CHAPTER VIII
"NUIT DE MAI"
Some half-hour later Adrian turned into the garden of the Tower House by the wicket gate opening off the carriage-drive. And so doing, the tranquil beauty of the night made itself felt. During his walk from Heatherleigh his preoccupation had been too great to admit of the bestowal of intelligent attention upon outward things, however poetic their aspect. He possessed the comfortable assurance, it is true, of having worsted the animal Challoner in the only way possible, swords and pistols being forbidden. He also possessed the comfortable assurance of having scrupulously and successfully regulated the affaire Smyrthwaite, in as far as business was concerned, and taken his discharge in respect of it. But the events of the afternoon had proved to him, beyond all shadow of doubt and denial, the existence of a second affaire Smyrthwaite, compared with which regulation of hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of property was, from his personal standpoint, but the veriest bagatelle! Now the question of how to deal with this second affaire, alike scrupulously and successfully, racked his brain, usually so direct in decision, so prompt in honorable instinct and thought. And it was to the young man's credit that, while fully measuring the abominable nature of the hole in which the unhappy Joanna had put him, he remained just and temperate in his judgment of Joanna herself. The more to his credit, because, as a native of a country where certain subjects are treated in a spirit of merry common-sense—which, if it makes in some degree for license, also makes for absence of hypocrisy and much wholesome delight in life—Joanna's attitude offered an obscure problem. Were she a vicious woman his position would be a comparatively simple one. But Joanna and vice were, he felt, far as the poles asunder. Even that ugly matter of "trying to buy him"—as in his first overwhelming disgust he had defined it—proved, on calmer inspection, innocent of any intention of offense. She didn't know, poor, dear woman, she didn't know. In her virtuous ignorance of certain fundamental tendencies of human nature, of the correlative action of body and spirit, she had not a conception of the atrocities she was in process of committing! For she was essentially high-minded, deep-hearted, sincere; a positive slave to the demands of her own overdeveloped moral sense. But, heavens and earth, if only those responsible for her education had taught her a little more about the nature of the genus homo—male and female—and the physiology of her own emotions, and a little less about quite supererogatory theoretic ethics! The burning, though veiled, passion from which he recoiled was, he believed, in great measure the result of the narrow intellectualism on which she had been nurtured working upon a naturally ardent temperament. What she must have suffered! What she would suffer in the coming days!
For it was that last which hit Adrian hardest, in all this distracting imbroglio, giving him that "uncommon nasty blow below the belt" the effects of which Joseph Challoner had noted. The more he analyzed, and, analyzing, excused, Joanna's attitude the more odiously distasteful did his own position become. In how far was he to blame? What had he done, by word, act, or look, to provoke or to foster Joanna's most lamentable infatuation? He explored his memory, and, to his rather bitter amusement, found it an absolute blank. He had not flirted with her, even within the most restrained of the limits sanctioned by ordinary social intercourse. For this he did not commend himself. On the contrary, he felt almost penitent; since—there hadn't been any temptation to flirt. Positively not any—though Adrian knew himself to be by no means insensible to feminine influence. He loved Madame St. Leger. She constituted, so to speak, the religion of his heart. But he found dozens of other women charming, and did not scruple to—as good as—tell them so.—Why not? Are not such tellings the delightful and perfectly legitimate small change of a gallant man's affections? And out of the farthings and half-farthings, the very fractions of half-farthings, indeed—of such small change, Joanna had constructed a great and serious romance terminating in matrimony! The young man could have beat his breast, torn his hair, poured ashes upon his thus forcibly denuded scalp, and rent his up-to-date and particularly well-tailored garments. He, Adrian Savage, the husband of Joanna!—From this his lively Gallic imagination galloped away, blushing in humorous horror, utterly refusing to contemplate the picture. At the same time his pity for her was immense. And how, oh! how, without gross and really sickening cruelty, to dispel her disastrous delusion?
With the above question upon his lips, Adrian turned by the wicket gate into the garden, where the tranquil beauty surrounding him compelled his observation.
High above the dark-feathered crests of the firs, the moon, two days short of the full, rode in the south-eastern sky, obliterating all stars in the vicinity of her pathway. She showed to-night not as a flat disk plastered against the solid vault, but as a mammoth, delicately tarnished silver ball, traveling in stateliest fashion the steel-blue fields of space. The roofs and façade of the house, its multiplicity of glinting window-panes, the lawns and shrubberies, and all-encircling woodland, were alike overlaid with the searching whiteness of her light. The air was dry and very mellow, rich with a blending of forest and garden scents. Faintly to northward Adrian's ear could detect the rattle and grind of a belated tram on the Barryport Road, and, southward, the continuous wistful murmur of the mile-distant sea!
Now, as often before, he was sensible of the subtle charm produced by this conjunction of a highly finished, material civilization with gently savage and unsubjugated Nature. England is, in so great measure, a sylvan country even yet; a country of close-coming, abounding, and invading trees. And when, as now, just upon midnight, its transitory human populations—which in silly pride suppose themselves proprietors of the soil and all that grows upon it—are herded safe indoors, abed and asleep, the trees resume their primitive sovereignty, making their presence proudly evident. They had no voice to-night, it is true. They stood becalmed and silent. Yet the genius of them, both in their woodland unity and endless individual diversity of form and growth, declared itself nevertheless. For this last the infiltration of moonlight was partly accountable, since it lent each stem, branch, and twig, each differing species of foliage—the large leaves of laurel and rhododendron, the semi-transparent, fringed and fluted leaves of the beech, the finely spiked tufts of fir-needles—a definiteness and separateness such as hoar-frost might. Each tree and bush stood apart from its fellows in charming completeness and relief, challenging the eye by a certain sprightly independence of mien and aspect. Had they moved from their fixed places, the big trees mingling in some stately procession or dance, while the shrubs and bushes frisked upon the greensward, Adrian would hardly have been surprised. A spirit of phantasy was abroad—here in the Baughurst Park Ward, local municipal government notwithstanding—entrancing to his poetic sense.
Therefore he lingered, walking slowly along the path leading to the garden entrance of the house, here shaded by a broken line of tall Scotch firs, their smooth stems rising like pillars, bare of branches for some twenty or thirty feet. Now and again he stopped, held captive by the tranquil yet disquieting beauty of the scene. It reminded him strangely of Gabrielle St. Leger's beauty, and the something elusive, delicately malicious and ironic, in the character of it. Her smiling, unclosed lips, the dimple in her left cheek; those mysterious oblique glances from beneath her long-shaped, half-closed eyelids, full at once of invitation and reserve; the untamed, deliciously tricksy spirit he apprehended in her; and a something majestic, too, as of those vast, calm, steel-blue fields of space,—these, all and severally, he, lover-like, found mirrored in the loveliness of this May night.
On his left the lawns, flooded by moonlight, stretched away to the tennis court and the terrace walk in front of the pavilion. On his right, backed by the line of Scotch firs aforesaid, a thick wall of deciduous shrubs—allspice, lilac, syringa, hydrangea, sweetbrier, and laburnum—shut out the carriage-drive. The quaint leathery flowers of the allspice gave off a powerful and luscious sweetness as of sun-ripened fruit. Adrian paused, inhaling it, gazing meanwhile in fond imagination into la belle Gabrielle's golden-brown eyes, refreshingly forgetful of the distracting perplexities of the affaire Smyrthwaite No. 2.
It was a good moment, at once chaste and voluptuous, wherein the very finest flame of ideal love burned upon his heart's altar. But it was broken up by an arresting apparition. For a white owl swept, phantom-like, out of the plantation behind the pavilion and beat over the moonlit turf in swift and absolutely noiseless flight. A soft thistle-down could hardly have passed more lightly or silently than the great wide-winged bird. Beneath it, its shadow, skimming the close-cut surface of the grass, seemed as much alive and more substantial than itself. Twice, while Adrian watched, moved and a little startled, it quartered the lawn in search of prey; then flung itself up, high in air, vanishing among the tree-tops, with a long-drawn hoo-hoo-hooing of hollow laughter. And in the space of a few seconds, from the recesses of the woodland, its mate answered with a far-off elfin echo of its sinister note. Then Adrian heard a window open. And, on to the far end of the red-balustraded balcony—extending along the first floor of the house, in the recess above the veranda—a woman came.
She was dressed in a white négligé of some soft, woolen material, which hung straight in knife-edge pleatings from her shoulders to her feet, covering them—as the young man could see between the wide-spaced balusters—and lying outspread for some inches around her upon the floor. Over this she wore a black cloak, straight-hanging too, made of some fine and supple fur. The fronts of it, which were thrown open, leaving her arms free, appeared to be lined with ermine. Her peculiar garb and the perceptible angularity of her form and action suggested some crabbed medieval figure of church wood-carving or memorial brass.