At the Gate of Samaria

by William John Locke

So Mrs. Blather and Janet went back to Durdleham, to raise a flutter of excitement at the Durdleham tea tables over their accounts of Clytie's moral and material prosperity and her husband's manifold perfections. But the old man, Mr. Davenant, shook his head and sighed. Slow to receive fresh impressions, he could not conceive Clytie other than wilful and paradoxical. And he was suspicious of the brilliant soldier of fortune. He would much have preferred his daughter to have married a steady-going country gentleman or professional man. Still no fault could be found with Hammerdyke, who had treated him with every courtesy.

Before Thornton's departure for Scotland a kind of reconciliation was patched up between them. The first overtures had come from Clytie. After all, he was her husband. They were bound together, for better or worse, till death parted them. It was only common sense to struggle that it should be for better. She humbled herself, then, a little, confessed that she had been unreasonable in some things. He happened to be in a softer mood, and encouraged her to tell him she was sorry if she had been cold and selfish. Unconsciously she made him feel quite magnanimous. He kissed her gaily, bade her think no more about it, and even condescended to say with regard to the main point at issue:

“Well, perhaps you are about right in not caring to go to Durdleham. Your sisters are not rapid.”

A remark which, although it jarred somewhat on Clytie's strung nerves, she nevertheless accepted as a token of peace.

This was the second time in her life that she had deliberately humbled herself before a man. She thought of it with a queer little pang. When she had put down her young pride so as to retain Kent's friendship and esteem, on the day that Jack had destroyed Winifred's picture, it had been all gladness and triumph. She remembered how happily she had gone to sleep that night, in pleasant subconsciousness of certain feminine workings. It had been a joy to surrender then. But now? She shrugged her shoulders, tried to dismiss it from her mind.

In the middle of August she found herself alone in the great house, enjoying the leisure and solitude, the independence, the freedom from friction. She devoted most of her time to her painting, which had been sadly neglected since her marriage. Her studio was a pleasant room, with a good light. It had not the severe, businesslike air of the one in the King's Road; it was warmer, heavier with velvet hangings, richer in quaint furniture. Instead of the whitewashed walls scrawled over with grotesque caricatures, it had a delicately toned Morris paper. The floor was polished, strewn with thick rugs; a great white bearskin lay before the hearth. The piles of canvases stretched upon rough wooden backs that used to lie stacked up in odd corners Thornton had had framed for her, as a surprise to greet her on her home-coming, and now the best of them were hung round the room. Some of her cherished possessions found a place—the etching by Rupert Kent, two or three of Winifred's delicate studies, and an exquisite Jacquemart that Kent had given her long ago. But otherwise all was new, luxurious, separating her from the old associations of her art life.

Whilst searching for a subject she took out her studies for the Faustina picture. But she put them aside with a shudder. She was painting merely for amusement, to gratify the artistic impulse that urged her to create. But the hope, by which she had been gradually rising towards the goal of her ambition, the hope of fame and full accomplishment, was gone, apparently beyond recall; and she mused upon it sadly. This sense of finality is characteristic of youth—its one governing pessimism. Yet she was cheerful enough, glad to feel the brush between her fingers again, and to smell the familiar odour of turpentine, and to see her fancies take visible form under her touch. The artist within her asserted itself, though vaguely, as from some depth where it lay buried. It was undergoing a subtle change, and its weak, inchoate manifestations were those of a period of transition. But Clytie knew it not.

The Farquharsons returned to town towards the end of the month, and Winifred also, after her annual seaside holiday with the children. And many of Clytie's other friends remained in London, and welcomed her back among them. It was like a return to her old life. Only Kent was absent from her circle. She missed him, sighing a little for the impossible.

Thornton wrote from Scotland with affectionate brevity. He did not know that he could have missed her so much. He had bagged so many brace that morning. He longed to see her. He thought he might as well stay on with Carteret so long as there was any sport forward. His letters, dashed off with a broad quill pen in a great, bold hand, covered four sides of notepaper, and came once a week. Clytie had no reason to complain of lack of attention on the part of her husband. Consequently she looked forward to less troubled days when they should lead their common life together again.

An occasional visitor that she had during these weeks was the boy Jack. He had been for a term at the industrial school to which Treherne and Kent had procured him admittance, and now passed as a reformed character amongst his enthusiasts. The teachers at the school, with vivid memories of stormy scenes, might have demurred at this opinion; but they were miles away holiday-making, and for the time blissfully oblivious of Jack. Four months over a spelling-book and a carpenter's bench, even though the latter may be situated amid pleasant fields, are not long enough to purify the blood from the wildness of London streets; and a lifetime so spent cannot wash out hereditary taint; but they can teach the use of soap and water and a suitable adjustment of garments. And Jack was clean, and his wild elf locks were cropped into compulsory smugness, and his clothes conformed to a strictly conventional order. This external revolution was so startling that an accompanying moral reform seemed unquestionable. Even his mother's dull pessimism was affected by it. When she returned from her work she bribed him with bread and treacle to sit in a chair where she could admire him, instead of sending him out of her way into the streets as she had been wont to do. But Jack ate the bread and treacle and then sauntered into the street of his own accord. He did not admire his mother, and only heeded her blandishments when they assumed an objective form. He admired one person, and that was Winifred. With her the young animal was tame, almost docile. It was merely owing to lack of special instinct that he did not lick her hand. He was often in the studio, where he had been constituted general factotum during his holidays. He swept the floor, cleaned the windows, set the brushes and paints in order before Winifred arrived, ran messages for her, and whenever she permitted would sprawl on the ground by her side, following her movements with his great brown eyes. To prevent him from wasting his time and energies in this passive adoration, Winifred often invented commissions for him which he executed with proud despatch, disregarding all allurements to eat the lotus of the gutter and holding his person sacred as Winifred's messenger. It was in consequence of this that he found his way to Clytie's house, acting as postman for his patroness. At first he was shy. He had not lost the feeling of awe with which Clytie inspired him, nor had he forgotten the dread picture of her anger on that day when she had summarily dismissed him from her service. It was only his devotion to Winifred that had induced him to put, as it seemed to him, his head in the lion's mouth. But when he found that the lion was kind and roared as gently as his own dove, and further, gave him various unimaginable dainties to eat and odd shillings to spend in surreptitious tobacco, the house in the Cromwell Road became invested with pleasant associations.