"I told you he was a sure judge of men. But women, except to bring him children, and mind his house, and put up with his tempers, and fetch and carry for him, didn't enter into his calculations at all. He was a bit of a Grand Turk was Mr. Smyrthwaite. And Joanna, from quite a little mite, made herself useful as his amanuensis and reader and so on. He looked upon her as his private property, and kept her busy, I promise you; so that the man who wanted to take her away from him didn't have a fighting chance."
"But now the Grand Turk is finally removed," Adrian declared. "Haven't we just concluded all that?"
"And now a man is afraid of her money, I'm thinking," the big Yorkshireman returned, slowly, a grim smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Joanna was always the plain one of the two girls. And she has aged lately. You can't seem to picture her with a healthy baby on her lap. And so, nobody would believe—the man, though he wished it ever so, would hardly believe himself—it was the woman he wanted, the woman he was after, and not just her wealth."
He stood silent a moment, his jaw set, and then held out a large, hard, but not unkindly hand to Adrian.
"I reckon our time's about up," he said. "Write or wire me to come if I am needed, Mr. Savage. And, when you leave, I should be obliged if you'll remind Joanna I'm always at her service. I shall look after the girls' interest at the mills right enough, but I can get away down here for twenty-four hours almost any time at a push. Good-day to you, sir. I am glad we've met. Now I must round up my lads and take 'em back home to work."
This conversation, in its crude sincerity of language and statement, remained by Adrian, and was still present to his mind next morning when he rose. Early in his stay at the Tower House he had petitioned Smallbridge to bring him rolls and coffee when calling him, since a solid breakfast at nine, followed by a solid luncheon at one-thirty, proved too serious an undertaking for the comfort of the Latin stomach. By the above arrangement he secured two or three hours to himself either for writing or for exercise. This morning he went out soon after eight and walked down the wide avenue, past large, jealously secluded villas, each standing in its acre or half acre of thickly planted grounds, to where the mouth of the long, dark wooded valley opens between striated gray and orange sand-cliffs, as through a giant gateway, upon the sea. Thin, primrose-yellow sunlight glinted on the backs of the steel-blue waves. A great flight of gulls, driven inshore by stress of weather, swept, and dropped, and lifted again, with wild, yelping laughter, above the flowing tide. Fringing the cliff edge the purple boles, red trunks, and black, ragged heads of a line of wind-tormented Scotch firs, detached themselves, from foot to crown, against the colorless winter sky.
The thirty or forty yards of level sand, stretching from the turn of the road in the valley bottom to the dark windrows of sea-wrack marking the tide-line, were pocketed by footsteps. But, at this hour, the place was wholly deserted, it being too early in the day, and too early in the season, for invasion by any advance guard of the mighty army of tourists and trippers which infests the coast from Marychurch and Stourmouth, westward to Barryport, during the summer and autumn months. Adrian found himself solitary, in a silent wilderness, save for the murmur of the pines, the plunge and hush of the waves, and harsh laughter of the strong-winged gulls. From where he stood, looking inland, the surface of the vast, somber amphitheater of blue-black fir forest, variegated here and there by the purple-brown of a grove of bare, deciduous trees, or the pallor of a snow-dusted space of tussock-grass and heather, was unbroken by house-roof or other sign of human habitation. Looking seaward no shipping was visible. To Adrian the scene appeared arrestingly northern in character, the spirit of it questioning, introspective, coldly complex, yet primitive and elfin, reminding him of Grieg's Occasional Music to the haunting parable-poem of Peer Gynt. Then, as he paced the harder sand to the seaward side of the tide-mark, the chill breeze pushing against him and the keen smell of the brine in his nostrils, his thought carried back vividly to his conversation of last night with Andrew Merriman.
For, now that he came to think of it, might not Joanna, the main subject of that conversation, in all her feminine leanness and overstrained mentality, have stepped straight out of one of those plays of Ibsen's which, heretofore, had so perplexed him by their distance from any moral and racial conditions with which he was familiar? Northern, joyless, uncertain in faith, burdened by scruples, prey to a misplaced intellectualism, yet clear-headed and able in practical matters, could not her prototype be found again and again in the Norwegian playwright's penetrating and disheartening pages? And, if it came to that, in the relentless common-sense of the big Yorkshireman's cruelly sagacious estimate of his own attitude toward her was there not an Ibsenish element, too? For that Andrew Merriman was, himself, "the man" of whom he had spoken, Adrian entertained no doubt.
So he paced the sand, absorbed in analysis and in apprehension, while ripples of spent waves slipped, in foam-outlined curves, near and nearer to his feet. It seemed to him he touched something new here in human tendencies and human development; something which, in the coming social order, might very widely obtain, especially among Protestant English-speaking peoples.—A democratic, scientific, unsparing self-knowledge, physical and mental, on the one hand, and a narrow, sectarian, self-sufficiency, on the other; a morbidly cold-blooded acknowledgment of fact and application of means to ends, in which neither poetry nor religion had any determining part. The artist in him protested hotly. For really a world so ordered did not look enticing in the very least!
Then, his thought fixing itself again exclusively on Joanna, played around the everlastingly baffling problem of woman's mind, woman's outlook, in itself, divorced from her relation to man. It was not the first time his imagination had been held up by this problem, nor was he conceited enough to suppose it would be the last. Woman in her relation to man was a stale enough, obvious enough, story. But in her relation to her fellow-woman, in her relation to herself—had not this tripped even the cleverest novelists and dramatists of his own sex? Wasn't it, after all, easier for a woman rightly to imagine the life a man lives among men, than for a man to conceive woman's life with his own great self left out of it? He feared so, though the admission was far from flattering to masculine perspicacity. He resented his own inability to negotiate those moral and emotional lines of cleavage which do, so very actually, divide the sexes. To think, for example, that Joanna Smyrthwaite and Gabrielle St. Leger—their radical differences of circumstances, endowment, and experience notwithstanding—were still essentially nearer to each other, more capable of mutual sympathy and understanding in the deep places of their nature, than he, with all his acute sensibility and dramatic insight, could ever be to either of them!