Where Love Is

by William John Locke

Chapter XXV—THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT

EVERY one knew that the marriage arranged between Morland King and Norma Hardacre would not take place. It was announced in the “Times” and “Morning Post” on the Tuesday morning; those bidden to the wedding received hurried messages, and a day or two later the wedding-gifts were returned to the senders, who stored them up for some happier pair. But the new engagement upon which Norma had entered remained a secret. Norma herself did not desire to complete the banquet of gossip she had afforded society, and Mrs. Hardacre was not anxious to fill to overflowing the cup of her own humiliation. The stricken lady maintained a discreet reserve. The lovers had quarrelled, Norma had broken off the match and would not be going out for some time. She even defied the duchess, who commanded an explicit statement of reasons. Her grace retorted severely that she ought to have brought her daughter up better, and signified that this was the second time Norma had behaved with scandalous want of consideration for her august convenience. “She shall not have the opportunity of doing it again. I dislike being mixed up in scandals,” said the duchess; and Mrs. Hardacre saw the gates of Wiltshire House and Chiltern Towers closed to her forever. But of the impossible painter wretch she spoke not a word, hoping desperately that in some mysterious fashion the God of her fathers would avert this crowning disgrace from them and would lead Norma forth again into the paths of decency and virtue. As for her husband, he stormily refused to speak or hear the outcast's name. He had done with her. She should never sleep again beneath the roof she had dishonoured. He would not allow her a penny. He would cut her out of his will. She had dragged him in the mud, and by heaven! she could go to the devil! It took much to rouse the passions of the feeble, mean-faced little man; but once they were roused, he had the snarling tenacity of the fox. Mrs. Hardacre did not tell him of Morland's confession and the rehabilitation of his rival. The memory of her stunning humiliation brought on a feeling akin to physical nausea. She strove to bury it deep down in her sub-consciousness, beneath all the other unhallowed memories. There were none quite so rank. On the other hand, her husband's vilification of the detested creature was a source of consolation which she had no desire to choke. Why should she deny herself this comfort. The supreme joy of vitriol throwing was not countenanced in her social sphere. At odd times she regretted that she was a lady.

While the black fog of depression darkened Devonshire Place, in neighbouring parts of London the days were radiant. A thousand suns glorified the heavens and the breaths of a thousand springs perfumed the air. It was a period of exaggeration, unreality, a page out of a fairy tale lived and relived. Norma abandoned herself to the intoxication, heedless of the fog in Devonshire Place, and the decent grey of the world elsewhere. She refused to think or speculate. Rose veils shrouded the future; the present was a fantasy of delight. For material things, food, shelter, raiment, she had no concern. Connie fed and housed her, making her the thrice welcome guest, the beloved sister. From society she withdrew altogether. Visitors paid calls, odd people were entertained at meals, the routine of a wealthy woman's establishment proceeded in its ordinary course, and Norma's presence in the house remained unknown and unsuspected. She was there in hiding. The world was given to understand that she was in Cornwall. Even common life had thus its air of romance and mystery. Being as it were a fugitive, she had no engagements. There was a glorious incongruity in the position. She regarded the beginnings of the London season with the amused detachment of a disembodied spirit revisiting the scenes of which it once made a part. Morning, afternoon, and evening she was free—an exhilarating novelty. Nobody wanted to see her save Jimmie; save him she wanted to see nobody.

They met every day—sometimes in the sitting-room on the ground floor which Connie had set apart for her guest's exclusive use, and sometimes in Jimmie's studio. Now and then, when the weather was fine, they walked together in sweet places unfrequented by the fashionable world, Regent's Park and Hampstead Heath, fresh woods and pastures new to Norma, who had heard of the heath vaguely as an undesirable common where the lower orders wore each other's hats and shied at cocoanuts. Its smiling loneliness and April beauty, seen perhaps through the artist's eyes, enchanted her. Jimmie pointed out its undulations; like a bosom, said he, swelling with the first breaths of pure air on its release from London.

Most of all she loved to drive up to St. John's Wood after dinner and burst upon him unexpectedly. The new Bohemian freedom of it all was a part of the queer delicious life. She laughed in anticipation at his cry of delighted welcome. When she heard it, her eyes grew soft. To lift her veil and hang back her head to receive his kiss on her lips was an ever-new sensation. The intimacy had a bewildering sweetness. To complete it she threw aside gloves and jacket and unpinned her hat, a battered gilt Empire mirror over the long table serving her to guide the necessary touches to her hair. Although she did not repeat the little comedy of the shirt which had been inspired by the exaltation of a rare moment, yet she sat in Aline's chair, now called her own, and knitted at a silk tie she was making for him. She had learned the art from her aunt in Cornwall, and she brought the materials in a little black silk bag slung to her wrist. The housewifely avocation fitted in with the fairy tale. Jimmie smoked and talked, the most responsive and least tiring of companions. His allusive speech, that of the imaginative and cultured man, in itself brought her into a world different from the one she had left. His simplicity, his ignorance of the ways of women, his delight at the little discoveries she allowed him to make, gave it a touch of Arcadia. In passionate moments there was the unfamiliar, poetic, rhapsodic in his utterance which turned the world into a corner of heaven. And so the magic hours passed.

“I do believe I have found a soul,” she remarked on one of these evenings, “and that's why I must be so immoderately happy. I'm like a child with a new toy.”

She was unconscious of the instinctive, pitiless analysis of herself; and Jimmie, drunk with the wonder of her, did not heed the warning.

Of their future life together they only spoke as happy lovers in the rosy mist shed about them by the veil. They dwelt in the glamour of the fairy tale, where the princess who marries the shepherd lives not only happy ever afterwards, but also delicately dressed and daintily environed, her chief occupation being to tie silk bows round the lambs' necks, and to serve to her husband the whitest of bread and the whitest of cheese with the whitest of hands. Their forecast of the future might have been an Idyll of Theocritus.

“You will be the inspiration of all my pictures, dear,” said Jimmie.