first at random, like a cheap-jack, trying to catch his hearers’ attention with a laugh. Then, when his audience was sufficiently interested, he unrolled a sheet upon which the words of a hymn were printed. He held it before him like a bill-board, so that all could see and the light fell on it. He sang the first verse himself in a strong, gusty baritone. One by one the crowd caught the air and joined in with him.
They sang four verses, each verse followed by a chorus. The man allowed the sheet to drop, and handed the pole with the lantern to a bystander.
His brows puckered. His eyes concentrated. His somewhat brutal jaw squared itself. His face had become impassioned and earnest all of a sudden. It had been coarse and rather stupid before; now a certain eagerness of purpose gave it sharpness. He began to talk with vehemence, making crude, forceful gestures, thrashing the air with his arms, bringing down his clenched right-fist into the open palm of his left-hand when a remark called for emphasis. His thick throat swelled above the red knotted handkerchief which took the place of a collar. He spoke with a kind of savage anger. He mauled his audience with brutal eloquence. His way of talking was ignorant. He was displeasing, yet compelling. There were fifteen minutes until the train started. I watched him with cynicism as a diversion from my thoughts.
“Brothers and sisters,” he shouted, “we are ’ere met in the sight of h’Almighty Gawd. It was ’im as brought us together. Yer didn’t know that when yer started out this starlit h’evenin’ for yer walk. It was ’im as sent me ’ere ter tell yer this evenin’ that the wages o’ sin is death. I know wot h’I’m a-saying of, for I was once a sinner. But blessed be Gawd, ’e ’as saved me and washed me white h’in ’is son’s precious blood. ’E can do that for you ter-night, an ’e sent me’ere ter tell yer.”
Some of the Cornish Methodists, in Ransby for the herring season, began to warm to the orator’s enthusiasm. They urged him to further fervor by ejaculating texts and crying, “Amen!”
“Blessed be ’is name!”
“Glory!” etc.
The man sank his voice from the roaring monotone in which he had started. “The wages o’ sin is death,” he repeated. “Oh, my friends, h’I speak as a dyin’ man to dyin’ men. Yer carn’t h’escape them wages nohow. The fool ’as said in ’is ’eart, ‘There ain’t no Gawd.’ ’Ave you said that? Wot’ll yer say when yer ’ave ter take the wages? Now yer say, ‘No one’s lookin’. They’ll never find out. H’everyone’s as bad as I h’am, only they doan’t let me know it. I’ll h’injoy myself. There ain’t no Gawd.’ I tells yer, my friends, yer wrong. ’E’s a-watchin’ yer now, lookin’ down from them blessed stars. ’E looks inter yer ’eart and sees the sin yer a-meditatin’ and a-planning. ’E knows the wages yer’ll ’ave ter take for it. ’E sees the conserquences. And the conserquences is death. Death ter self-respec’! Death ter ’uman h’affection! Death ter the woman and children yer love! Death ter ’ope and purity! Damnation ter yer soul! ’Ave yer thought o’ that? Death! Death! Death!”
He hissed the words, speaking slower and slower. His voice died away in an awestruck whisper. In the pause that followed, the quiet was broken by a shrill laugh. All heads turned. On the outskirts of the crowd stood “Lady Halloway.” She had evidently been drinking. A foolish smile played about her mouth. Her lips were swollen. She mimicked the evangelist in a hoarse, cracked voice, “Death! Death! Death!”
I signed to Vi. Going first, carrying Dorrie in my arms, I commenced to force a passage. We had become wedged against the wall. Our going caused a ripple of disturbance. Attention was distracted from “Lady Halloway” to ourselves. She turned her glazed eyes on us. Stupid with drink, she did not recognize me at first. I had to pass beneath the lantern quite near her. As the light struck across my face, she saw who I was. “’E’s got another gal,” she tittered so all could hear her. “It’s easy come and easy go-a. Love ’ere ter-day and thar ter-morrer. Good-evenin’, Sir Dante Cardover, that is ter be. And ’oo’s yer noo sweet-’art? Is she as pretty h’as me? Let a poor gal ’ave a look at ’er.”
I pushed by her roughly. She would have followed, but some of the crowd restrained her. She made a grab at Vi. I could hear Vi’s dress rending. “So I ain’t good ’nough!” she shouted. “I ain’t good ’nough for yer! And ’oo are you ter despise me, I’d like ter h’arsk?”
She said a lot more, but her voice was drowned in a protesting clamor. I turned my head as I crossed the station-yard. Beneath the evangelist’s lantern I saw her arms tossing. Her hair had broken loose. Her eyes followed us. I entered the station and saw no more. Not until we had slipped through the barrier on to the platform did we slacken. Even while loathing her for her display of bestiality, my grandmother’s words came back to me, “She was as nice and kind a little girl as there was in Ransby, until that rascal, Lord Halloway, ruined her.”
We found that the porter, with whom we had left our luggage, had secured three seats for us. Two of them were corners. I took mine with my back to the engine, so that Vi and I sat facing one another. Dorrie sat beside Vi for a few minutes, uncomfortably, with her legs dangling. Then she slipped to the floor and climbing up my knees, snuggled herself down in my arms.
“We’ll have fine timeth in London together, won’t we?” she questioned. “I’m tho glad you’s toming.”
It was strange how difficult I found it to speak to Vi. I wanted to say so much. I knew I ought to say something. Yet all I could think to mention was some reference to what had happened beside the harbor—and that was so contaminating that I wanted to forget it. Luckily, just then, an old countrywoman bundled in with a basket on her arm.
“Gooing ter Lun’non, me dear?” she asked of Vi. “Well, ter be sure, I intend ter goo ter Lun’non some day. I get out at Beccles, the nex’ stop.” Lowering her voice, “That your little gal, and ’usband, bor? Not your ‘usband! Well, ’e do seem fond o’ your little gal, now doan’t ’e, just the same as if ’e wuz ’er father?”
The train began to move. The lights of Ransby flashed by, twinkling and growing smaller. We thundered across the bridge which separates the Broads from the harbor.
Vi and the countrywoman were talking, or rather the countrywoman was talking and Vi was paying feigned attention. Dorrie, her flaxen curls falling across my shoulder, began to nod. Of the other passengers, one was drowsing and the other, a fierce be-whiskered little man, was reading a paper, leaning forward to catch the glimmering light which fell from the lamp in the center of the carriage. I was left alone with my thoughts.
They were not pleasant. The religious commonsense of the man by the harbor disturbed me. The face of “Lady Halloway” proved the truth of his assertions. His words would not be silenced. Strident and accusing, they rose, above the rumbling of the train, and wove themselves into a maddening chorus: “The wages of sin is death; the wages of sin is death; the wages of sin is death.” A man whose intellect I despised, to whose opinions I should ordinarily pay no attention, had spoken truth—and I had heard it.
At Beccles the train stopped. The countrywoman alighted. The drowsy man woke up and followed her. The fierce little man curled himself up in his corner and spread his paper over his face to shut out the light. There were four hours more until we reached London. The train resumed its journey through the dark.
I dared not stir for fear of waking Dorrie.
“Comfortable, Vi?”
She nodded and leant her face against the cushioned back of the carriage, closing her eyes. I watched her pure profile—the arched eyebrows, the heavy eyelids, the straight nose, the full and pouting mouth, the rounded chin, the long, sensuous curve of the graceful neck. I traced the small blue veins beneath the transparent whiteness of her temples. I studied her beauty, comihitting it to memory. Then I commenced to compare her with Dorrie, discovering the likeness. I wondered whether I had first felt drawn to her because she was so like Dorrie, or only for herself.
I looked up from Dorrie, and found Vi gazing at me.
I had thought her sleeping.
“Just wakened?”
“I’ve been awake all the time. I’ve been thinking.”
“Of what?”
“Last night. How different it was! We didn’t have to hide. No one was looking.”
“Then we’ll go again to where no one is looking.”
“We can’t always do that. But I was thinking of something else.”
“What was it this time?”
She pressed her cheek against the glass of the window, gazing out into the night. Then she leant over to me, clasping her hands. “How cruel it was, what he said to us!”
“Who?”
“The man there in Ransby.”
“But he didn’t speak to us. He was one of those people who shout at street-corners because they like to hear their own voices.”
“He was speaking to me,” she said, “though he didn’t know it.”
“Vi, you’re not growing nervous?”
“That isn’t the word. I’m looking forward and thinking how horrid it would be to have to hide always.”
“We shan’t.”
She looked at Dorrie, making no reply.
Presently she spoke again. “Dante, have you ever thought of it? I’m four years older than you are.”
“No, I’ve never thought of it.”
“You ought to.”
“Why?”
“Because four years makes a lot of difference in a woman. You’ll look still young when I’m turning forty.”
“Pooh!”
She ignored my attempt to turn from the topic. “If—if we should ever do anything rash, people would say that I was a scheming woman; that I’d taken advantage of you; that, being the elder, I ought to have known better.”
The idea of Vi leading me astray was so supremely ridiculous that I laughed outright. Dorrie stirred, and gazed up in my face. “Dear Dante!” she muttered, and sank back again.
“Her father will be waiting for the cable,” said Vi.
I wondered if this was the kind of conversation my father and mother had carried on all those years ago when they ran away. I felt that if my arms were only free to place about her, all would be well.
“We shall have to tell him, Vi,” I whispered.
She pretended not to hear me. Her eyes were closed. One hand shaded them from the light. She was again playing hide-and-seek with the purpose of our errand.
The rumble of the wheels droned on. I planned for what I would do when the train reached London and the moment of decision should arrive.
Perhaps two hours passed in silence. The glare of London was growing in the distance. Towns and houses became more frequent. One had glimpses of illumined windows and silhouettes against the blinds. Each house meant a problem as large to someone as mine was to me. The fact that life was so teeming and various robbed my crisis of its isolated augustness. Locals met us with a crash like thunder. As we flashed by, I could glance into their carriages and see men and women, all of whom, at some time in their existence, would decide just such problems of love and self-fulfilment—to each one of them the decision would seem vital to the universe, and in each case it would be relatively trivial. How easy to do what one liked unnoticed in such a crowded world! How preposterous that theory of the man by the harbor! As if any God could have time to follow the individual doings of such a host of cheese-mites!
Our fellow-traveler in the corner woke and removed the paper from before his eyes.
“Wife tired?”
“Yes, it’s a tedious journey.”
It was too much trouble to correct him as to our exact relations.
He cleared the misty panes and looked out at a vanishing t station. “Stratford. We’ll be there in a quarter of an hour. Live in London?”
“Yes. At least, sometimes.”
He commenced to get his baggage together, keeping up his desultory volley of questions.
We entered the last tunnel. I touched Vi’s hand.
“We’re pulling into Liverpool Street. Do you want to claim your boxes to-night or to-morrow?”
“To-morrow’ll do,” she said.
A porter jumped on the step of our carriage. Our fellow-traveler alighted, refusing his assistance. The man climbed in and, shouldering our luggage, inquired whether we wanted a cab.
“Where to?” he asked.
I turned to Vi. “Where’ll we stay?”
She slipped her arm through mine and drew me aside. The porter went forward to engage the cabby.
“Give me one more night alone with Dorrie,” she whispered. “Everything has been so—so hurried. You understand, dearest, don’t you?”
I helped her into the four-wheeler and lifted Dorrie after her. Having told the man to drive to the Cecil, I was about to enter. She checked me. “We shall be able to get on all right.” Then, in the darkness of the cab, her arms went passionately about my neck, and, all pretense abandoned, I felt her warm lips pressed against my mouth.
As the door banged Dorrie roused. Seeing me standing on the platform, she stretched her arms out of the window, crying, “Oh, I fought you was toming wiv’ us, Dante.”
“Not to-night, darling,” said Vi.
“To-morrow,” I promised her. Then to Vi, “I’ll be round at the Cecil shortly after ten. Will that do?”
She nodded. I watched them drive away, after which I jumped into a hansom and set off to pay Pope Lane a surprise visit.
I could not sleep that night; was making plans. The haste with which this step had been approached and taken had terrified Vi. I had been unwise. Her sensitiveness had been shocked by the raw way in which a desire takes shape in action. And the man by the harbor had upset her. I must get her away to a cottage in the country, where we could be alone, and where she would have time to grow accustomed to our altered relations.
Next morning, full of these arrangements, I sought her at the Hotel Cecil.
She was not there; the office had no record of her. I remembered that her boxes had been left at Liverpool Street overnight. When I got there and made inquiries of the clerk, I found that the lady I described had been to the baggage-room an hour before me and had claimed them. After much difficulty I hunted out the cabman who had driven her. He showed me alcoholic sympathy, at once divining the irregularity of our relations, and told me that the lady had countermanded my orders and instructed him to drive her to the Hotel Thackeray. I arrived at the Hotel Thackeray in time to be informed that she had already left.
Four days later I received a letter which had been sent on from Ransby. It was from Vi, despatched with the pilot from the ship on which she was sailing to America.
She had not dared to see me again, she said. She was running away from the temptation to be selfish. She had reckoned up the price which her husband, Dorrie, and myself would have to pay that she might gain her happiness; she had no right to exact it. As far as her husband and Dorrie were concerned, if we had done what we had contemplated, we should have shattered something for them which we could never replace. She was going back to do her duty. That the task might not be made too difficult, she begged me not to write.
I returned to Oxford. My rooms at Lazarus were in Fellows’ Quad—one was a big room in which I lived and worked, the other was a small bedroom leading out of it. My windows overlooked the smooth lawns and gravel paths of the college garden. Flowers were over, hanging crumpled and brown on their withered stalks. Here and there, a solitary late-blooming rose shone faintly. The garden stood upon the city-wall, overlooking the meadows of the Broad Walk. Every evening white mists from the river invaded it, billowing across the open spaces, breaking against the shrubs, climbing higher and higher, till the tops of the trees were covered. Sitting beside my fire I could hear the leaves rustle, and turning my head could see them falling.
The ceiling of my living-room was low; the walls were paneled in white from bottom to top. The furniture was covered in warm red. The hearth was deep and the fender of polished steel, which reflected the glow of the coals when the day drew near its close. It was a room in which to sit quietly, to think, and to grow drowsy.
It was October when I returned. Meadows were turning from green to ash-color. Virginia-creeper flared like scarlet flame against pale walls. The contented melancholy of the austere city was healing. It cured feverishness by turning one’s thoughts away from the present. In its stoic calm it was like an old man—one who had grown indifferent to the world’s changefulness. In healthy contrast to its ancientness was the exuberant youth of the undergrads.
Most grief arises from a thwarted sense of one’s own importance. Here, among broken records of the past, the impermanence of physical existence was written plainly.
Defaced hopes of the ages encountered one at every corner. Of all the men who had wrought here, nothing but the best of what they had thought stood fast; their personalities, the fashion of their daily lives were lost beneath the dust of decades. No place could have been found better in which to doctor a wounded heart.
Through the winter that followed Vi’s departure, the new conception I had of her nobility upheld me. I could not sink beneath her standard of honor. When the temptation to write to her came over me, I shamed myself into setting it aside.
I recognized now what would have been the inevitable penalty, had we followed our inclination that night. Only the madness of the moment could have blinded me to its result. We should have become persons cast off by society—insecure even in our claim on one another’s affections, continually fleeing from the lean greyhound of remorse. Never for a day should we have been permitted to forget the irregularity of our relation. We should have been continually apologizing for our fault. We should have been continually hiding from curious, unfriendly eyes. The shame with which other people regarded us would have re-acted on our characters. And then there was Dorrie! She would have had to know one day.
We had the man by the harbor and “Lady Hallo way” to thank for our escape. The strange combination of influences they had exerted at our hour of crisis, had saved us.
Black moments came when I gazed ahead into the vacant future. I must go through life without her. Unless some circumstance unforeseen should arise, we would never meet again. Then I felt that, to possess her, no price of disgrace would be too high to pay.
I trained myself like an athlete to defeat the despair which such thoughts occasioned. I tried to banish her from my mind. In my conscious moments I succeeded by keeping myself occupied. But in sleep she came to me in all manner of intimate and forbidden ways.
I crowded my hours with work that I might keep true to my purpose. And yet this method of fighting, when analyzed, consisted chiefly in running away. I took up tutorial duties at my college. I commenced to make studies for a biography of that typical genius of the Renaissance, half libertine, half mystic, ?neas Sylvius Piccolomini, known to history in his old age as Pope Pius IL I tried to fill up my leisure with new friendships. In none of these things could I become truly interested. My thoughts were crossing the ocean. When I was deepest in study I would start, hearing her voice, sharp and poignant.
One afternoon I was sitting with my chair drawn up to the hearth, my feet on the fender, a board across my knees, trying to write. A tap fell on the door. Lord Halloway entered.
He took a seat on the other side of the fireplace. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you for some time,” he said, “wanting to explain.”
“Wanting to explain what?”
“Myself in general. You don’t like me; I think you’re mistaken. I’m not the man I was.”
“But why should you explain to me?”
“Because I like you.”
“Don’t see why you should. Woadley’s probably coming to me—which you once thought was to be yours.”
“That doesn’t worry me. I’ll have the Lovegrove estates when my father dies. But I don’t like to feel that any man despises me—it hampers a chap in trying to do right. You pass me in the quads with a nod, and hurry as you go by so that I shan’t stop you. Why?”
“Want to know the truth?”
“Yes.”
“It’s because of the woman they call ‘Lady Halloway’ and all the other girls you’ve ruined.”
“I thought it. That was why I wanted to tell you that I’m done with that way of life. I was a colossal ass in the old days. But, you know, a good many fellows have been what I was, and they’ve married, and settled down and become respected.”
“And what of the girls they’ve ruined?”
He leant forward, clasping his hands and spreading his knees apart. “You’re blaming me for the injustices of society. Women have always had to suffer. But I’ve always done the sportsmanlike thing by the girls I’ve wronged. All of them are provided for.”
“These things are your own affairs,” I said shortly; “but I’ve always felt——”
“Felt what?”
“Felt that the most disreputable thing about most prodigals is the method of their returning. They leave all the women they’ve deceived and all their bastards in the Far Country with the swine and the husks, while they hobble home to forgiveness and luxury. Simply because they acknowledge the obvious—that they’ve sinned and disgraced their fathers—they expect to escape the rewards of their profligacy. It’s cheap, Halloway. You speak as though marriage will re-instate your morals. A man should be able to bring a clean record to the woman he marries.” The off-hand manner in which he referred to his villainies had made me cold with a sense of justice. His lolling, fashionably attired person and his glib assertion that he had done with that way of life, roused my anger when I remembered his idiot son and the scene on the esplanade. He regarded me with a friendly man-of-the-world smile, pointing his delicate fingers one against the other. I would have liked him better had he shown resentment.
“You make things hard,” he objected. “If everyone thought as you do, there’d be no incentive for reformation. The man who had been a little wild would never be anything else. According to your way of thinking, he’d be more estimable as a rake than as the father of a family. You shut the door against all coming back.”
He spoke reasonably, trying to lift what had started as a personal attack, on to the impartial plane of a sociological discussion.
“It’s the unfairness of it that irks me,” I said. “You tempt a girl and leave her to her disgrace. She bears both her own and your share of the scandal, while you scramble back into respectability. If you brought her back with you, I shouldn’t object. But, after you’ve persuaded her to go down into the pit, you draw up the ladder and walk away.”
He gave his high-pitched laugh. “That’s how the world’s made. It’s none of my doing. If I married one of these girls, neither of us would be happy. One of these days I shall be Earl of Lovegrove. They’re better as they are. You know that, surely?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then, why prevent me, when I’m trying to get on to higher ground? I know I’ve been a rotter. I’ve made a mess of things. I don’t need anyone to remind me.”
I held out my hand, saying, “I’ve been censorious. I’m sorry.”
After this he dropped in often to see me. He was coaching the Lazarus toggers that autumn; his usual time for calling was between four and five, on his way up from the river. I got to know him well and to look for him. His big robustness and high color filled the student atmosphere of my room with an air of outdoor vitality. He was always cheerful. And yet I could not get away from the idea that he was making use of me for some undisclosed purpose.
He was an egoist at heart—a charming egoist. Much of his conversation turned about himself. “Now that you know me better, do you still think that I’m barred from marriage?” he would ask.
“All kinds of people marry. It still seems unfair to me that, after knocking about the way you have, you should marry anyone who doesn’t know the world pretty thoroughly.”
“You mean I’m tarnished and should marry a woman who is tarnished. You don’t understand me, Cardover. My very knowledge of evil makes me worship feminine purity.”
It was difficult to regard Lord Halloway as tarnished when you looked at his splendid body. His healthy physical handsomeness seemed an excuse for his transgressions. He upset all your ideas of the degrading influences of immorality.
After Christmas I had Ruthita down to stay at Oxford. We were walking along the tow-path towards Iffley on the afternoon of her arrival, when the Lazarus Eight went by. Halloway was mounted, riding along the bank, shouting orders to the cox. As he passed us, he recognized Ruthita. I saw her color flame up. She halted abruptly, following him with her eyes round the bend of the river.
“Shall we meet them again if we go on?”
I told her we should be certain to meet them, as they would turn at Iffley Lock.
“But I don’t want to meet them.” Then, in a whisper, “I’m afraid of him, Dante.”
We retraced our steps to Folly Bridge and walked out to Hinksey to avoid him.
“You’re an odd little creature, Ruthie. Why on earth should you be afraid of him? He can’t do you any harm.”
“It’s his eyes. When he looks at me so hard, I forget all that I know about him, and begin to like him. And then, when he’s gone, I come to myself and feel humiliated.”
Now that I had found someone who would run him down, I changed sides and began to plead his cause. “Seems to me it’s a bit rough on the chap to remember his old faults. He’s quite changed.”
“But the woman at Ransby hasn’t,” she retorted bitterly. “He didn’t leave her a chance.”
It was pleasant having Ruthita with me. I liked to hear the swish of her skirts as she walked, and to feel the light pressure of her hand upon my arm. She spoke with her face tilted up to mine. It was such a tiny face, so emotional and innocent. The frost in the air had brought a color to her cheeks and a luster to her hair. She loved to make me feel that she was my possession for the moment; I knew that I pleased her when I used her as though she were all mine. We treated one another with frank affection.
“D’you ever hear from Vi?” she asked.
“Never.”
“It was awfully strange the way she left Ransby—so suddenly, without saying good-by. I had just one little note from her before she sailed; that was all. I’ve written to her several times since then, but she’s never answered.”
I turned the subject by saying, “What’s this about Uncle Obad? Is he giving up the boarding-house?”
“Yes, he’s going down into Surrey to raise fowls. He’s already got his farm. Aunt Lavinia’s wild about it.”
“But where does he get his money?”
“Nobody knows, and he refuses to tell. Papa says that he must have found another Rapson.”
“But he isn’t selling shares again, is he?”
“Oh dear no. He’s become wonderfully independent, and says he doesn’t need to make his poultry pay. It’s just a hobby.”
“Dear old chap! I hope he doesn’t come another cropper.”
“He says he can’t, but he won’t explain why. And d’you know, I believe he’s given Papa back the two thousand pounds that he lost.”
“I don’t believe it. What makes you think that?”
“Because Papa’s stopped talking against him, and because I caught him looking up those guide-books to Italy again.”
We turned off from the Abingdon Road and curved round to the left through the sheep-farms of Hinksey. Hedges bristled bare on either side. Uplands rose bleak against the steely sky. Rutted lanes were brittle beneath our feet, crusted over here and there with ice. On thatched roofs of cottages sparrows squatted with ruffled feathers. Icicles hung down from spouts. The lambing season was just commencing. As we drew near farms the warm smell of sheep packed close together assailed our nostrils. From far and wide a constant, distressful bleating went up. Quickly and silently, rising out of the ground, dropping down from the sky, darkness closed in about us. In the cup of the valley, with the river sweeping round it, lay Oxford with its glistening towers and church spires. Little pin-points of fire sprang up, shining hard and frosty through the winter’s shadows. They raced through the city, as though a hundred lamp-lighters had wakened at once and were making up for lost time. Soon the somber mass was a blazing jewel, flinging up a golden blur into the night.
Ruthita hugged my arm. “Doesn’t it make you glad to be alive? I’m never so happy as when I’m alone with you, Dante. It isn’t what we say that does it. It’s just being near one another.”
She spoke like a child, groping after words, feeling far more than she could ever utter. But I knew what she meant. The woman in her was striving. Just as her flowerlike womanhood, unfolding itself to me secretly, made me hungry for Vi, so my masculinity stung her into wistful eagerness for a man’s affection.
“You’re a queer little kiddie. What you need’s a husband. I shall be frightfully jealous of him. At first I shall almost hate him.”
“If you hated him, I shouldn’t marry him. Besides, I don’t believe I shall ever marry.”
We trudged back to Oxford in a gay mood, carrying on a bantering conversation. When we had entered Lazarus, I left her at the lodge, telling her to go to Fellows’ Quad while I ordered tea at the pantry. As I approached my rooms, I heard the sound of voices. Opening the door, I saw the lamp had not been lit. By the flare of the fire, I made out the profile of Ruthita as she leant back in the arm-chair, resting her feet on the fender. Standing up, looking down on her, with his arm against the mantelshelf was Lord Halloway.
He glanced towards me in his careless fashion. “This is quite the pleasantest thing that could have happened. I’ve often thought about the drive to Woadley and wondered whether we three should ever meet all together again.” Then, turning to Ruthita, “Your brother’s so secretive, Miss Cardover. He never breathed a word about your coming.”
“My sister’s name is not Cardover,” I corrected him.
He drew himself to his full height languidly. “I must apologize for having misnamed you, Miss—Miss——”
“My name is Favart,” put in Ruthita.
“Isn’t it strange,” he asked, “that a brother and sister should be named differently?”
Then I had another illustration of how he could draw out women’s confidence. Ruthita had just run three miles in the opposite direction to avoid him, yet here she was eagerly telling him many things that were most intimate—all about her father and the Siege of Paris, and how I climbed the wall and discovered her, and how we had run off to get married and stayed with the gipsies in the forest.
The tea-boy came and set crumpets and muffins down by the hearth. I lit the lamp. Still they went on talking, referring to me occasionally, but paying little heed to my presence.
The bell began to toll for Hall.
Halloway rose. “How long are you going to be in Oxford, Miss Favart?”
“That depends on Dante, and how long he will have me.
“Then you’re staying a little while?”
“Yes.”
“I ask, because I’d like to take Cardover and yourself out driving. I have my horses in Oxford and you ought to see some of the country.”
“That depends on Dante.”
“We’ll talk it over to-morrow,” I said brusquely.
For the next few days, wherever we went we were unaccountably coming across Halloway. He always expressed surprise at meeting us, and always made himself delightful after we had met. If we walked out to Cumnor, or Sandford or Godstow, it made no difference in which direction, we were sure to hear the sharp trit-trotting of his tandem, and to see his high red dog-cart gaining on us above the hedges. Then he would rein up, with a display of amazed pleasure at these repeated accidents, and insist on our mounting beside him. Ruthita told me that she was annoyed at the way he broke up our privacy; but her annoyance was saved entirely for his absence. In his company she allowed him to absorb her.
I had accompanied Ruthita back to the Mitre, where she was staying. It was her last night. On returning to my rooms, I found Halloway waiting. I was surprised, for the hour was late. I noticed that his manner was unusually serious and pre-occupied for such an habitual trifler. When I had mixed him a whiskey and soda, I sat down and watched him. He tapped his teeth with his thumbnail.
I grew restless. “What is it?” I asked. “Something on your mind?”
“Don’t know how to express it. You’ve made it difficult for me.”
“How?”
“By the things you’ve said from time to time. You see, it’s this way. Until I met Miss Favart I was quite unashamed of myself. Her purity and goodness made me view myself in a new light. Since then I’ve tried to retrieve my past to some extent. Of course, I can never be worthy of her, but——”
“Worthy of her! I don’t understand.” I leant forward in my chair, frowning.
“You do understand,” he said quietly. “You must have guessed it from the first. I’m in love with her and intend to make her my wife.”
“Intend!” I repeated.
He rose to his feet, as though willing to show me his fine body, and began to pace the room with the stealthy tread of a panther. He kept his eyes on mine. When he spoke there was a purring determination in his voice.
“Yes, intend. I’ve always had my way with women. You’ll see; I shan’t fail this time. I may have to wait, perhaps.”
“Halloway,” I said, “I don’t suppose you’re capable of realizing how decent people feel about you. Of course there are many men who disguise their feelings when they see you trying to do better. But very few of those same men would introduce you to their sisters, or daughters, or wives. To put it plainly, they’d feel they were insulting them. So now you know how I feel about what you’ve just told me.”
He paused above me, looking down with an amused smile.
“My dear Cardover, that’s just what I expected from you. You virgin men are so brutally honest where your ideals are concerned—so hopelessly evasive in facing up to realities. Don’t you know that life is a coarse affair? I’ve lived it naturally—most strong men have at some time. I’ve been open in what I’ve done. Everybody knows the worst there is to know about me. Most men do these things in secret. I couldn’t be secret and preserve my self-respect. Skeletons in the cupboard ar’n’t much in my line. Ruthita knows me at my wickedest now; when she knows me at my best, she’ll love me.”
“When my sister marries,” I said coldly, “it’ll be to a man who can bring her something better than the dregs of his debaucheries.”
He gave his foolish laugh. “That’s a new name for the Lovegrove titles. I’d better be going. If I stay longer, you may make me angry.”
I rose to see him take his departure. He had passed out and gone a few steps down the passage, when I heard him returning. The door just opened wide enough for him to look in on me. “My dear Cardover,” he said, “I came back to remind you of another of those evasive realities. You know, she isn’t your sister.”
A week later I received an indignant letter from Ruthita, saying that Lord Halloway had been to Pope Lane to see my father, and had asked for her hand in marriage. She had refused even to see him. By the same mail came a letter from the Snow Lady, couched in milder terms and asking for information. She wanted to know whether Halloway was as black as he was painted. I referred her to Ruthita, telling her to ask her to describe what happened on the esplanade. As a result I received a final letter, agreeing with me that the matter was impossible, but at the same time enlarging on the wealth and prestige of the Lovegrove earldom.
For a fortnight I refused to have anything to do with my cousin, but his imperturbable good-humor made rancor impossible. In the cabined intimacies of college life a quarrel was awkward. To the aristocratic much is forgiven; moreover he was a splendid all-round athlete and one of the hardest riders to hounds that the ‘Varsity had ever had. So he was popular with dons and undergraduates alike. One morning when he stopped me in Merton Street, offering me his hand, I took it, agreeing to renew his acquaintance. My commonsense told me that the defeated party had most cause for grievance. His sporting lack of bitterness sent him up in my estimation.
Spring broke late on the world that year in a foam of flowers. Like a swollen tide it swept through our valley in wanton riot and stormed across the walls of our gray old town. It surged into shadowy cloisters and dashed up in spray of may-blossom and lilac. Every tree was crested with the flying foam of its hurry. The Broad Walk, leading down to the barges, was white with blown bloom of chestnuts.
Quadrangles became gay with geraniums. Through open windows music and men’s laughter sounded. Flanneled figures, carrying rackets and cricket-bats, shot hither and thither on bicycles. At evening, in the streets beneath college windows, groups of strolling minstrels strummed on banjos and sang. Fresh-faced girls, sweethearts and sisters of the undergraduates, drifted up and down our monastic by-ways, smiling eagerly into their escort’s eyes, leaving behind them ripples of excitement.
All live things were mating. The instinct for love was in the air. My longing for Vi was quickened. The sight of girls’ faces filled me with poignancy. Every beauty of sound, or sight, or fragrance became commemorative of her. By day I traced her resemblance in the features of strangers. Inflamed desire wove tapestries of passion on the canvas of the night. Roaming through lanes of the countryside, I would meet young lovers in secluded places, and flee from them in a tempest of envy. Had she sent me one little sign that she still cared, I would have abandoned everything and have gone to claim her. My mind was burning. I poured out my heart to her in letters which, instead of sending, I destroyed. I became afraid.
Halloway was in the same plight. He never mentioned Ruthita; but he would come to my room, and pause before her photograph and fall silent. However, he knew how to shuffle his fortune to convenience his environment. He had his comforters. Gorgeous young females fluttered in and out of his apartments, like painted butterflies. His only discretion was in the numbers of his choice. They might have been the daughters of dukes by their appearance, but you knew they were chorus-girls from London. One day when I questioned him, he threw me a cynical smile, saying, “I’m trying the expulsive power of a new affection.”
The phrase took root. If I was to do the honorable thing by Vi, I also must employ my heart in a new direction. The thing was easy to say, but it seemed impossible that I should ever be attracted by another woman.
It had become my habit to spend much of my time sitting by the open window of my room, gazing out into the college garden. Hyacinths, tulips, crocuses bubbled up from beneath the turf. Every day brought a change. In the spring breeze the garden tossed and nodded, applauding its own endeavor. Songsters had returned to their last year’s nests. From morn to dusk they caroled in the shrubberies. Twittering their love-songs or trailing straws, they flashed across gulfs which separated the chestnuts. Over Bagley Wood, as I sat at work, I could hear the cuckoo calling. From the unseen river came the shouting of coaches to their crews, and the long and regular roll of oars as they turned in their rowlocks.
I glanced up from my books one evening. The glow of sunset, hovered along the city-wall. Leaning over its edge, looking down into the meadows, a tall girl was standing. Her back was towards me. She was dressed in the palest green. Her hair was auburn. She held her skirt daringly high, disclosing the daintiest of ankles. Her open-work stockings were also of green to match the rest of her attire. Her companion was Brookins, the assistant chaplain, an effeminate little man, who was known among the undergraduates as the doe-priest. He seemed ill at ease; she was manifestly flirting with him. In the stillness of the garden the penetrating cadence of her gay voice reached me. It was friendly, and had the lazy caressing quality of a summer’s afternoon when bees are humming in and out of flowers. I was tantalized by a haunting memory. She turned her face part way towards me. I caught her mocking profile. The way the red-gold curls fell across her forehead was familiar; and yet I could not remember. She came along the terrace, walking in long, slow, undulating strides. The west shone full upon her. She was brilliant and gracious, and carried herself with an air of challenging pride. Her tall, slim figure broke into exquisite lines as she walked, revealing its shapely frailty. Her narrow face, with its arch expression of innocence, promised a personality full of secrets and disguises.
I stepped across the sill of my window into the garden. They were near enough now for me to catch an occasional word of their conversation. I approached across the lawn towards them. She glanced in my direction casually; then she steadied her gaze. I saw that her eyes were green, specked with gold about the iris. She stooped her head, still gazing at me, and asked a question of the doe-priest in a lowered voice. I heard him speak my name. A bubbling laugh sprang from her lips. She came tripping towards me with her hand extended.
“You’re not going to pretend you don’t know me?”
“I do know you, and yet I can’t recall where we have met or what is your name.”
“Were you ever in Sneard’s garden at the Red House?”
“You’re———”
“Fiesole Cortona, and you’re Dante.”
We stood there holding one another’s hands, searching one another’s faces and laughing gladly.
“Well I never!” I kept repeating. “Fancy meeting you after all these years!”
“Am I much changed?” she questioned.
“You’re more beautiful,” I said boldly.
She nodded her head roguishly. “I can see you’re no longer afraid of girls. You were once, you remember.” The doe-priest had stood by watching us nervously. It was plain that Fiesole had scared him—he was glad to be relieved of her. The bell in the tower began to toll for dinner. Brookins jangled his keys, edging towards the gate.
“Poor Mr. Brookins, are you hungry? Must you be going?”
“I don’t like to be late at high table, Miss Cortona,” he replied stiffly. “The Warden is very particular about punctuality.”
“Never mind, Brookins,” I said, “I’ll look after Miss Cortona. You cut along.”
Brookins made his farewells with more alacrity than politeness. Fiesole gazed after his departing figure with mischievous merriment in her eyes.
“He thinks me a dangerous person,” she pouted. “He thinks I was luring him on to be naughty. He’ll go and preach a sermon about me. He’s bristling with righteousness. And now that he’s managed to escape, he’s locking poor innocent you, Dante, all alone in the garden with the wicked temptress.”
“I rather like it. Besides, I know a way out—over there, through my window.”
As we strolled across the lawn I asked her, “Where, under the sun, did you pick up Brookins? He doesn’t seem just your sort.”
“I picked him up at Aix-les-Bains. He was sowing his wild oats imaginatively and eyeing the ladies in La Villa des Fleurs. He was trying to find out what it felt like to be truly devilish.”
“That doesn’t sound like Brookins. I suppose he was gathering experience, so that he might be able to deal understanding with erring undergrads.”
“You’re charitable. At any rate, when I met him he was playing the truant from morality. I was in the Casino.”
“What doing? Gambling?”
She nodded. “You see I was nearly as bad as Mr. Brookins. He came and stood behind my chair while I was playing. When I got up and went out into the garden, he followed. It was all dusky and dimly lit with faery-lamps. I suppose it made him feel romantic. I saw what he was doing out of the corner of my eye; so, for the fun of it, I tried to fascinate him.”
“I’ll warrant you did. It was the old game you played with me and the Bantam. You take delight in making other people uncomfortable. It’s the most adventurous thing about you, Fiesole. You’ve got the name of a lullaby and the manners of a mustard-plaster. You’ll be trying to sting me presently, when you catch me sleepy and unaware.”
“Not you, Dante.”
She spoke my name coaxingly, veiling her eyes with her long lashes.
“But you did once.”
“Did I? So you still remember?”
I was unwilling to be sentimental. “What did you do next to poor Brookins?”
She took up the thread of her story with feigned demureness. “I chose out a bench well hidden in the shadows. He came and seated himself on the edge of it, as far away as he could get from me. He cleared his throat several times. I could hear him moistening his lips. Then he whispered, almost turning his back on me, ‘Je vous aime.’ And I whispered, turning my back on him, ‘Do you? Now isn’t that lovely!’”
“And then?”
“Oh, then, finding I was English, he became more comfy. He began to boast about Oxford and mentioned Lazarus. So I thought to-day the least I could do was to call on him. I didn’t know he was a parson. You should have seen his face when he saw me. I’ve been getting even with him all this afternoon. He thinks I’ve risen out of the buried past to haunt him.”
She broke into low musical laughter, shaking her shoulders.
“You were cruel, Fiesole. What he said to you was the sum total of the intent of his wickedness. He had reached the limit of his daring.”
“I know it. That’s why I don’t like him. He isn’t thorough. He told me that his name was Jordan at Aix. When I asked for him at the lodge to-day, the porter said there weren’t no sich purson. I was turning away, when I saw him coming across quad in full clericals, walking by the side of a stooping old gentleman shaped like the letter C.”
“That would be the Warden.”
“Oh, was it? Well, he didn’t see me and was walking right by me. I tapped him on the arm and said, ‘Good-afternoon, Mr. Jordan.’ He paled to his lips and stared. The old gentleman raised his hat to me and said, ‘This is Mr. Brookins, not Mr. Jordan, my dear young lady. You must be mistaken.’ ‘Jordan’s my pet name for him,’ I answered. The old gentleman smiled, and smiled again and left us. Then I turned to Mr. Brookins and said, ‘Je vous aime. Be sure your sins will find you out.’ After that I tried to be very nice to him, but somehow I couldn’t make him happy.”
“I’m not surprised. Brookins was wondering how he could explain to the Warden not knowing a charming young lady, who had a pet name for him. They’re asking him about it now at the high-table, and he’s lying fit to shame the devil. His pillow will be drenched to-night with tears of penitence. You rehearsed the Judgment Day to him. You’ve turned the tables on him, because, you know, that’s his profession every Sunday.”
I helped her to step across the sill of my window. She gazed round my room, taking in the pipes and tobacco-ash and clothes strewn about. “I love it,” she said. “It’s so cosy and mannish.”
She perched herself on the arm of a chair, so that the golden, after-glow fell athwart her. I watched her, thinking how little she had changed from the old Fiesole. She was still tantalizing, as mischievous as a school-girl; once she had fiddled with boys’ heartstrings, now she took her pastime in breaking men’s.
She was a creature of vivid mysteries, alternately wooing and repelling. She could beckon you on with passionate white arms and thrust you from her with hands of ice. She came out of nowhere like a wild thing from a wood. You looked up and saw her—she vanished. She courted capture and invited pursuit; but you knew that, though you caught her, you would never tame her.
She had plucked a deep-cupped daffodil from a vase on the table. She was bending over it with a tender air of contemplation. She held the long slim stalk low down in her dainty, long, slim fingers. The golden dust of the petals seemed the reflection of the golden glint that was in her hair. The stalk was the color of her eyes. Her tempestuous loveliness—made to lure and torture men, to fill them with cravings which she could not satisfy—was resting now.
She looked up at me with calculated suddenness. She read admiration in my eyes.
“You find me pretty nice, don’t you, Dante?”
“I’m not disguising it, am I?”
“I thought, maybe, you were cross with me about Brookins. We never quite approved of one another, did we, Dante? You thought and still think me a coquette.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“With some people, but not with you. I only played with the Bantam to draw you out of your shell.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Then the absurdity of being serious over an affair of childhood struck us and we went off into gales of laughter.
“Let’s be sensible,” I said. “What are you doing? Staying at Oxford with friends?”
“No. I’m traveling alone with my maid.”
“Have you any engagement for this evening?”
“No.”
“Then why shouldn’t we spend it together?”
“No reason in the world.”
“Where’ll we spend it?”
“Here, if you like.”
“But we can’t spend it here, just you and I. The college doesn’t allow it. Besides, you haven’t had dinner. Where’ll we dine?”
“Anywhere.”
“What do you say to punting down to Sandford and dinner at the inn there?”
“I’m game.”
As we passed through the quads, men were coming out of Hall from dinner. Some of them went thundering up wooden-stairs to their rooms, tearing off their gowns. Others strolled arm-in-arm joking and conversing, smoking cigarettes. At sight of Fiesole, they hauled up sharply. She was a man’s woman, and they were struck by her beauty. With one accord they turned unobstrusively and hurried their steps towards the lodge, to catch one more glimpse of her face as she passed out. She betrayed no sign that she was aware of the sensation she was creating. She advanced beside me with eyes modestly lowered, enhancing her allurement with a serene air of innocence. Out in the street her manner changed.
“The men do that always,” she said, “and, do you know, I rather like them for it.”
“What do they do?”
“Stare after me.”
“Don’t wonder Brookins was shocked by you, Fiesole. You’re a very shocking person. You say the most alarming things.”
She laid her hand on my arm for a second. “But I say them charmingly. Don’t I?”
On our way through the meadows to the barges, I asked her what she had been doing all these years.
“For a time I tried the stage, but lately I’ve been traveling in Europe. I have no relations—nothing to keep me tethered. I roam from place to place with my maid, moving on and on again.”
“Not married?”
“I’m not the kind of woman who marries. Men like me, but when it comes to making me their wife, it’s ‘Oh no, thank you.’ They want a woman a little more stupid. Are you married?”
“Hardly.”
She shot me a penetrating glance. “Engaged?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
We came to the Lazarus barge. I piled cushions in a punt for her. She lay with her back to the prow, so that she faced me. I took the pole and pushed off into midstream.
We had the river to ourselves; its restful loneliness caused us to fall silent. We left the barges quickly; then we drifted slowly. Fields were growing white and vaporous. The air was damp, and cool, and earthy. Behind us the spires of Oxford shone like a clump of spears against the embattled, orange-tinted sky. Before us, swimming in blue haze, was Iffley Mill. Everything was becoming ill-defined—receding into nothingness. Far away across meadows to the right we caught sounds of gritting hoofs and the grinding of a wagon. Sometimes a bird uttered one long fluty cry. Sometimes a swallow swooped near us.
“Dante, all the others have passed on, and there’s only you and I. What’s happened to the Bantam?”
“Married in Canada. He’s farming.”
“I believe you thought you loved me in the old days.”
“I could tell you some things to prove it.”
“You didn’t do much to prove it at the time. You were a terribly shy and stubborn boy. You left me to do all the courting. I’ve often laughed at the things I did to try and make you kiss me.”
“And that was what I was wanting most to do all the time. D’you know what sent me to the infirmary?”
Then I told her how I had crept out of bed and out of doors in the middle of the night to visit the summer-house.
“What a little beast I was,” she said. “I’m always being a little beast, Dante. That’s the way I’m made. Can’t help it. But I’ll never be like that to you again.”
By the time we got to Sandford it was night. Lamps in the inn were lighted, shining through the trees across the river. We had dinner in the room next to the bar, in an atmosphere of beer and sawdust and tobacco. The windows were open; the singing of water across the weir was accompaniment to our conversation.
She told me the beginning of many things about herself with a strange mixture of frankness and restraint. She spoke of the early days in Italy before her parents died, and of the ordered quiet of her convent life at Tours. After her expulsion from the Red House she had returned to France, and fallen in with the artistic set that had been her father’s in Paris. Her guardian, an old actor, had persuaded her to train for the stage. For a time she had succeeded, but had dropped her profession to go traveling.
“I’m an amateur at living,” she told me; “I’m always chopping and changing. I’ll find what I want some day.”
Her restlessness had carried her into many strange places. Northern Africa was known to her; she had been through India and Persia. Speaking in her lazy voice, with the faintest trace of a foreign accent, she painted pictures of sun-baked deserts with caravans of nodding camels; of decayed, oriental cities sprawled out like bleached bones in palm-groves beside some ancient river-bank; of strange fierce rituals in musty temples, demanding the blood-sacrifice. She made me feel while she spoke how narrowly I had lived my life. Like a fly on a window-pane I had crawled back and forth, back and forth, viewing the adventure of the great outside, rebellious at restraint, but never taking any rational measures for escape.
The river droned across the weir. In the bar-room next door glasses clinked; yokels’ voices rose and fell hoarsely in argument. Fiesole came to a halt and leant back in her chair, gazing searchingly into my face across the table.
“You look queer, Dante. What’s the matter?”
I laughed shortly. “You’ve been putting the telescope to my eye. You’ve been making me see things largely. How was it that you broke loose that way?”
“I had a horror of growing stodgy. I was born to be a South Sea Islander and to run about naked in the sunshine.”
“How long are you to be in Oxford?”
“Don’t know. I’ve made no plans. I hadn’t expected to spend more than one night. But now——”
She did not finish the sentence. We rose from the table. In the porch we loitered, breathing in the deep, cool stillness.
“You’ll stay a little while, won’t you, Fiesole?”
She took my arm and smiled. “Of course—if you want me.”
Going down through the arbors, we stepped into the punt The river was a-silver with moonlight.
I drugged myself with Fiesole to avoid thinking of Vi. Fiesole was so vivid in her personality that, while she was present, she absorbed my whole attention and shut out memory.
She was a continual source of pleasure and surprise, for her mood was forever changing. She could be as naughty as a French novel and as solemn as the Church of England Prayer Book. When she tried to be both together she was at her drollest; it was like Handel played on a mouth-organ.
She would never let me take her seriously. There lay the safety of our comradeship. At the first hint of sentiment, she flew like a hare before a greyhound; the way she showed her alarm was by converting what should have been pathos into absurdity.
Day after day of memorable beauty I spent with her in that blowy Cotswold country. We would usually appoint our place of meeting somewhere on the outskirts of Oxford. It was not necessary to let everyone know just how much of our time was lived together. This care for public opinion lent our actions the zest of indiscretion.
As I set out to meet her, I would pass crowds of undergrads, capped and gowned, sauntering off to their morning lectures. I was playing truant, and that gave an added spice to adventure. Each college doorway frowned on my frivolity, calling me back to a sense of duty. But the young foliage glittered and the spring wind romped down the street, and the shadows quivered and jumped aside as the sunlight splashed them. The lure of the feminine beckoned. Where the houses grew wider apart I would find her, and we would commence our climb out of the valley. Now we would come to a farm-house, standing gray and mediaeval in a sea of tossing green. Now we would pass by flowery orchards, smoking with scattered bloom. Brooks tinkled; birds sang; across the hedge a plowman called to his horses and started them up a new furrow. And through all this commotion of new-found life and clamorous hearts we two wandered, glad in one another.
Only the atmosphere of what we talked about remains with me. There were moments when we skirted the seashore of affection, and perhaps pushed out from land a little way, speculating on love’s audacities and dangers. But these moments were rare, for Fiesole delighted in love’s pursuit and not in its certainty. We made no pretense that our attraction for one another was more than friendly and temporary. If we played occasionally at being lovers, it was understood that we were only playing.
Fiesole never admitted that she had prolonged her stay in Oxford for my sake. She kept me in constant attendance by the threat that this might be my last chance of being with her. The supposition that her visit was shortly to end gave us the excuse we needed for being always together. We lived the hours which we shared intensely, as friends do who must soon go their separate ways.
But beneath her veneer of wit and frivolity I began to discover a truer and kinder Fiesole. These flashes of self-revelation came when she was off her guard. They were betrayed by a tremor in her tone or a hesitancy in her gaiety. After a day of exquisite sensations, her independence would break down and the fear of loneliness would look out from her eyes. She would prolong her departure, again postponing it beyond the date appointed. I began to suspect that her dashing recklessness was a barrier of habit, which she had erected to defend her shyness from curious observers. Insincerity was a cloak for her sincerity. Hidden behind her tantalizing lightness lay the deep and urgent feminine desire for a man and little children. I had roused in her the mating instinct. I was not the man; she had yet to find him. With myself the same thing was true. I took delight in her partly for herself, but mainly as Vi’s proxy. Fiesole and I had come together in a moment of crisis. We saw in each other the shadow of what we desired.
When a month had gone by I began to debate with myself how far our conduct was safe and justifiable. I went so far as to ask myself the question, did I want to marry her. But that consideration was impossible in my state of mind. Besides, as Fiesole herself had said, she was the type of woman that a man may love and yet fear to marry. She had no sense of moral responsibility. She would demand too much of herself and her lover. Her passion, once aroused, would burn too ardently. It would be self-consuming. She was a wild thing of the wood, swift and beautiful, and un-moral.
May had slipped by. June was nearly ended. Still she delayed. A chance remark of Brookins brought me to my senses and forced me to face the impression we had created. Fiesole, when she visited me in college, invariably brought her maid; we would shut her up in my bedroom while we sat in my study. In this way, we supposed, appearances had been saved. But Brookins’s remark proved the contrary—that he hoped I’d let him know when I moved out of Lazarus as he’d like to have my rooms.
“I’m not moving out of Lazarus. What made you think that?”
“You’ll have to when you’re married.”
“But what makes you think that I’m going to be married?”
“We don’t have to think,” he tittered. “We only have to use our eyes.”
That decided me. In common fairness we must separate. Since I could not make the suggestion to her, I determined to leave Oxford myself. The term was nearly ended. My work on the Renaissance furnished an excuse for a visit to Italy. I had never been out of England as yet; at Pope Lane we had had all we could do to keep up a plausible appearance of stay-at-home respectability. But Fiesole with her talk of travel, had led me to peep out of the back-door of the world. I made up my mind to start immediately.
It was a golden summer’s evening. How well I remember it! I had not seen her for two days. I was finishing my packing. A trunk stood in the middle of the floor partly filled. Over the backs of chairs clothes hung disorderly. Piles of books lay muddled about the carpet, among socks and shirts and underwear. Through the open window from the garden drifted in the rumor of voices and the perfume of roses.
The door opened without warning. I was kneeling beside the trunk. Glancing over my shoulder I saw her. She slipped into the room like a ray of sunlight, and stood behind me. She wore a golden dress, gathered in at the waist with a girdle of silver. Her arms, bare from the elbow, hung looped before her with the fingers knotted.
I glanced at her a moment. Her face was pale with reproach. Her rebelliousness had departed. Her lips trembled. She looked like a sensitive child, trying not to cry when her feelings had been wounded. This was the true Fiesole I had long suspected, but had never before discovered. We had no use for polite explanations; in the past two months we had lived too near together. She knew what it all meant—the half-filled trunk, the scattered clothing, the piles of books. Feeling ashamed, with a hurried greeting I turned back to my packing.
“You’re going.”
She spoke in a low voice, with a tremble in it. It filled me with panic desire to be kind to her; yet I dared not trust myself. I did not love her. I kept telling myself that I did not love her. My whole mind and being were pledged to another woman. And yet pity is so near to love that I could not allow myself to touch her. I was mad from the restraint I had suffered. To touch her might result in irreparable folly. Kneeling lower over my trunk, I shifted articles hither and thither, pressed them closer, moved them back to their original places, doing nothing useful, simply trying to keep my hands busy.
She watched me. I could not see her, but I felt that behind my back the slow, sweet, lazy smile was curling up the corners of her mouth. I knew just how she was looking—how the eyebrows were twitching and nostrils panting, the long white throat was working. I fixed my mind upon Vi. I was doing this for her. Maybe, if Fiesole had come first, we might have married. But we should not have been happy. I must be true to Vi, I told myself. I was like a man parched with thirst in a burning desert, who sees arise a mirage of green waters and blue palm-trees—and knows it to be a mirage, and yet is tempted.
“You were going away without telling me.”
Her voice broke. I listened for the sob, but it did not follow. Outside in the garden a thrush awoke; his notes fell like flashing silver, gleaming dimmer and dimmer as they sank into the silence.
“You were going away because of me. I would have gone if you had spoken.”
Still kneeling, I looked up at her. “Fiesole, I didn’t dare to tell you. Something was said. We had to separate. I thought this way was best.”
“Said about me?”
“About us.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t like to tell you.”
“I can guess. They said you were in love with me. Was that it?”
I tried to rise, but she held me down with her hands upon my shoulders. Each time I bent back my head to answer, she stooped lower above me. Her breath was in my hair. The gold flashed up in the depths of her eyes. Her voice broke into slow laughter. With her lips touching my forehead she whispered, “And what if they did say it?”
For a moment we gazed at one another. I hoped and I dreaded. By one slight action of assent, the quiver of an eye-lid or the raising of a hand, I would thrust Vi from me forever. A marriage with Fiesole would at least be correct—approved by society; but I should have to sin against Vi to get it—to sin against a love which was half-sinful.
Fiesole straightened. The tension relaxed. She placed her hand on my head, ruffling my hair. As though imitating the thrush, a peal of silver laughter fell from her lips. “Oh, Dante, Dante! You are just as you were. You’re still afraid of girls.”
I rose to my feet. She was again a coquette, rash, luring attack, but always on the defensive. I gained control of myself as my pity ebbed. I had been mistaken in thinking I had hurt her. I should have known she was play-acting. And yet I doubted.
We walked over to the lounge by the window. I seated myself beside her, confident now of my power to restrain myself. “I was afraid for you—not of you.”
“Why should you be afraid for me when I’m not afraid for myself? No, Dante, it wasn’t that. You’re afraid of yourself. Someone told you long, long ago, when you were quite little, that it was naughty to flirt. You’ve never forgotten it, and each time you begin to feel a bit happy you believe you’re going to do something bad. So you’ve put your heart to bed, and you’ve locked the door, and you’ve drawn the curtains. You play nurse to it, and every time it stirs, you tiptoe to the door to see that the key is turned, and to the windows to see that they’re properly bolted. I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you, Dante. I stole along the passage and hammered on the door of your heart’s bedroom, and your heart half-roused and called, ‘Nurse.’ There!”
She threw herself back against the cushions, seizing both my hands in hers. She gazed at me unflinchingly, daringly, mockingly. She drew me to her and thrust me from her with quick sharp jerks. She treated the situation so lightheartedly, so theatrically, that I could have kissed her with impunity. But it would have been like kissing the statue of a woman. She would have remained unmoved, unresponsive. There would have been no adventure of conquest.
“No, Miss Impudence,” I said, “you’re wrong. I wish sometimes my heart were safe in bed. You and I have been good friends. You came to me at a time when I most needed you. You never guessed the good you were doing. If this hadn’t happened, I would never have told you. But when I heard something said about you, which no girl would like to have said unless it were true, I thought it was time I should be going. You’ve been so good to me that I couldn’t return your good with evil.”
“But, my dear, I daresay I’ve flirted with half-a-hun-dred men. It’s very nice of you to think I haven’t, and to be so careful of me. But really it doesn’t matter what anybody says. I don’t want you to run away because of that, just when we were having such a good time together.”
“You won’t let me be serious,” I protested. “Now I want you to imagine for a minute that I’m old, and inoffensive, and have white hair.”
“Oh, yes, and about seventy.”
“About seventy-five I should say—I’ve known some pretty lively men of seventy.”
“All right. About seventy-five. I’m imagining.”
“My dear girl, you’re twenty-four or thereabouts, and you’re extremely beautiful. No man can look at you without being fascinated. I’ve often wanted to kiss you myself.”
“Then why didn’t you do it?”
“Fiesole, you’re not playing the game,” I said sternly. “Please go on imagining.”
“I’m imagining.”
“As I was saying, you’re extremely fascinating. Everything’s in your favor for making a happy and successful marriage, except one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You have no parents. Now parents are a kind of passport. Seeing that you haven’t any, you’ve got to be more circumspect than other girls. It has come to my ears that for the past two months you’ve been seen every day with one young gentleman. People are beginning to talk about it. Since you don’t intend to marry him, you ought to drop him until you are married.”
“Who says I don’t intend to marry him?”
She took me by the shoulders and drew me to her. The afterglow had faded from the garden. I could not see her face distinctly, but it seemed to me that that old expression of hungry wistfulness was coming back. I heard men enter the room overhead. A bar of light, like a golden streamer, fluttered and fell across the lawn. A piano struck up, playing Mr. Dooley. The dusk was humanized and robbed of its austerity. Her hands trembled on my shoulders. For a second time I doubted the genuineness of her playacting. I hurried on.
“But if you did want to marry him it would make no difference. He’s pledged to another woman.”
Her hands fell away. When she spoke it was gravely and with effort. “You didn’t tell me. You said you weren’t engaged when I asked you.”
“Neither am I, nor likely to be.”
“Why not?”
“She’s married.”
The silence was broken by her taking my hand. She took it with a sudden gesture and, bowing her head, kissed it. “Poor Dante,” she whispered.
I rose from the sofa and lit the lamp. Kneeling by my trunk, I blunderingly recommenced my packing. From the window came a muffled, choking sound. Perhaps she was trying not to sob. I had never seen her so gentle as just now. My mind ran back over the long road we had traveled. The Fiesole I had seen was a wild, mad girl, provoking, charming, inconsiderate as a child and frolicsome as the mad spring weather—but rarely tender. I wondered what other secrets of kindness lay hidden in her personality. She was the sort of woman a man might live with for twenty years and still be discovering. She kept one restless by the very richness of her character. It was true what she had said: many men might love her; few would desire to marry her.
She rose from the lounge. Standing between me and the lamp, her long shadow fell across me. I looked up and saw that her lashes glistened. Against the background of the white-paneled room she looked supremely lovely—a tall, gold daffodil. She held her head high on her splendid shoulders with a gesture of proud despair. And yet an appearance of meekness clothed her. Her face had an expression which a young girl’s often has, but which hers had seldom—an expression which was maternal. She watched my clumsy attempts to squeeze my clothes into smaller compass. Then she came and knelt beside me, saying, “Let me do it.”
Her swift white hands plied back and forth, re-arranging, smoothing out with deft touches, reaching out for socks to fill the hollows, rectifying my awkwardness. The thought flashed on me that this sensation I had was one of the sacred things of marriage—a man’s dependence on a woman. As I watched, I imagined the future, if this woman should become a wife to me. But the passion for her was not in me. She was only an emotion. The sight of her made me hungrier, but not for her. I reasoned with myself, saying how many men would desire her. I forced myself to notice the curve of her neck, the way the red-gold curls clustered about her shell-like ears and broad white forehead. I told myself that the best solution for Vi would be that I leave her unembarrassed by marrying Fiesole. But the more I urged matters, the colder grew my emotions. Then my emotions ceased and my observations became entirely mental.
Overhead, strident and uproarious, as if striving to burlesque what should have been chivalrous, the piano thumped and banged; men’s voices smote the night like hammer-strokes on steel, singing,
“Mr. Dooley! Oh, Mr. Dooley!
Mr. Dooley—-ooley——-ooley——-oo.”
“It’s done,” she said. Then, “Where are you going?”
“To Italy.”
“My country. When?”
“To-morrow.”
“You’ll write me sometimes? I shall be lonely, you know, at first.”
“Why, certainly.”
“Then, if you’re going to write to me, I must write to you. You’ll have to let me have your addresses so that I can send my letters on ahead.”
I wrote her out the list of towns and dates, telling her to address me poste restante.
I accompanied her across the quad to the lodge. I had had no idea it was so late. Big Tom had ceased ringing for an hour. It was past ten. The porter, when I called him out to unlock the gate, eyed us disapprovingly.
“I’ll see you home,” I told her.
She hesitated, urged that she could get home quite safely by herself, it was such a short way to go—but at last she surrendered.
Through the mysterious, moon-washed streets we walked; but not near together as formerly. We had nothing to say to one another. Or was it that we had too much, and they were things that we were ashamed to utter? The echo of our footfall followed behind us like a presence. At the turnings we lost it. Then it seemed to hurry till it had made up the distance; again it followed. The cobble-stones beneath us made our steps uneven. Sometimes we just brushed shoulders, and started apart with a guilty sense of contact. Sometimes we passed a window that was lighted by a student’s lamp. We could see him through the curtains poring over outspread books, holding his head between his hands. As we turned to look in on him, our faces were illumined. Her face was troubled; coming out of the night suddenly it looked blanched and distressful.
The air became heavy with the perfume of laburnums. It occurred to me that the laburnum was the flower with which she was best compared. It burned, and blazed, and fell unwithered. In crossing Magdalene Bridge we caught the sighing of willows along the banks of the Cherwell. I had often thought how restful was the sound. To-night I marveled at myself; it seemed poignant with anguish, like a fretful heart stirring. Under the bridge as we crossed, a punt slipped ghostlike down stream; the subdued laughter of a girl and the muffled pleading of a man’s voice reached us. Then memory assailed me. “They are even as you and I, Fiesole,” my heart whispered, “even as you and I once were.”
I fell to wondering, as I caught the moon shining through the lace-work parapet of Magdalene tower, how many such love-affairs of lightness it had seen commenced.
At the door of the house in which she lodged we halted abruptly.
“So this is the end,” she said. Then, feigning cheerfulness, she ran up the steps, crying, “Good luck to you on your journey.”
From the pavement I called to her, “I’m afraid, I’ve kept you out late, I——”
The door banged.
I had had much to say to her. Now that she was gone the thoughts and words bayed in my brain like bloodhounds. There were apologies, excuses, explanations—kind, meaningless phrases, which would have held a meaning of comfort for her. It was too late now. For a moment her shadow fell across the blind; then her arm was raised and the light went out.
The Englishman is brought up to live his life independently of woman. He considers his masculine solitariness a sign of strength. To be seen in the streets with his wife or sisters is to acknowledge that they are necessary. He feels awkward at being observed publicly in their company. He shows them no gallantries. He walks a little way apart. His conversation with them lacks spontaneity. He is not enjoying himself. He is wanting to be kind and natural, but he dreads lest he should be thought effeminate. His national conception of manliness demands that he should be complete in himself. How he ever so forgets his shyness as to make a woman his wife is one of the unsolved mysteries. Some primeval instinct, deeper than his national training of reserve, goads him to it. On recovering from his madness, he is among the first to marvel.
When Christian had climbed to the top of the hill his sack of sins fell from his back. When an Englishman lands in France, he drops his bundle of moral scruples in the harbor as he passes down the gang-plank. For morality is a matter of temperament, and for the time being his temperament shall be French. Just as a soul newly departed, may look back with pitying resentment on the chill chaotic body that once confined it, so he looks back across the English Channel at the uncharming rectitude of his former self. Being an Englishman has bored him.
I shall never forget the first wild rapture with which I viewed the tall white cliffs of Dieppe. It was about three in the afternoon. The sky was intensely blue, dotted here and there with fleecy islands of cloud. The sun smote down so hotly on the deck that one’s feet felt swollen. Far away the gleaming quaintness of the French fishing-town grew up and stole nearer. It seemed to me that as the wind swept towards us from the land, I caught the merry frou-frou of ten thousand skirts. Fields and woodlands which topped the cliffs, hid laughing eyes and emotional white arms eagerly extended. The staccato chatter of happiness lay before me. I had escaped from the Eveless Paradise of my own countrymen. I had slipped out by the back-door of the world. I was free to act as I liked. I was unobserved. Discretion had lost its most obvious purpose. It excited me to pretend to myself that I was almost willing to be tempted.
That night I sat by the quays at Rouen, observing the groups of men and women, always together, passing up and down. I saw how they drew frankly near to one another. I listened to their scraps of quiet conversation. The lazy laughter, now the hoarse brass of men’s voices, now the silver clearness of a woman’s, rose and fell. Below me barges from Paris creaked against the piles, and the golden Seine swept beneath the bridges, singing like a gay grisette. As night sank down I was stung to loneliness, thinking of the absence of Vi and Fiesole.
I arrived in Paris on the evening of the following day. Hastily depositing my baggage at my hotel in the Rue St. Honoré, I set out to stroll the boulevards. Until three in the morning I wandered from café to café. I searched the faces of passers-by for signs of the gracious abandon to happiness of which I had so often heard. My mind teemed with vivid images of pleasure such as crowd the pages of novels concerning Paris. Flitting moth-like up and down garish tunnels of light I saw a painted death. It simpered at me from under shadows of austere churches. It flirted with me, ogling me with slanted eyes, as I passed beneath the glare of lamps. I crossed the Pont St. Michel going southward, and found it in the guise of girls masquerading in male attire. I went across the bridges again and found it in the Rue de Rivoli, hunting with jaded feverish expression for men. Wherever I went I encountered the same fixed mercenary smile, saw the same lavish display of ankles beneath foamy skirts, and heard the same weary tip-tapping of feet which carried bodies which should be sold to whoever would purchase.
Where was the joy and adventure of which I had heard? The purpose of happiness should be life, not death. Several times that night women turned aside and seated themselves at a table beside me. They roused my pity; pity was quickly changed to disgust by their hot-foot avarice. All around me was a painted death.
Overhead the breeze ruffled the tree-tops. I looked up through the leaves. Stars were going out. I caught between roofs of tired houses a glimpse of the Eternal looking down. Surely the God who kept the wind going and replenished the sky with clouds, meant man to be happy in some better fashion. I went back to my hotel and, gathering together my baggage, fled.
At Florence the problem of right and wrong presented itself to me in another aspect. Restraint seemed attended with sadness; license with ugliness and regret. From above dim shrines disfigured Christs bespoke the anguish of crucified passions. On the other hand, Filippino’s tattered Magdalene symbolized the hideous rewards of abandonment. Both restraint and unrestraint brought sorrow, and I wanted to be supremely glad. Life should be an affair of singing. I was fascinated by the thought of woman. With one woman I was in love; in another I was interested. Both of them I must forget. I would not love Fiesole because I could not marry Vi. Yet within me was this capacity for passion, smoldering, leaping, expanding, fighting for an outlet. Surely in a rightly governed world it should find some fine expression! Through the by-ways of every city that I entered the lean hound of vice hunted after nightfall, and behind him stalked the painted death. The cleanness of the country called me. Like a captive stag, I longed to feel the cool touch of leaves against my shoulders.
In the Accademia at Florence I discovered my own dilemma portrayed. It stated my problem, but it offered no solution. However, it gave me a sense of comradeship to find that Botticelli, so many years ago, had peered down over the same precipice. In The Kingdom of Venus one sees a flowered wood; from leafy trees hangs golden fruit; between their trunks drifts in the flaming light that never was on sea or land. Here a band of maidens have met with a solitary youth to celebrate the renewal of spring. In the center of the landscape, a little back from the group, stands a sad-faced Venus, who might equally well be a madonna listening for the dreadful beat of Gabriel’s wings who shall summon her to be mother of a saviour to the world. To her left stand three wanton spirits of earth and air, innocently carnal, eternal in their loveliness. To her right three maidens dance with lifted hands. One of them gazes with melancholy desire towards the youth. He looks away from her unwillingly. In their eyes broods the gloomy foreknowledge of wrong-doing. They would fain be Grecians, but they have bowed to the Vatican. The shadows, the flowers, the rustling leaves are still pagan; but in the young girl’s eyes hangs the memory of the tortured Christ. She is wanton in her scarcely veiled nakedness, but she dares not forget; and while she remembers, she cannot be happy. The lips with which she will woo her lover have worshiped the wound-prints of the pierced hand.
The Renaissance made even its sadness exquisite by using it as the vehicle for poetry; but we, having lost our sense of magic, explain our melancholy in mediaeval terms. Magic was still in the world; I was determined to find it.
I was continually drawn back to the picture. I would sit before it for hours. It explained nothing. If offered no suggestions. It simply told me what I already knew about myself. But in watching it I found rest. Rebellion against social facts which turn love into lust left me. I came to see that a love which is unlawful is only lovely in its unfulfilment. The young girl in the woodland, did she rouse the frenzy in her lover, would lose the purity which was irrecoverable; by evening she would weep among the broken flowers. Perhaps, did I win her, it might be so with Vi.
I tried to find satisfaction by losing myself in memories of the past. The past is always kindlier than the present because, as Carlyle once said, the fear has gone out of it. The heavy actuality of the sorrows of Romeos makes them pleasurable romance only to latter-day observers. In their own day they were scandals. So I wandered through sun-scorched Italian towns, red and white and saffron, and I hung above ancient bridges, looking down on rushing mountain torrents, and I dreamt myself back to the glory of the loves that had once been self-consuming beneath that forgetful hard blue sky.
When I came to Ferrara my mind was stormy with thoughts of Lucrezia Borgia—Lucrezia of the amber hair. It was here that she came in her pageantry of shame to seek her third husband in the unwilling Alphonso. Ferrara had not changed since that day. She had seen it as I saw it. I entered the town at sunset. The golden light smote against the red-brick walls of the Castello. I imagined that I saw her sweet wronged face, half-saint, half-siren, gazing out from the narrow barred windows across the green-scummed moat.
I hired rooms in the primitive Pellegrino e Gaiana. They looked out on the dusty tree-shadowed Piazza Torquato Tasso, where tables with white cloths were spread, on which stood tall bottles of rough country wine. I promised myself that from there, as I sat, I could just discern the Castello. I had my dinner beneath the trees. On the further side of the square was a wine tavern. Men and girls were singing there. Sometimes the door would push open, letting out a rush of light. I tried to think that they were the men-at-arms of long ago. A cool breeze stirred the dust at my feet. The moon was rising. I got up and sauntered through gaunt paved streets, past empty palaces, past Ariosto’s house and out toward the country, where vines hung heavy with grapes, festooning the olivetrees. Italy lay languorous and scented in the night, like a fair deep-bosomed courtesan. The sensuous delight of the present mingled with my thoughts of the past. I had been hardly surprised had Lucrezia stolen out from the dusk towards me, with the breeze whipping about her the golden snakes of her hair.
Slowly I turned back to the town. At the Castello I halted, peering across the moat at the sullen darkness of the walls on the other side. As I stood smoking my cigar, I saw an English girl coming towards me across the Piazza Savonarola. Her nationality was unmistakable; she walked with a healthy air of self-reliance which you do not find in Latin women. I was surprised to see her. July is not the month for tourists. So far, save for a few Americans, I had had Italy to myself. And I was surprised for another reason—she was unaccompanied.
As she drew nearer, I turned my back so that she should not be offended by my staring. I heard her step coming closer. It halted at my side. I looked round, supposing she had lost her direction and was about to question me.
“You—you here!” I exclaimed and remained staring.
“I didn’t think you’d expect me,” she laughed shyly.
“Of course I didn’t. How should I? What brought you?”
“I was on my way to Venice; but remembering you were here, I stayed over for the night. You don’t mind?”
“Mind! I should say not. Where are you staying?”
“At the Albergo Europa. I was just on my way over to the Pellegrino e Gaiana to inquire if you were there. I’ve asked at all the other hotels.”
While we had been speaking I had been watching her closely. What was it that was changed in her? Was it the voluptuousness of the Italian night that made her more splendidly feminine? She had lost her laughing tone of laziness. Her beauty was strong wine and fire. Something had become earnest in her. Then I asked myself why had she come—was she really on her way to Venice?
“I’m jolly glad you came,” I said impetuously; “I’ve been missing you ever since I left.”
“And I you.”
She took my arm, giving it a friendly hug, just as Ruthita did when she was glad. We walked over to the Piazza Torquato Tasso. Seating ourselves at a table beneath the trees, we called for wine. The light from the trattoria fell softly on her face. The air was dreamy with fragrance of limes. At tables nearby other men and women were sitting. Across the way in the tavern my men-at-arms were still singing and carousing.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, leaning across towards me.
“I was thinking that I now begin to understand you.”
“In what way?” She jerked the question out. It was as though she had flung up her arms to ward off a blow. Her voice panted.
“You’ve always puzzled me,” I said. “You are a mixture of ice and fire. The ice is English and the fire is Italian. You’re different to-night.”
“How?”
“You’re mediaeval. The fire has melted the ice.”
She took my hand gratefully and drew me nearer. “Do you like me better?”
“Much better. I keep thinking how like you are to Simonetta in The Kingdom of Venus. I spent hours sitting before it at the Accademia in Florence. I couldn’t tell what was the attraction. Now I know. It was you I was looking at; you as you are now—not as you were.”
“Dante,” she said, “you can see what is beautiful in a painting or a poem, but you can’t see beauty in things themselves. You’re afraid to—you’re afraid of being disillusioned. You see life as reflected in a mirror.”
“It’s safer,” I smiled.
She took me up sharply. There was pain in what she said. “Ah, yes, safer! You’re always counting the cost and looking ahead for sorrow. You’re a pagan, but fear makes you an ascetic. You have the feeling that joy is something stolen, and you grow timid lest you’re going to be bad.”
“That’s true.”
“Can’t you believe,” she whispered, “that anything that makes two people happy must be right and best?”
“I wish I could.”
“And that anything that makes them sad must be wicked?”
“Fiesole,” I said, “have you been sad?”
She would not answer, but drew herself back into the shadow so I could not see her expression. We sat silent, fingering our glasses, giving ourselves over to the languor of the summer’s night. Through the rapturous stillness we heard the breeze from the mountains rustling across the Emilian plain like a woman in silk attire. At a neighboring table a man and a girl, thinking themselves unobserved, swayed slowly towards one another and kissed, as though constrained by some power stronger than themselves. Through the golden windows of the tavern across the way, one could see the silhouettes of men and women trail stealthily across the white-washed walls. The spirit of Lucrezia and her lover-poets seemed to haunt Ferrara that night.
“You’re going to Venice,” I said abruptly. “So am I. Perhaps we shall meet there.”
“Perhaps.”
“We might travel there together.”
“I should be glad.”
We rose from the table. It was late. The piazza was growing empty. The apple-green shutters before the windows of the houses were closed. Behind some of them were lights which threw gold bars on the pavement. The streets were silent.
“How did you know that I would be here?” I asked.
“You forget—you left me your addresses.”
“So I did. But you didn’t write. Why didn’t you write?”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t understand.”
What she meant by that I could only guess. Perhaps she hardly knew herself. My blood was rushing wildly through my veins. I was breathing the atmosphere of passion. I did not look ahead; I was absorbed in the present. I had been hungry for Vi—well, now I had Fiesole. I had been thirsty for the love of a woman. Fiesole was giving me her comradeship. I was intoxicated with life’s beauty.
The saffron moon looked down, pillowed on a bank of silver cloud. As we passed the Castello, a fish leapt in the moat, and fell back with a splash. I halted, leaning against the parapet.
“And it was here we met.”
She pressed against me. I could feel the wild beating of her heart; it tapped against my side, calling to my heart for entrance. Her voice shook with emotion; it whispered above the surge of conflicting thoughts like the solemn tolling of a sunken bell. “Since then everything has become golden, somehow.”
I dared not trust myself to respond to her tenderness. I was shaken and awed by her intensity. With her lips just a little way from mine, so that my cheeks were fanned by her breath, her face looked into mine, the chin tilted and the long white throat stretched back. I gazed on her motionless, with my arms strained down against my side.
“Fiesole,” I whispered, “how many girls and boys have stood here and said that!”
Her eagerness died out. She slipped her arm into mine. “But we are alive. I was thinking of nobody but our two selves to-night.”
We plunged into the cool deep shadows of the colonnade. We turned into the Corso della Giovecca. Down the long dim street all the houses stood in darkness, save for a faint patch of light which carpeted the pavement in front of her hotel.
“Your maid will be wondering what has happened.”
She looked at me curiously. “She won’t. I didn’t bring her.”
“Good-night until to-morrow.”
“Good-night.”
She looked back once from the doorway and smiled She entered. The sleepy porter came out and swung to the gates.
I was amazed at her bewitching indiscretion. For myself it did not matter. But what of her, if we should be seen together? A man can afford such accidents; but a woman—— I tried to deceive myself. Our meeting was, as she had said, haphazard. We were both alone in Italy. Our routes lay in the same direction. What more natural than that we should travel together? But I knew that this was not the case. I determined to open her eyes to the risks she was taking.
Next morning when I woke, I wondered vaguely what was the cause of this strange elation. Then memory came back. I jumped out of bed and flung the shutters wide. Out in the piazza some earlier risers were already seated at the tables. A man was watering the pavement, singing gaily to himself. Beneath the trees a parrot and a cockatoo screeched, hurling insults at one another from their perches. A soldier showed his teeth and laughed, talking to a broad-hipped peasant girl. At the top of the piazza a slim white figure waited.
I made haste with my dressing. I was extremely happy. I tried to analyze the situation, but lost patience with myself.
Picking up my hat and running down the stairs, I came across her standing outside the Cathedral, in the full glare of the sun. Before I had spoken she turned, darting like a pigeon, instinctively aware of my approach. “I’ve beaten you by nearly two hours,” she called gaily.
We passed into the fruit-market. I bought a basket of ripe figs; sitting down on a bench we ate them together. All round us was stir and bustle. Farmers in their broad straw-hats were unyoking oxen while women spread the wares.
“Fiesole, there’s just one thing I want to say to you, after which I’ll never mention it.”
“I know what it is. I’ve thought it all out.”
“Are you sure you have? Of course no one may ever know. But if by some chance they should find out, are you sure that you think it’s worth while?”
“Reckoning the cost again!” she laughed, helping herself to another fig.
“I’ll pay gladly. It’s you I’m considering,” I said seriously.
She rested her hand on mine. It was cool, and long, and delicate. I was startled at the thrill it gave me. “Dante,” she whispered, “have you ever wanted anything so badly that your whole body ached to get it? When you were very thirsty, say, and you heard a stream, singing ‘Find me. Find me’ out of sight in the hills among the heather? Then you climbed up and up, and the sun beat down, and your throat was dry, and the stream sang louder, and at last you found it. I’m like that. I don’t mind what the bank is like. I lie down full-length and let the water sing against my mouth. I’ve been thirsty for something, Dante, all my life. Yes, I’ve counted the price. If you don’t mind having me, Dannie, I’ll stay with you for the present.”
She rubbed her cheek against my shoulder ever so slightly. I bent towards her. When you’ve wounded a woman, there’s only one way of making recompense. She saw my intent. She drew back laughing, dragging my hand with her. The quick red blood mounted to her forehead. The gold in her green eyes sparkled with gladness. “Not now,” she cried. Then recovering herself, “But you’re a dear to want me like that.”
That morning we visited the Corpus Domini where Lu-crezia Borgia lies buried. We were admitted to a little chapel where all was lonely and silent. Presently a door opened and two nuns dressed in black entered. Their faces were covered from sight by long black veils. All that was human we were permitted to see of them was their eyes, which looked out from two black holes like stars in a dreary night. They had been beautiful perhaps, but because Christ was crucified they had crucified themselves. And these women, who had never tasted life, whose flesh had never throbbed with the sweet torture which was their right, whose bodies were the unremembered sepulchres of little children whose lips had never pressed the breast—these women were the guardians of her who had been the Magdalene of the Renaissance, whose feet had climbed the Calvary of passion, but not the Calvary of sacrifice. Sunlight, amber-colored as Lucrezia’s hair, slipped across the slab which marked her grave. Down there in the unbroken dusk, did her tresses mock decay?
From a hidden cloister the chanting of children’s voices broke the quiet. Its very suddenness took me by the throat. It was the future calling out of the sad and molder-ing content of stupidly misspent lives. Fiesole edged her hand into mine. I smiled into her eyes; then I looked at the nuns again. Who would remember them when three centuries had gone by? Lucrezia, if she had been wanton, had at least given joy; so the world forgave her now that she was buried. We tiptoed out into the tawny street, where water tinkled down the gutters. We had found a new sanction for desire.
It was towards evening that we sighted Venice, floating between sea and sky in a tepid light. Where we parted from the mainland, thin trees ran down to the water’s edge, shivering and gleaming, like naked boys. As the train thundered across the trestled bridge which spans the lagoon, Fiesole and I crowded against the window, tingling with excitement. The salt wind smote upon our faces and loosened a strand of her red-brown hair. Laughing, I fastened it into place. She snatched up my hand and kissed the fingers separately. We were children, so thrilled with happiness that we could speak only by signs and exclamations. A gondola drifted by, rowed by a poppe in a scarlet sash. Though we both saw it, we cried to one another that it was a gondola, and waved. Then the gold sun fell splashing through the clouds; Venice was stained to orange, and the lagoon to the purple of wine.
Not until the train had halted in the station did it occur to me that we had made no plans.
Hotel porters were already fighting to get possession of our baggage.
“Where are you going to stay?” I asked.
“Wherever you like,” she said. “A good place is the Hotel D’Angleterre on the Riva degli Schiavoni.”
So she took it for granted that we should put up at the same hotel! We went aboard the steamer and traveled down the Grand Canal in prosaic fashion, with the nodding black swans of gondolas all about us.
The Hotel D’Angleterre stands facing the Canale di San Marco, looking across to San Maria della Salute. The angle is that from which so many of Canaletto’s Venetian masterpieces were painted.
The proprietor came out to greet us suave and smiling. “A room for Monsieur and Madame?”
“Two rooms,” I said shortly.
When we went upstairs to look at them, we found that they were next door to one another. Fiesole made no objection.
They were both front rooms and faced the Canal. One could hardly find fault with them on the ground that they were too near together.
By the time dinner was over the silver dusk was falling. A hundred yards out two barche, a little distance separated, drifted with swinging lanterns. The tinkling of guitars sounded and the impassioned singing of a girl. Above embattled roofs of palaces to the westward fiery panthers of the sunset crouched. The beauty of it all was stinging—it seemed the misty fabric of a dream which must instantly shatter and fade into a pale and torturing remembrance.
We stepped into a gondola.
She spoke a few hasty words in Italian, then we stole out from the quay across the velvet blackness.
“Where are we going?” I asked her.
“Round the old canals of the Rialto.”
Soon every sound, even the faint sounds of Venice, grew fainter and vanished. Only the dip of the oar was heard, the water lapping, and the weird plaintive cry of the poppe as we approached a corner, “A-?el,” and “Sia stali” or “Sia premi” as we turned. We crept along old waterways where the oozy walls ground against the gondola on either side. Far, far up the narrow ribbon of ink-blue sky and the twinkling of stars looked down. Fiesole cuddled against me, like a contented tired child. I kept thinking of what she had said, “Have you ever wanted anything so badly that your whole body ached to get it?” I wondered if she had got that something now.
When we returned to the hotel it was past midnight. The sharp tang of morning was in the air. Lights which had blazed across the lagoon, now smoldered like torches burnt to the socket. Venice floated, a fair Ophelia with eyes drowned and hair disordered; one saw her mistily as through water.
Our gondola creaked against the landing, banged by the little waves. A poppe in a nearby barca groaned in his sleep and stirred. We were cramped with our long sitting. I gave Fiesole my arm; she shrank against me. At the door of her room I paused.
“We’ve had one brilliant day to remember. You’re happy now?”
“Very happy, dear Dante.”
I entered my room and sat down in the dark on the side of the bed.
I did not love her. I blundered my way over all the old arguments. I told myself that, since I could not marry Vi, I could not do better than marry Fiesole. But at the thought my soul rebelled—it was treachery. I tried to expel Vi’s image from my mind, but it refused to be expelled. I lived over again all the intoxicating pleasure of the day, but it was Vi who was my companion. I only drugged myself with Fiesole. She appealed to my imagination; her loveliness went like a strong wine to my head.
In the next room all sounds of stirring had ceased. I looked up; greyhound clouds, long and lean, coursed in pursuit of stars across the moon. I tiptoed to the window. As I leant out, I heard a faint sighing. I caught the glint of copper-gold hair poured across the sill of the neighboring window. Fearing she might see me, I drew back. Why was it, I asked myself, that Fiesole was not my woman? What was the reason for this fantastic loyalty to Vi, who could never be mine? Was it instinct that held me back from Fiesole or mere cold-heartedness?
For the next three days we wandered Venice, doing the usual round of churches and palaces. I was feverishly careful to live my life with Fiesole in public. I feared for her sake to be left alone with her. There was protection in spectators. She understood and accepted the situation, though we had not discussed it together. She played the part of a daring boy, carrying herself with merry independence. At times I almost forgot she was a girl. She disarmed my watchfulness, and seemed bent on showing me that it was unnecessary.
On the morning of the fourth day, we returned to déjeuner parched and footsore from exploring the stifling alleys which lie back of the Rialto. The air was heavy and sultry. The water seemed to boil in the canals. Every stone flung back the steady glare. Blue lagoons, polished as reflectors, mirrored the blue of the cloudless sky.
From where we sat at table, we could see crowded steamers draw in at the pier and crawl like flies across the bay to Lido.
Fiesole made a queer little face at me. “Stupid old sober-sides!”
“What’s the matter?”
She flung herself back in her chair, regarding me with a languid, arch expression. “I’m tired of fudging in and out of old palaces and churches. I came here to enjoy myself. If I promise to be a good girl, will you take me to Lido to bathe? We’ll have one dear little afternoon all to ourselves.”
A warm breeze caught us on the steamer. What ripe lips Fiesole had, and what inscrutable eyes! Since that first night of our arrival, she had prevented me from treating her with any of the privileges of her sex. She had walked when and where she liked. She had insisted on paying her share of everything down to the last centesimi. Now she changed her mood and slipped her arm through mine. We had both grown tired of pretending she was a man. “You needn’t be afraid to be nice to me,” she said.
There were lovers all about us: girls from the glass-factories in white dresses, bareheaded, with tasseled black shawls; sailors from the Arsenal with keen bronzed faces and silky mustaches. Venice was taking a day off and giving us a lesson in happiness. The self-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, which makes the expression of pleasure bad taste and distressing, was absent. Each was occupied with him or herself, sublimely unconscious of spectators.
“Haven’t I been nice?”
She patted my hand, entirely the woman now. “You’ve been trying to be correct. Why can’t you be your own dear self?”
Taking the tram across the island, we came to the Stabilimento dei Bagni. We walked through the arcade and down on to the terrace. The sea rolled in flashing, green and silver, in a long slow swell. Leaning over the side, we watched the bathers. Men, with costumes unfastened at the shoulders, sifted golden sand through their fingers on to their naked chests. Women lay beside them, buried in the sand, laughing and chatting.
I noticed a blond young giant standing at the water’s edge. His face kindled. I followed the direction in which he was looking. A dark-eyed girl had come out of her cabin. She wore a single-piece, tight-fitting suit of stockingette, which displayed her figure in all its splendid curves. Her face was roguish and vivid as that of Carmen. On her head she wore a scarlet turban. Her costume was sky blue.
The men who had been lying on their backs, turned over and regarded her with lazy admiration of her physical loveliness. Seemingly unaware of the interest she aroused, she came tripping daintily to the water’s edge, her white limbs flashing. The man held out his hand. With little birdlike exclamations she ran to him; then drew back and shivered as the first wave rippled about her feet. He encouraged her with tender, quickly spoken words. Her timidity was all a pretty pretense and they both knew it; but it gave them a chance to be charming to one another. He seized her hand again; she hung back from him laughing. Then they waded out together, hand-in-hand, splashing up diamonds as they went. They seemed to see no one but each other; they eyed one another innocently, unabashed. When they came to the deeper water, she clasped her arms about his neck; he swam out toward the horizon with her riding on his back. He was like a young sea-god capturing a land-maiden.
A stab of envy shot through me. I felt indignant with my inherited puritanism. It would not permit me simply to enjoy myself. I must be forever analyzing motives, and lifting the lid off the future to search for consequences.
I looked at Fiesole. Her eyes were starry. They seemed to mock me and plead with me saying, “Oh, Dannie, why can’t we be like that?”
I glanced down at the beach. The bathers were rising up and shaking off the sand. I noticed that only the women who had no beauty hid themselves behind bathing-skirts. The Italian standard of modesty!—you only need be modest when you have something to be ashamed of. I accepted the standard.
Fiesole broke the silence, clapping her hands, crying “Wasn’t she perfect!” Then she took hold of my face in childish excitement and turned my head. “Oh, look there!”
An English girl had come out. Her bathing-suit was drab-colored and baggy. Sagging about her knees hung an ugly skirt. In her clothes she might have been pretty; but now she was awkward and embarrassed. Her manner called attention to the fact that she was more sparsely clad than usual. She wore tight round her forehead a wretched waterproof cap.
“There’s Miss England,” laughed Fiesole.
“When we bathe, you be Miss Italy,” I laughed back.
And she was.
When I look back to that sunny July afternoon with the blue and silver Adriatic singing against the lips of the land, the warm wind blowing toward the shore from Egypt’s way, the daring flashing of slim white bodies tossed high by glistening waves, and the undercurrent merriment of laughter and secret love-making, I know that I had ventured as far as is safe into the garden which knows no barriers. It is as I saw her then that I like to remember Fiesole. I can see her coming down the golden sands, with a tress of her gold-red hair, that had escaped, lying shining between her breasts. I recall her astonishing girlishness, which she had hidden from me so long. Like a wild thing of the woods, she came to me at last, timid in her daring, halting to glance back at the green covert, advancing again with glad shy gestures. Whatever had gone before was gallant make-belief. Without a word spoken, as her eyes met mine she told me all at the water’s edge.
That afternoon I learnt the absurd delirium that may overtake a man who is owned in public by a pretty woman. She was the prettiest woman in Italy that day from her small pink feet to her golden crown. And she knew it. She treated me as though I was hers and, forgetting everything, I was glad of it. I can still thrill with the boyish pride I felt when I fastened her dress, with all the beach watching. Whatever she asked me to do was a delightful form of flattery. It pleased me to know that others were suffering the same pangs of envy that I had felt. They were saying to themselves, “How charming she is! What a lucky fellow! That’s what youth can do for you. I wonder whether they’re married.”
Tucking her arm under mine with a delicious sense of proprietorship, we set out with the crowd through the tropic growth of flowers to the pier from where the steamer started. A little way ahead I saw the blond giant with his gay little sweetheart. He was all care of her. She fluttered about him like a blue butterfly about a tall sunflower. She looked up into his face, making impertinent grimaces. He nodded his head and laughed down.
Was it only the spirit of imitation that caused us to copy them? They gave us a glimpse into the tender lovers’ world, which we both were sick with longing to enter. If Fiesole was playing a part she played it well. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes were brilliant. She made me feel the same bewilderment of gladness I had felt all those years ago, as a boy at the Red House. How much it would have meant to me then if she had treated me as she did now!
We crossed the bay towards the hour of sunset. Venice swooned in a golden haze. Clouds struck sparks from the burning disk, like hammers falling on a glowing anvil. The lagoon stared at the sky without a quiver. We traveled a pathway of molten fire.
“We must live this day out,” I said as we landed. “Let’s go to the Bauer-Grunwald to-night.”
We hurried upstairs and changed into evening-dress. I tapped at her door, asking, “Are you ready?”
“All except some hooks and eyes. Come in,” she replied.
She was seated before the looking-glass, with her arms curved upward, tucking a bow of black ribbon in her hair. It was her reflection that looked into my face and smiled.
“You do me proud, Fiesole,” I said, remembering one of Vi’s phrases.
She looked as simple as a sixteen year old girl. Her dress was of pale green satin, cut high in the waist in Empire fashion, hanging without fullness to just above her ankles. The sleeves left off at the elbows. Her wonderful russet hair was gathered into a loose knot and lay coiled along her neck. She was the Fiesole of my school-days. Had she intended to remind me?
I sat down on the edge of the bed while she finished her dressing, following with my eyes the feminine nick-nacks which were strewn about. But always my eyes came back to her, with the mellow glory from the window transfiguring her face and neck. There was a nipping sweetness in being so near to a woman whom I could not hope to possess. I knew that without marrying her I could not keep her. Platonic friendships are only safe between men and women whose youth is withered. I was wise enough to know that. We were chance-met travelers in Lovers’ Land—truants who would soon be dragged back. I kept saying to myself, “Intimacy such as we have can go but a short way further; any hour all this may end.”
Then I tried to imagine how this evening would seem to me years hence. The poignancy of life’s changefulness made me wistful. One day we should both be old. We should be free from tempestuous desires. The generous fires of youth would have burnt out. We should know the worth then of the pleasures we now withheld from one another. We should meet, having grown commonsense or satiated, and would wonder wherein lay the mastering attraction we had felt—from what source we had stolen our romance. We should be weary then, walking where our feet now ran. Why could we not last out this moment forever?
She rose, shaking down her skirt and courting my admiration.
“You may get to work on the hooks and eyes, old boy.”
Her voice was jerky with excitement. My fingers were awkward with trembling. As I leant over her, she patted my cheek, flashing a caress with her eyes. “Do you know, you’re handsome, Dante?”
I wanted to crush her in my arms, but my habitual restraint prevented. I should destroy the virginal quality in her—something which could never be put back. My mind conjured the scene. I saw her folded against me, her eyes brimming up to mine in tender amazement. But my arms went on with their business, as though some strong power held them down.
“It’s done. Come, bambino, it’s getting late.”
She followed me down the stairs. My senses were reeling with the maddening fragrance of her presence. We walked through the Piazzetta and Piazza di San Marco, through the narrow streets and across the bridges till we arrived at the garden beside the canal. Arbors were illumined with faery-lamps. It seemed a scene staged for a theatre rather than a living actuality. Gondolas stole past the garden through the dusk. Mysterious people alighted. Guitars tinkled. In tall mediaeval houses rising opposite, lamps flashed and women looked down. As specters in a dream, people leant above the bridge, gazed into the water, and vanished. Venice walked with slippered feet and finger to lips that night.
The silence shivered; a clear peal of laughter rippled on the air. We turned. The girl with the young sea-god was entering the garden. They seated themselves at a table near us—so near that we could watch their expressions and overhear much that was said. It seemed they were fated to goad us on and make us ambitious of attaining their happiness.
Fiesole stretched out her hands. I smiled and took them, holding them palms up. “They’re like petals of pink roses,” I said.
Her face was laughing. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
“I’ve always thought that, and you know it—ever since you wouldn’t kiss me in Sneard’s garden.”
“It was you who wouldn’t ask to be kissed,” she pouted. “What you could have, you didn’t value. It’s the same now.”
Her hands quivered; her lips became piteous. All the wild commotion of her heart seemed to travel through them to myself. My throat became suddenly parched.
“You know how it is, Fiesole. It isn’t that I haven’t affection for you; but to do that kind of thing, if I don’t intend to make you more to me, wouldn’t be fair.”
“But if I want it? What if I were to tell you, Dante, that you’re the only man I’ve ever cared for? What if I were to tell you that you’ve always been first in my heart, ever since we first met?”
I looked away from her to the street of water. I had nothing with which to answer. She tried to drag her hands from me, but still I held them.
“Dante,” she whispered, “look at me.” Her voice grew fainter. “I’m not speaking of marriage. Two people can be kind to one another without that.”
“And have I been unkind?”
She turned from my question. “You can never marry her,” she said. “You know that.”
A long silence elapsed, which was broken by voices of the girl and her lover at the neighboring table. Fiesole spoke again. “They’re not married. They never will be married. And yet they can share with one another one little corner of their lives.”
“For me it’s all or nothing,” I said. “If it wasn’t all, I should be forever thinking of the end. That’s how I’m made—it’s my training. If I did anything to you, Fiesole, that wounded you ever so little, I should hate myself. Wherever you were, I should be thinking of you—wanting to leave everything to come to you. I can’t forget. My conscience would give me no rest.”
She drew her hands free. “And yet you’re wounding me now.”
She was always different from other women, doing the unexpected. Instead of sitting melancholy through dinner, she broke into a burst of high spirits. She told me about her father, who had marched with Garibaldi. She rallied me on the awkward little boy I had been when first we met—all arms, and legs, and shyness. She talked of love in a bantering fashion, as insanity of the will. One minute she was the cynical woman of the world—the next the innocent young school-girl. She puzzled and played with me. Then she fell back into the vein of tenderness, recalling the good times we had had, stampeding through the Cotswolds in springtime with the mad wind blowing.
It was nearing midnight when we rose. Going down the little garden, we halted on the steps by the canal. A dozen shadowy figures leapt up with hoarse cries. We beckoned to a poppe; the gondola stole up and we entered.
“Don’t go back yet,” Fiesole pleaded.
We crept through ancient waterways, all solitary and silent; past churches blanched in the moonlight, and empty piazzas; under bridges from which some solitary figure leant to observe us. Now a swiftly moving barca would overtake us; as it fled by we had a glimpse through the curtains of a man and a woman sitting close together. Now the door of a tavern would suddenly open, flinging across the water a bar of garish light; cloaked figures would emerge and the door would close as suddenly as it had opened. Overhead in balconies we sometimes detected the stir of life where we had thought there was emptiness, and would catch the rustle of a woman’s dress or see the red flare of a cigarette. We had the haunted sensation one has in a wood in May-time: though he discerns but little with the eye, he is conscious that behind green leaves an anonymous, teeming world is mating and providing for its momentous cares.
Fiesole pressed against me; the darkness seemed to fling out hands, thrusting us together. She slipped off her hood and pushed back her cloak, displaying her arms and throat and hair. The seduction of her beauty enthralled and held me spellbound. The air pulsated with illicit influences. The dreaming city, vague and labyrinthine, was the outward symbol of my state of mind. I had lost my standards; my will-power was too inert to rouse itself for their recovery. I was entranced by a sensuous inner vision of loveliness which exhausted my faculties of resistance. I apprehended some fresh allurement of femininity through each portal of sense. Fiesole’s touch made my flesh burn; her eyes stung me to pity; her voice caressed me. Her body relaxed till it rested the length of mine. Her head lay against my shoulder; her arms were warm about my neck. I tried to think—to think of honor and duty; but I could only think of her.
“You know what you said about Simonetta,” she whispered; “how you thought I was like her and you spent hours before The Kingdom of Venus. You were wrong, all wrong, Dante, in your thoughts about her. The young man in the picture was Giuliano dei Medici and Simonetta was dear to him for many years. So the flowers weren’t broken, Dannie. Instead of broken flowers, they made poetry for Botticelli to paint.”
How could I tell her that there was a difference between love and passion?—that my feeling for her could be only passion, because my love was with Vi? She loved me—that made all her actions pure. Morality would sound like the rasping voice of a tired schoolmaster, scolding a classroom of healthy boys. It was even unsafe for me to pity her; when I drew my coat about her, she kissed my hand. I clasped her closely, gazing straight ahead, not daring to look down. Every quiver of her languorous body communicated itself.
“Fiesole, if I don’t marry her, I will marry you some day. I promise.”
“But I want you now—now—now.” Her whisper was sharp-edged with longing; it beat me down and ran out among the shadows like a darting blade.
We floated under the Bridge of Sighs and drew up at the landing. She leant heavily on my arm. We walked along the quay in silence. Few people were about. I saw mistily; my eyes were burning as if they had gazed too long into a glowing furnace. She drooped against me like a crushed flower.
“You’re breaking my heart, Fiesole. I’d give you anything, but the thing that would hurt you. Let me have time to consider.”
I was saying to myself, “Perhaps it would be right to marry her.” But the memory of her whisper clamored insistently in my ears and prevented me from thinking, “I want you now—now—now.” With her voice she made no reply.
We entered the hotel and stole past the office; the porter was sleeping with his head bowed across his arms. On the dimly lit stairs she dragged on my arm, so that I halted. Suddenly she freed herself and broke from me, running on ahead.
Standing still, almost hiding from her, I listened for her door to open and shut. Nothing stirred. I crept along the naked passage and found her leaning against the wall outside our rooms. Her head was thrown back in weariness, not in defiance; her arms were spread out helplessly; her hands, with palms inward, wandered blindly over the wall’s surface. She was panting like a hunted fawn. Her knees shook under her. Her attitude was horribly that of one who had been crucified.
Made reckless by remorse, I bent over her and kissed her. Because I did not put my arms about her, she made no response.
Something happened, wholly inexplicable, as though we had been joined by a third presence. Not a stair creaked. Everyone was in bed. The air was flooded with the slow, sweet smell of violets. I became aware of a palpitating sense of moral danger.
I drew back from Fiesole. Her physical fascination faded from me; yet I had never felt more tender towards her.
“I’m sorry, dear,” I said.
She met my gaze with a frozen, focusless expression of despair. Her hands ceased their wandering.
I entered my room and, closing the door, stood pressed against the panel, listening. After what seemed an interminable silence, her door opened and shut. I looked out into the passage; it was empty.
I spent a sleepless night and rose with my mind made up; since she wanted it I would marry her.
Going downstairs, I found she had not breakfasted. As a rule she was an earlier riser than myself; usually I found her waiting for me. I went for a stroll on the Piazzetta to give her time. On my return she had not appeared. I was beginning to grow nervous; then it occurred to me that she was postponing the first awkwardness of meeting me by breakfasting in bed.
Taking my place at our table in the window, I told the waiter to carry Fiesole’s rolls and coffee up to her bedroom. He looked a trifle blank, and hurried away without explanation. He returned, followed by the proprietor, who informed me with much secret amusement that the signora had called for her bill at seven o’clock that morning and had departed, taking her baggage. I inquired if she had left any message for me; the proprietor stifled a laugh and shook his head. I immediately looked up trains, to discover which one she had intended catching. There was one which had left Venice at eight for Milan. At the station I found that a lady resembling Fiesole had taken a ticket for the through-journey. By this time it was ten; the next train did not leave till two o’clock. I sent a telegram to catch her at Brescia, to be delivered to her in the carriage. No reply had been returned by the time I left Venice. I reached Milan in the evening and pursued my inquiries till midnight, but could get no trace of her. Either I had been mistaken in her direction, or she had alighted at one of the intermediate stations.
Before my experience at Venice the world had consisted for me of Vi, myself, and other people; now it was only myself and Vi. I spent my days in shadowy unreality; just as a child, waking from a bad dream, sees one face he can trust gazing over the brink of his horror, so out of the blurred confusion of my present I saw the face of Vi.
Fiesole had not shown me love in its purity, but she certainly had taught me something of its courage and selfishness. She had disabused my mind forever of the thought that it was a polite, intensified form of liking. A blazing ship, she had met me in mid-ocean and had set my rigging aflame. I had turned from her, but not in time to get off scatheless. Her wild unrestraint had accustomed my imagination to phases of desire which had before seemed abnormal and foreign to my nature.
When I missed her at Milan, I abandoned my pursuit of her. Now that the temptation was over, I realized how near we had come to wrecking each other’s lives. Physical lassitude overtook me. Because I had withstood Fiesole, I thought myself safe in indulging my fancy with more intimate thoughts of Vi. I excused myself for so doing, by telling myself that it was her memory that had made me strong to escape. It was like saying that because water had rescued me from fire it could no longer drown me.
I traveled northwards into the mountains to Raveno. Each morning I rowed across Maggiore to the island of Isola Madré. Lying beneath the camphor trees, watching the turquoise of the lake filling in the spaces between the yellowing bamboo canes, I gave rein to my longing. Shadowy foliage dripped from shadowy trees, curtaining the glaring light; down spy-hole vistas of overgrown pathways I watched the lazy world drift by. I numbed my cravings with the opiate of voluptuous beauty.
I had been there a fortnight when a letter from home arrived. With its confident domestic chatter, it brought a message of trust. It took from me my sense of isolation. One of them would understand.
Slowly the thought had taken shape within me that I must go to Vi. If I saw her only once again, I believed that I would be satisfied. It would not be necessary to speak to her—that would be unsportsmanlike if she had managed to forget me. All I asked was to be allowed just once to look upon her face. She should not know that I was near her; I would look at her and go away. With that strange sophistry that we practise on ourselves, I tried to be persuaded that, were I to see her in her own surroundings with her husband and Dorrie, it would be a lesson to me of how little share I had in her life. Perhaps I had even idealized her memory; seeing her might cure me. So I reasoned, but I was conscious that my own judgment on the wisdom of such a step was not to be trusted. Ruthita was too young to tell. My father, though I admired him, was not the man to whom a son would willingly betray a weakness. I would speak to the Snow Lady.
As I drove from the station through London, old scenes and memories woke to life. The city had spread out towards Stoke Newington, so that it had lost much of its quaintness; but it retained enough of its old-world quiet to put me in touch with my childhood.
I alighted at the foot of Pope Lane. The wooden posts still stood there to shut out traffic. I walked quickly up the avenue of fragrant limes with the eager expectancy of one who had been years absent instead of days. In the distance I heard the rumble of London. The golden August evening lay in pools upon the pathway. Sensations of the happy past came back. Dead memories stirred, plucking at my heartstrings. I thought of how Ruthita and I had bowled hoops and played marbles on that same gray pavement, making the air ring with our childish voices. I thought of those rare occasions when the Spuffler had carried me away with him into a boy’s world of mysterious small things, which he knew so well how to find. All the comings and goings of school-days, immense exaltations and magnified tragedies, rose before me—Ruthita waiting to catch first sight of me, and Ruthita running beside the dog-cart, with flushed cheeks and hair flying, to share the last of me as I drove away. What had happened since then seemed for the moment but an interlude in the momentous play.
Passing between the steeply-rising red-brick walls, dotted with gates, I came to the door through which I had been so eager to escape when it had been locked against me. I reflected that I had not gained much from the new things which I had dragged into my life. The narrowness which I had once detested as imprisoned dullness I now coveted as peaceful security.
I found the bell beneath the Virginia creeper. The door was opened by Hetty. Hetty had grown buxom and middle-aged. Her sweetheart had never come for her. The tradesmen no longer made love to her; they left their goods perfunctorily and went out in search of younger faces. Her hips had broadened. The curve between her bust and her waist had vanished. The dream of love was all that she had gained from life. I wondered whether she still told herself impossible stories of the deliverance wrought by marriage. If she did, no signs of her romantic tendencies revealed themselves in her face. Her expression had grown vacantly kind and stolid. To me she was respectful nowadays, and seemed even distressed by the immodesty of the memory that I had once been the little boy whom she had spanked, spoilt, bathed, and dried.
She gave a quick cry at catching sight of me, for I had warned no one of my coming.
“Sh! where are they?” I asked her.
She told me that the master was at work in his study, and that Miss Ruthita and her ma were in the garden.
I walked round the house slowly, lasting out the pleasure of their surprise. Nothing seemed to have changed except we people. Sunflowers kept guard in just the same places, like ranks of lean soldiers wearing golden helmets. Along the borders scarlet geraniums flared among the blue of lobelia and the white of featherfew, just as they had when I was a boy. Pigeons, descendants of those whose freedom I had envied, perched on the housetops opposite, or wheeled against the encrimsoned sky.
I stole across the lawn to where two stooping figures sat with their backs towards me. Halfway across I halted, gazing over my shoulder. Through the study-window, with ivy aslant the pane, I saw my father. His hair was white.. In the stoop of his shoulders was the sign of creeping age. He did not look up to notice me; he had never had time. As the years went by I grew proudly sorry for him. I saw him now, as I had seen him so many times when I paused to glance up from my play. He was cramped above his desk, writing, writing. His face was turned away. His head was supported on his hand as though weary. He was-the prisoner now; it was I who held the key of escape. How oddly life had changed!
Ruthita saw me. Her sewing fell from her lap. In a. trice she was racing towards me.
“You! You!” she cried.
Her thin arms went round me. Suddenly I felt miles distant from her because I was unworthy.
“Why did you come back?” she asked me. There was a note of anxiety in her voice. She searched my bronzed face.
“To see you, chickabiddy.”
“No, no. That’s not true,” she whispered; but she pressed her cheek against my shoulder as though she were willing to distrust her own denial. “You can get on quite well without me, Dannie; you would never have come back to see me only.”
The Snow Lady touched me on the elbow. Her eyes were excited and full of questioning. She gazed quickly from me to Ruthita. With a self-consciousness which was foreign to both of us, we dropped our eyes under her gaze and separated. Ruthita excused herself, saying that she would go and tell my father.
The Snow Lady offered me her cheek; it was soft and velvety. Slipping her arm through mine, she led me away to the apple-tree under which they had been sitting. She was still the frail little Madam Favart, half-frivolous, half-saintly; my father’s intense reticence had subdued, but not quite silenced her gaiety. Her silver hair was as abundant as ever and her figure as girlish; but her face had tired lines, especially about the eyes. I sat myself on the grass at her feet.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
“Much the same. He doesn’t change.”
“Is he still at the same old grind?”
She nodded. “But, Dante,” she said, “you look thinner and older.”
“That’s the heat and the rapid traveling. A day or two’s rest’ll put me right.”
She dropped her sewing into her lap and, pressing her cool hand against my forehead, drew me back against her. It was a mothering love-trick of hers that had lasted over from my childhood.
“What brought you home so suddenly, laddie?”
Her hand slipped to my shoulder. I bent aside and kissed it. “To see you and Ruthie. I had something to tell you.” She narrowed her eyes shrewdly. “You’ve been worried for nearly a year now. I’ve noticed it.”
“Have I shown it so plainly?”
“Plainly enough for me to notice. Is it something to do with a woman? But of course it is—at your age only a woman could make you wear a solemn face.”
“Yes. It’s a woman. And I want you to help me, Snow Lady, just as you used to long ago when I couldn’t make things go right.”
The slow tears clouded her eyes; yet my news seemed to make her happy. “When I was as old as you, Ruthie had been long enough with me to grow long curls.” She smiled inscrutably.
From where we sat we could watch the house. While we had been talking, I had seen through the study-window how Ruthita stole to my father’s chair. He looked up irritably at being disturbed. Her attitude was all meekness and apology as she explained her intrusion. He seemed to sigh at having to leave his work. She withdrew while he completed his sentence. He laid his pen carefully aside, glanced out into the garden shortsightedly, rose, and melted into the shadows at the back of his cave. The door at the top of the steps opened. He descended slowly and gravely, as though his brain was still tangled in the web of thought it had been weaving.
We sat together beneath the apple-tree while the light faded. Little ovals of gold, falling flaky through leaves on the turf, paled imperceptibly into the twilight grayness. My father’s voice was worn and unsteady. It came over me that he had aged; up till now I had not noticed it. Beyond the wall in a neighboring garden children were playing; a woman called them to bed; a lawn-mower ran to and fro across the silence. He questioned me eagerly as to where I had been in Italy, punctuating my answers and descriptions with such remarks as, “I always wanted to go there—never had time—always felt that such a background would have made all the difference.”
It was noticeable that Ruthita and the Snow Lady suppressed themselves in his presence; if they ventured anything, it was only to keep him interested or to lead his thoughts in happier directions. Presently he told them that they would be tired if they sat up later. Taking the hint as a command, they bade us good-night.
Darkness had gathered when they left us; to the southward London waved a torch against the clouds. We watched the lights spring up in the bedrooms, and saw Ruthita and then the Snow Lady step to their windows and draw down their blinds. Presently the lights went out.
“Lord Halloway’s been here again.” When I waited for further explanation my father added, “Didn’t like the fellow at first; he improves on acquaintance.”
Then I spoke. “Depends how far you carry his acquaintance.”
My father fidgeted in his chair. “He’s got flaws in his character, but he’s honest in keeping back nothing. Most people in our position wouldn’t hesitate two minutes over such a match.” Then, after a long pause, “And what’s to become of Ruthita when I die?”
I took him up sharply. I was young enough to fear the mention of death. “You’ll live for many years yet. After that, I’ll take care of her if she doesn’t marry.”
My father sat upright. I wondered how I had hurt him. He spoke stiffly. “You’ll inherit Sir Charles’s money. When I married a first and a second time, I didn’t consult his convenience, and the responsibilities I undertook are mine. Ruthita’s only your sister by accident; already you’ve been too much together. We must consider this offer apart from sentiment. He’s sowed his wild oats—well, he’s sorry. And he’ll be the Earl of Lovegrove by and by. To stand in her way would be selfishness.”
His argument took me by surprise. “Is Ruthita anxious for it? What does she say?”
“She knows nothing of the world. She takes her coloring from you. She’s afraid to speak out her mind. She thinks you would never forgive her.”
His voice was high-strung and challenging.
“I don’t believe it,” I said quietly. “She doesn’t love him—she’d be selling herself for safety.”
In the interval that followed I could feel the grimness of his expression which the darkness hid from my eyes. “You’re young; you don’t understand. For years I’ve had to struggle to make ends meet. I’m about done—I’m tired. If Ruthita were settled, I could lie down with an easy mind. There’s enough saved to see me and her mother to our journey’s end.”
He rose to his feet suddenly. “You think I’m acting shabbily. Good-night.”
He walked away, a gaunt shadow moving through the silver night. The awe I had of him kept me from following. I sat there and tried to puzzle out how this thing might be avoided. I could help financially; but my help would be refused because it was Sir Charles’s money.
Next morning I woke at six and dressed. Dew was on the turf; it sparkled in the gossamer veils of spider-webs caught among the bushes. Blackbirds and thrushes in trees were calling. A cock crew, and a cock in the distance echoed. The childish thought came back to me—how much grown-ups miss of pleasure in their anxiety for the morrow. There is so much to be enjoyed for nothing!
A window-sash was raised sharply. Looking up I saw Ruthita in her white night-gown, with her hair tumbled like a cloud about her breast. I watched her, thinking her lovely—so timid and small and delicate. I called to her softly; she started and drew back. I waited. Soon she came down to me in the garden. I must have eyed her curiously.
“You’ve heard?”
She held out her hand pleadingly, afraid that I would judge her. “They’re making me,” she cried, “and I don’t—don’t want to, Dannie.”
I led her away behind the tool-shed at the bottom of the garden; it was the place where I had discovered Hetty in her one flirtation.
“I’m not wanted,” moaned Ruthita; “I cost money. So they’re giving me to a man I don’t love.”
“They shan’t,” I told her, slipping my arm about her. “You shall come to me—I don’t suppose I shall ever marry.”
She nestled her head against my shoulder, saying, “You were always good to me; I don’t know why. I’m not much use to anybody.”
“Rubbish!” I retorted. “None of us could get along without you.”
Then I told her that if the pressure became unbearable she must come to me. She promised.
The Snow Lady found us sitting there together; we made room for her beside us. Shortly after her coming Ruthita made an excuse to vanish.
I turned to the Snow Lady abruptly. “She’s not going to marry Halloway.”
She raised her brows, laughing with her eyes. “Why not? Why so positive?”
“Because it’s an arranged marriage.”
“Mine with her father was arranged; it was very happy.”
Somehow I knew she was not serious.
“You don’t want it?” I challenged.
“No, I don’t want it; but Ruthita’s growing older. No one else has asked for her. It would be a shame if she became an old maid.”
“She won’t.”
“She won’t, if you say so,” said the Snow Lady.
During breakfast my father was silent. He seemed conscious of a conspiracy against him. When the meal was ended, he retired to his study, where he shut himself up, working morosely. I sought opportunities to tell the Snow Lady what I had come to say, but I could never find an opening to introduce the name of Vi. Whenever we were alone together she insisted on discussing Ruthita’s future, stating and re-stating the reasons for and against the proposed match. The atmosphere was never sympathetic for the broaching of my own perplexities. Gradually I came to see that I must make my decision unaided; then I knew that I should decide in only one way. I engaged a passage to Boston provisionally, telling myself that it could be canceled. That I think was the turning-point, though I still pretended to hesitate.
The day before the boat sailed, my father announced at table, avoiding my eyes, that Lord Halloway had written that he would call next day. I went to my bedroom and commenced to pack. Ruthita followed.
“You’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Because he’s coming?”
“Partly.”
Her eyes were blinded with tears; she sank against the wall in a fit of sobbing. “Oh, I wish you could take me—I wish you could take me!” she cried.
I comforted her, telling her to be brave, reminding her of her promise to come to me if they used pressure. She dabbed her eyes. “You and I’ve always stood together, little sister; you mustn’t be afraid,” I told her.
I carried my bags downstairs into the hall. The Snow Lady met me.
“What’s this? You’re going?” Her voice reflected dismay and bewilderment.
“Yes, going.”
“But not for long! You’ll be back shortly?”
“That depends.”
I entered my father’s study. He looked up from his writing. “I’m going away.”
He held my hand in silence a moment; his throat was working; he would not look me in the eyes. “Won’t you stay?” he asked hoarsely.
I shook my head.
“Good-by,” he muttered. “Don’t judge us harshly. Come back again.”
Ruthita accompanied me to the end of the lane. She did not come further; she was grown up now and ashamed to be seen crying. At the last minute I wanted to tell her. I realized that she would understand—she was a woman. The knowledge came too late. She said she would write me at Oxford, and I did not correct her. I looked back as I went down the road and waved. I turned a corner; she was lost to sight.
Next day I sailed.
A sleepy, contented little town, overshadowed by giant elms, sprawled out along the banks of a winding river, surrounded for miles by undulating woodlands—that is how I remember Sheba. The houses were for the most part of timber, and nearly all of them were painted white. They sat each in its unfenced garden, comfortably separate from neighbors, with a green lawn flowing from the roadway all about it, and a nosegay of salvias, hollyhocks, and lavender, making cheerfulness beside the piazza. I suppose unkind things happened there, but they have left no mark on my memory. When I think of Sheba there comes to me the sound of bees humming, woodpeckers tapping, frogs croaking, and the sight of blue indolent smoke curling above quiet gables, butterflies sailing over flowers, a nodding team of oxen on a sunlit road hauling fagots into town and, after sunset hour, the indigo silence of dusk beneath orchards where apples are dropping and fireflies blink with the eyes of goblins.
Sheba was one of those old New England towns from which the hurry of life has departed; it cared more for its traditions than for its future, and sat watching the present like a gray spectacled grandmother, pleased to be behind the times, with its worn hands folded.
I arrived there with only a small sum of money and the price of my return passage. I had limited my funds purposely, so that I might not be tempted to prolong my visit.
The day after my arrival my calculations were upset; I discovered that the Carpenter house was shut, and that Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter had not yet returned from the coast. This made me careful. I was unwilling to draw on my bank in London lest my whereabouts should be discovered, which would necessitate awkward explanations to my family and the association of Vi’s name with doubtful circumstances.
In my search for cheap lodgings I had a strange stroke of luck. Randall Carpenter’s house stood in an old-world street, which at this time of the year was a tunnel through foliage. I waited until the gardeners had departed. Evening came; pushing open the gate, I entered the grounds.
I passed down a rough path under apple-trees, where fruit kept falling. In stables to the left, horses chafed in their stalls and snorted. To the right in the vegetable garden, birds of brilliant plumage flashed and darted, and fat gray squirrels sat up quivering to watch me. Overhead, near and far, the air vibrated with incessant twittering. The golden haze of sunset was over everything; the whole world seemed enkindled. The path descended to low, flat meadows where haymaking was in progress. Farm implements stood carelessly about, ready for the morrow. In one field the hay was cocked, in another gathered, in a third the cutting had commenced. I told myself I was with her, and shivered at the aching loneliness of reality.
Circling the meadows was a narrow stream, which at a little distance joined the main river; on the farther side stood scattered cottages, with gardens straggling down a hill to its banks. In one of these a gray-haired woman was working. She wore a sunbonnet and print-dress of lavender. In my idleness I threw myself down in the grass and observed her. She grew conscious that she was being watched, and cast sly glances across her shoulder. At first I thought she was suspicious of my trespassing; she came lower down the hill and nodded in shy friendly fashion.
“Good-evening,” I called to her over the stream.
She drew herself erect and eyed me. “Guess you’re a stranger?” she questioned, having found something foreign in my English accent.
I told her that I was, and then, for the sake of conversation, asked her if she knew of any rooms to rent. “Guess I do,” she called back, “me and my sisters have one room to spare.”
That was how I came to take lodgings with the three Misses Januaries. I paid them ten dollars weekly and had everything found. My room lay at the back; from my window I could see much of what went on in Randall Carpenter’s grounds.
From the three Misses Januaries I learnt many things. They were decayed ladies and eked out a livelihood by bringing home piece-work to do for the jewelry factories. Every other day Miss Priscilla, the eldest, went to deliver the finished task and to take further orders. Miss Priscilla was proud, angular, and bent. Miss Julia was round and jolly, but crippled with rheumatism. Miss Lucy, the youngest, had a weak spine and was never dressed; day after day she lay between white sheets dreamily smiling, small as a child, making hardly any mound in the bed.
At first they hid from me the fact that they worked. Then they pretended that they did it to occupy their leisure. Sewing was so useless, Miss Priscilla said. At last they admitted the truth to the extent of letting me sit with them in Miss Lucy’s bedroom, even allowing me to help them with the fastening of the interminable links that went to the making of one chain-bag.
It was during these meetings that they gossiped of their neighbors and themselves. By delicate manouvering I would lead the conversation round to Vi. I found that for them Sheba was the one and only town, and Randall Carpenter was its richest citizen. He stood behind all its thriving institutions. He was president of the Sheba National Bank. He had controlling interest in the jewelry factory. He owned the cotton-works. He had been Senator at Washington. Vi was the social leader and the mirror of local fashion. They spoke of her as though she embodied for them all that is meant by romance. They told me the story, which I had already heard, of how Randall Carpenter had saved her father from ruin.
While such matters were being discussed and fresh details added, Miss Lucy would smile up at the ceiling, with her thin arms stretched straight out and her fingers plucking at the coverlet. I discovered later that long years before, Randall Carpenter had kept company with her; then her spine trouble had commenced and their money had gone from them, and it had been ended. As a middle-aged bachelor he had married Vi, and now Miss Lucy re-lived her own girlhood in listening to stories of Vi’s reported happiness.
Three weeks after my arrival in Sheba Vi returned. The evening before I had seen from my window that lights had sprung up in the house; early next morning I saw Dorrie in the garden, a white, diminutive, butterfly figure fluttering beneath the boughs. After breakfast I saw Vi come out, walking with a portly man. An eighth of a mile separated us—by listening intently I could hear her voice when she called, “Dorrie, Dorrie.”
Twice I came near to her, though she did not know it. One Sunday morning I waited till service had commenced, and followed her to church. I slipped into a seat at the back. There were few people present. From where I sat I could get a clear view of her and her husband across empty pews. Mr. Carpenter was a squarely-built, kindly-looking man—unimaginative and mildly corpulent. His face was clean-shaven and ruddy. He had an air of benevolent prosperity; his hair was grizzled, the top of his head was bald and polished. When he offered me the plate in taking the collection, I noticed that his fingers were podgy. I remembered Vi’s continually reiterated assertion that he was so kind to her. I knew what she had meant—kind, but lacking subtlety in expressing the affections. I judged that he was the sort of person to whom life had scattered largesse—he had never been tested, and consequently accepted all good fortune as something merited. His wide shrewd eyes had a steely gleam of justice; the puckered eye-lids promised humor. He was lovable rather than likable—a big boy, a mixture of na?ve self-complacency and masterfulness. Before the benediction was pronounced, I left.
This was the first time I had seen him at close quarters. I had come prepared to find faults in the man; I was surprised at my lack of anger. His comfortable amiability disarmed me.
The second time I came near to her was at nightfall. It was November. A touch of frost had nipped the leaves to blood-red; the Indian Summer had commenced. The air was pungent with the walnut fragrance of decaying foliage; violet mist trailed in shreds from thickets, like a woman’s scarf torn from her throat in the passage. I had wandered out into the country. An aimless restlessness was on me—a sense of defiant self-dissatisfaction.
Occupied with my thoughts, I was strolling moodily along with hands in pockets, when I chanced to look up. She was coming down the road towards me. She was alone; her trim, clean-cut figure made a silhouette against the twilight. She was whistling like a boy as she approached; her skirt was short to the ankles; she carried a light cane in her hand. I wanted to stand still till she had come up with me and then to catch her in my arms before she was aware. For a moment I halted irresolute; then I turned into the woods to the left.
I could not understand how she could be so near to me and not know it. It seemed to me that I would raise clenched hands against the coffin-lid, were she to approach me, though I was buried deep underground.
As the year drew towards a close my uncertainty of mind became a torture. I knew that I ought to return to England; I was breaking the promise I had made to myself. My friends must be getting anxious. By this time Sir Charles must have heard of my disappearance. I was imperiling my future by stopping. Worse still, the longer I lived near Vi, the more difficult was I making it for myself to take up the threads of my old life without her. I continually set dates for my departure, and I continually postponed them. At last I booked my passage some way ahead for the first week in January. In order to prevent myself from altering my decision, I told Miss Priscilla that I was going.
I fought a series of never finished battles with myself. As the time of my respite shortened, I grew frenzied. Was I to go away forever without speaking to her? Was I to give her no sign of my presence? Was I to let her think that I had forgotten her and had ceased to care? I kept myself awake of nights on purpose to make my respite go further; from where I lay on the pillow with my face turned to the snow-covered meadows, I could see the blur which was her house. Sometimes in the darkness, when one loses all standards, I determined to risk everything and go to her. With morning I mastered myself and saw clearly—to go to her would be basest selfishness.
In one of my long tramps I had come upon a pond in a secluded stretch of woodland on the outskirts of Sheba. On the last evening before my departure I remembered it. I was in almost hourly fear of myself—afraid that I would seek her out. I planned diversions of thought and action for my physical self, so that my will might keep it in subjection. This evening, when I was at a loss what to do, the inclination occurred to go there skating.
As I walked along the road, sleighs slid by with bells jingling. The merry golden windows of white houses in white fields brought a sense of peacefulness. The night was blue-black; the sky was starry; the air had that deceptive dryness which hides its coldness. Beneath the woods trees cast intricate sprawling traceries of shadows. Every now and then the frozen silence was shattered by the snapping of some overladen bough; then the whole wood shook and shivered as though it were spun from glassy threads.
Picking my way through bushes, I came to the edge of the pond and sat down to adjust my skates. It was perhaps four hundred yards in extent and curved in the middle, so that one could not see from end to end. To the right grew a plantation of firs almost large enough for cutting; on the other three sides lay tangled swamp and brushwood.
I had risen to my feet and was on the point of striking out, when I heard a sound which was unmistakable, rrh! rrh! rrh!—the sharp ring of skates cutting against ice.
From a point above me at the edge of the fir-grove a figure darted out and vanished round the bend. The moon was just rising; behind bars of tall trunks I could see its pale disk shining—the pond had not yet caught its light.
I felt foolishly angry and disappointed that I was not to have my last evening to myself. I was jealous that some stranger, to whom it would lack the same intensity, should share this memory. Unreasonable chagrin held me hesitant; I was minded to steal away unnoticed.
The intruder had reached the far end of the pond—there was silence. Then the rrh! rrh! rrh! commenced again, coming back. I set out to meet it; it was eerie for two people to be within earshot, but out of sight in that still solitude. We swung round the corner together; the moon peered above the tree-tops. For an instant we were face to face, staring into one another’s eyes; then our impetus carried us apart into the dusk.
I listened, and heard nothing but the brittle shuddering of icicles as boughs strained up to free themselves. Stealing back round the bend, I came upon her standing fixed and silent; as I approached her, she spread her hands before her eyes in a gesture of terror.
“Vi, Vi,” I whispered, “it’s Dante.”
She muttered to herself in choking, babbling fashion.
When I had put my arms about her, she ceased to speak, but her body was shaken with sobbing. She made no sound, but a deep convulsive trembling ran through her. I talked to her soothingly, trying to convince her I was real. Slowly she relaxed against me sighing, and trusted herself to look up at me, letting her fingers wander over my face and hands. I had brought her the bitterness of remembrance. Stooping, I kissed her mouth. “Just once,” I pleaded, “after all these months of loneliness. I’m going to-morrow.”
“You must,” she said, freeing herself from my embrace and clasping her arms about my neck; “oh, it’s wrong, but I’ve wanted you so badly.”
I led her to the edge of the pond and removed her skates. The moon had now sailed above the spear-topped firs and the ice was a silver mirror. Walking through the muffled woods I told her of my coming to Sheba, of the window from which I had watched her, and of all that had happened. From her I learnt that she also had been going through the same struggle between duty and desire ever since we parted.
“Sometimes I felt that it was no use,” she said; “I couldn’t fight any longer—I must write or come to you. Then something would happen; I would read or hear of a woman who had done it, and in the revulsion I felt I realized how other people would feel about myself. And I saw how it would spoil Randall’s life, and especially what it would mean to Dorrie. You can’t tell your personal excuses to the world; it just judges you wholesale by what you do, and I couldn’t bear that. It’s so easy to slip into temptation, Dante, especially our kind of temptation; because we love one another, anything we might do seems good. You can only see what sin really is when you picture it in the lives of others.”
We were walking apart now; she had withdrawn her arm from mine. “I shall always love you,” I said.
“And I you.”
“I shall never marry any other woman,” I told her; “I shall wait for you.”
“Poor boy,” she murmured, “it isn’t even right for you to think of that.”
Then, because there were things we dared not mention, we fell to talking about Dorrie, how she was growing, how she was losing her lisp, and all the tender little coaxing ways she had of making people happy.
We came out of the woods on the road which led back to Sheba. The lights twinkling ahead and the occasional travelers passing, robbed us of the danger of being alone together. I think she had been waiting for that.
“Dante,” she said, smiling at me bravely, “there is only one thing for you to do—you must marry.”
“Marry,” I exclaimed, “some woman whom I don’t love!”
“Not that,” she said; “but many men learn to love a second woman. I’ve often thought you should be happy with Ruthita; you love her already. After you had had children, you’d soon forget me. You’d be able to smile about it. Then it would be easier for me to forget.”
My answer was a tortured whisper. “It’s impossible; I’m not made like that. For my own peace of mind I almost wish I were.”
We came to the gate of her house. Across the snow, beneath the gloom of elms lighted windows smote the darkness with bars of gold. Within one of the rooms a man was stirring; he came to the panes and looked out, watching for her return.
“He’s always like that; he can’t bear to be without me. I had one of my moods this evening, when I want to be alone—he knew it.”
“When you wanted to think of me; that’s what you meant—why didn’t you say it?”
“One daren’t say these things, when they’re saying good-by, perhaps for ever.”
She had her hand on the gate, preparing to enter; we neither of us knew what to say at parting. The things that were in my heart I must not utter, and all other things seemed trivial. I looked from her to the burly figure framed in the glowing window. I pitied him with the proud pity of youth for age, a pity which is half cruel. After all, she loved me and we had our years before us. We could afford disappointment, we whose lives were mostly in the future; his life was two-thirds spent, and his years were running out.
Looking up the path in his direction, I asked, “Shall you tell him?”
“He has known for a year; it was only fair.”
“And he was angry? He blamed you?”
“He was sorry. I wish he had blamed me. He blames himself, which is the hardest thing I have to bear.”
“Vi,” I said, “he’s a good man—better than I am. You must learn to love him.”
She held out her hand quickly; her voice was muffled. “Good-night, my dearest, and good-by.”
The gate clanged. As she ran up the path, I saw that her husband had moved from the window. He opened the door to her; in the lighted room I saw him put his arms about her. By the way she looked up at him and he bent over her, I knew she was confessing.
Then I shambled down the road, feeling very old and tired. I was so tired that I hardly knew how to finish my packing; I was cold, bitterly cold. I dragged myself to bed; in order to catch the boat in Boston, I had to make an early start next morning. My teeth were chattering and my flesh was burning. Several times in the night I caught myself speaking aloud, saying stupid, tangled things about Vi. Then I thought that what I had said had been overheard. I shouted angrily to them to go away, declaring, that I had not meant what I said.
When my eyes closed, the stars were going out. “It will soon be morning,” I told myself; “I must get up and dress.”
I tried to get up, but my head would stick to the pillow and my body refused to work. “That’s queer,” I thought; “never mind, I’ll try later.”
One morning, it seemed the one on which I had planned to sail, I awoke in a strange room. I knew it was strange because the sun was pouring in across the bed, and the sun never looked through my window at the Misses Januaries’ till late in the afternoon. Something wet was on my forehead—a kind of bandage that came down low across my eyes almost preventing me from seeing anything. This set me wondering in a slow, thick-witted manner.
I did not much care how I came to be there—I felt effortless and contented; yet, in a lazy way, my mind became interested. I lay still, piecing together little scraps of happenings as I remembered them. The last thing I could recall that was rational was my attempting to get out of bed. Then came vague haunting shapes, too sweet and too horrible for reality—things which refused to be embodied and remained mere atmospheres in the brain, terrors and delights of sleep which slowly faded as the mind cleared itself.
I pulled my hand from under the sheets and was surprised at the effort it took to raise it to my forehead. I heard the rustle of a starched skirt: it was the kind of sound that Hetty used to make in my childhood, when she came to dress me in the mornings and I pretended that I still slept. I used to think in those days that it was a stern clean sound which threatened me with soap and chilly water. Someone was bending over me; a cool voice said, “Don’t move, Mr. Cardover. I’ll do that.”
The bandage was pushed back and in the sudden rush of light I saw a young woman in a blue print-dress, standing beside my pillow. I tried to speak to her, but my mouth was parched and my voice did not make the proper sound.
“Don’t try to speak,” she said; “you’ve been sick, you know. Soon you’ll feel better.”
I stopped trying to talk and obeyed her, just as I used to obey Hetty. At the back of my mind I smiled to myself that I, a grown man, should obey her; she looked such a girl. After she had put water to my lips and passed a damp cloth over my face and hands, she nodded pleasantly and went back to her seat by the window.
No—until now I had never seen this room. The walls were covered in cherry-colored satin, which was patterned in vertical stripes, with bunches of flowers woven in between the lines. All the wood-work was painted a gleaming white. Chippendale chairs and old-fashioned delicate bits of furniture stood about in odd corners. Between the posts of the big Colonial bed I could see a broad bay-window, with a seat going round it. Across the panes leafless boughs cast a net-work of shadows, and through them fell a bar of solid sunlight in which dust-motes were dancing by the thousand. Half-way down each side of the bed screens were standing, so that I could only see straight before me and a part of the room to the left and right beyond where they ended.
Through weakness I was powerless to speak or stir, yet my swimming senses were anxiously alert. I saw objects without their perspective, as though I were gazing up through water. In the same way with sounds, I heard them thunderously and waited in suspense for their repetition. Though I lay so still, nothing missed my attention.
By the quietness of the house I gathered that the hour was yet early. Far away cocks crew their rural challenge. On a road near by footsteps passed in a hurry. The whistle of a factory sounded; then I knew they had been footsteps of people going to work. Beneath the window a garden-roller clanged across gravel, and became muffled as it reached the turf. A door banged remotely; a few seconds later someone tapped on the door of my bedroom. The nurse laid aside her knitting and rustled over to the threshold. A question was asked in a low whisper and the nurse’s voice answered.
A woman entered into the bar of sunlight and stood regarding me from the foot of the bed. With the immense indifference of weakness I gazed back. Her long, fine-spun hair hung loose about her shoulders like a mantle. She wore a blue dressing-gown, which she held together with one hand across her breast. Her eyes were still sleepy; she had come directly she had wakened to inquire after me. She smiled at me, nodding her head. She seemed very distant; I wanted to return her smile, but I had not the energy. I closed my eyes; when I looked again she had vanished.
For the next few days I do not know how many people came and looked at me, whispered a few words and went. There was the old gray-haired doctor, with his military-bearing and his trick of pursing his lips and knitting his brows as he took my temperature. I had one visitor who was regular—Randall Carpenter. He looked years older. Tiptoeing into the room, he would seat himself in the bay-window; from there he would gaze at me moodily without a word, with his knees spread apart, and his podgy hands clasped together. Sometimes I would doze while he watched me and would awake to find him still there, his position unaltered. One thing I noticed; Vi and he were never in my room together.
In these first days, which slipped by uncounted, I realized that I had been very near to death. It seemed to me that my spirit still hovered on the borderland and looked back across the boundary half-regretful. I had the feeling that life was a thing apart from me—something which I was unanxious to share. All these people came and went, but I could not respond to them. I desired only to be undisturbed.
Several times I had heard the shrill piping voice of Dorrie and the long low hush of someone warning her to speak less loudly. She would come to the door many times in the day, inquiring impatiently whether I were better. Sometimes she would leave flowers, which the nurse would put in water and set down by the side of my bed. I would watch them dreamily, saying to myself, “Dorrie’s flowers.”
One afternoon I heard her voice at the door, asking “Nurth, how ith Dante?” The nurse had left the room for a moment, so no one answered her question. I heard the door pushed wider, and stealthy feet slipping across the carpet. Round the edge of the screen came the excited face and little shining head. I held out my hand to her and tried to speak. Then I tried again and whispered, “Dor-rie! Dorrie darling!”
She took my hand in both her small ones, trying to mask the fear which my changed appearance caused her. “Dear Dante,” she whispered, “I’m tho thorry.”
“Kiss me, Dorrie,” I said.
“Dear Dante, you’ll get better, won’t you? For my thake, Dante! Then we’ll play together, like we uthed to.” Tears trickled down her flushed cheeks as she questioned.
As her soft lips brushed me and her silky curls fell about my forehead, I felt for the first time that my grip on life was coming back. Lying there thinking things over confusedly, it had seemed hardly worth while trying to get better. It seemed worth while, now that I was reminded that there was such beautiful innocence as Dorrie’s in the world.
When the nurse came back a few moments later, she shook her head at Dorrie reproachfully and tried to take her away from me.
“But he wanths me,” cried Dorrie in self-defense, and I kept fast hold of her.
After that I began to gather strength. I noticed that as I threw off my lethargy, Vi’s visits grew less frequent. When she came her manner was restrained; she entered hurriedly and made it appear that her only reason for coming was to confer with the nurse. At first I would follow her about with my eyes; but when I found how much it embarrassed her, I pretended to be dozing when I heard her enter.
I could not understand how I came to be in Randall Carpenter’s house. I dared not ask Vi or her husband; my presence implied too much already. I was afraid to ask the nurse; I did not know how much I should be telling by my question. There seemed to be a polite conspiracy of silence against me. I wondered where it would all end.
I had grown to like the old doctor. He was a shrewd, wise, serious man. He never spoke a word of religion, yet he made his religion felt by his kindness. As he went about his work, he would become chatty, trying to rouse my interest. He spoke a good deal about himself and told me anecdotes of scenes which he had lived through in the War, when he had been a surgeon in the Northern army. Out of his old tired eyes he would watch me narrowly; I began to feel that he understood.
One day I whispered to him to send away the nurse. He invented an errand for her, saying that he would stay with me till she returned. When she had gone, he closed the door carefully and came and sat down on the side of the bed. “Now, what is it, my boy?”
“What happened, doctor?”
He pursed his lips judicially and looked away from me for a full minute, as though he would escape answering; then his eyes came back and I saw that he was going to tell.
“I reckoned you’d be asking that question,” he said.
“The morning that you figured to sail, you were taken sick at the Misses Januaries’. You were mighty bad when they sent for me; you had pneumonia and a touch of brain-fever. It’s a close call you’ve had. I found you wandering in your head—and saying things.”
“Things, doctor? Things that I wouldn’t want heard?”
He nodded gravely. “No one in Sheba knew anything about you. I saw that you were in for a long spell, and that the Misses Januaries’ was no place for you to get proper nursing.”
He halted awkwardly. “Then I came to Randall and told him.”
“Had I mentioned him in my delirium?”
“You’d mentioned her.”
I could feel the warm flush of color spreading through my body and turned away my head. The old doctor gripped my hand. “That’s how it happened, I guess.” Little by little he told me about Randall Carpenter. During the first days of crisis he had scarcely gone to bed, but had paced the house, always returning to my bedroom door to see if he could be of any service.
“But, why should he care?” I questioned.
“Because she cared, I guess. He’s so fond of her that he wants to do more than ever she could ask him. And then, Randall’s a mighty just man, and he’s always most just when he’s most tempted.”
He looked down at me sidelong and silence fell between us. It was broken by the footfall of the nurse along the passage. I asked him quickly when I should be well enough to be moved.
“You’re some better now, but we mustn’t think of moving you yet, though, of course, you must go at the earliest.” Towards midnight the nurse took my temperature. I saw that she was surprised, for she took it a second time. “Have you any pain?” she asked me.
Randall Carpenter came in and they went away together. I lay staring up at the ceiling, my hands clenched and my eyes burning. They all knew; I alone was ignorant of what things I had said.
A carriage came bowling up the driveway. I recognized whose it was, for I had become familiar with the horse’s step. The doctor came into the room; as he bent over me our eyes met. I clutched his arm and he stooped lower. “Stay and talk with me,” I whispered. “You all look at me and none of you will tell me. I can’t bear it—can’t bear it any longer.”
“What can’t you bear?”
“Not knowing.”
When he had told them that there was no change for the worse and had sent them back to bed, he came and sat down beside me. The lights in the room were extinguished, save for a reading lamp in a far corner where the nurse had been sitting.
“I guess something’s troubling you. Take your time and tell me slowly. I’ll sure help you, if I can.”
“Doctor, you know about me and Mrs. Carpenter?”
“I reckon you’re sort of fond of her—is that it?”
I buried my face against the cool pillow. I dared not look at him, but he signaled me courage with the pressure of his hand.
“More than fond, that’s why I came to Sheba. I didn’t mean to let her know that I’d ever been here; that last evening we met by accident. I was a fool to have come. I’ve been unfair to her—unfair to everybody.”
He did not answer me; he could not deny my assertion.
“You remember what you said this afternoon—that I let things out in my delirium. I want to know what they were. I’ve been trying to remember; but it all comes wild and confused. Tell me, did I say anything that would make her ashamed of me—anything that would make her hate me?”
He shook his head. “Nothing that would make her hate you. Perhaps, that’s the worst of it.”
“Well then, anything that would damage her reputation? Was I brought here only to prevent strangers from listening to what I said, just as you’d shut a mad dog up for safety?”
In my feverish suspense, I gained sudden strength and raised myself up on my elbow to face him. He patted me gently on the shoulder, saying, “Lie down; it’s a sick man’s fancy. You’re guessing wide of the mark—it was nothing such as that.” He tucked me up and smoothed out the sheets.
“Now stay still and I’ll tell you. You were calling for her when I came to you. At first we didn’t know what you meant; then you mentioned Dorrie. Only Miss Priscilla and I heard what you were saying; you can trust Miss Priscilla not to speak about it. I let Randall know and he brought his wife over with him. Directly she touched you, you grew quiet. It was Randall suggested you being brought here; he was sorry for you and it was kindness made him do it. All through your illness till you came to yourself, Mrs. Carpenter sat by you; whenever she left you, you grew restless. She and her husband saved your life, I guess.”
“But what makes them all so strange to me now?”
He fidgeted and cleared his throat. “It’s the truth I’m wanting,” I urged.
“Randall saw what she meant to you.”
“Anything else?”
“And what you meant to her.”
Against my will a wave of joy throbbed through me. I felt like sobbing from relief and happiness. Then a clear vision of the reality came to me—the great silent man who stared at me for hours, and the high-spirited woman, so suddenly grown timid, stealing in and out the room with averted eyes in pallid meekness.
“What ought I to do?” My voice choked me as I asked it.
He turned his wise, care-wrinkled face towards me gravely. “I’m wondering,” he said. “There’s only one thing to do—ask God about it. You did wrong in coming—there’s no disguising that. But the good God’s spared you. He knows what He means you to do. I’m an old fellow, and I’ve seen a heap of suffering and trouble. I’ve seen men die on the battlefield, and I’ve seen ’em go under when it was least expected. I don’t know how I’d have come through, if I hadn’t believed God knew what He was doing. I guess if He’d been lazy, like me and you, He’d just have let you slip out, ‘cause it seemed easiest. But He hasn’t, and He knows why He hasn’t. I’d just leave it in His hands.”
Long after he had ceased to speak, I lay thinking of his words—thinking how simple life would be if God were exactly like this old man. Then I began to hope that He might be—a kind of doctor of sick souls, who would get up out of bed and come driving through the night without complaining, just to bring quiet to sinful people like myself. I closed my eyes, trying to think that God sat beside me. Some time must have elapsed, but when I looked round the doctor was still there. His head was bowed forward from his bent shoulders, nodding.
“You’re tired. I can sleep now.”
He awoke with a jerk. His last words to me before he left were, “Just leave it in His hands.”
From then on there was a changed atmosphere in the house. We had all been afraid of one another and of one another’s misunderstandings.
When Dorrie had gone to bed, Vi would sit within the circle of the lamp and read to me while I lay back on my pillows in the shadows, watching how the gold light broke about her face and hands. She was always doing something, either reading or sewing, as though when we were alone she were afraid to trust herself.
One evening she said to me, “You haven’t asked if there are any letters.”
“I wasn’t expecting any.”
“Weren’t expecting any! Why not?”
“Because none of my friends know that I’ve come to Sheba.”
She drew her face back from the lamp; her sewing fell from her hands. My words had reminded us both of the guilty situation which lay unchanged behind our present attitude.
It was she who broke the silence. “When you were taken ill I wrote Ruthita and told her—and told her that you were being nursed in our house.”
She brought me my letters and then made an excuse to leave me to myself. My father had written; so had the Snow Lady. After expressing concern for my health, the tone of their letters became constrained and unnatural; they refrained from accusing me, but they had guessed. Ruthita’s was an awkward, shamefaced little note—it puzzled me by omitting to say anything of Halloway.
More and more after this Vi showed fear of being left alone with me; any moment a slip of the tongue might betray our passion. Frequently during the evening hours Mr. Carpenter would join us. He would steal into the room while Vi was reading and sit down by my bedside. I began to have great sympathy for the man. Vi’s actions to him were those of a daughter, and he, when he addressed her, called her “My child.” Both their attitudes to one another were wrong—it hurt me to watch them; they made such efforts to create the impression that everything was well. Sitting beside me while she read, he would fasten his eyes on her. If she smiled across at him in turning a page, his heavy face would flood with a quite disproportionate joy. He was too fine a man for the part he was playing; he had strength of character and mastery over men.
Along his own lines he had a wonderful mind. It was always scheming for efficiency, concentration, and bigger projects. If money was the reward of his energy, the desire for power impelled him. But I could quite understand how a woman might yearn for more human interests and more subtle methods of conveying affection than the mere piling of luxury on luxury. He could articulate his deepest emotions only in acts.
One evening when Vi had excused herself on the ground that she had a headache, I took the opportunity to thank him for his kindness. He became as confused as if I had discovered him in a lie.
“My dear boy, you mustn’t speak to me like that; you don’t owe me anything. It is I who owe you everything.”
I was staggered by his disclaimer. Under existing circumstances it seemed a superlative extravagance of language. Then he explained, “If it hadn’t been for you, we shouldn’t have Vi.”
It was the first reference that any of us had made to what had happened at Ransby.
After that Randall Carpenter and I grew to be friends. We didn’t do much talking about it, but we each realized how the other felt....
I was almost sufficiently recovered to travel. I broached the subject of my leaving several times—the first time at breakfast. Randall glanced up sharply from the letter he was opening—his expression clouded—instead of looking at me he stared at Vi. “Certainly not. Certainly not,” he blustered. “Couldn’t hear of it.”
Dorrie added her piping protest. Vi alone was silent. Every time I approached the subject it was the same. The truth was our relations were so delicately balanced that the slightest disturbance would precipitate a crisis—and the crisis we dreaded. We each one knew that the time for frank speaking could scarcely be avoided, but we were eager to postpone it. So we procrastinated, lengthening out our respite.
One afternoon I returned with Randall from a drive to find Vi waiting for us at the gate. Her face was drawn with anxiety.
“What’s happened?” asked Randall, and the sharpness of suspense wa$ in his voice.
Vi handed me a cable. It was my recall—we all knew that. I ripped the envelope in haste; what I read, strange to say, caused me no elation—only the bitterness of finality. I raised my eyes; they were both staring at me. “My grandfather’s dead. His will’s in my favor. I must return to England immediately.”
They received the news as though a blow had fallen. Vi crept in and out the rooms with a masked expression of unspoken tragedy. Dorrie caused frequent embarrassment by her coaxing attempts to make me promise to visit them again. Nevertheless, when she had gone to bed and we no longer had her to distract us, we would pass more painful hours in inventing small talk to tide us over dangerous topics.
The night before I sailed, we kept Dorrie up till she fell asleep against me. Her innocence was a barrier between us. When she had been carried to bed, Vi sat down to the piano and sang, while we two men glowered desperately before the fire. I dared not watch her; I could not bear the pain that was in her eyes. As I listened, I knew that her chief difficulty in selections was what to avoid. We were in a mood to read into everything a sentimental interpretation.
There were long pauses between her playing, during which no one spoke and the only sound to be heard was the falling of ashes in the grate. The way in which we were grouped seemed symbolic—she at the piano apart from us, while we were side by side; by loving her, we had pushed her out of both our lives. Randall turned querulously in his chair, “Why don’t you go on playing, my child?”
Several times she half-commenced an air and broke off. Her voice was a blind thing, tottering down an endless passage. For a horrid minute there was dead silence—quivering suspense; then the keys crashed discordantly as she gave way to a storm of weeping.
She rose with an appealing gesture, and slipped out. We heard her footsteps trailing up the stairs, her door close, and then stillness.
I shuddered as though a window had been flung open behind me and a cold wind blew across my back. The man at my side huddled down into his chair; his fleshy face had lost its firmness; his eyes, like a statue’s, seemed without pupils. The moment which we had dreaded and postponed had arrived.
Randall followed her into the hall; he came back, shutting the door carefully behind him. There was slow decision in his voice when he said, “After all, we’ve got to speak about it.”
He sank down, his cheeks blotchy and his hands quivering as with palsy. When he spoke, he tried to make his voice steady and matter-of-fact. It was as though he were saying, “We’ve got to be commonsense, we men of the world. We knew this would happen. There’s nothing to be gained by losing our nerves.”
This is what he actually said, “It isn’t her fault. You and I are to blame.”
“Not you,” I protested. “It’s I who’ve behaved abominably.”
He shifted in his chair; struck a match; raised it part way to his cigar and let it flicker out. Without looking at me he answered, “We shan’t gain anything by quarreling over who’s to blame. We’ve got her into a mess between us—it’s up to us to get her out.”
“But you didn’t——”
He flung out his arm in irritation. “Don’t waste words. I married her when she was too young to know what marriage meant; I loved her and supposed that nothing else mattered. That’s my share. You made love to my wife and followed her to Sheba. That’s yours. We’ve got her into a mess between us, and we’ve got to get her out.”
He waited for me to make a suggestion; I was too much taken aback. We couldn’t get her out; we could only help her to endure it. We both knew that—so why discuss it?
Turning his head and staring hard at me, he continued, “There’s only one thing to be considered—her happiness.”
“Perhaps she’ll forget when I’m gone,” I ventured.
“She won’t and you know it.”
He barked the words. His manner was losing its air of tired patience.
“See here, Cardover, you and I have got to get down to facts. We don’t help one another by fooling ourselves. You went out of her life for a year; she didn’t forget It’s different now; you’ve been with her in this house and everything will remind her of you. What are we going to do about it?”
He repeated his question harshly, as though demanding an instant answer. What could I tell him?
He broke the miserable silence. “Ever since you talked of leaving, I’ve been studying this thing out. I knew we’d have to face it, and yet somehow I hoped—— Never mind what I hoped. So you’ve nothing to say? You can’t guess what I’m driving at?”
I shook my head.
His face became haggard and stern; only the twitching of the eye-lids betrayed his nervousness.
“I’d give anything to see Vi happy. So would you—isn’t that correct?” He darted a challenging look in my direction. “I’d give all I possess, I say, factories, banks, good name, popularity. She’s more to me than anything in the world.” Then reluctantly forcing himself to speak the words, “There’s only one way out—only one way to make her happy.”
He leant forward, clutching my knee. “You must have her.”
I drew back from him amazed, startled out of my self-possession. There was something so horribly commonsense about his offer; I could not take him seriously for the moment. He was tempting me, perhaps, in order that he might find out just how far Vi and I had gone together—he might easily suspect that things had happened during that summer at Ransby which had not been confessed.
Now as I met his cold gray eyes, I felt his power. His face was inscrutable and set, his mouth relentless. I had often wondered as I had watched him in his home-life what stern qualities his amiability disguised—qualities which would account for his business success. I knew now: here was a man who could state facts in their nudity and strip problems of their sentiment—a man who could lay aside feeling and act with the cruelty of logic.
“You must have her,” he repeated.
“Randall,” I broke out hoarsely, “you don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it.”
“She wouldn’t allow it.”
“She’d have to if I forced her; when I’d forced her, she’d be glad.”
“But it’s impossible. It isn’t honorable.”
“Honorable! If we’d been honorable, you and I, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“But think what people would say?”
“What people would say doesn’t matter. There are some things which go so deep that they concern only ourselves.”
“But Vi—before ever we decide anything, it would be honest to consult her.”
“You had her decision to-night.” He spoke bitterly, with settled finality. “You see it’s this way: I’ve tried to make her happy; because of you I never shall. She wants you; she’s a right to have you.”
The fire had all but gone out; the room had grown chilly. We sat without talking, thinking of her, reviewing the brutal cruelties of life. I had reached the logical goal of my desire—the impossible had happened.
I let my fancy run a little way ahead, picturing the first freshness of the days that were coming. Far away, with faery sounds, bugles of the future were blowing. I was recalled to the ominous present by the frozen hopelessness of this just man. We were placing society at defiance; we were settling our problem on grounds of individual expediency. Would we have strength to be happy in spite of condemnation? Would our conception of what was just to Vi prove just in the end?
I began to waver. I thought I saw what had happened to Randall—the tension of the last weeks had wrought upon his nerves. He had brooded over the situation till remorse for his own share in it had made him lose his regard for social standards. There was a tinge of insanity about this quixotic determination to sacrifice himself.
I went over to the fireplace and pulled the smoldering logs together, so that they broke into a feeble flame. I did it leisurely to gain time. With my back towards him I inquired, “Have you reckoned the cost of all this?”
“Probably.”
“But the cost to yourself?”
“As far as I can.”
“You can’t have. You wouldn’t propose it if you had. You know what’ll be said.”
“What’ll be said?”
“That you wanted to get rid of her and that that was why you took me into your house.”
“Leave me out of it. If love means anything, it means sacrifice. I love her; you’ve come between us. My love’s injuring her now, and I’m not going to see you spoil her life by going away without her.”
“But she’ll spoil her life if she goes with me. People——”
“People! Well, what’ll they say about her?”
“Everything defiling that hasn’t occurred.”
“And you think that we ought to keep her miserable just because of that—out of fear of tittle-tattle? If she stays with me she’ll be wretched; I shall have to watch myself torturing her—paining her even with my affection. If she goes with you——”
“If she goes with me she’ll become a social outcast. She couldn’t bear that; she’d sink under it. No, Randall, we can’t decide this matter as if it concerned only ourselves. It doesn’t. There are all kinds of things involved in it. I’ve been your guest, and you’ve become my friend. We’d look low-down in other people’s eyes. You want her to be happy—none of us could ever be that if we did what you suggest. Don’t you see that you’d be the only one who was playing a decent part? Vi’s part and mine would be contemptible. We’d appear treacherous even to ourselves. As for other people——!! You take me into your house when I’m sick, and I run off with your wife! It can’t be done, Randall.”
“But that’s not what I’m proposing,” he said quietly; “I don’t want you to run away together.”
“What then?”
“I’ll arrange that she shall divorce me. I’ve consulted lawyers. According to the laws of Massachusetts an absolute divorce, which would permit you to marry her within a reasonable time, is only granted on one ground. I’ll provide her with fictitious evidence. She can bring the case against me and I’ll let it go uncontested. She can win her freedom respectably without your name being mentioned.”
My position was elaborately false. I wanted her with every atom of my body, and here was I contending that I would not have her. At Ransby I had been willing to steal her, and now she was offered me; but I had not seen how much she meant to Randall then—at that time he was a hostile figure in my imagination.
His unselfishness filled me with shame that I had ever thought to wrong him. And yet the thing which he proposed was the inevitable consequence of our actions; his cold reasoning had discerned that. If facts were as he had stated them, what other way was there out?
“You agree, then?”
“I don’t. You’d save our faces for us, but what d’you suppose we’d think of ourselves? The thing’s not decent. People don’t do things like that. Men can run off with other men’s wives and still respect themselves; if they did what you suggest—take the husband’s happiness and his good name as well—they’d know what to call themselves, though no one else suspected.”
“What’s that?”
“Blackguards.”
“So in your opinion it’s worse to take a wife with her husband’s consent than to steal her? Humph!”
He leant across the table for a cigar. With great deliberation he cut the end. When it was well alight, he thrust his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, looking me up and down. When he spoke, he left gaps between his words. There was the rumble of suppressed anger in what he said.
“I thought you were a strong man, Cardover, or I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I have. You fell in love with my wife without knowing she was married; I don’t blame you for that. But after you knew, you followed her—followed her to her home-town. You’ve made an impossible situation. You can’t leave it at that; you’ve got to help out, and, by God, you shall. I’ve got to lose her and stand the disgrace of it. You’ve got to lose your self-respect. What d’you think life is, anyhow? If you gamble, you incur debts. We’re going to play this game to a finish. You talk of decency and honor; you should have thought of them earlier. You came here to rob me of my wife; well, now I’m going to give her to you because she can’t do without you. And now, out of consideration for me, you want to crawl out at the last minute. Your crawling out may save appearances, but it don’t alter facts. You’re something worse than a blackguard—a quitter.”
He drew in his breath as if he were about to strike; then he flung out his fist, shaking it at me. “Don’t you want her?”
“You know I want her.”
“Then what’s the matter? Are you afraid of the price?”
“The price she’d have to pay and you’d have to pay—yes.”
He frowned. His face was puckered with suspicion. “Isn’t it that you’re afraid for yourself?”
The heat of his anger scorched me. I had watched this interpretation of my conduct taking shape under my repeated refusals.
“I’ve been accused of counting the cost before to-day,” I said. “I’m not counting the cost now. I’m thinking of Vi with her clean standards and her sense of duty. If she were the woman to consent to what you’re proposing, I wouldn’t want to marry her and you wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice yourself for her. But she won’t consent, and I won’t consent.”
Lurching heavily to his feet, he stood over me threateningly. “Don’t you know I can force you? If I divorced her you’d have to marry her.”
“But you won’t.”
“But I would if I thought it was only for my sake you were refusing.”
“It’s only partly for your sake.”
“Why, then?”
“I’ve shared your hospitality.”
“And because of that you won’t take her?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll make you—— For the last time, will you take her?”
“Not on those terms.”
Our voices had risen. A silence followed. Behind us we heard a sound. The temperature of the room seemed lowered, as though something we had killed had entered.
Turning, we saw Vi standing in the doorway. Her hair fell loose about her shoulders. She was thinly clad and had risen hastily from bed. Our quarrel must have reached her through the silent house. Her face was pinched and pitiful. As she watched us her eyes searched Randall’s in terror and her hands plucked at her breasts.
How much had she heard? How long had she been standing there? Did she know how we had been degrading her? What had she gathered from my last words? She had found us haggling over her as though she were a chattel, each one trying to force the other to accept her, neither showing any sign that he desired her for himself. In the chilly room we shivered, hanging our heads.
Slowly she crossed the room. Her eyes were fixed on Randall; for all the attention she paid me, I might not have been there.
“You didn’t mean it. You can’t have meant it.”
He lifted his head weakly, in one last effort to be firm.
“But I did, Vi. It’s for your sake—for your happiness.”
She flung her arms about him, holding him to her though he tried to draw back.
“But you forgot——”
“I forgot nothing.”
“You did—there’s Dorrie.”
She buried her head on his shoulder, sobbing her heart out. He eyed me sullenly. He looked an old man. Awkwardly, with a gesture that was afraid of its tenderness, he let his hand wander across her hair. She raised her face to his, clinging against him, and kissed him on the mouth.
They traversed the room, going from me; their footsteps died out upon the stairs.
Never once had she looked at me.
In the grayness of the morning, before the servants had begun to stir, I packed my bag and left.
Thou hast been in Eden. Thou shalt eat the fruit of thy doings, yea, even the fruit of thy thoughts.
Leaving the hansom at the foot of Pope Lane and carrying my bags, I walked up the avenue of limes. The wantonness of spring was in the air and its melancholy. Above the high walls the golden hurry of the sunset quivered. A breeze tore past me down the passage, twisting and turning like a madcap ballet-dancer. Overhead in the young greenness of the trees a host of sparrows fluttered, impudently publishing their love-making.
At Plymouth on landing I had been met by letters from my lawyers and from Uncle Obad. They were addressed to Sir Dante Cardover. It was rather pleasant to be addressed as Sir Dante; until then I had not realized my luck. The memory of that last night at Sheba had numbed my faculties and taken my future from me. But now, with the thought of Woadley, life began to weave itself into a new pattern.
On the run up to London, as the quiet of English landscapes and the greenness of English meadows drifted by, I lost my bitter sense of isolation: I belonged to this; it was part of me. At the same time, the impassive wholesomeness of English faces awoke me in a strange way to the enormity of what I had done. It was odd how far I had wandered from old traditions and old landmarks in the delirium of the past two years. Even I was a little scandalized by some of my recollections.
Next day I purposed to go down to Woadley; to-night I would spend with my father at Pope Lane. There were explanations to be made; explanations where my father was concerned, were never comfortable. I walked with a pebble in my shoe till I had got them over. I had sure proof that he was annoyed, for none of my letters, written to him since my recovery, had been answered.
Thrusting my hand into the creeper, I found the knob. Far away at the back of the house the bell tinkled; after an interval footsteps shuffled down the path. The door opened cautiously; in the slit it made I saw the face of Hetty. There was something in-its expression that warned me.
“Father at home?” I asked cheerfully, pushing forward.
“Master Dante, or Sir Dante as I should say, don’t you go for to see ’im.”
“Why not?”
“’E’s bitter against you.”
“What nonsense! Here, take one of these bags. Why should he be bitter against me?”
She crumpled her apron nervously. “‘Cause of ’er—the woman in Ameriky. I don’t know the rights of it, but ’e’s ’ardly spoke your name since.”
“But I’ve come to see him. I’ve only just landed.”
She stared at me gloomily, barring the entrance. Across her shoulder I could see the path winding round the house and down to the garden where everything was familiar. Once I had longed to leave it! How much I would now give to get back! The leaves shivered, making patches of sunlight move like gold checkers, pushed forward and backward on the lawn. My mind keenly visualized all the details that lay out of sight. I knew just how my father must look sitting writing at his study-window. I ought to have told him; he might have understood. But the barrier of reticence had always divided us.
“If I was you, Sir Dante, I’d go away and write ’im. I’ll see that ’e reads it this time. Yes I will, if I loses my plaice.”
“This time?”
Her cheeks went crimson. “’E didn’t read the letters you sent after ’ers. ’E tossed ’em aside.”
“But the Snow Lady and Ruthie, they’ll see me.”
She looked furtively over her shoulder at the house, then she slipped out into the lane beside me, almost closing the door.
“There ain’t no Miss Ruthie now,” she said sadly. Then, in a voice which betrayed pride, “She’s Lady Halloway. ’Is Lordship, ’e were a wery ’ot lover, ’e were—wouldn’t take no for an answer and suchlike. After you’d gone away angry and no one knew where you’d gone, Miss Ruthie felt kind o’ flat; but she kept on sayin’ no to ‘is Lordship, though she was always cryin’. Then that letter came from Americky. It kind o’ took us by surprise; Miss Ruthie especially. We felt—well, you know, sir—disrespectable. So she gave way like, and now she’s Lady Halloway. And there you are. We’ve ’ad a ’eap of trouble.”
Little Ruthie the wife of that man! I had made them unrespectable, so she had rectified my mistake by marrying the father of Lottie’s child!
“You’d better write.”
She had edged herself into the garden and held the door at closing-point. I could see the house no longer. Her head looked out through the slit as though it had no body. I was sick and angry—angry because of Ruthita. Anger restored my determination. They should not condemn me without a hearing; their morality was stucco-fronted—a cheap imitation of righteousness.
I pushed roughly past Hetty like an insolent peddler, and left her bleating protests behind. In the hall I dropped my bags and entered my father’s study unannounced.
He glanced up from under the hand with which his eyes were shaded. His mouth straightened. He went on with his writing, feigning that he had not heard me enter. I remembered the trick well—as a boy it had made punishment the more impressive. It was done for that purpose now; he had never accustomed himself to think of me as a grown man.
I watched him. How lean, and threadbare, and overworked he looked! How he tyrannized over himself! The hair had grown thin about the temples; his eyes were weak, his forehead lined. He had disciplined joy out of his life. But there was something big about him—a stern forcefulness of character which came of long years of iron purpose. He had failed, but he would not acknowledge his failure. All these years his daily routine of drudgery had remained unchanged. Outside the spring was stirring, just as it had stirred in his children’s lives. But his windows were shut against the spring because he had to earn his daily bread. The anger I had felt turned to pity. He was so lonely in his strength. Had he been weaker, he would have been happier.
“You did not want to see me?”
He blotted his page carefully and laid aside his pen. “I had good reason.” His voice was cold and tired.
“You can’t judge of that; you haven’t heard.”
“I can conjecture.”
“But I have at least the right to explain. You can’t conjecture the details that led up to it.”
“These things are usually led up to by the same details. All I know is that any meeting between us now can only cause pain, and I cannot afford to be upset. You have your standards of honor; I have mine. Evidently they are divergent. You didn’t give me your confidence before you sailed; I don’t invite it now.”
He had allowed me to remain standing, making me feel my intrusion on his privacy. I had always felt that in talking to him I was keeping him from his work. My mind went back to the fear with which I had entered his study in the old days. And this was the end of it.
“You can never have cared much for me,” I threw out bitterly, “if you can break with me so lightly.”
His pale face flushed; his distant manner broke down. “How should you know how much I cared?”
“How should I know! All my life you’ve been silent and there were times——”
He interrupted. “It is because I cared so much. I was so anxious for you and wanted you to do so well. I’m not demonstrative. I always hoped that we might be friends. But you never came to me with your troubles from a little chap, anyone was better than your father—-servants, your Uncle Spreckles, Ruthita, anybody. With me you were dumb.”
“You never encouraged my confidence and now you condemn me unheard. Silence between us has become a habit.”
He stabbed the blotting-paper with his pen. His emotions were stirred; he was afraid he might betray them. So he spoke hurriedly. “It’s too late to cover old ground. We’ve drifted apart, that’s certain—and now this has happened... this disgrace... this adultery of thoughts... this lust for a married woman.”
I walked across to the window and drummed upon the panes. Across the garden a soft gray dusk was falling. Along those paths Ruthita and I had played; the garden was empty and very lonely. Scene after scene came back, made kindly by distance. I turned. “Father, I’m not going to let you turn me out until you know all about it. For the first time you’ve told me frankly that you wanted me. I was always frightened as a little chap.”
Instead of taking me up angrily as I expected, he spoke gently. “Why shouldn’t I want you? I thought you’d understand by the way I worked. Sit down, boy; why are you standing? How... how did it happen?”
The Snow Lady rapped on the door and almost entered. My father signed to her to go away, saying that we would come to her later. Then I told him. And while I told him I kept thinking how strange it was that until now, when we had quarreled, we should never have found one another, but, like two people eager to meet, had walked always at the same pace, in the same direction, out of sight, round and round on opposite sides of the same house.
It was dark when I finished. He leant out and laid his hand on my arm. “And now that it’s all ended, we can make a new start together.”
“It may not be all ended.”
“But it is. You’re not going to tell me that you’re still hankering after a married woman?”
“I am.”
The kindness went from his voice. He rang the bell, waited in silence till Hetty brought the lamp, and took it from her at the door to prevent her entering.
“You say it isn’t ended, this criminal folly. I can’t conceive what you mean by it. One of these days you’ll drag my name through the dirt. There are other people to consider besides yourself. There’s Ruthita—her husband’s sensitive already. In fact, he doesn’t want to meet you, and he doesn’t want you to meet her. What it comes to is this: we can’t be friends unless you give this woman up absolutely.”
“It’s not possible. Randall threatened to divorce her. If he does, it will be that I may marry her. I shall have to marry her, and I shall be jolly glad to marry her. What has happened since I left I can’t tell. Until I know, I hold myself prepared. So I can’t promise anything.”
“The choice is between her and your family.”
“I choose her.”
“Then until you’ve come to your senses, there can be no communication between us.”
He sat down noisily at his desk. “You’ll excuse me; there’s nothing more to be said.”
When I still waited, he took up his pen. “I have an article here that I must get finished.”
I walked slowly down the lane. The door swung to behind me. I felt that I was seeing this for the last time. All the old, trivial, sweet associations came thronging back: the dying affections, the lost innocence which had seemed so permanent, stretched out hands to restrain me. Even Hetty had condemned; it was written in her face. Long ago Hetty and I had viewed the world from the same angle, we had criticised and schemed against our tyrants together. The chapter of home life was ended. Whatever happened as regards Vi, there could be no going back.