CHAPTER TEN
If it be true that everything is in the eye of the beholder, then Joyselle's and Brigit Mead's eyes must have been full of beauties that day.
For to them Hampstead Heath was the most marvellously lovely place on earth.
His light-heartedness, chiefly due to his faculty for ignoring side-issues and enjoying the present, was of course magnified as well by the fact that it followed close on the heels of one of his despairing black fits. Yesterday he had been, because of an unsatisfactory morning's work in Chelsea, in the very depths, honestly despising himself as an artist, sincerely loathing his incorrigible love of amusement and consequent wasting of time.
So this sunny, rather windy morning, Brigit by his side, and his newly awakened conscience stilled for the moment, was to him as near Paradise as anything he could imagine.
They lunched somewhere—neither of them could ever remember where—on very tough cold ham and insufficiently cooled beer, but they were both too happy to mind, or even to observe the faults of the menu. And as neither of them had ever before set eyes on the Heath, it was full of surprises, as well as of beauties. Yielding to some unexplained instinct, they both took off their hats (what is it that induces people to uncover their heads in high places?), and the warm sun shone down on their hair.
"Your hair must be very long, Brigitte?" observed Joyselle once, as he looked at her silky plaits that covered her crown in disregard of the laws of fashion.
"It is. Comes to my knees. Oh, look!"
Two people, a man and a girl, sat in the shade of an isolated tree only a few yards below the place where they stood. They were evidently enjoying an unlawful holiday, for they were workers—factory hands, probably, and they were as palpably rejoicing in their freedom.
The girl, whose brilliant red hair was pulled out at the sides until her head was as big as a bushel basket, wore a pink blouse and a green skirt. The youth, stunted and pale, was gorgeous only as to tie, but quite evidently she considered him her complement. For they were busy drinking beer from a bottle, turn about, and kissing each other delightedly between swallows. Joyselle started, drawing a deep breath, and Brigit, without moving her head, looked at him sideways, as the so-called Fornarina looks in the Uffizi, in Florence.
"They are cheery, aren't they?" she asked hastily, and he, nodding, turned away. For a few moments he was silent, and then he began to talk rather loudly about nothing in particular, and in a few moments was himself—the Joyselle of that particular day. Brigit realised that their stronghold of reserves and lies had been dangerously threatened by his mounting emotion. If he had broken down in his rôle—and she knew that the playing of any kind of a rôle was foreign to his nature, and therefore perilous—she would have lost him.
His mind, of course, except in certain moments when it all unconsciously was subjugated by her will, was a closed book to her.
For he was not only a man (and no woman can ever wholly understand any man's mind), but he was nearly twenty years older than she, and he was a Norman—a race very complicated, in its mixture of shrewd cunning and simplicity, and difficult for even other French people to comprehend. But groping in the dark though she was, the girl had grasped two essential facts: if Joyselle learned that she loved him, he would go away if it killed him; and if, though remaining in ignorance of her love, he was led to betray his, the result would be the same.
So her aim must be to keep him well under his own control, and to avoid betraying her personal feelings in the very least degree.
It was easy that first day. He was still more or less dazed and taken up with his discovery that he loved her, and therefore not so shrewd as usual. The future, she knew, would be harder.
But that one day was a delight to them both. He told her about his youth—as truthful an account as his wife's, but oh, how infinitely more picturesque and interesting.
His acquisition of the Amati was recounted with a wealth of detail that enchanted her, and she closed her eyes the better to see the little dark shop on the quai at Rouen, and the old man who would not sell his treasure, even for a good price, until he had heard the would-be purchaser play on it. "And then, my dear, I tuned it, and played. It was a bit from Tschaikovsky's Pathetic Symphony—the adagio movement. It was dark in the shop, with the velvety darkness old places get on a sunny day, and on the other side of the street lay the sunshine like gold. He sat, le vieux, in his chair away from the light, for his eyes were bad, and listened. And I played well, for I was playing for the greatest price I had ever commanded!"
"And then?" she asked softly, stroking her cheek with some young beech-leaves.
"And then he kissed me, and—I took out my cheque-book," returned Joyselle simply.
It was after four, and the wind had gone down, freeing the common from the beautiful cloud-streams that had chased over it earlier in the day.
The red-headed girl and her young man had disappeared, and from where they sat Joyselle and Brigit saw no signs of life.
"To-morrow it will be crowded with odious people," Brigit sighed.
"Why odious?"
"Well, I mean vulgar, noisy people."
He shook his head in a way that ruffled his halo of silver hair, and laughed.
"You should not be a snob," he teased. "After all, you are marrying the son of peasants."
"Peasants are different," she insisted, a little sulkily.
"Peasants are picturesque only in books, my dear. As for me, I like happy people, and even your English 'noisy and vulgar' ones are happy, I suppose, when they come up here on Sunday. Some day you and I will come again. And bring Théo," he added suddenly.
Then he rose. "Come, we had better start to walk back." She obeyed in silence.
"If I had not had genius," he continued as they reached the bottom of the slope and turned homewards, "I should be now—what? A Norman peasant in a black blouse driving, probably, a char-à-bancs to sell my fruit—or my corn. I could never have been a gamekeeper like my father, for I cannot kill. And if you, then, had come to Falaise and gone to the market, you might have bought a pennyworth of cherries of me. And all this might have been if I had not, one day, heard an old half-witted blind man play a cracked fiddle on the high road, thirty years ago!"
She frowned, for she hated this kind of talk. It was too true, and it hurt her baser pride, even while her nobler pride rejoiced in the very humbleness of his origin because it emphasised his present greatness.
"But—you are you, and I am only—me," she returned, ungrammatical but proudly humble.
He turned, his face flushing brilliantly. "Then you are proud of me?" he cried.
Danger again. After a long pause, which visibly hurt him, she returned with a smile, "Of course I am. Who would not be proud of such a father-in-law?"
Half an hour later it was all over, the wonderful day was finished, and to Brigit's amazement she was more than a little glad. It had been delightful, but it had been full of danger.
In time Joyselle would learn to evade these pitfalls, with which their future seemed to bristle, but as yet he was so unused to avoiding things in his path that it was almost a miracle that she had, as she put it with a half-whimsical, half-despairing smile, got him safely home without an outburst.
She was, had been from the first, fairly sure of herself, but she was wise enough to acknowledge that her strength depended largely on his. If he had broken down, she knew that the odds were largely against her being able, in her inevitable despair over his certain-to-follow good-bye, to continue to hide her own feelings. And after that, she believed, he would never see her again.
So it was with a strong feeling of relief that she said good-bye to him, half-way home, and went on alone.
As the hansom started again she turned and looked back. Joyselle stood, hat in hand, where she had left him, his face, now that he believed himself to be unseen by her, black with thought. Then, with the so familiar jerk of his head, he put on his hat, smiled, and marched off down the street.