AUDREY CRAVEN
BY
MAY SINCLAIR
AUTHOR OF "THE DIVINE FIRE," ETC.
"Made subject to vanity"
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1906
AUTHOR'S EDITION
TO
MY MOTHER
AUDREY CRAVEN
CHAPTER I
Everybody knew that Miss Audrey Craven was the original of "Laura," the heroine of Langley Wyndham's masterpiece. She first attracted the attention of that student of human nature at Oxford, at a dinner given by her guardian, the Dean of St. Benedict's, ostensibly in honour of the new Master of Lazarus, in reality for his ward's entertainment and instruction in the bewildering art of life.
It was thunder-weather. Out of doors, a hot and sleepy air hung over the city; indoors, the forecast was no less heavy and depressing. Not so, however, to Miss Audrey Craven. The party was large and mixed; and to the fresh, untutored mind of a tyro, this in itself was promising. The Dean pursued the ruinous policy of being all things to all men; and to-night, together with nonentities and Oxonians of European renown, there was a sprinkling of celebrities from the outside world. Among these were Mr. Langley Wyndham, the eminent novelist, and his friend Mr. Percival Knowles, the critic who had helped him to his eminence. Having collected these discordant elements around him, the Dean withdrew from the unequal contest, and hovered, smiling ineffectually, on the outskirts of his little chaos. Perhaps he tried to find comfort in a conscience satisfied for a party spoiled. But for Audrey this wild confusion was rich in possibility. However baffling to those officially responsible, it offered a wider field for individual enterprise; and if she did not possess that fine flow of animal spirits which sometimes supports lesser minds under such circumstances, she had other qualities which stood her in good stead. Conspicuous amongst these was an indomitable moral courage. She prepared to hurl herself into the breach.
Wyndham was standing a little apart from the herd, leaning against the wall, as if overcome by an atmosphere too oppressive for endurance, when he saw his friend approaching him. Knowles was looking about him with eyes alert, and that furtive but uncontrollable smile which made ladies say, "Yes; but Mr. Knowles is so dreadfully cynical, you know."
"By the way, Wyndham—I don't want to startle you, but there is a lady here who particularly wants me to introduce you to her."
Wyndham turned on him a look terrible in its dignified reproach.
"Anything but that, my dear fellow. No more introductions to-night, please. I've just suffered torture from an unspeakable youth from Aberdeen, who expected me to rejoice with him because Oxford is at last recognising the 'exeestence of a metapheesical principle in the wur-r-ld and mon——'"
"I admit that the party is dull, from a mere worldling's point of view. But it's a glorious field for the student of human nature. And here's an opportunity for exceptional research—something quite off the beaten track. The admirer of you and all your works is the lovely Miss Craven, and I assure you she's creating a sensation at the other end of the room."
"Which is she?"
"There, the girl with the copper-coloured hair, talking to Broadbent."
"Ah, that one. No, thanks. I know what you're going to tell me—she writes."
"She doesn't, but she's pretty enough to do that or anything else she chooses. Scandal says she's looking for a religion. She must be a simple soul if she thinks she can pick up the article in Oxford."
"Oh, I don't know. Religions are cheap everywhere nowadays, the supply being so remarkably in excess of the demand, and Miss Craven's soul may be immortal (we'll give it the benefit of the doubt), but its simplicity is un grand peut-être. What's the matter?"
"It makes me ill to see the way these fellows go about leading captive silly women. Do look at Broadbent cramming his spiritual pabulum into that girl's mouth. Moral platitudes—all the old crusts he can lay his hands on, soaked in the milk-and-water of sentiment."
"And a little new wine—with the alcohol extracted by the latest process; no possible risk of injury to the bottles. Don't be uneasy; I've been watching her all evening, ever since I found her in a corner with the unspeakable youth, talking transcendentalism. A woman who can look you in the face and ask you if you have ever doubted your own existence, and if it isn't a very weird and unaccountable sensation, would be capable of anything. Five minutes afterwards she was complimenting Flaxman Reed on the splendid logic of the Roman Faith, and now I've no doubt she's contributing valuable material to Broadbent's great work on the Fourth Gospel."
He was wrong. At that moment the earnest seeker after truth was gazing abstractedly in his direction, and had left the Canon lecturing to empty benches, balancing himself on his toes, while he defined his theological position with convincing emphasis of finger and thumb. What he said is neither here nor there. Then Wyndham repented of his rudeness. He waited till Knowles was looking another way, and made for the Dean in a bee-line, approaching him from the rear to find him introducing a late arrival to his niece. He heard the name Mr. Jackson, and noted the faint shade of annoyance on the girl's face, as the interloper sat down beside her with a smile of dreamy content. It was enough to quench Wyndham's languid ardour. He was not going to take any more trouble to get an introduction to Miss Audrey Craven.
He saw her once more that evening as he turned to take leave of his host. She was still sitting beside Mr. Jackson, and Wyndham watched them furtively. Mr. Jackson was a heavy, flaxen-haired young man, with a large eye-glass and no profile to speak of. To judge by Miss Craven's expression, his conversation was not very interesting, though he was evidently exerting himself to give it a humorous turn. Wyndham smiled in spite of himself.
"Hard lines, wasn't it?" said Knowles at his elbow. "Brilliant idea of the Dean's, though—introduce the biggest bore in the county to the prettiest girl in the room."
The unconscious Mr. Jackson burst into laughter, and Audrey raised her eyebrows; she looked from Mr. Jackson to Wyndham, and from Wyndham to Mr. Jackson, and laughed a low musical laugh, without any humour in it, which echoed unmusically in the memory. Wyndham turned abruptly away, and Audrey looked after him as he turned. Her face was that of one who sees her last hope disappearing. Poor Audrey! Who would not have pitied her? After hovering all evening on the verge of an introduction to his Eminence, it was hard to bear the irony of this decline, unsustained by any sense of its comedy. He had avoided her in the most marked manner; but all the same, she wondered whether he was thinking about her, and if so, what he was thinking.
What he thought that night, and the next, and the next after that, was something like this: "My dear lady, you think yourself remarkably clever. But really there is nothing striking about you except the colour of your hair. Biggest bore in the county—prettiest girl in the room? If it weren't for your prettiness—well, as yet that may have saved you from being a bore." After that he laughed whenever he caught himself trying to piece together the image which his memory persistently presented to him in fragments: now an oval face tinged with a childlike bloom, now grey eyes ringed with black, under dark eyebrows and lashes; or a little Roman nose with a sensitive tip, or a mouth that to the best of his recollection curled up at the corners, making a perpetual dimple in each cheek. They were frivolous details, but for weeks he carried them about with him along with his more valuable property.
CHAPTER II
Scandal was mistaken. Miss Audrey Craven was not in search of a religion, but she had passed all her life looking for a revelation. She had no idea of the precise form it was to take, but had never wavered in her belief that it was there, waiting for her, as it were, round a dark corner. Hitherto the ideal had shown a provoking reticence; the perfectly unique sensation had failed to turn up at the critical moment. Audrey had reached the ripe age of ten before the death of her father and mother, and this event could not be expected to provide her with a wholly new emotion. She had been familiarised with sorrow through fine gradations of funereal tragedy, having witnessed the passing of her canary, her dormouse, and her rabbit. The end of these engaging creatures had been peculiarly distressing, hastened as it was by starvation, under most insanitary conditions.
The age of ten is the age of disenchantment—for those of us who can take a hint. For Audrey disenchantment never wholly came. She went on making the same extravagant demands, without a suspicion of the limited resources of life. It was the way of the Cravens. Up to the last her father never lost his blind confidence in a world which had provided him with a great deal of irregular amusement. But the late Mr. Craven could be wise for others, though not for himself, and he had taken a singular precaution with regard to his daughter. Not counting the wife whom he had too soon ceased to care for, he had a low opinion of all women, and he distrusted Audrey's temperament, judging it probably by his own and that of his more intimate acquaintance. By a special clause in his will, she had to wait for her majority four years longer than the term by law appointed. Further, until she reached her majority she was to spend six months of the year at Oxford, near her guardian, for the forming and informing of her mind—always supposing that she had a mind to form. And now, at the age of five-and-twenty, being the mistress of her own person, her own income, and her own house in Chelsea, she was still looking out for a revelation.
Her cousin, Mr. Vincent Hardy, believed that he had been providentially invented to supply it. But in the nature of things a cousin whom you have known familiarly from childhood cannot strike you as a revelation. He is really little better than a more or less animated platitude.
Vincent Hardy would have been unaffectedly surprised if you had told him so. To himself he seemed the very incarnation of distinguished paradox. This simply meant that he was one of those who innocently imagine that they can defy the minor conventions with a rarer grace than other men.
Certainly his was not exactly the sort of figure that convention expects to find in its drawing-rooms at nine o'clock in the evening. It was in Audrey's house in Chelsea, the little brown house with discreet white storm-shutters, that stands back from the Embankment, screened by the narrow strip of railed plantation known as Chelsea Gardens. Here or hereabouts Hardy was to be met with at any hour of the day; and late one July evening he had settled himself, as usual, near a certain "cosy corner" in the big drawing-room. His face, and especially his nose, was bronzed with recent exercise in sun and wind, his hair was limp with the steam of his own speed, and on his forehead his hat had left its mark in a deep red cincture. His loose shooting jacket, worn open, displayed a flannel shirt, white, but not too white. This much of Hardy was raised and supported on his elbow; the rest of him, encased in knickerbockers, stockings, and exceedingly muddy boots, sprawled with a naïve abandonment at the feet of the owner of the drawing-room. Lying in this easy attitude, he delivered himself of the following address—
"Life in London is a life for lunatics. And life in England generally is a glorious life for clergymen and counter-hoppers, but it's not the life for a man. It was all very well in the last century, you know, when Englishmen were men first, and lunatics, if they chose, or clergymen or counter-hoppers, afterwards. Ah! if that wasn't exactly our golden age, it was the age of our maturity, of our manhood. If you doubt it, read the literature of the eighteenth century. Take Fielding—no, don't take Fielding. Anyhow, since then we have added nothing to the fabric of life. To pile it on above, we've simply been digging away like mad from below, and at last our top-heavy civilisation is nodding to its fall; and its fall will sweep us all back into barbarism again. Then, when we are forced back into natural conditions, the new race will be born. No more of your big-headed, spindle-shanked manikins: we shall have a chance then of seeing a man—that is, a perfect animal. You may turn up your nose, my superfine lady: let me tell you that this glorious animalism means sanity, and sanity means strength, and strength means virtue. Vis—vir—virtus, ma'am."
Hardy sat up and caressed the calves of his legs with thoughtful emotion, as if he recognised them as the sources of the moral law within him. His cousin had not followed his precipitate logic. With woman's well-known aversion from the abstract, she was concentrating her attention on the concrete case, the glorious animal before her. Now it would be very wrong to suppose that Hardy was in the least tainted with socialism, anarchism, or any such pestilent heresies, or that he had read "Emile" and "Walden." He had never heard of either of these works, and had no desire whatever for the restoration of society on a primitive basis of animalism, modified by light literature, clothing, and the moral law. For all modern theories he had a withering contempt, his own simple creed being that in the beginning God made man a Tory squire. His quarrel with the social order was a purely private and particular one. In our modern mythology, Custom, Circumstance, and Heredity are the three Fates that weave the web of human life. Hardy did not wholly sympathise with this belief. He had too profound a respect for his own pedigree to lay his sins at his great-grandfather's door. As the nephew of a Tory squire, he was but two degrees removed from original righteousness. In spite of this consideration, he was wont to describe himself with engaging candour as a "bad hat." In doing so he recognised that he was a dependent part of a vast and complicated system. If he, Vincent Hardy, was a bad hat, who was to blame for it? Obviously, civilisation for providing him with temptation, and society for supplying encouragement. As a consequence he owed both civilisation and society a grudge.
"Therefore I say that a return to barbarism will be our salvation. You and I mayn't live to see the day, but——"
Here the impassioned orator, who had been making charges at his boots with the point of his walking-stick, succeeded in detaching a large cake of mud, which he immediately ground to powder on the carpet. Civilisation personified in Audrey Craven gazed at him in polite reproach.
"My new carpet will certainly not live to see it. It may be part of the detestable social order, but it is not responsible for it, any more than I am."
"Never mind, Audrey. It's honest Hertfordshire mud—clean from the country as God made it, if I hadn't had to cross your filthy London in order to get here."
Audrey smiled, though she knew that brown streaks of the honest Hertfordshire mud marked the hero's passage from the doorway to her feet. She was naturally long-suffering, and seldom repulsed any one, save a few of the more impertinent of her own sex. She lay back in her cosy corner, outwardly contemplating the unusual length of muscular humanity extended before her, inwardly admiring her own smile, a smile of indulgent lips and arch eyebrows, in which the eyes preserved a languid neutrality.
Being thus pleasantly preoccupied, she may be supposed ignorant of her cousin's broad gaze of unreflecting admiration, and totally unprepared for his rapid change of theme.
"Audrey," he began, with alarming suddenness, "some people would lead up to the subject cautiously. That would only waste time, and time's everything now. Is Miss Craven at home?"
"Miss Craven is always at home when I am. Would you like to see her?"
"See her? Good heavens, no! Do you know positively where she is secreting herself, or must I lock the door?"
"That is unnecessary. She will not come in—she never does."
A suspicious look darted from the corners of Hardy's eyes.
"Except when I ask her," added Audrey, sweetly.
"Well, then, if you can ensure me against the sort of interruption that annoyed me before, we will return to the question we were discussing when——"
"Please don't go over any old ground. That would bore me."
"It would bore me. I will begin where we left off. The problem, if you remember, was this—to put it baldly—do you care for me, or do you not?"
"Didn't we get any farther than that?"
"No, we didn't."
"Do I—or—do I not? Really I cannot tell you, Vincent, for I don't know myself."
"Nonsense! there's no logical dilemma. You can't go on for ever treating it as an open question."
"Well—you draw such absurdly hard-and-fast lines."
"Audrey, do you honestly suppose that I've walked here thirty miles, parboiled between sun and rain, in order to be made a fool of?" (in his excitement Hardy forgot that twenty miles was the precise distance, and that he had much better have taken the train). "How much longer are you going to keep up this fiendish cat-and-mouse sort of game?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that ten years is a devil of a time to keep a man waiting for his answer."
"Ten years?—ten days, you mean."
"Excuse me, I broached this subject for the first time ten years ago."
"Oh, I daresay, when we were both children."
"We are neither of us children now, Audrey."
"Speak for yourself. I was an infant in the eyes of the law till the other day."
"You are—let me see—five-and-twenty. If you have any mind at all, you must have made it up by this time."
"The case would be much easier if you were not such a mass of inconsistency yourself."
"I've been consistent enough in one respect. Do you remember the first time you stayed with us at Woodford, when you weren't much higher than that table, and how you and I set off together for Wanstead Woods?"
"Yes—before breakfast. I have never forgotten it."
"Nor I. You did rile me that day, Audrey. You waited till we came within a stone's-throw of the woods, and then you sat down in a turnip field and cried because you couldn't go any farther."
"After running at your heels for two miles, like a dog."
"Yes—and, with the irresponsibility of the inferior animal, eating up the whole of the cake I provided for us both."
"It was perfectly fair; you dragged me out against my will."
"So you argued at the time, but I couldn't follow your reasoning. Perhaps you have forgotten how I carried you on my back to Woodford, and then gave the milkman sixpence to drive us the rest of the way home. And you were such a contemptible little snob that you cried again because you had to sit next the milkman."
"I remember perfectly. You only carried me as far as Red Bridge, in a position the most comfortable for yourself and the most undignified for me. You borrowed that sixpence from me and never paid me again; and we were both punished with dry bread for breakfast, because we were seen in the milk-cart."
"The abominable injustice of my parents was of a piece with the whole system I complain of. You will observe that we were punished, not for disobedience, but for riding in a milk-cart, and not so much for being in it as for being seen in it."
"Exactly, otherwise the reminiscence would be slightly irrelevant."
"Not at all. It illustrates my thorough-going consistency. I loved you then, in spite of your detestable conduct in the matter of that cake, and I have loved you ever since in spite of your other faults."
"Thank you."
"I suppose you would prefer some hypocrite who told you that you had none?"
"On the contrary, I enjoy being told of my faults."
This was true. If it came to the point, Audrey would boldly offer her own character for dissection rather than suffer conversation to be diverted to a less interesting topic. Hardy had rather neglected these opportunities for psychological study, and herein lay the secret of his failure. He continued, adopting a more practical line of argument suggested by the episode of the sixpence—
"It's not as if you were a millionaire and I a grovelling pauper. I shall have Lavernac and two thousand a-year when my uncle, Sir Theophilus Parker, dies." Hardy rolled out the title with a certain proprietary unction; his cousin had no share in this enviable relationship. "I give the old bird five years at the very worst, and it's a moral impossibility that he should leave me in the lurch. But I don't count on that. My own property has kept me idle all my life; but I've sold it at last, and, as I said just now, I am going out to Canada to farm."
Audrey blushed, and punished her blush with a frown. If she had been playing the amusing game that Hardy suggested, it was one thing to give the mouse a little run in order to renew the pleasures of the chase, another thing to let him escape altogether from her paws. Hardy saw his advantage and followed it up.
"When I told you that I had done with civilisation, I suppose you thought it was a joke?"
"I did. Only I couldn't see the point."
"The point is this, that I'm going down to Liverpool to-morrow, and shall sail for Canada this day week. I can't stand it any longer. I can't breathe here. Town or country, it's all the same—the air chokes me, it's teeming with moral bacilli. You never thought I was so particular? No more did I——". He paused, knitting his brows. "I admit frankly that I'm a bad hat. This place has been my ruin, as it has of many a better man than me. Perhaps, if it hadn't been for you, Audrey—but I won't press that point; it wouldn't be generous, however just. Anyhow, whatever my past has been, my future lies in your hands. I would say your love was life or death to me, but that wouldn't be anywhere near the truth. It's not so much a question of death as a question of damnation."
Hardy was desperately in earnest, but not so much so as to be careless of rhetorical effect. In his desire to represent himself as a fallen angel he had done himself no little injustice, as well as grossly exaggerated the power of Audrey's regenerative influence.
She was evidently moved. She took no pains to restrain the trembling of her lips, more than was necessary to preserve their delicate outline. Hardy had paid homage to her as the superior being.
It marked an epoch in the history of his passion.
He rose to his feet and looked down on her as from a height. A fallen angel is not without his epic sublimity.
The lady hesitated. She pulled out the tremolo stop, and then spoke.
"You say that if it hadn't been for me—I don't quite understand you, but you are mistaken if you think I never cared for you—never cared, I mean to say, for your good." She also rose, with an air of having made a statement as final as it was clear and convincing. He laid his hand on her shoulder and looked steadily in her face. There was no evasion in her eyes, but her eyelids quivered.
"It's all right, Audrey; you never have denied that you love me, and you can't for the life of you deny it now."
She did not attempt to; for the entrance of the footman with coffee made denial indecent at the moment, if not impossible. That deus ex machina from below the stage retired, unconscious of the imminent catastrophe he had averted. But he had brought into the little drama a certain prosaic element. Coffee and romantic passion do not go hand in hand.
Then it seemed to Audrey that the welcome interval of commonplace lapsed into a dream, in which Hardy's voice went sounding on in interminable monologue.
"I shall hear the wind, Audrey, rushing over prairies infinite as the sea; I shall see the great wall of the Rockies rising sky-high. And England will seem like a little piece of patchwork, with a pattern of mole-hills for mountains, and brooks for rivers. And when I've set our Canadian farm going, I shall hunt big game. And when I've exterminated the last bison off the face of the boundless prairie, I shall devote myself to literature."
"Literature?" she echoed faintly. It was all so grotesquely strange that even this announcement brought only a dreamlike surprise.
"Yes, literature. Do you think literature is only produced by the miserable noodles who sit in their studies at home, till their muscles wither and their hearts get flabby? My book will be a man's book, with a man's blood and a man's brains in it. It will be a book that will make posterity sit up. And when you have enjoyed the fame of it a little, we'll go out again together. In Canada we shall find a new heaven and a new earth."
She sat silent and passive. The situation had a charm which she was powerless to break. It seemed as if the mere brute force through which Hardy had dominated her intellect hitherto, had become refined by some extraordinary process, and was exerting a moral influence over her. In order to assert herself against the intolerable fascination she rose hastily and crossed the room to where her piano stood open in the corner.
She played loud and long,—wild Polish music, alive with the beating pulses of love and frenzy and despair. It would have roused another man to sublime enthusiasm or delirious rapture.
It sent Hardy to sleep.
Stretched on the hearthrug, with slackened jaw, and great chest heaving with regular rise and fall, he slept like a tired dog. She played on, and as she played he dreamed that he stood with her in the midst of the burning prairie, they two on a little ring of charred black earth, an island in a roaring sea of fire. The ring grew smaller and smaller, till they could only find standing-room by clinging close together. As he turned to her she thrust him from her into the sea of fire, crying, "It's perfectly fair, Vincent, for you dragged me here against my will!"
He woke with a snort as the music suddenly ceased. It was midnight. He had to start from home early next morning, and if he delayed longer he would lose the last train out.
He parted from Audrey as only the traveller outward bound parts from his betrothed. In fact, as she remarked afterwards, "For the fuss he made about it he might have been going to the North Pole with his life in his hands. So like Vincent!" As for Hardy, he felt already the wind of the new heaven and the sweetness of the new earth.
Audrey was staring abstractedly into the looking-glass, when she heard the front-door shut with a violent bang, and the sound of his quick footsteps on the pavement below. She came to herself with a cold shiver.
What had she done? Surely she had not gone and engaged herself to Vincent? bound herself in the first year of her liberty to a man she had known all her life, and her own cousin too?
It was impossible; for, you see, it would have argued great weakness of mind and a total want of originality.
CHAPTER III
Whether Audrey did or did not understand herself, she was a mystery to all about her, and to none more than her father's cousin and her own chaperon, Miss Craven. This unfortunate lady, under stress of circumstances, had accepted the charge of Audrey after her parents' death, and had never ceased to watch her movements with bewildered interest and surprise. The most familiar phenomena are often the least understood, and Miss Craven's intelligence was daily baffled by the problem of Audrey. Daily she renewed her researches, with enthusiasm which would have done credit to a natural philosopher, but hitherto she had found no hypothesis to cover all the facts. The girl was either a rule for herself, or the exception that proved other people's rules; and Miss Craven was obliged to rest satisfied in the vague conclusion that she had a great deal of "character." Strange to say, that is how Audrey struck most of her acquaintance, though as yet no one had been known to venture on further definition. Miss Craven was repaid for her affectionate solicitude by an indifference none the less galling because evidently unstudied. Audrey rather liked her chaperon than otherwise. The "poor old thing," as she called her, never got in her way, never questioned her will, and made no claims whatsoever on her valuable time; besides relieving her of all those little duties that make us wonder whether life be worth living.
Under the present dispensation chaperons were a necessary evil; and Audrey was not one to fly heedlessly in the face of her Providence, Society.
All the same, Miss Craven had her drawbacks. If you, being young and vivacious, take a highly nervous old lady and keep her in a state of perpetual repression, shutting her out from all your little confidences, you will find that the curiosity so natural to her age will be sure to burst out, after such bottling, in alarming effervescence. As soon as Hardy's unmistakable footsteps were heard on the stairs, she had left the drawing-room on a hint from Audrey. In her room above she had heard the alternate booming and buzzing of their voices prolonged far into the night, but could make out no intelligible sounds. To ears tingling with prophetic apprehension the provocation was intense.
The old lady passed a restless night, and came down to breakfast the next morning quivering with suppressed excitement. Audrey's face did not inspire confidence; and it was not until she had touched lightly on the state of the weather, and other topics of general interest, that Miss Craven darted irrelevantly to her point.
"My dear, is there anything between you and your—er—cousin Mr. Hardy?"
The awful question hung in the air without a context, while Audrey went on making tea. This she did with a graceful and deliberate precision, completing the delicate operation before answering.
"Yes, there is a great deal between me and my cousin Mr. Hardy, which neither of us can get over."
There was a freezing finality in the manner of the reply, in spite of the smile which accompanied it; and even Miss Craven could not fail to understand. She bridled a little, wrapping herself closer in her soft shawl as in an impenetrable husk of reserve, and began nervously buttering toast. The whole thing was very odd; but then the ways of Audrey were inscrutable.
Audrey herself felt an unspeakable relief after that question and her own inspired answer. Last night she had possibly been ambiguous; to-day, at any rate, her words had a trenchant force which severed one of the thousand little threads that bound her to Hardy. After all, when it came to the point, there was an immense amount of decision in her character. And as the days went on, and Hardy with them, leaving league after league of the Atlantic behind him, the load at her heart grew lighter; and when at last the letter came which told her that he had crossed the Rocky Mountains, she felt with a little tremor of delight that she was a free woman once more. Her world was all before her, vaguely alluring, as it had been a month ago.
The letters which Hardy sent from time to time had no power to destroy this agreeable illusion; for of course letters were bound to come, and she answered them all with cousinly affection, as she would have answered them in any case. At last one came which roused her from her indifference, for it had a postscript:—
"By the way, there's a Miss Katherine Haviland living near you, at 12 Devon Street, Pimlico. She's a sort of little half-sister of mine, so I'd be glad if you'd go and look her up some day and be kind to her. There's a brother knocking about somewhere, but he doesn't count, he's only a baby. Ripping sport—shot a moose and two wapiti this morning."
Audrey read the letter with languid attention. She was not in the least interested to hear that he had taken up land and put it into the hands of an agent to farm. She was tired of the long highly-coloured descriptions of Canadian scenery and the tales of Vincent's adventures, and she had got into the way of skipping his vain repetitions of all the absurd things he had said to her on the night of his departure; but the postscript stirred strange feelings in her breast. His mother was married a second time, but to Audrey's certain knowledge Vincent had no little half-sisters; it followed that for some reason he had used a figure of speech. She was not in the least in love with him, but at the same time she felt all the dignity of her position as empress of his heart, and could bear no little half-sisters near the throne. She would certainly look Miss Haviland up. She would go and be kind to her that afternoon; and she put on her best clothes for the occasion.
A few minutes' walk brought her to No. 12 Devon Street, one of a row of gloomy little houses—"full of dreadful city clerks and dressmakers," she said to herself in a flight of imagination.
She lifted the knocker gingerly in her white gloved hand, and felt by no means reassured when she was shown in, and followed the servant up the narrow staircases to the attics. As she neared the top she heard a voice above her sounding in passionate remonstrance.
"Three baths in the one blessed dy, a-splashin' and a-sloogin' somethin' orful—'e didn't ought for to do it, m'm, not if it was ever so!"
Here the voice was cut short by a mingled roar and ripple of laughter, and Miss Audrey Craven paused before announcing herself. Through the half-open doorway she saw a girl standing before an easel. She had laid down her palette and brushes, and with bold sure strokes of the pencil was sketching against time, leaning a little backwards, with her head in a critically observant pose. The voice reasserted itself in crushing peroration—
"I tell you wot it is, Mr. 'Aviland—you're no gentleman."
And Audrey's entrance coincided with the retreat of a stout woman, moving slowly with an unnatural calm.
The girl doubled back her sketch-book and came forward, apologising for the confusion. Face to face with the object of her curiosity, Audrey's first feeling was one of surprised and reluctant admiration. Miss Haviland was dark, and pale, and thin; she was also a little too tall, and Audrey did not know whether she quite liked the airy masses of black hair that curled high up from her forehead and low down on it, in crisp tendrils like fine wire. Yet, but for her nose, which was a shade too long, a thought too retroussé, Miss Haviland would have been beautiful after the Greek type. (Audrey's own type, as she had once described it in a moment of introspection, was the "Roman piquante," therefore she made that admission the more readily.) There was a touch of classic grace, too, in the girl's figure and her dress. She had rolled up the sleeves of her long blue overall, and bound it below her breasts and waist with a girdle of tape—not for the sake of effect, as Audrey supposed, but to give her greater freedom as she worked and moved about the studio. At this point Audrey found out that all Miss Haviland's beauty lay in the shape of her head and neck. With "that nose" she might be "interesting," but could never be beautiful; in fact, her mouth was too firm and her chin stuck out too much even for moderate prettiness.
Audrey did not arrive at these conclusions in the gradual manner here set forth. The total impression was photographed on her sensitive feminine brain by the instantaneous process; and with the same comprehensive rapidity she began to take in the details of her surroundings. The attic was long, and had one window to the west, and another to the north under the roof, looking over the leads. At the far end were a plain square table and a corner cupboard. That was the dining-room and the pantry. Before the fireplace were a small Persian rug bounded by a revolving book-case, a bamboo couch, a palm fern, a tea-table. That was the library and drawing-room. All the remaining space was the studio; and amongst easels, stacks of canvases, draperies, and general litter, a few life-size casts from the antique gleamed from their corners.
From these rapid observations Audrey concluded that Miss Haviland was poor.
"You were busy when I came in?" she asked sweetly.
"No; I was only taking a hurried sketch from the life. It's not often that our landlady exhibits herself in that sublime mood; so I seized the opportunity."
"And I interrupted you."
"No; you interrupted Mrs. Rogers, for which we were much obliged—she might have sat for us longer than we liked. I am very pleased to see you."
Certainly Audrey was a pleasant sight. There was no critical afterthought in the admiring look which Miss Haviland turned on her visitor, and Audrey felt to her finger-tips this large-hearted feminine homage. To compel another woman to admire you is always a triumph; besides, Miss Haviland was an artist, and her admiration was worth something—it was like having the opinion of an expert. Audrey pondered for a moment, with her head at a becoming angle, for she had not yet accounted for herself.
"My cousin Vincent Hardy asked me to call on you. I believe he is a very old friend of yours?"
"Yes; we have known each other since we were children."
"What do you think of his going out to Canada to farm?"
"I didn't know he had gone."
(Then Vincent had not thought it worth while to say good-bye to his "little half-sister." So far, so good.)
"Oh, didn't you? He went six weeks ago."
"I never heard. It's an unlikely thing for him to do, but that's the sort of thing he always did do."
"He hated going, poor fellow. He came to say good-bye to me the night before he went, and he was in a dreadful state. I've heard from him every week since he sailed, and he's promised to send me some bearskins. Isn't it nice of him?" ("She won't like that!")
Miss Haviland assented gravely, but her eyes smiled.
"I suppose you've seen a good deal of Vincent? He wrote to me about you from the Rocky Mountains."
"Did he? We used to be a good deal together when we were little. Since then we have been the best of friends, which means that we ignore each other's existence with the most perfect understanding in the world. I always liked Vincent."
This was reassuring. Miss Haviland's manner was candour itself; and depend upon it, if there had been any self-consciousness about her, Audrey would have found it out at once. She dropped the subject, and looked about her for another. The suggestions of the place were obvious.
"I see you are a great artist. My cousin didn't prepare me for that."
Miss Haviland laughed.
"Vincent is probably unaware of the interesting fact, like the rest of the world."
"That picture is very beautiful; may I look at it?" said Audrey, going up to the easel.
"Certainly. It's hardly finished yet, and I don't think it will be particularly beautiful when it is. I can't choose my subjects."
"It looks—interesting," murmured Audrey, fatuously. (What was the subject, after all?) "Have you done many others?"
"Yes, a good many."
"May I——?" she hesitated, wondering whether her request might not be a social solecism, like asking a professional to play.
"If you care about pictures, I will show you some of my brother's some day. His are better than mine—more original, at least."
"Your brother? Oh, of course. Vincent told me you had a brother, a baby brother. Surely——"
Miss Haviland laughed again.
"How like Vincent! He is unconscious of the flight of time. I suppose he told you I was about ten years old. But you must really see the baby; he will be delighted with your description of him." She called through the skylight, and Audrey remembered the gentleman who was "no gentleman," and who must have been responsible for half the laughter she had overheard.
"You see," Miss Haviland explained, "we've only one room for everything; so Ted always climbs on to the leads when we hear people coming—he's bound to meet them on the stairs, if he makes a rush for the bedrooms. If any bores come, I let him stay up there; and if it's any one likely to be interesting, I call him down."
"He must have great confidence in your judgment."
Audrey looked up in time to see the baby lowering himself through the skylight. With his spine curved well back, his legs hanging within the room, and his head and the upper part of his body laid flat on the leads outside it, he balanced himself for a second of time. It was a most undignified position; but he triumphed over it, as, with one supple undulation, he shot himself on to the floor, saving his forehead from the window by a hair's-breath.
After this fashion Ted Haviland was revealed to Audrey. She was, if anything, more surprised by his personal appearance than by the unusual manner of his entrance. The baby could not have been more than nineteen or twenty, and there could be no dispute as to his beauty. Nature had cast his features in the same mould as his sister's, and produced a very striking effect by giving him the same dark eyebrows and lashes, with blue eyes and a mass of light brown hair. Detractors complained that the type was too feminine for their taste; but when challenged to show a single weak line in his face, they evaded the point and laid stress on the delicate pallor of his complexion. Not that it mattered, for Ted soon made you think as little of his good looks as he did himself. But Audrey never forgot him as she first saw him, glowing with exercise and the midday bath which had roused his landlady's indignation.
"I'm extremely sorry," he began airily, "for disappearing in that rude way."
"Perhaps I ought to apologise," said Audrey, "for I frightened you away."
"Not at all, though I was desperately frightened too. I was flying before Mrs. Rogers when you came in. You'll probably think I ought to have braved it out, just for the look of the thing—especially after her reflections on my social position—but unfortunately my sister has imbued that terrible woman with the belief that art can't possibly flourish anywhere outside this attic of hers. Ever since then she's kept us in the most humiliating subjection. I don't want you to think badly of Mrs. Rogers: there's no malice about her; she wouldn't raise your rent suddenly, or leave pails of water on the stairs, or anything of that kind, and she's capable of really deep feeling when it's a question of dinner."
"Ted—if you can forget Mrs. Rogers for a minute—I told Miss Craven that you would show her some of your sketches and things some day."
"All right; we'll have the exhibition to-day, if Miss Craven cares to stop. Plenty of time before the light goes."
Audrey hesitated: but Miss Haviland had moved aside her own easel to make room for her brother's; she seconded his invitation, and Miss Craven stopped.
Three months ago, in an Oxford drawing-room, she had found herself absorbing metaphysics, as it were through the pores of her skin, without any previous discipline in that exacting science; now, in a London studio, she became aware of a similarly miraculous influx of power. Yesterday she would have told you that she knew nothing about art, and cared less. To-day it seemed that she had lived in its atmosphere from her cradle, and learned its language at her nurse's knee. But, though familiar with art, she was not prepared for the behaviour of the artist. Ted treated his works as if he were the last person concerned with them. He would pass scathing judgment on those which pleased Audrey best; or he would stand, like a self-complacent deity, aloof from his own creations, beholding them to be very good, and not hesitating to say so.
"Well," said Audrey at last, "you've shown me a great many lovely things, but which is your masterpiece?"
"They were all masterpieces when I first finished them."
"Yes; but seriously, which do you consider your best? I want to know."
Ted hesitated, and then turned to a stack of larger canvases.
"I wonder," she murmured, "if I shall think it your best."
"Probably not."
"Why not?"
Ted did not answer: he hardly liked to say, "Because hitherto you have persistently admired my worst."
"This," he said, laughing, as he lifted a large canvas on to the easel, "is the only masterpiece that has withstood the test of time."
"He means," struck in his sister, "that he finished it a week ago, and that in another week he'll want to stick a knife into it."
With all its faults the picture had a poetic audacity that defied the criticism it provoked. If you looked long enough, you saw that a youth and a maiden were lying in a trance that was half sleep, half death; while their souls, diaphanous forms with indefinite legs, hovered above them in mid-air, each leaning towards the other's body. The souls described two curves that crossed like the intersecting of rainbows; and where they met, their wings mingled in a confused iridescence. Eros, in a flame-coloured tunic, looked on with an air of studied indifference that might or might not have been intended by the painter.
Audrey looked helplessly at the picture. She could not understand it, and with things that she could not understand she always felt a vague impotent displeasure.
"What—what is the subject?" she gasped at length.
"A metempsychosis."
She knitted her brows and said nothing.
"Transmigration of souls—why didn't I say so at first?" returned Ted, in cheerful response to the frown.
"So I see; but what's Apollo doing there with his bow and arrows, and why is he all in red?"
"It's not meant for Apollo—it's an Eros."
"I beg your pardon?"
"An Eros—Love, a very inferior order of deity."
"Why is he in red?"
"I don't know, I'm sure. His taste in dress always was a little loud."
"But why is he there at all?"
"Love! Can't you see? I can't explain if it's not obvious. He—er—he must be there."
Audrey looked up, but the baby was not looking at her; he was absorbed in his masterpiece. She flushed, and pressed one little pointed boot firmly to the ground.
"Yes, yes, I see that; but I can't make out the rest of it."
Ted shook his head helplessly, while his sister laughed at his discomfiture.
"Please don't mind my sister," said he, nervously flourishing his maul-stick. "The picture represents two people exchanging souls"—Audrey raised her eyebrows: "those are the souls, and these are the people—do be quiet, Katherine! It's a perfectly conceivable transaction, though I own it might be a very bad bargain for some. I wouldn't like to swop souls with my sister, for instance—she hasn't any imagination."
Audrey gave a little shudder.
"What a curious idea! It makes me feel quite creepy. But I'm sure I never could lose my sense, of personal identity. My individuality is too strong—or something. And then, what has Love got to do with it? What does it all mean?"
"Obviously, that Love is Master of the Ceremonies at every well-regulated metempsychosis," said Katherine.
"I see." Audrey lay back in her chair and gazed dreamily at the painting, while the painter gazed at her. Was he trying to find out the secret of that individuality?
Audrey turned to Katherine with her radiant smile.
"Do you paint like this, too?"
"No, I'm a portrait-painter."
"Ah! that means that you'd rather paint what you see?"
"It means that I have to paint a great deal that I'd rather not see."
"But your brother is an idealist—aren't you, Mr. Haviland?"
"Probably. I've always noticed that when people call you an idealist, it's a polite way of saying you're a failure. I may be an idealist; I don't know, and I'm afraid I don't much care."
"I'm sure you do care; and you must have your ideals."
"Oh, as for that, I've kept as many as seven of them at a time. But I never could tame them, and when it comes to taking their portraits the things don't know how to sit properly. Look at that woman's soul, for instance"—and Ted pointed to his masterpiece with disgust.
"Why, what's wrong with it? It's beautiful."
"Yes; I got on all right with the upper half, but, as you see, I've been a little unfortunate with the feet and legs."
"Of course!" interrupted Katherine, "because you got tired of the whole thing. That's what a man's idealism comes to!"
Audrey looked up with a quick sidelong glance.
"And what does a woman's idealism come to?"
"Generally to this—that she's tried to paint her own portrait large, with a big brush, and made a mess of the canvas."
There was a sad inflection in the girl's voice, and she looked away as she spoke. The look and the tone were details that lay beyond the range of Audrey's observation, and she felt hurt, though she hardly knew why. She rose, carefully adjusting her veil and the lace about her throat.
"I adore idealists—I can't help it; I'm made that way, you see."
She shrugged her shoulders, in delicate deprecation of the decrees of Fate.
Katherine did not see, but she went down with Miss Craven to the door. Ted had proposed tea on the leads, and Audrey had agreed that it would have been charming—idyllic—if she could have stayed. But she had looked at the skylight, and then at her own closely fitting gown, and Propriety, her guardian angel, had suggested that she had better not.
"Ted," said Katherine an hour later, "I've got an idea. What a magnificent model Miss Craven would make!"
Ted made no answer; but he flung his sketch-book to the other end of the room, where it took Apollo neatly in the eye.
"I've failed miserably in my Mrs. Rogers," said he, and went off for solitary contemplation on the leads.
Katherine picked up the book and looked at it.
He had failed in his Mrs. Rogers; but in a corner of a fresh page he had made a little sketch of a face and figure which were not those of Mrs. Rogers. And that was a failure too.
CHAPTER IV
There was a certain truth in Hardy's description of Ted Haviland. Ted had all a baby's fascination, a baby's irresponsibility, and a baby's rigid tenacity of purpose. There perhaps the likeness ended. At any rate, Ted had contrived to plan a career for himself at the age of seven, had said nothing about it for ten years, and then quietly carried it through in spite of circumstances and the influential members of his family. These powers had been against him from the first. His mother had died in giving him birth; and as his father chose to hold him directly responsible for the tragedy, his early years were passed somewhat under a cloud. Katherine was his only comfort and stay. The girl had five years the start of him, which gave her an enormous advantage in dealing with the uncertain details of life. Her method was simplicity itself. It was summed up in the golden rule: Take your own way first, and then let other people take theirs. It was in this spirit that, mounted on a table, she painted the great battle-piece that covered the north wall of the nursery; and with equal heroism she met the unrighteous Nemesis that waits upon mortal success, and skipped off to bed at three o'clock in the afternoon as if to a tea-party. Ted worshipped his sister, because of her courage and resource, because of her fuzzy black hair cut short like a boy's, for the strength of her long limbs, and for a hundred other reasons. And Katherine loved Ted with a passion all the more intense because he was the only creature she knew that would let itself be loved comfortably; for "Papa" was an abstraction, and "Nurse" erred on the opposite extreme, being a terribly concrete reality, with a great many acute angles about her, which was a drawback to demonstrations of affection.
One day Katherine mixed some colours for Ted and taught him how to manage a pencil and paint-brush. That was just before she went to school, and then Ted said to himself, "I too will paint battle-pieces"; and he painted them in season and out of season, and was obliged to hide them away in drawers and cupboards and places, for there was no one to care for them now that Kathy was gone. As for that headstrong young person, her method was so far successful that when she was eighteen it began to be rumoured in the family that Katherine would do great things, but that Ted was an idle young beggar. The boy had shown no talent for anything in particular, and nobody had thought of his future: not Katherine—she was too busy with her own—and certainly not his father, who at the best of times lived piously in the past with the memory of his dead wife, and was day by day loosening his hold upon the present. For Ted "Papa" became more and more an abstraction, until a higher Power withdrew him altogether from earthly affairs.
Mr. Haviland had lived in a melancholy gentility on a pension which died with him, and at his death the children were left with nothing but the pittance they inherited from their mother. When the family met in solemn conclave to decide the fate of Katherine and Ted, it learned that Katherine, true to her old principles, had taken the decision into her own hands. She meant to live for art and by art, and Uncle James was much mistaken if he thought that an expensive training was to be flung away upon a "niggling amateur." At any rate, she had taken a studio in Pimlico and furnished it, and as she had come of age yesterday, there was really no more to be said. Ted, of course, would live with her, and choose his own profession. But Ted's profession was not so easily chosen. The boy had brought a perfectly open mind to the subject, and discussed the reasons for and against the Church, the Bar, the Bank, and a trade, with admirable clearness and impartiality; but when invited to make a selection from among the four, he betrayed no enthusiasm. Finally he was asked if he had any objection to the medical profession, and replied that he had none, having, indeed, never thought about it. On the whole, he considered that the idea was not a bad one, and he would try it. He tried it for a year and a half, but not altogether with success. He had been advised to take up surgery, for a great man had noticed his long sensitive fingers, and told him that he had the hands of a born surgeon. He managed to get through the hours in the dissecting-room, standing on his head from time to time as a precaution against faintness; but his heroism gave way before the horrors of the theatre. Soon, with indignation naturally mingled with pleasure at this fulfilment of its own predictions, the family heard that Ted had flung up the medical profession. That the boy had the hands of a born surgeon was considered to be an aggravation of his offence; it constituted it flying in the face of Providence. When Ted drew attention to the fact that he had passed first in Comparative Anatomy, his uncle James told him that stupidity was excusable, and that his abilities only proved him a lazy good-for-nothing fellow. He then offered him a berth in his office, with board and lodging in his own house; and as Ted was in low water, there was nothing for it but to accept. Mr. James Pigott remained master of the situation, without a suspicion of its pathetic irony. Ted, whose intellect was incapable of adding two and two together, had to sit on a high stool and work endless sums in arithmetic. Ted, whose soul was married sub rosa to ideal beauty, had to live in a house where every object had the same unwinking self-complacent ugliness, and where the cook was the only artist whose genius was appreciated. Ted was a little bit of a Stoic, and he could have borne the long impressive dinners and the unstudied malice of the furniture, if only his uncle would have let him alone. But Mr. Pigott was nothing if not conscientious; and now that he had him under his thumb, he made superhuman efforts to understand his nephew's character and to win his confidence. The poor gentleman might just as well have tried to understand the character of an asymptote, or to win the confidence of a Will-o'-the-wisp; and nothing but misery can come of it when a middle-aged city merchant, born without even a rudimentary sense of humour, suddenly determines to cultivate that gift for the benefit of a boy who can detect humour in the wording of an invoice.
Well, he never knew how it happened—his mind might have been running on an illustrated edition of the cash accounts of Messrs. Pigott & Co.—but at last Ted made an arithmetical blunder so unprecedented, so astounding, that a commercial career was closed to him for ever. "Stupidity is excusable," said Uncle James. "If you had been stupid, I would have forgiven you; but you have ability enough, sir, and it follows that you are careless—criminally careless—and I wash my hands of you." And, like Pilate, he suited the action to the word.
So it happened that as Katherine was putting the last touches to her great picture "The Witch of Atlas," and to her sketch of an elaborate future, Fate stepped in and altered all her arrangements. She called it Fate, for she never could bring herself to say it was Ted. For months she had been living in a dream, in which she was no longer a poor artist toiling in a London garret: she was on the highest peak of Atlas, in the land where, as you know, dreams last forever, where the light comes down unfiltered through the transcendental air, and where, owing to the unmelting ice and snow, the shadows are always colours. To live for art and by art—she had not yet realised the incompatibility of these two aims; for Katherine was as uncompromising in this as in everything else, and refused to work in a liberal and enlightened spirit. She believed that beauty is the only right or possible or conceivable aim of the artist, and she was ready to sacrifice a great deal for this belief. For this she slept and worked in one room, which she left bare of all but necessary furniture—under which head, in defiance of all laws of political economy, she included a small Pantheon of plaster deities: for this she stinted herself in everything except air and exercise, which were cheap; and for this she refused to join housekeeping with her cousin Nettie, thereby giving lasting offence to an influential branch of the family. At the end of three years she had begun to hope, and to feel the quickening of new powers; and as her nature expanded, her art took on a subtler quality, a subdued and delicate sensuousness, which, it must be owned, had very little in common with the flesh and blood of ordinary humanity.
She was painting steadily, in a pallid fervour of concentrated excitement, the ease of her pliant hands contrasting with her firm lips and knitted brows, when Ted burst into the studio, with a thin Gladstone bag in one hand and a fat portfolio in the other. His face told her of a crisis in his history; it was humorous, pathetic, deprecating, and determined, all at once,—not the face of a boy dropping in casually at tea-time. When asked if anything had gone wrong at the office, he replied, "Probably—by this time. They lost their brightest ornament this morning. You see they said—among other things—that it wasn't the least use my stopping, as I hadn't any head for figures,—which was odd, considering that it's just with figures I've been most successful." But Katherine was to judge for herself. He sat down leisurely and began untying his portfolio. Then he caught sight of "The Witch of Atlas." "That's going to be a stunning picture, Kathy," said he. He stood before the canvas for a moment, and then turned abruptly away. When he looked at Katherine again, his face was set and a little flushed. He seemed to be making a calculation—a thing he had always some difficulty in doing. "You've been at it practically all your life; but it took you—one—two—three—five years' real hard work, didn't it, before you could paint like that?"
"Yes, Ted, five years' hard labour, with costs."
"It'll take me four. Thank heaven, I've learnt anatomy!"
Katherine said nothing: she had opened the portfolio and spread out the drawings, and was hanging over them in amazement. How, when, and where the boy had done the things, she could not imagine. There were finished studies in anatomy, of heads and limbs in every conceivable attitude. There were shilling drawing-books crammed with illustrations of most possible subjects and some impossible ones; loose sketches done on the backs of envelopes, the fly-leaves of books, and (fearful revelation of artistic depravity!) the ruled pages of ledgers. And in every one of them there was power and wild exuberant vitality. It was genius, rampant and undisciplined, but unmistakable; and she told him so. Her first feeling sent the blood to her cheeks for pure joy; her second drove it back to her heart again. Katherine was one of those people who can see a thing instantly, in all its possible bearings; and at the present moment she saw clearly, not only that Ted was a genius, but that his genius had everything to learn, and that it would take the whole of his tiny income to teach it, while the necessities of his board and lodging in the meanwhile would more than double her own expenses. She saw herself doomed to the production of an unbroken succession of pot-boilers, and for the next few years at least Ted's career was only possible at the sacrifice of her own. "Yes," she said at last, sitting down and tying the strings of the portfolio tenderly, "you'll have to work hard for four or five years or so; and then you'll have to wait. Art is long, you know, and high art's the longest of all." And when she told him that it would be a great help to her if they clubbed together, Ted actually believed her, so unaware was he of the complexities of life.
Katherine understood why Ted had gone to Guy's Hospital; but when she asked him—idiot!—why he had wasted a year at his uncle Pigott's office, he said that he wanted to prove to his uncle Pigott's limited capacity that he was utterly incapable of managing anybody's business but his own. Katherine asked no more questions, for she was trying to think. Then when she had done thinking, she took the Witch and turned her with her face to the wall. And when she looked at Ted again it was with a choking sensation, and for the first time for three years she was aware that she had a heart beating under the blue overall. She had come down from Atlas faster than she had gone up. After all, the climate there is frightfully cold, and there are passes on that lonely mountain which overhang the bottomless pit, where some have perished very miserably. Katherine had escaped the abyss, and left behind her the dreams and the golden mists and the starry peaks of ice. It was dark in the studio, and a voice was heard inquiring whether the young gentleman was going to stay for supper, "Because, if a bysin of hoatmeal porridge yn't enuff for one——"
Mrs. Rogers was great in the argument a fortiori.
CHAPTER V
Audrey had never been able to enjoy the friendship of her own sex for more than ten minutes at a time. Her own society bored her inexpressibly, and that of the women she had known hitherto was uninteresting because it was like her own. But Katherine was unlike all other women, and she had taken Audrey's fancy. Audrey was always devising pretty little excuses for calling, always bringing in hothouse flowers, or the last hothouse novel, which Katherine positively must read; until, by dint of a naïve persistency, she won the right to come and go as she pleased. As for Katherine, she considered that a beautiful woman is exempt from criticism; and so long as she could watch Audrey moving about, arranging flowers with dainty fastidious touches, or lying back on the couch in some reckless but perfect pose, she reserved her judgment. She rejoiced in her presence for its beauty's sake. She loved the curves of her limbs, the play of her dimples, the shifting lights in her hair. But she had to pay for the pleasure these things afforded her, and "man's time" became a frequent item in the account. Katherine had set her heart on Ted's studying in Paris for six months, and was trying hard to make enough money to send him there. With this absorbing object in view, she herself worked equally well whether Audrey were in the studio or out of it; but it seemed that Ted's powers were either paralysed or diverted into another channel from the moment she came in. The baby was trying to solve a problem which had puzzled wiser heads than his. But he had no clue to the labyrinth of Audrey's soul; he was not even certain whether she was an intelligent being, though to doubt it was blasphemy against the divine spirit of beauty.
His researches took him very often to Chelsea Gardens, and most of his spare time not spent there was employed in running errands to and fro. Owing to these distractions his nerves became quite unhinged, and for the first time in his life he began to show signs of a temper. He had been full of the Paris scheme at first, but he had not spoken of it now for at least a month.
He had just sat down for the twentieth time to a study of Katherine's head as "Sappho," and had thrown down his palette in disgust, exclaiming—
"What's the use of keeping your mouth still, if your confounded eyes giggle?" when a note arrived from Miss Craven.
You can't step out of a violent passion all in a minute, and perhaps that was the reason why Ted's hands trembled a little as he tore open the envelope and read—
"Dear Mr. Haviland,—Do come over at once. I'm in a dreadful fix, and want your advice and help badly. I would ask your sister, only I know she is always busy.—Sincerely yours,
"Audrey Craven."
Audrey wrote on rough-edged paper, in the bold round hand they teach in schools. She had modelled hers on another girl's, and she signed her name with an enormous A and a flourish. People said there was a great deal of character in her hand-writing.
Ted crammed the note hastily into his pocket, and did his best to hide the radiance of his smile.
"It's only Miss Craven. I'm just going over for half an hour,—I'll be back for tea."
And before Katherine had time to answer he was gone.
Ted's first thought as he entered Miss Craven's drawing-room was that she was in the midst of a removal. The place was turned topsy-turvy. Curtains had been taken down, ornaments removed from their shelves, pictures from their hangings; and the grand piano stood where it had never yet been allowed to stand, in a draught between the window and the door. Tripping over a Persian rug, he saw that the floor was littered with tapestries and rich stuffs of magnificent design. On his left was a miscellaneous collection of brass and copper ware, on his right a heap of shields and weapons of barbarous warfare. On all the tables and cabinets there stood an array of Venetian glass, and statuettes in bronze, marble, and terra-cotta. He was looking about for Miss Craven, when that lady arose from a confused ocean of cushions and Oriental drapery—Aphrodite in an "Art" tea-gown. She greeted him with childlike effusion.
"At last! I'm so glad you've come—I was afraid you mightn't. Help me out of this somehow—I'm simply distracted."
And she pointed to the floor with a gesture of despair.
"Yes; but what do you want me to do?"
"Why, to offer suggestions, advice, anything—only speak."
Ted looked about him, and his eyes rested on the grand piano. "Is it a ball, a bazaar, or an auction? And are we awake or dreaming, alive or dead?"
"Can't you see, Mr. Haviland?"
"Yes, I see a great many things. But what does it all mean?"
Audrey sank on to an ottoman, and answered slowly and incisively, looking straight before her—
"It means that I'm sick of the hideousness of life, of the excruciating lower middle-class arrangement of this room. I don't know how I've stood it all these years. My soul must have been starved—stifled. I want to live in another atmosphere, to be surrounded by beautiful things. Don't laugh like that,—I know I'm not an artist; I couldn't paint a picture—how could I? I haven't been taught. But I know that Art is the only thing worth caring about. I want to cultivate my sense of beauty, and I don't want my room to look like anybody else's."
"It certainly doesn't at present."
"Please be serious. You're not helping me one bit. Look at that pile of things Liberty's have sent me! First of all, I want you to choose between them. Then I want you to suggest a colour-scheme, and to tell me the difference between Louis Quinze and Louis Quatorze (I can't remember), whether it'll do to mix Queen Anne with either. And whether would you have old oak, real old oak, or Chippendale, for the furniture? and must I do away with the cosy corner?"
Ted felt his head going round and round. Artistic delight in Audrey's beauty, pagan adoration of it, saintly belief in it, the first tremor of crude unconscious passion, mingled with intense amusement, reduced him to a state of utter bewilderment. But he had sufficient presence of mind to take her last question first and to answer authoritatively—
"Certainly. A cosy corner is weak-minded and conventional."
"Yes, it is. I'm not in the least conventional, and I don't think I'm weak-minded. And I want my room to express my character, to be a bit of myself. So give me some ideas. You don't mind my asking you, do you? You're the only artist I know."
"Am I really? And if you knew six or seven artists, what then?"
"Why, then—I should ask you all the same, of course."
Boy-like he laughed for pure pleasure, and boy-like he tried to dissemble his emotion, and did her bidding under a faint show of protest. He gave his vote in favour of Venetian glass and a small marble Diana, against majolica and a French dancing-girl in terra-cotta; he made an intelligent choice from amongst the various state-properties around him, and avoided committing himself on the subject of Louis Quatorze. On one point Audrey was firm. For what reasons nobody can say, but some Malay creeses had caught her fancy, and no argument could dissuade her from arranging them over the Neapolitan Psyche which she had kept at Ted's suggestion. The gruesome weapons, on a background of barbaric gold, hung above that pathetic torso, like a Fate responsible for its mutilation. Audrey was pleased with the effect; she revelled in strong contrasts and grotesque combinations, and if Liberty's had sent her a stuffed monkey, she would have perched him on Psyche's pedestal.
"I know a man," said Ted, when he had disposed the last bit of drapery according to an ingenious colour-scheme, in which Audrey's hair sounded a brilliant staccato note—"a first-rate artist—who was asked to decorate a lady's room. What do you think he did? He made her take all the pictures off the walls, and he covered them over with little halfpenny Japanese fans, and stuck little halves and quarters of fans in the corners and under the ceiling. Then he put a large Japanese umbrella in the fireplace, and went away smiling."
"Was the lady pleased?"
"Immensely. She asked all her friends to a Japanese tea-party in Mr. Robinson's room. The rest of the furniture was early Victorian."
This anecdote was not altogether to Audrey's taste. She walked to a shelf where Ted had put some bronzes, looked at them with a decided air of criticism, and arranged them differently. Having asserted her independence, she replied severely—
"Your friend's friend must have been an extremely silly woman."
"Not at all; she was a most intelligent, well-informed person, with—er—a deep sense of religion."
"And now, Mr. Haviland, you're making matters worse. You care nothing about her religion; you simply think her a fool, and you meant that I'm like her. Else why did you tell such a pointless story?"
"Forgive me; the association of ideas was irresistible. You are like her—in your utter simplicity and guileless devotion to an ideal."
He looked all round the room again, and sank back on the sofa cushions all limp with laughter.
"I—I never saw anything so inexpressibly sad as this afternoon's work; it's heartrending."
His eye fell on the terra-cotta Parisienne dancing inanely on her pedestal, and he moaned like one in pain. Audrey's mouth twitched and her cheeks flamed for a second. She turned her back on Ted, until his fit had spent itself, dying away among the cushions in low gurgles. Then there was silence.
Ted raised his head and looked up. She was still standing in the same place, but one hand was moving slowly towards her pocket.
He sprang to his feet and faced her. She walked to the window, convulsively grasping her pocket-handkerchief.
He followed her.
"Miss Craven—dear Miss Craven—on my soul—I swear—I never—— Can't you—won't you believe me?"
Still there was silence and an averted head.
"Speak, can't you!"
He leant against the window and began to giggle again. Audrey turned at the sound, and looked at him through eyes veiled with tears; her lips were trembling a little, and her fingers relaxed their convulsive grasp. He darted forward, seized her hand, and kissed it an indefinite number of times, exclaiming incoherently—
"Brute, hound, cur that I am! Forgive me—only say you'll forgive me! I know I'm not fit to live! And yet, how could I tell? Good heavens! what funny things women are?" Here he took possession of the little lace pocket-handkerchief, and wiped her eyes very gently. Then he kissed her once on the mouth, reverently but deliberately.
To do Audrey justice, she had meant to sustain her part with maidenly reserve, but she was totally unprepared for this acceleration of the march of events. She said nothing, but went back submissively to her sofa, hand in hand with Ted. There they sat for a minute looking rather stupidly into each other's faces.
The lady was the first to recover her self-possession. She raised her hand with a benedictory air and let it rest lightly, ever so lightly, on Ted's hair.
"My dear boy," she murmured, "I forgave you all the time."
Now there is nothing that will dwarf the proportions of the grand passion and bring you to your sober senses sooner than being patted on the head and called "My dear boy" by the lady of your love. Ted ducked from under the delicate caress, and rose to his feet with dignity. His emotion was spent, and he was chiefly conscious of the absurdity of the situation. Every object in that ridiculous room accentuated the distasteful humour of the thing. Psyche looked downcast virgin disapproval from her pedestal under the Malay creeses, and the frivolous little Parisienne flung her skirts abroad in the very abandonment of derision.
If only he hadn't made a fool of himself, if only he hadn't told that drivelling story about the Japanese umbrella, if only he hadn't laughed in that frantic manner, and if only—— But no, he could not look back on the last five minutes. The past was a grey blank, but the flaming episode of the kiss had burnt a big black hole in his present consciousness. He felt that by that rash, unpardonable act he had desecrated the holy thing; and with it all, had forestalled, delayed, perhaps for ever prevented, the sanction of some diviner opportunity. If he had only waited another year, she could not have called him her dear boy.
"I'm fully aware," he said, ruefully, "that I've behaved like a heaven-afflicted idiot, and I'd better go."
"No, you shall not go. You shall stay. I wish it. Sit down—here."
She patted the sofa beside her, and he obeyed mechanically.
"Poor, poor Ted! I do forgive you. We will never misunderstand each other again—never. And now I want to talk to you. What distressed me so much just now was not anything that you said or thought about me, but the shocking way you treat yourself and what is best in you. Can't you understand it? You know how I believe in you and hope for you, and it was your affectation of indifference to things which are a religion to me—as they are to you—that cut me to the heart."
She had worked herself up till she believed firmly in this little fiction. Yes, those tears were tears of pure altruism—tears not of wounded vanity and self-love, but of compassion for an erring genius.
She drew back her head proudly and looked him full in the face. Then she continued, in a subdued voice, with a certain incisive tremor in it, the voice that is usually expressive of the deeper emotions—
"You know, and I know, that there is nothing worth caring about except art. Then why pretend to despise it as you do? And Katherine's every bit as bad as you are,—she encourages you. I know—what perhaps she doesn't—that you have great enthusiasms, great ideals; but you are unfaithful to them. You laughed at me; you know you did——"
("I didn't," from Ted.)
"——because I'm trying to make my life beautiful. You're led away by your strong sense of humour, till you see something ridiculous in the loveliest and noblest things" (Ted's eyes wandered in spite of himself to the little lady in terra-cotta). "I know why: you're afraid of being sentimental. But if people have feelings, why should they be ashamed of them? Why should they mind showing them? Now I want you to promise me that, from this day forth, you'll take yourself and your art seriously; that you'll work hard—you've been idling shamefully lately" (oh, Audrey! whose fault was that?)—"and finish some great picture before the year's out" (he had only five weeks to do it in, but that was a detail). "Now promise."
"I—I'll promise anything," stammered the miserable Ted, "if only you'll look at me like that—sometimes, say between the hours of seven and eight in the evening."
"Ridiculous baby! Now we must see about the pictures; we've just time before tea."
The mention of tea was a master-stroke; it brought them both back to the world of fact, and restored the familiar landmarks.
Ted, solemnly penitent, gave his best attention to the pictures: there was not a trace of his former abominable levity in the air with which he passed sentence on each as Audrey brought them up for judgment. But when he came to the family portraits he suspended his verdict, and Audrey was obliged to take the matter into her own hands.
She took up a small picture in a square frame and held it close to Ted's face.
"Portrait of my uncle, the Dean of St. Benedict's. What shall I do with it?"
"That depends entirely on the amount of affection you feel for the original."
"H'm—does it? He's a dear old thing, and I'm very fond of him, but—what do you think of him?—from an artistic point of view?"
She stood with her body curved a little backwards, holding the Dean up high in a good light. Her attitude was so lovely that it was impossible to disapprove of her. Ted's reason tottered on its throne, and he laughed, which was perhaps the best thing he could have done.
"He is not, strictly speaking, handsome."
"No," said Audrey; "I'm afraid he'll have to go."
She knelt down beside the portrait of a lady. It was evidently the work of an inferior artist, but his most malignant efforts had failed to disguise the beauty of the face. It bore a strong resemblance to Audrey, but it was the face of an older woman, grave, intelligent, and refined by suffering.
"I've been obliged to take this down," she said, as if apologising more to herself than Ted, "because I want to hang my large photo of the Sistine Madonna in its place."
"What is it?"
"It's—my mother's portrait. She died when I was a very little girl, and I hardly ever saw her, you know. I'm not a bit like her."
He stood silent, watching her intently as she spoke.
"Family portraits," she continued, "may be interesting, but they are not decorative. Unless, of course," she added, hastily, being at a loss to account for the peculiar expression of Ted's face, "they're very old ones—Lelys and Sir Joshua Reynoldses."
"That face does not look old, certainly."
"No. She died young."
She had not meant to say that; a little shiver went through her as the words passed her lips, and she felt a desire to change the subject. But the portrait of the late Mrs. Craven was turned to the wall along with the Dean.
"Hullo!" exclaimed Ted, taking up a photo in a glass frame, hand-painted, "here's old Hardy! What on earth is he doing here?"
Audrey blushed, but answered with unruffled calm.
"Vincent? Oh, he's a family portrait too. He's my cousin—first cousin, you know."
"What are you going to do with him?"
"I—I hardly know."
She took the photo out of his hands and examined it carefully back and front. Then she looked at Ted.
"What shall I do with him? Is he to go too?"
"Well, I suppose he ought to. He's all very well in his own line, but—from an artistic point of view—he's not exactly—decorative."
"Poor old Vincent! No, he's not."
And Vincent was turned face downward among the ruins of the cosy corner, and Audrey and Ted rested from their labours.
When Ted had gone, the very first thing Audrey did was to get a map and to look out the Rocky Mountains. There they were, to be sure, just as Vincent had described them, a great high wall dividing the continent. At that moment Hardy was kneeling on the floor of his little shanty, busy sorting bearskins and thinking of Audrey and bears. He had had splendid sport—that is, he had succeeded in killing a grizzly just before the grizzly killed him. How nervous Audrey would feel when she got the letter describing that encounter! Then he chose the best and fluffiest bearskin to make a nice warm cape for her, and amused himself by picturing her small oval chin nestling in the brown fur. And then he fell to wondering what she was doing now.
He would have been delighted if he could have seen her poring over that map with her pencilled eyebrows knit, while she traced the jagged outlines of the Rockies with her finger-nail, congratulating herself on the height of that magnificent range.
Yes, there was a great deal between her and her cousin Mr. Hardy.
CHAPTER VI
One fine morning in latter spring, about four months after the day of the transformation scene in Audrey's drawing-room, Ted Haviland was lying on his back sunning himself on the leads. There are many lovelier places even in London than the leads of No. 12 Devon Street, Pimlico, but none more favourable to high and solitary thinking. Here the roar of traffic is subdued to a murmur hardly greater than the stir of country woods on a warm spring morning—a murmur less obtrusive, because more monotonous. It is the place of all others for one absorbed in metaphysical speculation, or cultivating the gift of detachment. The very chimney-pots have a remote abstracted air; the slopes of the slates rise up around you, shutting you in on three sides, and throwing you so far back on yourself; while before you lies the vast, misty network of roofs, stretching eastward towards the heart of the city, and above you is the open sky. It is even pleasant here on a day like this, a day with all the ardour of summer in it, and all the languor of spring, with the sun warming the slates at your back, and a soft breeze from the river fanning your face. You must go up on to the leads on such a day to feel the beauty and infinity of blue sky, the only beautiful and boundless thing here, where there is no green earth to rival heaven.
Ted had certainly no taste for detachment, but he was so far advanced towards metaphysical speculation that he was engaged in an analysis of sensation. Off and on, ever since that day of unreasonable mirth and subsequent madness, he had been a prey to remorse. He had kept away from Audrey for a fortnight, during which time his imagination had run riot through past, present, and future. Audrey had been sweet and confiding from the first; she had believed in him with childlike simplicity, and when she had trusted to his guidance in her innocent æstheticism, he, like the coarse-minded villain that he was, had made fun of all her dear little arrangements, those pathetic efforts to make her life beautiful. He had made her cry, and then taken a brutal advantage of her tears. To Ted's conscience, in the white-heat of his virgin passion, that premature kiss, the kiss that transformed a boyish fancy into full-grown love, was a crime. And yet she had forgiven him. All the time she had been thinking, not of herself, but of him. Her words, hardly heeded at the moment, came back to him like a dull sermon heard in some exalted mood, and henceforth transfigured in memory. She had done well to reproach him for his frivolity and want of purpose. She was so ready to say pleasant things, that blame from her mouth was sweeter than its praise. It showed that she cared more. By this time he had forgotten the traits that had impressed him less pleasantly.
Happily for him, his passion for Audrey was at first altogether bound up with his art. We are not all geniuses, but to some of us, once perhaps in a lifetime, genius comes in the form of love. To Ted love came in the form of genius, quickening his whole nature, and bringing his highest powers to a sudden birth. He had begun and almost finished the work which Audrey had urged him to undertake, and nobody could say that he had approached his subject in a frivolous spirit. It was a portrait of herself. Ted had been rather inclined to affect the romantic antique: Audrey had been a revelation of the artistic possibilities of modern womanhood, and he turned in disgust from his languid studies of decadent renaissance, or renaissant decadence, to this brilliant type. One corner of the studio was stacked with sketches and little full-length portraits of Audrey. Audrey from every point of view. Audrey in a black Gainsborough hat, Audrey with brown fur about her throat, Audrey half-smothered in billowy silk and chiffon, Audrey as she appeared at a dance in a simple frock and sash, and Audrey in a tailor-made gown, in the straight lines of which Ted professed to have discovered new principles of beauty. In fact, he dreamed of founding a New Art on portraits of Audrey alone. From which it would appear that he was taking himself and his art very seriously indeed.
Audrey had just left him after a protracted sitting, and up among the dreamy chimney-pots he was reviving in fancy the sensations of the morning. He was brought back from his ecstasy by Katherine's voice calling, "Ted, come down this minute—I've got something to show you"; and, rousing himself very much against the grain, he dropped languidly into the room below.
Katherine had come in all glowing with excitement. She pushed back her broad-brimmed hat from her forehead, and thrust both hands into her coat-pockets, bringing out two loose heaps of gold.
"There!" she said, letting sovereigns and half-sovereigns drip on to the table with an impressive chink, "aren't you thankful that I wasn't murdered, walking through the great sinful city with all that capital about me?"
"What's up? Has our uncle climbed down, or have you been robbing a till?"
"Neither. I've been to the bank, cashing real live cheques. Five pounds for my black-and-white for the Saint Abroad, I mean the "Woman at Home." Fifteen pounds for Miss Maskelyne's prize bull-dog (I idealised him). Twenty pounds for Lady Stodart's prize baby. Total, forty pounds." She arranged the sovereigns in neat little piles on the table. "That's enough to take you to Paris and set you going." Ted started, and his face fell a little. "It's positively my only dream that ever came true. Picture it, think of it, just on the brink of it. You can start next week, to-morrow if you like!"
Ted's face turned a deep crimson, and he was silent.
"Then Audrey's promised me twenty for a copy of the Botticelli Madonna; I began it yesterday. That'll be enough to keep you on another month, if you want it, and bring you home again."
Still Ted said nothing. He sat down and buried his face in his hands. Katherine knelt down and put her arm tight round his neck.
"Ted, you duffer, do you really care so much? I am so glad. I didn't know you'd take it that way."
He drew back and looked her mournfully in the face.
"Kathy, you're an angel; it's awfully good of you; but I—I can't take it, you know."
"Why not? Too proud?"
"No—rubbish! It does seem an infernal shame not to, when you've scraped it together with your dear little paws; but—well—don't think me a brute—I don't know that I want to go to Paris now."
"Not to go to Paris?"
"No."
"Idiot!"
"Kathy, which Botticelli did she ask you to do for her?"
"The one you got so excited about, with St. John and the angel—right-hand side opposite you as you go in. Come, I can see through that trick, and I'm not going to stand any nonsense."
"It isn't nonsense."
"It is. Why, you were raving about Meissonier last year."
"Yes, last year; but——"
"Well?" Katherine rose and gazed at him with the austerity of an inquisitor. Ted gave an uneasy laugh.
"I've been thinking that you and I between us could found a school of our own this year. I've got the eccentricity, and you've got the cheek. We should build ourselves an everlasting name."
"Do be serious; I shall lose my temper in another minute. Is it the wretched money you're thinking of?"
"No, it isn't the money altogether." He got up and walked to his easel.
"Then, oh Ted, you know that Paris—Paris in May—must be simply divine!"
"Why don't you go yourself?"
"No, no; that's not the same thing at all. I don't want to go; besides, I can't. I haven't the time."
"Well, to tell you the truth, Kathy, no more can I. I haven't the time either." He took up his palette and brushes and began carefully touching up the canvas before him.
"Oh—h!" She stared at him for a minute in silence. Ted looked up suddenly; their eyes met, and he set his face like a flint.
"Kathy," he said, slowly, "I've behaved in the most ungrateful and abominable manner. I should like to go to Paris very much, and I—I think I'll start next week."
"Thank you, dear boy; it's the very least you can do."
And they dropped the subject. Ted was the first to speak again.
"By-the-bye, what's on to-morrow morning, Kathy?"
"National Gallery for me." She looked up from her work and saw Ted standing with his hands in his pockets, gazing with an agonised expression at his portrait of Audrey.
"I suppose she is going to sit again?"
"Well, yes; she may look in for another hour in the morning perhaps."
Ted was not skillful in deceit, and something in his manner told Katherine that the sitting somehow depended on her absence. She began to see dimly why he had been so frightened at the idea of going to Paris. She looked over her shoulder.
"You haven't made the corners of her mouth turn up enough. It's just as well, they turn up too much."
"No, they don't; that's what makes her so pretty."
Katherine went to her work next morning in anything but a cheerful spirit. She had set her heart on Ted's studying abroad; and now Audrey had come in between, frittering away his time, and making him restless and unlike himself. To be sure, his powers had expanded enormously of late; but she was not happy about him, and was half afraid to praise his work. To her mind there was something feverish and unhealthy in its vivid beauty. It suggested genius outgrowing its strength. If Audrey really had anything to do with it, if she was coming in any way between him and the end she dreamed for him, why, then, she could hate Audrey with a deadly hatred. That was what she said to herself just before she opened the front-door and found Audrey standing on the doorstep, looking reprehensibly pretty in a gown of white lawn over green silk. Her wide hat was trimmed with bunches of white tulle and pale green poppies, and she had a little basket full of lilies of the valley hanging from her wrist.
"You wretch!" she cried, shaking a bunch of lilies at Katherine, as she stood in the narrow passage; "you're always going out when I'm coming in."
"And you're always coming in when I'm going out. Isn't it funny?"
Audrey said nothing to that, but she kissed Katherine on both cheeks, and pinned a bunch of lilies at her throat with a little gold pin that she took from her own dress. Then she tripped lightly upstairs, with a swish, swish, of her silk skirts, wafting lilies of the valley as she went. Katherine watched her up the first flight, and the hate died out of her heart. After all, Audrey was so perfect from an artistic point of view that moral disapproval seemed somehow beside the point.'
"May I come in?" asked Audrey, tapping at the open door of the studio. Ted rose with a reverent alacrity, very much as you rise to the musical parts of a solemn service in church. He arranged her chair carefully, with soft cushions for her back and feet. "If you don't mind," said he, "we must work hard, for I want to finish you this morning, or perhaps to-morrow, if you can give me another sitting," and he patted a cushion and held it up for her head.
"You can have any number of sittings," said Audrey, ignoring these preparations for her comfort; "but first of all, I'm going to make your room pretty."
Ted dropped his cushion helplessly and followed her as she moved about the room. First she took off her gloves in a leisurely manner and laid them down among Ted's wet brushes. Then she began to arrange the lilies of the valley in a little copper bowl she found on the chimneypiece. Then she caught sight of her gloves and exclaimed, "Oh, look at my beautiful new gloves, lying among your nasty paints! Why didn't you tell me, you horrid boy?" Then Ted and she tried to clean them with turpentine, and made them worse than ever, and between them they wasted half an hour of the precious morning. After that, Audrey took off her hat and settled herself comfortably among the cushions; she drew her white fingers through her hair till it stood up in a great red aureole round her head, and the sitting began.
Ted's heart gave a bound as he set to work. He had learnt by this time to control the trembling of his hands, otherwise the portrait would never have reached its present perfection. He had painted from many women in the life school, and always with the same emotions, the same reverence for womanhood, and the same delight in his own power, tempered by compassion for the model. But these were so many studies in still life compared with the incarnate loveliness before him—Audrey: it made him feel giddy to paint the edge of the ruffles about her throat, or the tip of her shoe. Her beauty throbbed like pulses of light, it floated in air and went to his head like the scent of her lilies. He had reproduced this radiant, throbbing effect in his picture. It was a head, the delicate oval of the full face relieved against a background of atmospheric gold into which the golden surface tints of the hair faded imperceptibly. The eyebrows were arched a little over the earnest, unfathomable eyes; the lips were parted as if with impetuous breath; the whole head leaned slightly forward, giving prominence to the chin, which in reality retreated, a defect chiefly noticeable in profile. Ted had painted what he saw. It might have been the head of a saint looking for the Beatific Vision; it was only that of an ordinary pretty woman.
As a rule, they both chattered freely during the sittings. This is, of course, necessary, if the artist is to know his sitter's face with all its varying expressions; and Audrey had given Ted a great many to choose from. This morning, however, he worked steadily and in a silence which she was the first to break.
"What do you mean by talking about one more sitting in that way? You said you'd want six yesterday."
"I did, but——" He leaned back and began tilting his chair to and fro. "The fact is—I'm awfully sorry, but I'm afraid I'm going to leave England." The young rascal had chosen his words with a deliberate view to effect, and Audrey's first thoughts flew to America, though not to Hardy. She moved suddenly in her chair.
"To emigrate? You, with your genius? Surely not!"
"No, rather not; it's not as bad as all that. But—I'm afraid I have to go to Paris for six months or so."
"Whatever for?"
"Well—I must, you see."
"Must you? And for six months, too; why?"
"Because I—that is—I want to study for a bit in the schools there."
"Oh,"—she leaned back again among her cushions, and looked down at her hands clasped demurely,—"if you want to go, that's another thing."
"It isn't another thing; and I don't want to go, as it happens."
"Then I am sure you needn't go and study; what can they teach you that you don't know?" she leaned forward and looked into his face. "You're not going in for that horrid French style, surely?"
"Well, I'd some thoughts——" he hesitated, and Audrey took courage.
"It can't be—it mustn't be! Oh, do, do give up the idea—for my sake! It'll be your ruin as an artist." She had risen to her feet, and was gazing at him appealingly.
"You dear little thing, what do you know about the French school or any other?"
"Everything. I take in 'Modern Art,' and I read all the magazines and things, and—I know all about it."
"You don't know anything about it. All the same——" he paused, biting his lip.
"All the same, what?"
"If I thought you cared a straw whether I went or stayed——"
"Haven't I shown you that I care?"
"No, you haven't."
"Ted!" Audrey made that little word eloquent of pleading, reproachful pathos; but he went on—
"For heaven's sake, don't talk any more rot about art and my genius! Anybody can do it. Do you think that's what I want to hear from you?" He checked himself suddenly. "I beg your pardon. Now I think we'll go on, if you don't mind sitting a little longer."
"But I do mind. Either you're very rude, or—I can't understand you. Why do you speak to me like this?" She had picked up her hat and begun playing with its long pins. As she spoke she stabbed it savagely in the crown. The nervous action of her hands contrasted oddly with the pensive Madonna-like pose of her head, but the corners of her mouth were turned up more than ever, and the tip of her little Roman nose was trembling. Then she drew the pins slowly out of her hat, and made as if she would put it on. Ted tried to reason, but he could only grasp two facts clearly—that in another second she would be gone, and that if he left things as they stood he would have to exchange London for Paris. He leaned against the wall for support, and looked steadily at Audrey as he spoke.
"You think me a devil, and I can only prevent that by making you think me a fool. I don't care. I'm insane enough to love you—my curious behaviour must have made that quite obvious. If you'll say that you care for me a little bit, I won't go to Paris. If you won't, I'll go to-morrow and stay there."
Audrey had known for some time that something like this would happen. She had meant it to happen. From the day she first saw Ted Haviland, she had made up her mind to be his destiny; and yet, now that it had happened, though Ted's words made her heart beat uncomfortably fast, a little voice in her brain kept on saying, "Not yet—not yet—not yet." She sat down and tried to collect her thoughts. Ted would be sure to begin again in another second. He did.
"Or if you don't care now, if you'll only say that you might care some day, if you'll say that it's not an utter impossibility, I won't go. I'll wait five years—ten years—on the off chance, and hold my tongue about it too, if you tell me to."
Not yet—not yet—not yet.
"Audrey!"
She started as if a stranger had called her name suddenly, for the voice was not like Ted's at all. Yet it was Ted, Ted in the shabby clothes she had seen him in first, which never looked shabby somehow on him; but it was not the baby as she knew him. He was looking at her almost defiantly, a cloud had come over his eyes, and the muscles of his face were set. Audrey saw the look of unrelenting determination, which is only seen to perfection in the faces of the very young, but it seemed to her that Ted had taken a sudden leap into manhood.
"Audrey," he said again, and their eyes met. She tried to speak, but it was too late. The boy had crouched down on the floor beside her, and was clasping her knees like a suppliant before some marble divinity.
"Don't—Ted, don't," she gasped under her breath.
"I won't. I don't ask you to do it now, before I've made my name. It may take years, but—I shall make it. And then, perhaps——"
She tried to loosen his fingers one by one, and they closed on her hand with a grip like a dying man's. Through the folds of her thin dress she could feel his heart thumping obtrusively, and the air throbbed with the beating of a thousand pulses. Her brain reeled, and the little voice inside it left off saying "Not yet." She stooped down and whispered hurriedly—
"I will—I will."
The suppliant raised his head, and his fingers relaxed their hold.
"You will, Audrey? So you don't—at the present moment?"
"I do. It wasn't my fault. I didn't know what love was like. I know now."
Passion is absolutely sincere, but it is not bound to be either truthful or consistent. What has it to do with trains of reasoning, or with the sequence of events in time? Past and future history are nothing to it. For Audrey it was now—now—now. All foreshadowings, all dateless possibilities, were swept out of her fancy; or rather, they were crowded into one burning point of time. Now was the moment for which all other moments had lived and died. Life had owed her some great thing, and now with every heart-beat it was paying back its long arrears. Henceforth there would be no more monotony, no more measuring of existence by the hands of the clock, no more weighing of emotion by the scruple. The revelation had come. Now and for ever it was all the same; for sensation that knows nothing about time is always sure of eternity.
CHAPTER VII
When Katherine came back from the National Gallery she found Ted alone: he had drawn up the couch in front of his easel, and lay there gazing at his portrait. The restless, hungry look had gone from his eyes. There was no triumph there, only an absolute satisfaction and repose. Face and attitude said plainly, "I have attained my heart's desire. I am young in years, but old in wisdom. I know what faith and hope and love are, which is more than you do. I am not in the least excited about them, as you see; I can afford to wait, for these things last for ever. If you like, you may come and worship with me before my heavenly lady's image; but if you do, you must hold your tongue." And Katherine, being a sensible woman, held her tongue. But she took up a tiny pair of white gloves, stained with paint and turpentine, that lay folded on the easel's ledge, and after examining them critically, laid them on Ted's feet without a word. A faint smile flickered across his lips. That was all their confession.
After some inward debate, Katherine determined to go over and see Audrey. She had no very clear notion of what had happened that morning; but she could only think that the ridiculous boy had proposed to Audrey and been accepted. The idea seemed preposterous; for though she had been by no means blind to all that had been going on under her eyes for the last few months, she had never for a moment taken Audrey seriously, or supposed that Ted in his sober senses could do so either. This morning a horrible misgiving had come over her, and she had gone to her work in a tumult of mixed feelings. For the present she had made Ted's career the end and aim of her existence. What she most dreaded for him, next to the pain of a hopeless attachment, was the distraction of a successful one. A premature engagement is the thing of all others to blast a man's career at the outset. What good was it, she asked herself passionately, for her to pinch and save, to put aside her own ambition, to do the journeyman's work that brings pay, instead of the artist's work that brings praise, if Ted was going to fling himself away on the first pretty face that took his fancy? Again the feeling of hatred to Audrey surged up in her heart, and again it died down at the first sight of its object.
Audrey was standing at the window singing a little song to herself. She turned as the door opened, and when she saw Katherine she started ever so slightly, and stood at gaze like a frightened fawn. She was attracted by Katherine, as she was by every personality that she felt to be stronger than her own. Among all artists there is a strain of manhood in every woman, and of womanhood in every man. Katherine fascinated her weaker sister by some such super-feminine charm. At the same time, Audrey was afraid of her, as she had been afraid of Hardy in his passion, or of Ted in his boisterous mirth. There were moments when she thought that Katherine's direct unquestioning gaze must have seen what she hid from her own eyes, must have penetrated the more or less artistic disguises without which she would not have known herself. Now her one anxiety was lest Katherine knew or guessed her treatment of Vincent, and had come to reproach her with it. Owing to some slight similarity of detail, the events of the morning had brought the recollection of that last scene with Hardy uppermost in her mind. She had persuaded herself that her love for Ted was her first experience of passion, as it was his; but at the touch of one awkward memory the bloom was somehow brushed off this little romance. For these reasons there was fear in her grey eyes as she put up her face to Katherine's to be kissed.
"Do you know?" she half whispered. "Has he told you?"
"No, he has told me nothing; but I know."
There was silence as the two women sat down side by side and looked into each other's faces. Katherine's instinct was to soothe and protect the shy creatures that shrank from her, and Audrey in her doubt and timidity appealed to her more than she had ever done in the self-conscious triumph of her beauty. She took her hand, caressing it gently as she spoke.
"Audrey—you won't mind telling me frankly? Are you engaged to Ted?"
True to her imitative instincts, Audrey could be frank with the frank. "Yes, I am. But it's our own little secret, and we don't want anybody to know yet."
"Perhaps you are wise." She paused. How could she make Audrey understand what she had to say? She was not going to ask her to break off her engagement. In the first place, she had no right to do so; in the second place, any interference in these cases is generally fatal to its own ends. But she wanted to make Audrey realise the weight of her responsibility.
"Audrey," she said at last, "do you remember our first meeting, when you thought Ted was a baby?"
"Yes, of course I do. That was only six, seven months ago; and to think that I should be engaged to him now! Isn't it funny?"
"Very funny indeed. But you were perfectly right. He is a baby. He knows no more than a baby does of the world, and of the men in it. Of the women he knows rather less than an intelligent baby."
"I wouldn't have him different. He needn't know anything about other women, so long as he understands me."
"Well, the question is, does he understand himself? What's more, are you sure you understand him? Ted is two people rolled into one, and very badly rolled too. The human part of him has hardly begun to grow yet; he's got no practical common-sense to speak of, and only a rudimentary heart."
"Oh, Katherine!"
"Quite true,—it's all I had at his age. But the ideal, the artistic side of him is all but full-grown. That means that it's just at the critical stage now."
"Of course, I suppose it would be." Audrey always said "Of course" when she especially failed to see the drift of what was said to her.
"Yes; but do you realise all that the next few years will do for him? That they will either make or ruin his career as an artist? They ought to be years of downright hard work, of solitary hard work; he ought to have them all to himself. Do you mean to let him have them?"
Audrey lowered her eyes, and sat silent, playing with the ribbons of her dress, while Katherine went on as if to herself—
"He is so young, so dreadfully young. It would have been soon enough in another ten years' time. Oh, Audrey, why did you let it come to this?"
"Well, really, Katherine, I couldn't help it. Besides, one has one's feelings. You talk as if I was going to stand in Ted's way—as if I didn't care a straw. Surely his career must mean more to his wife than it can to his sister? I know you think that because I haven't been trained like you, because I've lived a different life from yours, that I can't love art as you do. You're mistaken. To begin with, I made up my mind ten years ago that whatever I did when I grew up, I wouldn't marry a nonentity. What do you suppose Ted's fascination was, if it wasn't his genius, and his utter unlikeness to anybody else?"
"Geniuses are common enough nowadays; there are plenty more where he came from."
"How cynical you are! You haven't met many people like Ted, have you?"
"No, I haven't. Oh, Audrey, do you really care like that? I wonder how I should feel if I were you, and knew that Ted's future lay in my hands, as it lies in yours."
Audrey's cheeks reddened with pleasure. "It does! It does!" She clasped her little hands passionately, as if they were holding Ted and his future tight. "I know it. All I want is to inspire him, to keep him true to himself. Haven't I done it? You know what his work was like before he loved me. Can you say that he ever painted better than he does now, or even one-half as well?"
Katherine could not honestly say that he had; but she smiled as she answered, "No; but for the last six months he has done nothing from anybody but yourself. You make a very charming picture, Audrey, but you can hardly want people to say that your husband can only paint one type."
"My husband can paint as many types as he pleases." Katherine still looked dubious. "Anything more?"
"Yes, one thing. You say you want to keep Ted true to himself, as you put it. He made up his mind this morning to go to Paris to study hard for six months. It means a lot of self-sacrifice for you both, to be separated so soon; but it will be the making of him. You won't let him change his mind? You won't say anything to keep him back, will you?"
Audrey's face had suddenly grown hard, and she looked away from Katherine as she answered, "You're not very consistent, I must say. You can't think Ted such an utter baby if you trust him to go off to Paris all by himself. As to his making up his mind this morning, our engagement alters all that. After all, how can it affect Ted's career if he goes now or three years hence?"
"It makes all the difference."
"I can't see it. And yet—and yet—I wouldn't spoil Ted's chances for worlds." She rose and walked a few paces to and fro. "Let me think, let me think!" She stood still, an image of abstract Justice, with one hand folded over her eyes, and the other clenched as if it held the invisible scales of destiny, weighing her present, overcharged with agreeable sensations, against her lover's future. Apparently, after some shifting of the weights, she had made the two balance, for she clapped her hands suddenly, and exclaimed, with an emphasis on every other word—
"Katherine! An inspiration! We'll go to Paris for our honeymoon, and Ted shall stay there six months—a year—for ever, if he likes. Paris is the place I adore above all others. I shall simply live in that dear Louvre!" She added in more matter-of-fact tones, "And I needn't order my trousseau till I get there. That'll save no end of bother on this side. I hate the way we do things here. For weeks before your wedding-day to have to think of nothing but clothes, clothes, clothes—could anything be more revolting?"
"Yes," said Katherine, "to think of them before a funeral."
Audrey looked offended. Death, like religion, is one of those subjects which it is very bad taste to mention under some circumstances.
Katherine went away more disheartened than ever, and more especially weighed down by the consciousness that she had made a fool of herself. She knew Audrey to be vain, she divined that she was selfish, but at least she had believed that she could be generous. By letting her feel that she held Ted's future in her hands, she had roused all her woman's vague cupidity and passion for power, and henceforth any appeal to her generosity would be worse than useless. With a little of her old artistic egoism, Katherine valued her brother's career very much as a thing of her own making, and the idea of another woman meddling with it and spoiling it was insupportable. It was as if some reckless colourist had taken the Witch of Atlas and daubed her all over with frightful scarlet and magenta. But the trouble at her heart of hearts was the certainty that Audrey, that creature of dubious intellect and fitful emotions, would never be able to love Ted as his wife should love him.
CHAPTER VIII
All true revelations soon seem as old as the hills and as obvious. Yesterday they were not, to-day they have struck you dumb, to-morrow they will have become commonplaces, and henceforth you will be incapable of seeing anything else. So it was with Audrey. Her engagement was barely a week old before she felt that it had lasted for ever. Not that she was tired of it; on the contrary, she hoped everything from Ted's eccentricity. She was sick to death of the polished conventional type—the man who, if he came into her life at all, must be introduced in the recognised way; while Ted, who had dropped into it literally through a skylight, roused her unflagging interest and curiosity. She was always longing to see what the boy would say and do next. Poor Audrey! Her own character was mainly such a bundle of negations that you described her best by saying what she was not; but other people's positive qualities acted on her as a powerful stimulant, and it was one for which she perpetually craved. She had found it in Hardy. In him it was the almost physical charm of blind will, and she yielded to it unwillingly. She had found it in Ted under the intoxicating form of vivid emotion. Life with Vincent would have been an unbroken bondage. Life with Ted would have no tyrannous continuity; it would be a series of splendid episodes. At the same time, it seemed to her that she had always lived this sort of life. Like the "souls" in Ted's ingenious masterpiece, Audrey had suffered a metempsychosis, and her very memory was changed. The change was not so much shown in the character of her dress and her surroundings (Audrey was not the first woman who has tried to be original by following the fashion); these things were only the outward signs of an inward transformation. If her worship of the beautiful was not natural, it was not altogether affected. She really appreciated the things she saw, though she only saw them through as much of Ted's mind as was transparent to her at the moment. It never occurred to her to ask herself whether she would have chosen to stand quite so often on the Embankment watching the sun go down behind Battersea Bridge, or whether she would have sat quite so many hours in the National Gallery looking at those white-faced grey-eyed Madonnas of Botticelli that Ted was never tired of talking about. It was so natural that he should be always with her when she did these things, that it was impossible to disentangle her ideas and say what was her own and what was his. She was not given to self-analysis.
But there were limits to Audrey's capacity for receiving impressions. Between her and the world where Katherine always lived, and which Ted visited at intervals now becoming rarer and rarer, there was a great gulf fixed. After all, Audrey had no grasp of the impersonal; she could only care for any object as it gave her certain emotions, raised certain associations, or drew attention to herself. She was at home in the dim borderland between art and nature, the region of vanity and vague sensation. Here she could meet Ted half-way and talk to him about ideals for the hour together. But in the realm of pure art, as he had told her when she once said that she liked all his pictures because they were his, personalities count for nothing; you must have an eye for the thing itself, and the thing itself was the one thing that Audrey could not see. In that world she was a pilgrim and a stranger; it was peopled with shadowy fantastic rivals, who left her with no field and no favour; flesh and blood were powerless to contend against them. They excited no jealousy—they were too intangible for that; but in their half-seen presence she had a sense of helpless irritation and bewilderment—it baffled, overpowered, and humiliated her. To a woman thirsting for a great experience, it was hard to find that the best things lay always just beyond her reach; that in Ted's life, after all of it that she had absorbed and made her own, there was still an elusive something on which she had no hold. Not that she allowed this reflection to trouble her happiness long. As Katherine had said, Ted was two people very imperfectly rolled into one. Consciously or unconsciously, it became more and more Audrey's aim to separate them, to play off the one against the other. This called for but little skill on her part. Ted's passion at its white-heat had fused together the boy's soul and the artist's, but at any temperature short of that its natural effect was disintegration. Audrey had some cause to congratulate herself on the result. It might or might not have been flattering to be called a "clever puss" or an "imaginative minx" (Ted chose his epithets at random), whenever she pointed out some novel effect of colour or picturesque grouping; but it was now July, and Ted had not done a stroke of work since he put the last touches to her portrait in April.
It was now July, and from across the Atlantic came the first rumours of Hardy's return. Within a month, or six weeks at the latest, he would be in England, in London. The news set Audrey thinking, and think as she would the question perpetually recurred, Whether would it be better to announce her engagement to Ted, or still keep it a secret, still drift on indefinitely as they had done for the last four months? If Audrey had formed any idea of the future at all, it was as a confused mirage of possibilities: visions of express trains in which she and Ted were whirled on for ever through strange landscapes; visions of Parisian life as she pictured it—a series of exquisite idyls, the long days of quivering sunlight under blue skies, the brief languid nights dying into dawn, coffee and rolls brought to you before you get up, strawberries eaten with claret instead of cream because cream makes you ill in hot climates, the Paris of fiction and the Paris of commonplace report; and with it all, scene after scene in which she figured as doing a thousand extravagant and interesting things, always dressed in appropriate costumes, always making characteristic little speeches to Ted, who invariably replied with some delicious absurdity. The peculiarity of these scenes was, that though they succeeded each other through endless time, yet neither she nor Ted ever appeared a day older in them. As Audrey's imagination borrowed nothing from the past, it had no sense of the demands made by the future. Now, although in publicly announcing her engagement to Ted she would give a fixity to this floating phantasmagoria which would rob it of half its charm, on the other hand she felt the need of some such definite and stable tie to secure her against Vincent's claim, the solidity of which she now realised for the first time. Unable to come to any conclusion, she continued to think.
The news from America had set old Miss Craven thinking too. She had at first rejoiced at Audrey's intimacy with the Havilands, for various reasons. She was glad to see her settling down—for the first time in her volatile life—into a friendship with another girl; to hear of her being interested in picture-galleries; to find a uniform gaiety taking the place of the restless, captious moods which made others suffer besides herself. As for the boy, he was a nice clever boy who would make his way in the world; but he was only "the boy." Three months ago, if anybody had told Miss Craven that there was a possibility of an engagement between Audrey and Ted Haviland, she would have laughed them to scorn. But when it gradually dawned on her that Katherine hardly ever called at the house with her brother, that he and Audrey went everywhere together, and Katherine never made a third in their expeditions, it occurred to her that she really ought to speak a word in season. Her only difficulty was to find the season. After much futile watching of her opportunity, she resolved to trust to the inspiration of the moment. Unfortunately, the moment of the inspiration happened to be that in which Audrey came in dressed for a row up the river, and chafing with anxiety because Ted was ten minutes behind time. This at once suggested the subject in hand. But Miss Craven began cautiously—
"Audrey, my dear, do you think you've enough wraps with you? These evenings on the river are treacherous."
Audrey gave an impatient twitch to a sort of Elizabethan ruff she wore round her neck.
"How tiresome of Ted to be late, when I particularly told him to be early!"
"Is Miss Haviland going with you? Poor girl, she looks as if a blow on the river would do her good."
"N-no, she isn't."
"H'm—you'd better wait and have some tea first?"
"I've waited quite long enough already. We're going to drive to Hammersmith, and we shall get tea there or at Kew."
"I don't want to interfere with your amusements, but doesn't it strike you as—er—a little imprudent to go about so much with 'Ted,' as you call him?"
"No, of course not. He's not going to throw me overboard. It's the most natural thing in the world that I should go with him."
"Yes—to you, my dear, and I daresay to the young man himself. But if you are seen together, people are sure to talk."
"Let them. I don't mind in the least—I rather like it."
"Like it?"
"Yes. You must own it's flattering. People here wouldn't take the trouble to talk if I were nobody. London isn't Oxford."
"No; you may do many things in Oxford which you mayn't do in London. But times have changed. I can't imagine your dear mother saying she would 'like' to be talked about."
"Please don't speak about mother in that way; you know I never could bear it. Oh, there's a ring at the front door! That's Ted." She stood on tiptoe, bending forward, and held her ear to the half-open door. "No, it isn't; it's some wretched visitor. Don't keep me, Cousin Bella, or I shall be caught."
"Really, Audrey, now we are on the subject, I must just tell you that your conduct lately has given me a great deal of anxiety."
"My conduct! What do you mean? I haven't broken any of the seven commandments. (Thank goodness, they've gone!)"
"I mean that if you don't take care you'll be entangling yourself with young Mr. Haviland, as you did——"
"As I did with Vincent, I suppose. That is so like you. You're always thinking things, always putting that and that together, and doing it quite wrong. You were hopelessly out of it about Vincent. Whether you're wrong or right about Mr. Haviland, I simply shan't condescend to tell you." And having lashed herself into a state of indignation, Audrey went on warmly—"I'm not a child of ten. I won't have my actions criticised. I won't have my motives spied into. I won't be ruled by your miserable middle-class, provincial standard. What I do is nobody's business but my own."
"Very well, very well; go your own way, and take the consequences. If it's not my business, don't blame me when you get into difficulties."
Audrey turned round with a withering glance.
"Cousin Bella, you are really too stupid!" she said, with a movement of her foot that was half rage, half sheer excitement. "Ah, there's Ted at last!" She ran joyously away. Miss Craven sank back in her chair, exhausted by her unusual moral effort, and too deeply hurt to return the smile which Audrey flashed back at her, by way of apology, as she flew.
The bitter little dialogue, at any rate, had the good effect of wakening Audrey to the practical aspects of her problem. Before their engagement could be announced, it was clear that Ted ought to be properly introduced to her friends. However she might affect to brave it out, Audrey was sensitive to the least breath of unfavourable opinion, and she did not want it said that she had picked up her husband heavens knows how, when, and where. If they had been talked about already, no time should be lost before people realised that Ted was a genius with a future before him, his sister a rising artist also, and so on. Audrey was busy with these thoughts as she was being rowed up the river from Hammersmith. At Kew the room where they had tea was full of people she knew; and as she and Ted passed on to a table in a far corner, she felt, rather than saw, that the men looked after them, and the women exchanged glances. The same thing happened at Richmond, where they dined; and there a little knot of people gathered about the river's bank and watched their departure with more than friendly interest. If she had any lingering doubts before, Audrey was ready now to make her engagement known, for mere prudence' sake. And as they almost drifted down in the quiet July evening, between the humid after-glow of the sunset and the dawn of the moonlit night, Audrey felt a wholly new and delicate sensation. It was as if she were penetrated for the first time by the indefinable, tender influences of air and moonlight and running water. The mood was vague and momentary—a mere fugitive reflection of the rapture with which Ted, rowing lazily now with the current, drank in the glory of life, and felt the heart of all nature beating with his. Yet for that one instant, transient as it was, Audrey's decision was being shaped for her by a motive finer than all prudence, stronger than all sense of propriety. In its temporary transfiguration her love for Ted was such that she would have been ready, if need were, to fix Siberia for their honeymoon and to-morrow for their wedding-day. As they parted on her doorstep at Chelsea, between ten and eleven o'clock, she whispered, "Ted, that row down was like heaven! I've never, never been so happy in all my life!" If she did not fix their wedding-day then and there, she did the next best thing—she fixed the day for a dinner to be given in Ted's honour. Not a tedious, large affair, of course. She was only going to ask a few people who would appreciate Ted, and be useful to him in "the future."
As it was nearly the end of the season Audrey had no time to lose, and the first thing she did after her arrival was to startle Miss Craven by the sudden question—
"Cousin Bella, who was the man who rushed out of his bath into the street shouting 'Eureka'?"
"I never heard of any one doing so," said Cousin Bella, a little testily; "and if he did, it was most improper of him."
"Wasn't it? Never mind; he had an idea, so have I. I think I shall run out on to the Embankment and shout 'Eureka' too. Aren't you dying to know? I'm going to give a grand dinner for Te—for Mr. and Miss Haviland; and I'm not going to ask one—single—nonentity,—there! First of all, we must have Mr. Knowles—of course. Then—perhaps—Mr. Flaxman Reed. H'm—yes; we haven't asked him since he came up to St. Teresa's. If he isn't anybody in particular, you can't exactly call him nobody." Having settled the question of Mr. Flaxman Reed, Audrey sat down and sent off several invitations on the spot.
Owing to some refusals, the dinner-party gradually shrank in size and importance, and it was not until within four days of its date that Audrey discovered to her dismay that she was "a man short." As good luck would have it, she met Knowles that afternoon in Regent Street, and confided to him her difficulty and her firm determination not to fill the gap with any "nonentity" whatever. Audrey was a little bit afraid of Mr. Percival Knowles, and nothing but real extremity would have driven her to this desperate course. "If you could suggest any one I know, who isn't a nonentity, and who wouldn't mind such ridiculously short notice: it's really quite an informal little dinner, got up in a hurry, you know, for Mr. Haviland, a very clever young artist, and his sister."
Knowles smiled faintly: he had heard before of the very clever young artist (though not of his sister). He was all sympathy.
"Sorry. I can't think of any one you know—not a nonentity—but I should like to bring a friend, if I may. You don't know him, I think, but I believe he very much wants to know you."
"Bring him by all means, if he won't mind such a casual invitation."
"I'll make that all right."
Knowles lifted his hat, and was about to hurry away.
"By-the-bye, you haven't told me your friend's name."
He stopped, and answered with a sibilant incoherence, struggling as he was with his amusement. But at that moment Audrey's attention was diverted by the sight of Ted coming out of the New Gallery, and she hardly heard what was being said to her.
"I shall be delighted to see Mr. St. John," she called back, making a random shot at the name, and went on her way with leisurely haste towards the New Gallery.
CHAPTER IX
On the evening of her dinner Audrey had some difficulty in distributing her guests. After all, eight had accepted. Besides the Havilands, with Mr. Knowles and his friend Mr. St. John, there was Mr. Flaxman Reed, who, as Audrey now discovered, greatly to her satisfaction, was causing some excitement in the religious world by his interesting attitude mid-way between High Anglicanism and Rome. There were Mr. Dixon Barnett, the great Asiatic explorer, and his wife; and Miss Gladys Armstrong, the daring authoress of "Sour Grapes" and "Through Fire to Moloch," two novels dealing with the problem of heredity. Audrey had to contrive as best she might to make herself the centre of attraction throughout the evening, and at the same time do justice to each of her distinguished guests. The question was, Who was to take her in to dinner? After weighing impartially the claims of her three more or less intimate acquaintances, Audrey decided in favour of the unknown. She felt unusual complacence with this arrangement. Her fancies were beginning to cluster round the idea of Mr. St. John with curiosity. It was to be herself and Mr. St. John, then. Mr. Knowles and Miss Armstrong, of course: the critic was so cynical and hard to please that she felt a little triumphant in having secured some one whom he would surely be delighted to meet. Mr. Flaxman Reed and Katherine—n-no, Mrs. Dixon Barnett, Mr. Dixon Barnett falling to Katherine's share. For Ted, quite naturally, there remained nobody but Cousin Bella. "Poor boy, he'll be terribly bored, I'm afraid, but it can't be helped."
The Havilands were the first to arrive.
"How superb you look!" was Audrey's exclamation, as she kissed her friend on both cheeks and stepped back to take a good look at her. Katherine's appearance justified the epithet. Her gown, the work of her own hands, was of some transparent black stuff, swathed about her breasts, setting off the honey-like pallor of her skin; her slight figure supplied any grace that was wanting in the draperies. That black and white was a splendid foil for Audrey's burnished hair and her dress, an ingenious medley of flesh-pink, apple-green, and ivory silk.
"One moment, dear; just let me pin that chiffon up on your shoulder, to make your sleeves look wider—there!" She hovered round Katherine, spying out the weak points in her dress, and disguising them with quick, skillful fingers. A woman never looks more charming than when doing these little services for another. So Ted thought, as he watched Audrey laying her white arms about his sister, and putting her head on one side to survey the effect critically. To the boy, with his senses sharpened to an almost feverish subtilty by the incessant stimulus of his imagination, Audrey was the epitome of everything most completely and joyously alive. Roses, sunlight, flame, with the shifting, waving lines of all things most fluent and elusive, were in her face, her hair, the movements of her limbs. Her body was like a soul to its clothes; it animated, inspired the mass of silk and lace. He could not think of her as she was—the creature of the day and the hour, modern from the surface to the core. Yet never had she looked more modern than at this moment; never had that vivid quality, that touch of artificial distinction, appeared more stereotyped in its very perfection and finish. But Ted, in the first religious fervour of his passion, had painted her as the Saint of the Beatific Vision; and in the same way, to Ted, ever since that evening on the river, she recalled none but open-air images. She was linked by flowery chains of association to an idyllic past—a past of four days ago. Her very caprices suggested the shy approaches and withdrawals of some divinity of nature. It was by these harmless fictions, each new one rising on the ruins of the old, that Ted managed to keep his ideal of Audrey intact.
There was a slight stir in the passage outside the half-open door. Audrey, still busy about Katherine's dress, seemed not to hear it.
"My dear Audrey!" protested Miss Craven from her corner.
"There, that'll do!" said Katherine, laughing; "you've stuck quite enough pins into me for one night."
"Stand still, and don't wiggle!" cried Audrey, as the door opened wide. For a second she was conscious of being watched by eyes that were not Ted's or anything like them. At the same time the footman announced in a firm, clear voice, "Mr. Knowles and Mr. Langley Wyndham!"
She had heard this time. The look she had seen from the doorway was the same look that had followed her in the Dean's drawing-room at Oxford. All the emotions of that evening thronged back into her mind—the vague fascination, the tense excitement, the mortification that resulted from the wound to her self-love and pride.
So this was Mr. St. John!
A year ago he had refused an introduction to her, and now he wanted to know her; his friend had said so. He was seeking the acquaintance of his own accord, without encouragement. How odd it all was! Well, whether his former discourtesy had been intentional or not, he knew how to apologise for it gracefully.
She had no time to think more about the matter, for her remaining guests came in all together; and in another five minutes Audrey was suffering from that kind of nightmare in which some grave issue—you don't know precisely what—hangs on the adjustment of trifles, absurdly disproportionate to the event, and which disarrange themselves perversely at the dramatic moment. Everything seemed to go wrong. She had relied on Knowles and Miss Gladys Armstrong for a brilliant display of intellectual fireworks; but beyond the first casual remarks absolutely required of them, they had not a word to say to each other. Miss Armstrong managed cleverly enough to strike a little spark of epigram from the flinty dialogue. It flickered and went out. Knowles smiled politely at the abortive attempt; but at her first serious remark he shook his head, as much as to say, "My dear lady, this is a conundrum; I give it up," and finally turned to Katherine on his left. In fact, he monopolised her during the rest of dinner, much to the annoyance of Mr. Dixon Barnett, who spent himself in futile efforts to win back her interest,—his behaviour in its turn rousing the uneasy attention of Mrs. Dixon Barnett. She, again, was so preoccupied in watching the movements of her lord, that she almost forgot the existence of Mr. Flaxman Reed, who sat silent and depressed under her shadow.
Wyndham gave Audrey credit for great perspicacity in pairing these two off together. "Poor fellow," he said to himself; "to preserve him from the temptations of the world and the flesh, she's considerately sent him in with the devil." For his own part, he devoted himself to Audrey and his dinner. From time to time he glanced across the table, and whenever he did so the corners of Knowles's mouth twitched nervously and he began to stroke his upper lip—a provoking habit of his, seeing that he had no moustache to account for it. Evidently there was some secret understanding between the two, and Wyndham was gravely and maliciously amused.
Katherine was enjoying herself too, but without malice. She had so few acquaintances and lived so much in the studio, that it was all fresh life to her. She was pleased with that unconscious irony of Audrey's which had thrown Knowles and Miss Armstrong together; pleased with the by-play between Knowles and Wyndham, and with the behaviour of the married couple. It was always a delight to her to watch strange faces. Mrs. Dixon Barnett was a big woman, with a long head, and she looked something like a horse with its ears laid back, her hair being arranged to carry out that idea. The great Asiatic explorer, whose round face wore an expression of permanent surprise, suggested a man who has met with some sudden shock from which he has never recovered. Katherine felt sorry for the Asiatic explorer. She felt sorry for Miss Gladys Armstrong too, a little pale woman with a large gaze that seemed to take you in without looking at you. Her face, still young and childlike, was scored with the marks of hard work and eager ambition, and there was bitterness in the downward droop of her delicate mouth. Yet the authoress of "Sour Grapes" was undeniably a successful woman. And Wyndham too, the successful man—Wyndham's face attracted Katherine in spite of herself, it was full of such curious inconsistencies. Altogether it was refined, impressive, almost noble; yet each of the features contradicted itself, the others, and the whole. The general outline was finely cut, but it looked a little worn at the edges. The shaven lips were sensitive, but they had hard curves at the corners; they were firm, without expressing self-restraint. In the same way the nose was fine at the bridge, and coarse towards the nostrils. The iris of the eyes was beautiful, with its clear brown streaks on an orb of greenish grey; yet his eyes were the most disagreeable feature in Wyndham's face. As for Knowles, he interested her with his genial cynicism; but it was a relief to turn from these restless types to Mr. Flaxman Reed. He had the face of the ideal ascetic—sweet in its austerity, militant in its renunciation. What in heaven's name was he doing at Audrey Craven's dinner-table?
Katherine was not too much absorbed in these speculations to see that Ted was behaving very prettily to old Miss Craven, and making himself useful by filling up awkward pauses with irrelevant remarks. The boy looked perfectly happy. Audrey's mere presence seemed to satisfy him, though she had not spoken a dozen words to him that evening, and was separated from him by the length of the table. At last she rose, and as he held the door open for her to go out, she turned to him with arched eyebrows and a smile that was meant to say, "You've been shamefully neglected, I know, but I had to attend to these tiresome people." Katherine saw Mr. Wyndham making a mental note of the look and the smile. She had taken an instinctive dislike to that man.
Upstairs in the drawing-room the five women settled down in a confidential group, and with one accord fell to discussing Mr. Wyndham. Miss Craven began it by mildly wondering whether he "looked so disagreeable on purpose, or because he couldn't help it." On the whole, she inclined to the more charitable view.
"What do you say, Kathy?" asked Audrey, without looking up.
"I agree with Miss Craven in thinking nature responsible for Mr. Wyndham's manners."
Mrs. Dixon Barnett disapproved of Katherine, but she joined in here with a guttural assent.
"Poor man," said Miss Gladys Armstrong, "he certainly hasn't improved since that affair with Miss Fraser."
Audrey looked up suddenly,—"What affair?"
"Don't you know? They were engaged a long time, wedding-day fixed and everything, when she broke it off suddenly, without a word of warning."
"Why?"
"Why indeed! She left her reasons to the imagination."
"When did it happen?"
"Just about this time last year. I can't think what made her do it, unless she had a turn for psychical research—raking in the ashes of his past, and that sort of thing."
"Was he very much cut up about it?"
"He didn't whine. But he's got an ugly wound somewhere about him. Curious man, Langley Wyndham. I haven't got to the bottom of him yet; and I flatter myself I know most men. My diagnosis is generally pretty correct. He's a very interesting type."
"Very," said Audrey below her breath. The novelist knitted her brows and fell into a reverie. Her interest in Langley Wyndham was not a purely professional one. Audrey reflected too. "Just about this time last year. That might account for things." She would have liked to ask more; but further discussion of his history was cut short by the entrance of Wyndham himself, followed by the rest.
Mr. Flaxman Reed was the first to take the empty seat by Audrey's side. He remembered the talk he had with her at Oxford—that talk which had provoked Wyndham's sarcastic comments. Himself a strange compound of intellectual subtilty and broad simplicity of character, he had taken Audrey's utterances in good faith. She had spoken to him of spiritual things, in one of those moments of self-revelation which, he knew well, come suddenly to those—especially to women—whose inner life is troubled. But this was not the atmosphere to revive such themes in. He had no part in Audrey's and in Wyndham's world,—the world which cared nothing for the principles he represented, those two great ideals which he served in his spirit and his body—the unity of the Church and the celibacy of the priesthood. But Audrey interested him. He had first met, last seen her, during a spiritual and intellectual crisis. He had stood alone then, severed from those dearest to him by troubled seas of controversy; and a word, a look, had passed which showed that she, this woman, sympathised with him. It was enough; there still clung to her the grave and tender associations of that time.
To-night the woman was unable to give him her whole-hearted attention. Audrey was disturbed and preoccupied. Ted was lounging at the back of her chair, hanging on her words; Wyndham and Miss Armstrong were sitting on the other side of her, and she felt herself straining every nerve to catch what they were saying.
"Yes," said Miss Armstrong in the tone of a proud parent, "'Through Fire to Moloch' was my first. In that book I threw down the gauntlet to Society. It shrugged its shoulders and took no notice. My second, 'Sour Grapes,' was a back-hander in its face. It shrieked that time, but it read 'Sour Grapes.'"
"Which at once increased the demand for 'Through Fire to Moloch.' I congratulate you."
Miss Armstrong ignored the impertinent parenthesis. "The critics abused me, but I expected that. They are men, and it was the men I exposed——"
Knowles, who was standing near, smiled, and blushed when he caught himself smiling. Wyndham laughed frankly at his confusion, and Audrey grew hot and cold by turns. What was the dreadful joke those two had about Miss Armstrong? She leaned back and looked up at Ted sweetly.
"Ted, I should like to introduce you to Mr. Knowles. He'll tell you all about that illustrated thing you wanted to get on to."
"I'm afraid," said Knowles, "that's not in my line: I don't know anything about any illustrated things."
"Well, never mind; I want you to know something about Mr. Haviland, anyhow."
This was just what Knowles wanted himself. He was deeply interested in the situation as far as he understood it, and he looked forward to its development. This little diversion created, Miss Armstrong continued with imperturbable calm. But Audrey, listening with one ear to Mr. Flaxman Reed, only heard the livelier parts of the dialogue.
"Life isn't all starched linen and eau-de-Cologne," said Miss Armstrong, sententiously.
"Did I ever say it was?" returned Wyndham.
"Virtually you do. You turn your back on average humanity."
"Pardon me, I do nothing of the kind. I use discrimination."
"Nature has no discrimination."
"Exactly. And Nature has no consideration for our feelings, and very little maidenly reserve. Therefore we've invented Art."
Audrey leaned forward eagerly. She felt an unusual exaltation. At last she was in the centre of intellectual life, carried on by the whirl of ideas. She answered her companion at random.
"Yes," Mr. Flaxman Reed was saying, "my work is disheartening. Half my parish are animals, brutalised by starvation, degraded out of all likeness to men and women."
"How dreadful! What hard work it must be!"
"Hard enough to find decent food and clothing for their bodies. But to have to 'create a soul under those ribs of death'——" he paused. His voice seemed suddenly to run dry.
"Yes," said Audrey in her buoyant staccato, "I can't think how you manage it."
There was a moment of silence. Wyndham had turned from Miss Armstrong; Knowles and Ted had long ago joined Miss Haviland at the other end of the room, where Mr. Dixon Barnett, still irresistibly attracted by Katherine, hovered round and round the little group, with the fatal "desire of the moth for the star." Audrey stood up; Miss Armstrong was holding out her hand and pleading a further engagement. The little woman looked sour and ruffled: Wyndham's manner had acted on her like vinegar on milk. She was followed by Mr. Flaxman Reed. Wyndham dropped into the seat he left.
"Dixon," said Mrs. Barnett in a low voice which the explorer knew and obeyed. They were going on to a large "At Home."
Audrey turned to Wyndham with a smile, "I hope you are not going to follow them, Mr. Wyndham?"
"No; I'm not a person of many engagements, I'm thankful to say. Barnett hasn't much the cut of a great explorer, has he?"
"No; but those wiry little men can go through a great deal."
"A very great deal. Is Mrs. Barnett a friend of yours?"
"No, not especially. Why?"
"Mere curiosity. That mouth of hers ought to have a bit in it. It's enough to send any man exploring in Central Asia. I can understand Barnett's mania for regions untrodden by the foot of man—or woman."
Audrey laughed a little nervously. "I made a mistake in introducing him to Miss Haviland."
"It was a little cruel of you. But not half so unkind as asking Miss Armstrong to meet Knowles. That was a refinement of cruelty."
"Why? What have I done? Tell me."
"Didn't you know that Knowles went for Miss Armstrong in last week's 'Piccadilly'? Criticised, witticised, slaughtered, and utterly made game of her?"
"No? I'd no idea! I thought they'd be delighted to meet each other; and I know so few really clever people, you know" (this rather plaintively). "He does cut up people so dreadfully, too."
"He cut her up into very small pieces. Knowles does these things artistically. He's so urbane in his brutality; that's what makes it so crushing. Are you an admirer of Miss Armstrong?"
He looked her full in the face, and Audrey blushed. She had read Miss Armstrong's works, and liked them, because it was the fashion; but not for worlds would she have admitted the fact now.
"I don't think I am. I've not read all her books."
"Did you like them?"
"I—I hardly know. She's written so many, and I can't understand them—at least not all of them."
Wyndham smiled. She had read all of them, then.
"I'm glad to hear it. I can't understand them myself; but I detest them, all the same."
"I thought so. I saw you were having an argument with her."
"Oh, as for that, I agreed with her—with her theory, that is, not with her practice; that's execrable. But whatever she says I always want to support the other side."
He changed the subject, much to Audrey's relief.
"I think you knew Mr. Flaxman Reed at Oxford?"
"Yes, slightly. He's an old friend of my uncle's."
"There's something infinitely pathetic about him. I've an immense respect for him—probably because I don't understand him. I was surprised to meet him here."
"Really, you are very uncomplimentary to me."
"Am I? Mr. Reed has renounced all the pleasant things of life—hence my astonishment at seeing him here. Do you find him easy to get on with?"
"Perfectly." She became absorbed in picking the broken feathers out of her fan. She took no interest in Mr. Flaxman Reed. What she wanted was to be roused, stimulated by contact with a great intellect; and the precious opportunity was slipping minute by minute from her grasp. Wyndham was wasting it in deliberate trivialities. She longed to draw him into some subject, large and deep, where their sympathies could touch, their thoughts expand and intermingle. She continued tentatively, with a suggestion of self-restrained suffering in her voice, "I don't think I have any right to discuss Mr. Reed. You know—I have no firm faith, no settled opinions."
It was an opening into the larger air, a very little one; she had no knowledge or skill to make it bigger, but she was determined to show herself a woman abreast of her time. Wyndham leaned back and looked at her through half-opened eyelids.
"You are no longer convinced of the splendid logic of the Roman faith?"
She started. His words recalled vividly that evening at Oxford, though she would not have recognised them as hers but for the quotation marks indicated by Wyndham's tone.
"No—that was a year ago. What did you know about me then?"
"Nothing. I divined much."
"You are right. How well you remember!" She leaned forward. Her face was animated, eager, in its greed of sympathy, understanding, acknowledgment. Clear and insistent, with a note as of delicate irony, the little porcelain clock in the corner sounded eleven. Knowles and others were making a move. Wyndham rose.
"I remember most things worth remembering."
Five minutes afterwards Audrey, wrapt in thought, was still standing where Wyndham had left her. Miss Craven and Katherine had gone upstairs, and she was alone with Ted. Suddenly she clenched her hands together, at the full length of her white arms, and turned to him in an agony of tenderness, clinging to him like an overwrought child, and lavishing more sweetness on him than she had done since the day of their engagement. Ted was touched with the unusual pathos of her manner. He put it down to sorrow at their separation during the whole of a long evening.
CHAPTER X
It was the third week in August; summer was dying, as a London summer dies, in days of feverish sunlight and breathless languor. Everywhere there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in death. It was in the streets with their sultry pallor, in the parks and squares where the dust lay like a grey blight on every green thing. Everywhere the glare accentuated this toneless melancholy. It was the symbol of the decadence following the brilliant efflorescence of the season, the exhaustion after that supreme effort of Society to amuse itself. This lassitude is felt most by those who have shared least in the amusement, the workers who must stay behind in the great workshop because they are too busy or too poor to leave it.
There was one worker, however, who felt nothing of this depression. Langley Wyndham had reasons for congratulating himself that everybody was out of town, and that he was left to himself in his rooms in Dover Street. For one thing, it gave him opportunity for cultivating Miss Craven's acquaintance. For another, he had now a luxurious leisure in which to polish up the proofs of his last novel, and to arrange his ideas for its successor. Compared with this great work, all former efforts would seem to the taste they had created as so much literary trifling. Hitherto he had been merely trying his instrument, running his fingers over the keys in his easy professional way; but these preliminary flourishes gave no idea of the constructive harmonies to follow. And now, on a dull evening, some three weeks after Audrey's dinner-party, he was alone in his study, smoking, as he leaned back in his easy-chair, in one of those dreamy moods which with him meant fiction in the making, the tobacco-smoke curling round his head the Pythian fumes of his inspiration. The study was curiously suggestive of its owner's inconsistencies. With its silk cushions, Oriental rugs, and velvet draperies, its lining of books, and writing-table heaped with manuscripts and proofs, it witnessed to his impartial love of luxury and hard work. It told other secrets too. The cigar-case on the table beside him was embroidered by a woman's hand, the initials L. W. worked with gold thread in a raised monogram. Two or three photographs of pretty women were stuck by their corners behind the big looking-glass over the fireplace, together with invitation cards, frivolous little notes, and ball programmes. On one end of the mantel-board there was a photograph of Knowles; on the other, the one nearest Wyndham's chair, an empty frame of solid silver. The photograph and the frame represented the friendship and the love of his life.
To-night he had left his proofs untouched on the writing-table, and had settled himself comfortably to his pipe, with the voluptuous satisfaction of a man who has put off a disagreeable duty. He felt that delicious turmoil of ideas which with him accompanied the building up of a story round its central character. Not that he yet understood that character. Wyndham had his intuitions, but he was not the man to trust them as such; it was his habit to verify them by a subsequent logic. His literary conscience allowed nothing to take the place of the experimental method, the careful observation, and arranging of minute facts, intimate analytical study from the life. No action was too small, no emotion too insignificant, for his uncompromising realism. He had applied the same method to his own experience. Whatever came in his way, the tragedy or comedy of his daily life, his moods of passion and apathy, the aspirations of his better moments, all underwent the same disintegrating process. He had the power of standing aloof from himself, of arresting the flight of his own sensations, and criticising his own actions as a disinterested spectator. Thus he made no experiment on others that he had not first tried on his own person. If any man ever understood himself, that man was Langley Wyndham. He was by no means vain of this distinction; on the contrary, he would have said that as a man's inner consciousness is the only thing he has any direct knowledge of, he must be a fool if he can live with himself—the closest of all human relations—for thirty-five years without understanding his own character.
What he really prided himself on was his knowledge of other people, especially of women. Unfortunately, for the first few years of his literary life he knew no women intimately: he had many acquaintances among them, a few enemies, but no friends; and the little he knew of individuals had not tended to raise his opinion of women in general. Consequently he drew them all, as he saw them, from the outside; the best sort with a certain delicacy and clearness of outline, the result of unerring eyesight and the gift of style; the worst sort with an incisive, almost brutal touch that suggested the black lines bitten out by some powerful acid. His work "took" because of its coarser qualities, the accentuated bitterness, the startling irony, the vigorous, characteristic phrase. Those black strokes were not introduced to throw up the grey wash or pencilled shading; Wyndham's cynicism was no mere literary affectation, it was engrained in his very nature. He had gone through many phases of disillusionment (including disgust at his own success) before that brief crisis of feeling which ended in his engagement to Miss Fraser. Then, for the first time in his life, a woman's nature had been given to him to know. It was a glorious opportunity for the born analyst; and for the first time in his life he let an opportunity go. He loved Alison Fraser, and he found that love made understanding impossible. He never wanted to understand her; the relentless passion for analysis was absorbed in a comprehensive enthusiasm which embraced the whole of Alison and took no count of the parts. To have pulled her to pieces, even with a view to reconstruction, would have been a profanation of her and of his love. For a whole year the student of the earthly and the visible lived on the substance of things unseen—on faith in the goodness of Alison Fraser. By a peculiar irony it was her very goodness—for she was a good woman—which made her give up Wyndham. As Miss Gladys Armstrong had guessed (or as she would have put it, diagnosed), a detail of Wyndham's past life had come to Miss Fraser's knowledge, as these details always come, through a well-meaning friend. It was one which made it difficult for her to reconcile her marriage with Wyndham to her conscience. And because she loved him, because the thought of him, so hard to other women, so tender to herself, fascinated her reason and paralysed her will—flattering the egoism inherent even in the very good—because she was weak and he was irresistibly strong, she cut herself from him deliberately, open-eyed, and with one stroke. She had just sufficient strength for the sudden breaking off of their engagement, none for explanation, and none, alas! to save her from regretting her act of supererogatory virtue.
Wyndham gave no sign of suffering. He simply sank back into himself, and became the man he had been before, plus his experience of feeling, and minus the ingenuousness of his self-knowledge. He took instead to self-mystification, trying to persuade himself that because he could not have Alison, Alison was not worth having. After that, it was but a step to palming off on his reason the monstrous syllogism that because Alison was unworthy, and Alison was a woman, therefore all women were unworthy. Except for purely literary purposes, he had done with the sex. He became if anything more intently, more remorselessly analytical, more absolutely the student of human nature. He lived now in and for his work.
He struck out into new paths; he was tired of his neutral washes, and striking effects in black and white. He had begun to dream of glorious subtilties of design and colour. Novels were lying in his head ten deep. He had whole note-books full of germs and embryos, all neatly arranged in their separate pigeon-holes. In some he had jotted down a name and a date, or a word which stood for a whole train of ideas. In others he had recorded some illustration as it occurred to him; or a single sentence stood flanked by a dozen variants—Wyndham being a careful worker and sensitive to niceties of language. To-night he was supremely happy. He saw his way to a lovely little bit of psychological realism. All that had been hitherto wanting to this particular development of his art had been the woman. In Audrey Craven he had found the indispensable thing—intimacy without love, or even, as he understood the word, friendship. She was the type he had long desired, the feminine creature artless in perpetual artifice, for ever revealing herself in a succession of disguises.
He was beginning to adjust his latest impressions to his earlier idea of her. He recalled the evening when he had first seen her—the hot, crowded drawing-room, the heavy atmosphere, the dull faces coming and going, and the figure of Audrey flashing through it all. She had irritated him then, for he had not yet classified her. He had tried not to think of her. She dogged his thoughts with most unmaidenly insistence; her image lay in wait for him at every cross-road of association; it was something vivid yet elusive, protean yet persistent. He recalled that other evening of her dinner-party—their first recognised meeting. Her whole person, which at first sight had impressed him with its emphatic individuality, now struck him as characterless and conventional. And yet—what was she like? She was like a chameleon. No, she wasn't; he recollected that the change of colour was a vital process in that animal. She was like an opal—all sparkle when you move it, and at rest dull, most undeniably dull. No, that wasn't it exactly. She was a looking-glass for other people's personalities (he hated the horrid word, and apologised to himself for using it), formless and colourless, reflecting form and colour. After a moment's satisfaction with this last fancy, he became aware that he was being made the fool of metaphor. That was not his way. To find out what lay at the bottom of this shifting personality, what elemental thoughts and feelings, if any, the real Audrey was composed of; to see for himself the play of circumstances on her plastic nature, and know what reaction it was capable of—in a word, to experimentalise in cold blood on the living nerve and brain tissue, was his plan of work for the year 1896.
Making a mental note of several of the above phrases for future use, Wyndham knocked the ashes out of his pipe and went to bed, where he dreamed that the Devil, in evening dress, was presenting him with Audrey's soul—done up in a brown wrapper marked "MS. only"—for dissection.
CHAPTER XI
It was in no direct accordance with his literary plans, though it may have been preordained in some divine scheme of chances, that Wyndham found himself next Sunday attending evensong at St. Teresa's, Lambeth. It so happened that Audrey and the Havilands had chosen that very evening to go and hear, or, as Ted expressed it, see Flaxman Reed. He wanted Flaxman Reed's head for a study. Ted seldom condescended to enter any church of later date than the fifteenth century, and, architecturally speaking, he feared the worst from St. Teresa's. Indeed, smoke, fog, and modern Gothic genius have made the outside of that building one with the grimy street it stands in, and Ted was not prepared for the golden beauty of the interior. His judgment halted as if some magic effect of colour had blinded it to stunted form and pitiful perspective. But the glory of St. Teresa's is its music. The three late-comers were shown into seats in the chancel as the choir were singing the Magnificat. Music was the one art to which Audrey's nature responded spontaneously after its kind. She knelt down and covered her face with her hands for a prayer's space, while the voices of the choir and organ shook her on every side with a palpable vibration. She was conscious then of a deep sense of religion merging in a faint expectancy, a premonition of things to follow. She rose from her knees and found an explanation of this in the fact that Langley Wyndham was standing in the opposite seat below the choir. She was not surprised; for her the unexpected was always about to happen. It had happened now.
She tried not to see or think of him; but she felt him as something illuminating and intensifying her consciousness. She heard the vicar's voice like a fine music playing in the background. Then organ and choir burst into the anthem. It was a fugue; the voices seemed to have gathered together from the ends of the world, flying, pursuing and flying, doubled, trebled, quadrupled in their flight, they met and parted, they overtook and were overtaken. And now it was no longer a fugue of sounds—it was a fugue of all sensations. The incense rose and mingled with the music; the music fled and rose, up among the clustering gas-jets, up to the chancel roof where it lost itself in a shimmering labyrinth of gold and sapphire, and died in a diminuendo of light and sound. Audrey looked up, and as her eyes met Wyndham's, it seemed as if a new and passionate theme had crashed into her fugue, dominating its harmonies, while the whole rushed on, more intricate, more tumultuous than before. Her individuality that had swum with the stream became fluent and coalesced with it now, soul flooded with sense, and sense with soul. She came to herself exhausted and shivering with cold. Flaxman Reed was in the pulpit. He stood motionless, with compressed lips and flashing eyes, as he watched the last deserters softly filing out through the side-aisles. The lights were turned low in nave and chancel; Ted wriggled in his seat until he commanded a good view of the fine head, in faint relief against a grey-white pillar, stone on stone; and Flaxman Reed flung out his text like a challenge to the world: "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." The words suggested something piquantly metaphysical, magnificently vague, and Audrey followed the sermon a little way. But Flaxman Reed was in his austerest, most militant mood. He was a master of antithesis, and to Audrey there was something repellent in his steel-clad thoughts, his clear diamond-pointed sentences. No eloquence had any charm for her that was not as water to reflect her image, or as wind to lift and carry her along. Her fancy soon fluttered gently down to earth, and she caught herself wondering whether Wyndham would walk back to Piccadilly or go in a hansom.
She was still pursuing this train of thought as they left the church, when she proposed that they should go back to Chelsea by Westminster instead of Lambeth Bridge. Wyndham overtook them as they turned down to the river by St. Thomas's Hospital. He stopped while Audrey pointed out the beauty of the scene with her little air of unique appreciation. "Isn't it too lovely for words? The suggestion—the mystery of it!" Her voice had a passionate impatience, as if she chafed at the limitations of the language. "Who says London's cold and grey? It's blue. And yet what would it be without the haze?" Wyndham smiled inscrutably: perhaps he wondered what Miss Audrey Craven would be without the haze?
"What did you think of the service?" she asked presently. By this time she and Wyndham were walking together a little in advance of the others.
"I didn't hear it. I was watching Flaxman Reed all the time." This statement, as Audrey well knew, was not strictly correct.
"So was I. My uncle says if he stays in the church he'll be the coming man."
"The coming man? H'm. He's been going back ever since I knew him. At present he's got to the thirteenth century; he may arrive at the Nicene age, but he'll never have a hold on his own. He's nothing but a holy anachronism."
"Oh? I thought you didn't understand him?"
"In one way I do, in another I don't. You see I knew him at Oxford when I was a happy undergraduate." (Audrey could not imagine Langley Wyndham ever being an undergraduate; it seemed to her that he must always have been a Master of Arts.) "I knew the real Flaxman Reed, and he was as logical a sceptic as you or I. There was an epidemic of ideas in our time, and the poor fellow was frightened, so he took it—badly. Of course he made up his mind that he was going to die, and he was horribly afraid of dying. So instead of talking about his interesting symptoms, as you or I might do" ("You or I"—again that flattering association!), "he quietly got rid of the disease by attacking its source."
"How?"
"Well, I forget the precise treatment, but I think he took equal parts of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, diluted with aqua sacra. He gave me the prescription, but I preferred the disease."
"At any rate he was in earnest."
"Deadly earnest. That's the piety of the fraud."
"You surely don't call him a fraud?"
"Well—a self-deceiver. Isn't that the completest and most fatal form of fraud? He fights and struggles to be what he isn't and calls it renouncing self."
"He renounces the world too—and everything that's pleasant."
"I'm afraid that doesn't impress me. I can't forget that he renounced reason because it was unpleasant. Rather than bear a little spiritual neuralgia, he killed the nerve of thought."
"How terrible!" said Audrey, though she had no very precise notion of what was involved in that operation.
"To us—not to him. Yet he talks about doing good work for his generation."
"Why shouldn't he? He works hard enough."
"Unfortunately his generation doesn't want his work or him either. It's too irrevocably pledged to reality. There's one thing about him though—his magnificent personality. I believe he has unlimited influence over some men and most women."
Audrey ignored the last suggestion. "You seem to find him very interesting."
"He is profoundly interesting. Not in himself so much, but in his associations. Do you know, when I saw you in church to-night it struck me that he might possibly influence you."
"Never! I should have to give up my intellect first, I suppose. I'm not prepared to do that." Wyndham smiled again. "Why, what made you think he would influence me?"
"I'd no right to think anything at all about it, but I know some women take him for a hierophant."
"Some women? Do you think I'm like them?"
"You are like nothing but yourself. I was only afraid that he might persuade you to renounce yourself and become somebody else, which would be a pity."
"Don't be alarmed. I'm not so impressionable as you think."
"Aren't you? Be frank. Didn't you feel to-night that he might have a revelation for you?"
"No. And yet it's odd you should say so. I have felt that, but—not with him. I shall never come under that influence."
"I hope not." (It was delightful to have Langley Wyndham "hoping" and being "afraid" for her.) "He belongs to the dead—you to the living."
What a thing it is to have a sense of style, to know the words that consecrate a moment! They were crossing Westminster Bridge now, and Audrey looked back. On the Lambeth end of the bridge Ted and Katherine were leaning over the parapet; she looked at them as she might have looked at two figures in a crowd. Lambeth and St. Teresa's seemed very far away. She said so, and her tone implied that she had left illusion behind her on the Surrey side.
Wyndham said good-bye at Westminster. Audrey was not quite pleased with his manner of hailing a hansom; it implied a conscious loss of valuable time.
"What fools we were to let him catch us up," said Ted as they walked towards Pimlico. Audrey made no answer. She was saying to herself that Langley Wyndham had read her, and—well, she hardly thought he would take the trouble to read anything that was not interesting.
CHAPTER XII
Audrey had made a faint protest against Wyndham's realistic presentation of Flaxman Reed. In doing so she was not guided by any insight into the character of that divine, or by any sympathy with his aims. Indeed she could not have understood him if she had tried. Her thoughts had never travelled along that avenue of time down which Wyndham had tracked his pathetic figure to the thirteenth century. She merely wanted to avoid a slavish acquiescence in Wyndham's view, to guard a characteristic intellectual attitude. Intellect has its responsibilities, and she was anxious to show herself impartial. In all this Flaxman Reed counted for nothing. It was intolerable to her that Wyndham should have classed her even for a moment with those weak emotional creatures who submitted to his influence. Why, he might just as well have said that she was influenced by Ted Haviland; the fact being that no engaged woman ever preserved her independence more completely than she had done. Had devotion to Ted interfered with her appreciation of Wyndham? Then she reflected that Wyndham did not know about her engagement any more than other people.
So when Mr. Flaxman Reed called, as he did on Monday afternoon, Audrey met him with a mind secure against any malignant charm. His most innocent remarks excited her suspicion.
"I'm glad you've found your way to St. Teresa's. We don't often get such a strong contingent from the other side." By "the other side" Mr. Reed meant Middlesex, but to Audrey the phrase was insidiously controversial. She determined to take her stand once and for all.
"I'm afraid my heterodoxy is incorrigible. So I should say is Mr. Langley Wyndham's."
The vicar raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. "I don't know why he came—unless it was for old acquaintance' sake."
"Ah! you knew him, didn't you? Do tell me about him. He's public property, you know."
"I daresay, but I have no right to discuss him. We hardly ever meet now; if we did we shouldn't agree. We are enigmas to each other."
"Yes," she said meditatively, and with a faint reproduction of Wyndham's manner, "I should say you would be. He belongs so essentially to the present, don't you think?"
Flaxman Reed flushed painfully. "And I to the past—is that what you mean?"
"Yes, I think I do."
"You may be right. I suppose he is very modern—a decadent who would rather die with his day than live an hour behind it—who can't see that the future may have more kindred with the past than with the present. Mind you, I'm not talking of him, but of his school."
"Then you read him? Of course—everybody reads him."
"I've not much time for any reading that lies outside my work. But I read his first book when it came out. Is it from him you get what you call your heterodoxy?"
"No. You have to think these things out for yourself."
Audrey was led into making this statement simply by the desire to please. That eternally feminine instinct told her that at the moment she would be most interesting to Flaxman Reed in the character of a forlorn sceptic. His face sharpened with a sudden distrust.
"What, have you got the malady of the century—the disease of thought? Surely this is something new?"
"It is. One can't go on for ever in the old grooves. One must think."
"Yes; that curse is laid upon us for our sins."
Audrey smiled a bitter smile, as much as to say that she must have committed some awful crime to be so tormented with intellect as she was.
"I suppose," he continued guilelessly, "every earnest mind must go through this sooner or later."
"Yes, but I've come out on what you call the other side. I can't go back, can I?"
"No; but you can go round."
Audrey shook her head sadly, feeling all the time how nice it was to be taken seriously.
"Why not? Why not compromise? What is life but compromise? What else is my own position as an Anglican priest? I daresay you know that my heart is not altogether with the Church I serve?" He checked himself; he had not meant to strike this personal note. And how could he explain the yearning of his heart for the great heart of the Mother-church? This would have been possible last year at Oxford, but not now. "I tell you this because I feel that it might perhaps help you."
"No; I know what you will say next. You will tell me to stop thinking because it hurts me."
"I won't. You will go on thinking in spite of me. But your intellect will be feeding on itself. You will get no farther. Thought can never be satisfied with thought."
Flaxman Reed was only a simple pure-minded priest, but Wyndham himself could not have chosen words more subtly calculated to establish the "influence." To have two such champions battling for possession of her soul was exciting enough in all conscience, but she was inexpressibly flattered by that dramatic conception of herself as a restless intellect struggling with the storms of doubt. It would be hard to say how Flaxman Reed came to believe in any real passion of thought behind Audrey's spiritual coquetry. His ministration to a living illusion was almost as touching as his devotion to a dead ideal. But Audrey herself was too completely the thrall of the illusion to feel compunction.
There was no voice to warn him that his enthusiasm was the prey of the eternal vanity. He leaned back in his meditative hieratic attitude, his elbows resting on the arm of his chair, his thin hands joined at the finger-tips, wondering what he should say to help her. After all, Audrey had stated her case a little vaguely—there was a reticence as to details. These, however, he easily supplied from his own experience, supposing hers to have been more or less like it. He said he wished he had known of this before, that he had spoken sooner, wincing perceptibly as Audrey pointed out the inexpediency of discussing eternal things on so temporal an occasion as her dinner-party. He did not mean that. His time now was short; he had a stupid parish meeting at five o'clock. He went rapidly over the ground, past immemorial stumbling-stones of thought, refuting current theories, suggesting lines of reading; in his excitement he even recommended some slight study of Patristics. There was nothing like getting to the sources—Polycarp and Irenæus were important; or he could lend her Lightfoot. But he did not want to overwhelm her with dogmas—mere matter for the intellect—he would prefer her to accept some truths provisionally and see how they worked out. After all, the working out was everything. He wanted her to see that it was a question of will. In the crisis of his own life he had helped himself most by helping others—practically, he meant—seeing after his poor people, and so on. Didn't she think it might be the same with her?
Audrey looked grave. It was good to be taken seriously, but this was going a little too far.
Didn't she think she could "do something? Other ladies——"
Flaxman Reed was doing well, very well indeed, but he had spoiled it all by that hopelessly inartistic touch. Any man of the world could have told him that to mention "other ladies" to Audrey—to take her out of the circle of supreme intelligences in which he had placed her ten minutes ago, and to confuse her with the rank and file of parochial underlings and hangers-on—was death to the "influence." It was an insult to her glorious womanhood. Some people might even have objected that such crass ignorance of the world he renounced detracted from the merit of the renunciation. Her voice was very cold and distant as she answered him. "What do you suppose I could do? If you mean slumming, I've never been down a slum in my life." No, he didn't mean slumming exactly. To tell the truth, he could not fancy Audrey mingling with the brutal side of life. He would have shrunk from giving her work that he committed without a pang to his deaconesses and sisters.
"Do you mean mothers' meetings then, and that sort of thing? I couldn't."
No, he didn't mean mothers' meetings either. But he thought she might like to come sometimes to their social evenings.
"Social evenings"—that was worse than all. He had plunged in his nervousness to the lowermost bathos. Audrey saw that he looked puzzled and disheartened. She crossed over to her writing-desk, wrote out a cheque for five pounds, and gave it to him with the prettiest action in the world. "I want you to take that for your poor people. I wish I could help in some other way, but I can't. I am so sorry." The apology was sweetness itself, but she had the air of having settled her account with humanity—and him. He thanked her gravely and took his leave, reminding her that whenever she needed his help, it would still be there. She remained musing some time after he had gone.
He little guessed how nearly he had won the victory. Perhaps he would have scorned any advantage gained by an appeal to her sex, though he had conceded much to it—more than he well knew.
CHAPTER XIII
August was a miserable month for Katherine in the hot attic, hard at work on her own pictures, and too often finishing the various orders for black and white which Knowles had after all managed to put in Ted's way. She could have stood the hard work if she had not been more than ever worried on Ted's account. With her feminine instinct sharpened by affection, she foresaw trouble at hand—complications which it would never have entered into the boy's head to consider. For reasons of her own Audrey was still keeping her engagement a secret. She was less regular, too, in making appointments, fixing days for Ted to go over and see her; and more often than not he missed her if he happened to call at Chelsea Gardens of his own accord. At the same time she came to Devon Street as often as, or oftener than, ever, and there her manner to Ted had all its old charm, with something added; it was more deeply, more seriously affectionate than before. And yet it was just in these tender passages that Katherine detected the change of key. That tenderness was not remorse, as she might have supposed. It had nothing to do with the past, being purely an emotion of the passing moment. Audrey was playing a new part. Her mind was swayed by a fresh current of ideas; it had suffered the invasion of a foreign personality. The evidence for this was purely psychological, but it all pointed one way. A sudden display of new interests, a startling phrase, a word hitherto unknown in Audrey's vocabulary, her way of handling a book, the alternate excitement and preoccupation of her manner, they were all unmistakable. Katherine had noticed the same signs in the days of Audrey's first absorption in Ted. She had caught his tricks, his idioms, his way of thinking. She had even begun to see, like Ted, the humour of things, and to make reckless speeches, not quite like Ted, that shocked cousin Bella's sense of propriety. Katherine had smiled at her innocent plagiarism, and wondered at the transforming power of love. And now—Audrey was actually undergoing another metempsychosis. Under whose influence? Here again Katherine's instinct was correct. It was Wyndham's presence that in three weeks had brought about the change. Yes; in that impressive affection, in the pleading tremor of her voice, in her smiles and caresses, Audrey was acting a part before one invisible spectator. She played as if Wyndham were standing by and looking on. Her love for Ted had been a reality; therefore it served as a standard to measure all emotions by—it made this new passion of the imagination a thing of flesh and blood. No wonder that she would not announce her engagement. At the best of times her fluent nature shrank from everything that was fixed and irrevocable—above all from the act of will that trammelled her wandering fancy, the finality that limited her outlook upon life. And now it was impossible. The three weeks in which she had known Wyndham had shown her that, compared with that complex character, that finished intellect, Ted was indeed little better than a baby. Not that she could have done without Ted—far from it. As yet Wyndham was still the unknown, shadowy, far-off, and unapproachable. The touch of Ted's hand seemed to make him living, to bring him nearer to her. Ted still stood between her and the void where there is no more revelation, no hope, no love—and Hardy would be in London in another week.
Katherine had not guessed all the truth, any more than Audrey had herself; but she had guessed enough to make her extremely anxious. Audrey was not the wife she could have wished for Ted: she disapproved of his marriage with her as a certain hindrance to his career; but, above all, she dreaded for him the agony of disappointment which must follow if Audrey gave him up. She had no very clear idea of what it would mean to him; but judging his nature by what she had seen of it, she feared some shock either to his moral system or to his artistic powers. She longed to speak to him about it; but Ted and she were not accustomed to handling their emotions, and of late they had avoided all personal questions not susceptible of humorous treatment. After this persistent choosing of the shallows, she shrank from a sudden plunge into the depths. She felt strongly, and with her strong feeling was a bar to utterance.
At last an incident occurred which laid the subject open to frivolous discussion.
Katherine was painting one afternoon, and Ted was leaning out of the window, which looked south-west to Chelsea, his thoughts travelling in a bee-line towards the little brown house. Suddenly he drew his head in with an exclamation.
"Uncle James, by Jove! He'll be upon us in another minute. I'm off!" And he made a rush for his bedroom.
Katherine had only time to wipe the paint from her brush, to throw a tablecloth over the Apollo and a mackintosh over the divine shoulders of the Venus—Mr. Pigott was a purist in art, and Katherine respected his prejudices—when her uncle arrived, panting and inarticulate.
"Well, uncle, this is a surprise! How are you?"
"No better for climbing up that precipice of yours. What on earth possessed you to come to this out-of-the-way hole?"
"It's a good room for painting, you see——"
"What's that? Couldn't you find a good room in West Kensington, instead of planting yourself up here away from us all?"
This was a standing grievance, as Katherine knew.
"Well, you see, it's nicer here by the river, and it's cheaper too; and—how's aunt Kate?"
"Your aunt Kate has got a stye in her eye."
"Dear me, I'm very sorry to hear it. And you, uncle?"
"Poorly, very poorly. I ought not to have got out of my bed to-day. One of my old attacks. My liver's never been the same since I caught that bad chill at your father's funeral."
Uncle James looked at Katherine severely, as if she had been to blame for the calamity. His feeling was natural. One way or another, the Havilands had been the cause of calamity in the family ever since they came into it. Family worship and the worship of the Family were different but equally indispensable forms of the one true religion. The stigma of schism, if not of atheism, attached to the Havilands in departing from the old traditions and forming a little sect by themselves. Mr. Pigott meant well by them; at any time he would have helped them substantially, in such a manner as he thought fit. But, one and all, the Havilands had refused to be benefited in any way but their own; their own way, in the Pigotts' opinion, being invariably a foolish one—"between you and me, sir, they hadn't a sound business head among them." As for Ted and Katherine, before the day when he had washed his hands of Ted in the office lavatory, uncle James had tried to play the part of an overruling Providence in their affairs, and the young infidels had signified their utter disbelief in him. Since then he had ceased to interfere with his creatures; and latterly his finger was only to be seen at times of marked crisis or disturbance, as in the arrangements for a marriage or a funeral.
An astounding piece of news had come to his ears, which was the reason of his present visitation. He hastened to the business in hand.
"What's this that I hear about Ted, eh?"
"I don't know," said Katherine, blushing violently.
"I'm told that he's taken up with some woman, nobody knows who, and that they're seen everywhere together——"
"'Who told you this?"
"Your cousin Nettie. She's seen them—constantly—in the National Gallery and the British Museum, carrying on all the time they're pretending to look at those heathen gods and goddesses"—Katherine glanced nervously round the studio. "They actually make assignations—they meet on the steps of public places. Nettie has noticed her hanging about waiting for him, and some young friends of hers saw them dining together alone at the Star and Garter. Now what's the meaning of all this?"
Katherine was too much amused to answer yet; she wanted to see what her uncle would say next. He shook his head solemnly.
"I knew what it would be when you two had it all your own way. As for you, Katherine, you took a very grave responsibility on your shoulders when you persuaded your young brother to live with you here, in this neighbourhood, away from all your relations. Your influence has been for anything but good."
"My dear uncle, you are so funny; but you're mistaken. I know Miss Craven, the lady you mean, perfectly well; she and Ted are great friends, and it's all right, I assure you."
"Do you mean to tell me he is engaged to this young lady he goes about with?"
Katherine hesitated: if she had felt inclined to gratify a curiosity which she considered impertinent, she was not at liberty to betray their secret.
"I can't tell you that, for I'm not supposed to know."
"Let me tell you, then, that it looks bad—very bad. To begin with, your cousin Nettie strongly disapproves of the young woman's appearance, so loud and over-dressed, evidently got up to attract. But it lies in a nutshell. If he's not engaged to her, why is he seen everywhere with her? If he is engaged to her, and she's a respectable woman—I say if she's respectable, why doesn't he introduce her to his family? Why doesn't he ask your aunt Kate to call on her?"
"Well, you see, supposing they are engaged, they wouldn't go and proclaim it all at once; and in any case, that would depend more on Miss Craven than Ted. I can't tell you any more than I have done; and I'd be greatly obliged if you wouldn't allow Ted's affairs to be gossiped about by cousin Nettie or anybody else."
She was relieved for the moment by the entrance of Mrs. Rogers with the tea-tray.
"Tea, uncle?"
"No, thank you, none of your cat-lap. I must see Ted himself. Where is he?"
"I'm not sure, but I think he's gone out."
Mrs. Rogers looked up from her tray, pleased to give valuable information.
"Mr. 'Aviland is in 'is bedroom, m'm; I 'eard 'im as I come up."
"Oh, I'll go and tell him then."
She found Ted dressing himself carefully before calling on Audrey. She wasted five minutes in trying to persuade him to see his uncle. Ted was firm.
"Give him my very kindest regards, and tell him a pressing engagement alone prevents my waiting on him."
With that he ran merrily downstairs. His feet carried him very swiftly towards Audrey.
Katherine gave the message, with some modifications; and Mr. Pigott, seeing that no good was to be gained by staying, took his leave.
Ted came back sooner than his sister had expected. He smiled faintly at the absurd appearance of the Venus in her mackintosh, but he was evidently depressed. He looked mournfully at the tea-table.
"I'm afraid the tea's poison, Ted, and it's cold."
"It doesn't matter, I don't want any."
"Had tea at Audrey's?"
"No."
He strode impatiently to the table and took up one of the illustrations Katherine had been working at.
"What's up?" said she.
"Oh—er—for one thing, I've heard from the editor of the 'Sunday Illustrated.' He's in a beastly bad temper, and says my last batch of illustrations isn't funny enough. The old duffer's bringing out a religious serial, and he must have humour to make it go down."
Katherine was relieved. To divert him, she told him the family's opinion as to his relations with Audrey. That raised his spirits so far that he called his uncle a "fantastic old gander," and his cousin Nettie an "evil-minded little beast."
"After all, Ted," said Katherine, judicially, "why does Audrey go on making a mystery of your engagement?"
"I don't know and I don't care," said Ted, savagely.
Surely it was not in the power of that harmless person, the editor of the "Sunday Illustrated," to move him so? Something must have happened.
What had happened was this. As Ted was going into the little brown house at Chelsea he had met Mr. Langley Wyndham coming out of it; and for the first time in his life he had found Audrey in a bad temper. She was annoyed, in the first place, because the novelist had been unable to stay to tea. She had provided a chocolate cake on purpose, the eminent man having once approved of that delicacy. (It was a pretty way Audrey had, this remembering the likings of her friends.) She was also annoyed because Ted's coming had followed so immediately on Wyndham's going. It was her habit now, whenever she had seen Wyndham, to pass from the reality of his presence into a reverie which revived the sense of it, and Ted's arrival had interfered with this pastime. The first thing the boy did, too, was to wound her tenderest susceptibilities. He began playing with the books that lay beside her.
"What a literary cat it is!"
She frowned and drew in her breath quickly, as if in pain. He went on turning over the pages—it was Wyndham's "London Legends"—with irreverent fingers.
"I should very much like to know——" said Audrey to Ted, and stopped short.
"What would you very much like to know, Puss?"
"What you saw in me, to begin with."
"I haven't the remotest idea—unless it was your intellect."
"I should also like to know," said Audrey to the teapot, "why people fall in love?"
"The taste is either natural or acquired. Some take to it because they like it; some are driven to it by a hereditary tendency or an unhappy home. I do it myself to drown care."
"Will you have any tea?" asked Audrey, sternly.
"No, thank you, I won't."
She laughed, as she might have laughed at a greedy child for revenging on its stomach the injury done to its heart. Poor Ted, he was fond of chocolate cake too! She would have given anything at that moment if she could have provoked him into quarrelling with her.
Instead of quarrelling, he stroked her beautiful hair as if she had been some soft but irritable animal. He said he was sure her dear little head was aching because she was so bad-tempered; he implored her not to eat too much cake, and promised to call again another day, when he hoped to find her better. So he left her, and went home with a dead weight at his heart.
Towards evening his misery became so acute that he could no longer keep it to himself. They were on the leads, in the long August twilight, Katherine sitting with her back against the tall chimney, watching the reflection of the sunset in the east, the boy lying at her feet, with his heels in the air and his head in the nasturtiums. The time, the place, the attitude were all favourable to confidences, and Ted wound up his by asking Katherine what she thought of Audrey? Now was the moment to rid herself of the burden that weighed on her; Ted might never be in so favourable a mood again. She spoke very gently.
"Ted, I am going to hurt your feelings. I don't quite know how to tell you what I think of her. She's not good enough for you, to begin with——"
"I know she's not intelligent. She can't help that."
"And she's not affectionate. Oh, Ted, forgive me! but she doesn't love you—she can't, it's not in her. She loves no one but herself."
"She is a little selfish, but she can't help that either. It makes no difference."
"So I fear. And then she's years older than you are, and you can't marry for ages; don't you see how impossible it all is?"
Her voice thrilled with her longing to impress him with her own conviction. His passion was wrestling with a ghastly doubt, but it was of the kind that dies hard.
"Of course it's quite impossible now"—neither he nor Katherine considered the question of Audrey's money, they had never thought of it—"but, as she said herself, in five years' time, when she's thirty and I'm twenty-five, the difference in our ages won't be so marked."
"It will be as marked as ever, even if your intellect grows at its present rate of development."
"I've admitted that she's a little deficient in parts; and, as you justly observe, stupidity, like death, is levelling. We should suit each other exactly in time."
"Ah, if you can see that, why, oh why, did you fall in love with her?"
"She asked me that this afternoon. I said it was because she was so clever. It was because I was a fool—stupidity came upon me like a madness—I wish to heaven I'd never done it. It's played the devil with my chances. I was sitting calmly on the highroad to success, with my camp-stool and my little portable easel, not interfering in the least with the traffic, when she came along like a steam-roller, knocked me down, crushed me, and rolled me out flat. I shall never recover my natural shape; and as for the camp-stool and the portable easel—these things are an allegory. But I love her all the same."
Katherine laughed in spite of herself, but she understood the allegory. Would he ever recover his natural shape? To that end she was determined to make him face the worst.
"Ted, what would you do, supposing—only supposing—she were to fling you over for—for some one else?"
"I should blow my brains out, if I had any left. Verdict, suicide while in a state of temporary insanity."
"Suicide of a genius! That would be a fine feather in Audrey's cap."
"She always had exquisite taste in dress. Besides, she's welcome to it—or to any little trifle of the kind."
It was useless attempting to make any impression on him. She gave it up. Ted, however, was so charmed with the idea of suicide that he spent the rest of the evening discussing ways and means. He was not going to blow his brains out, or to take poison in his bedroom, or do anything disagreeable that would depreciate Mrs. Rogers's property. On the whole, drowning was the cheapest, and would suit him best, if he could summon up spirits for it. Only he didn't want to spoil the river for her. It must be somewhere below London Bridge, say Wapping Old Stairs. Here Katherine suggested that he had better go to bed.
He went, and lay awake all night in a half-fever. When Katherine went into his room the next morning (ten o'clock had struck, and there was no appearance of Ted), she found him lying in a deep sleep; one arm was flung outside the counterpane, the hand had closed on a crumpled sheet of paper. It was Audrey's last note of invitation—the baby had taken it to bed with him.
"Poor boy—poor, poor Ted!"
But, for all her sympathy, love, the stupidity that comes on you like a madness, was a thing incomprehensible to Katherine.
CHAPTER XIV
The next day Audrey's head was aching to some purpose. She had been going through a course of Langley Wyndham. Yesterday he had brought her his last book, "London Legends," and she had sat up half the night to read it. She was to tell him what she thought of it, and her ideas were in a whirl.
She stayed in bed for breakfast, excused herself from lunch, left word with the footman that she was not at home that afternoon, and sent down another message five minutes afterwards that, if by any chance Mr. Wyndham were to call, he might be admitted. "Not that he's in the least likely to come after being here yesterday," she said to herself; and yet, as she sat alone in the drawing room, she listened for the ringing of bells, the opening of doors, and the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Every five minutes she looked at the clock, and her heart kept time to its ticking. Half-past two. In any case he wouldn't come before three; and yet—surely that was the front-door bell. No. Three o'clock, four o'clock—he would be more likely to drop in about tea-time. Five o'clock; tea came in on the stroke of it, and still no Wyndham. Half-past five—he had once called later than that when he wanted to find her alone. Something told her that he would come to-day. He would be anxious to know what she thought of his book. She was in that state of mind when people trust in intuitions, failing positive evidence. Surely in some past state of existence she had sat in that chair, surrounded by the same objects, thinking the same thoughts, and that train of ideas had been completed by the arrival of Wyndham. Science accounts for this sensation by supposing that one half of the brain, more agile than another, jumps to its conclusion before its tardier fellow can arrive. To Audrey it was a prophecy certain of fulfilment. And all the time her head kept on aching. The poor little brain went on wandering in a maze of its own making. How truly she had, in cousin Bella's phrase, "entangled herself" with Hardy, with Ted, and possibly, nay probably, with Wyndham. She saw no escape from the dreadful situation. And as a dark background to her thoughts there hung the shadow of Hardy's return. She only realised it in these moods of reaction that followed the exaltation of the last three weeks. And to make matters worse, for the first time in her life she was dissatisfied with herself. Not that she was in the least aware of the deterioration of her character. She took no count of the endless little meannesses and falsehoods which she was driven into by her position. Simple straightforward action was impossible. This much was evident to her, that whatever course she took now, she must end by forfeiting some one's good opinion: Hardy's first—well, she could get over that; but Ted's? Katherine's? Wyndham's?—if he came to know everything? It was there, in that last possibility, that she suffered most.
Half-past six. She had given up Wyndham and her belief in psychical prophecy, and was trying to find relief from unpleasant reflections in a book, when Wyndham actually appeared. He came in with the confident smile of the friend sure of a welcome at all hours.
"Forgive my calling at this unholy time. I knew if I came earlier I should find you surrounded by an admiring crowd. I wanted to see you alone."
"Quite right. I am always at home to friends."
They dropped into one of those trivial dialogues which were Audrey's despair in her intercourse with Wyndham.
Suddenly his tone changed. He took up "London Legends."
"As you've already guessed, my egregious vanity brings me here. I don't know whether you've had time to look at the thing——"
"I sat up to finish it last night."
"Indeed. What did you think of it?"
"Don't ask me. I didn't criticise—sympathy comes first."
"Excuse me, it doesn't. Criticism comes first with all of us. Sympathy comes last of all—when we know the whole of life, and understand it."
"What would my poor little opinion be worth?"
"Everything. A really unbiassed judgment is the rarest thing in the world, and there's always a charm about naïve criticism."
"I couldn't put the book down. Can I say more?"
"Yes, of course you can say more. You can tell me which legend you disliked least; you can criticise my hero's conduct, and find fault with my heroine's manners; you can object to my plot, pick holes in my style. No, thank goodness, you can't do that; but you can take exception to my morality."
She sat silent, waiting for her cue, and trying to collect her thoughts, which were fluttering all abroad in generalities.
He went on with a touch of bitterness in his voice—
"I thought so. It's the old stumbling-block—my morality. If it hadn't been for that, you would have told me, wouldn't you? that my figures breathe and move, that every touch is true to life. But you daren't. You are afraid of reality; facts are so immoral."
It would be impossible to describe the accent of scorn which Wyndham threw into this last word.
"I thought your book very clever—in spite of the facts."
"Facts or no facts, you'd rather have your beliefs, wouldn't you?"
"No, no; I lost them all long ago!" cried Audrey, indignantly.
"I don't mean the old vulgar dogmas, of course, but the dear little ideals that shed such a rosy light on things in general, you know. Ah! that's what you want; and when an artist paints the real thing for you, you say, 'Thank you; yes, it's very clever, I see; but I prefer the pretty magic-lantern views, and the limelight of life.'"
"Not at all. I've much too great a regard for truth."
"I know. You're always looking for Truth, with a capital T; but, when it comes to the point, you'd rather have two miserable little half-truths than one honest whole truth about anything. That's why you disliked my book."
"I didn't."
"Oh, yes, you did. What you disliked about it was this. It made you see men and women, not as you imagined them, but as God made them. You saw, that is, the naked human soul, stripped of the clumsy draperies that Puritanism wraps round it. You saw below the surface—below the top-dressing of education, below the solid layer of traditional morality—deep down to the primitive passions, the fire of the clay we're all made of. You saw love and hate, forces which are older than all religions and all laws, older than man and woman, and which make men and women what they are. And they seemed to you not commonplaces, which they are—but something worse. You don't know that these facts are the stuff of art, because they are the stuff of nature; that it takes multitudes of such facts, not just one or two picked out because of their 'moral beauty'—for you purists believe in the beauty of morality as well as in the immorality of beauty—to make up a faithful picture of life. And you shuddered, didn't you? as you laid down the book you sat up half the night to read, and you said it was ugly, revolting; you couldn't see any perfect characters in it—only character in the making, only wretched men and women acting according to certain disagreeable laws, which are none the less immutable because one half of the world professes to ignore their existence. You said, 'Take away the whole world of nature, take away logic and science and art, but leave me—leave me my ideals!' Isn't that it?"
The torrent of his rhetoric swept her away, she knew not whither. But in his last words she had caught her cue. If she was ever to be an influence in Wyndham's life, encouraging, inspiring his best work, she must not suffer him to speak lightly of "ideals." It seemed to her that her methods with Ted were crude compared with her management of Wyndham.
"Oh, don't, don't! It's dreadful! But you are right. I can't live without ideals. All the great artists had them. You have them yourself, or at least you had them. I don't know what to think about your book—I can't think, I can only feel; and I read between the lines. Surely you feel with me that there's nothing worth living for except morality? Surely you believe in purity and goodness?"
Her face was flushed, her hands were clasped tightly together in her intensity. So strong was the illusion her manner produced, that for one second Wyndham could have been convinced of her absolute sincerity. Not long—no, not long afterwards, her words were to come back to him with irony.
"Morality? I've the greatest respect for it. But after all, its rules only mark off one little corner from the plain of life. Out there, in the open, are the fine landscapes and the great highroads of thought. And if you are to travel at all, you must go by those ways. There's dust on them, and there's mud—plenty of mud; but—there are no others."
"I would be very careful where I put my feet, though. I don't like muddy boots."
"I daresay not; who does? But the traveller is not always thinking about his boots."
"Don't let's talk about boots." She made a little movement with her mouth, simulating disgust.
"Your own metaphor; but never mind. A propos des bottes, I should like——" he broke off and added in a deep, hieratic voice, "To the pure all things are pure, but to the Puritan most things are impure. I wish I could make you see that; but it's a large subject. And besides, I want to talk about you."
"Me?"
"Yes, you. With all your beliefs, there was a time, if I'm not much mistaken, when you were pleased to doubt the existence of your charming self?"
She looked up with a smile of pleasure and of perfect comprehension. He could hardly have said anything more delicately caressing to her self-love. It seemed, then, that every word she had uttered in his hearing had been weighed and treasured up. She could hardly be supposed to know that this power of noticing and preserving such little personal details was one of the functions of the literary organism. If a woman like Miss Fraser had been flattered by it, what must have been its effect on the susceptible Audrey?
"So you remember that too?" she said, softly.
"Yes; it impressed me at the time. Now I know you better I don't wonder at it. It's the fault of your very lovely and feminine idealism, but you seem to me to have hardly any hold on the fact of existence, to be unable to realise it. If I could only give you the sense of life—make you feel the movement, the passion, the drama of it! My books have a little of that; they've got the right atmosphere, the smell of life. But never mind my books. I don't want you to have another literary craze—I beg your pardon, I mean phase; you seem to have had an artistic one lately."
He rose to go.
"I've always cared for the great things of life," said she.
"Ah yes—the great things, stamped with other people's approval. I want you to love life itself, so that you may be yourself, and feel yourself being."
Her whole nature responded as the strings of the violin to the bow of the master. "Life" was one of those words which specially stirred her sensibility. As Wyndham had foreseen, it was a word to conjure with; and now, as he had willed, the idea of it possessed her. She repeated mechanically—
"Life—to love life for itself——"
"And first—you must know life in order to love it."
She sighed slightly, as if she had taken in a little more breath to say good-bye. The ideal was flown. She had received the stamp of Wyndham's spirit, as if it had been iron upon wax. It was her way of being herself and feeling herself being.
The same evening she wrote a little note to Ted that ran thus:—
"Dearest Ted,—I have been thinking it all over, ever since yesterday, and I am convinced that my only right course is to break off our engagement. It has all been a mistake—mine and yours. Why should we not recognise it, instead of each persisting in making the other miserable? I release you from your promise to me, and will always remain very affectionately yours, Audrey Craven."
She had just sent the note to the post, when a servant came in with a telegram. It was from Hardy, announcing his arrival at Queenstown. And she had trusted to her engagement to Ted for protection against Vincent's claim.
CHAPTER XV
"Great strength and safety with heaviest charges." "Absolute immunity from all risk of blowing open." "The combination of a perfect trigger action with a perfect cocking action." Ted Haviland was standing outside the window of a gunsmith's shop in the King's Road, Chelsea, reading the enticing legends in which Mr. Webley sets forth the superiority of his wares above those of all other makers. It was the second day after he had got Audrey's letter. In his least hopeful moods he had never expected that blow; and when it fell, as a bolt from the blue, he was stunned and could not realise that he was struck. He imagined all kinds of explanations to account for Audrey's conduct. It was a misunderstanding, a sudden freak; there was some mystery waiting to be solved; some one—his cousin Nettie probably—had spread some story about him which had reached Audrey. The scandal already spread in the family would have been enough; she could hardly have identified its loudly dressed heroine as herself. It only remained for him to clear his character. Anything, anything rather than believe in what all healthy youth revolts against—the irrevocable, the end.
He had tried three times to see Audrey, and she was "not at home"; though the third time he had seen her go into the house not two minutes before. That instant he had turned away with a stinging mist in his eyes and the blood surging in his brain. His thoughts now leaped to the end as blindly as they had shrunk from it before. He had no definite idea of shooting himself when he turned into the King's Road—his one object was to go in any direction rather than home; but the shop window, with its stacks of rifles and cards displaying "Mark I." revolvers, arranged on them like the spokes of a wheel, caught his attention. He was possessed with the desire to have a revolver of his own, no matter for what purpose.
He had just chosen a "Mark I.," and was going into the shop to buy it, when he heard his name called in a loud hearty voice, "Ted, you bounder! stop!" and his arm was pulled with a grip that drew him backward from the doorstep.
"Hardy!"
He knew the voice, but it was hard to recognise the man. A thick black beard, a face that might have been tanned with bark, trousers tucked into high boots, and tightened with a belt like a horse-girth, an old Norfolk jacket stained with travel and the chase, a canvas shirt laced with a red cord and tassels, and a plate-like hat of grey felt flapping about his ears, made Hardy look something like a cowboy or a bandit. So singular was the apparition that had plucked Ted back from the abyss, that the Furies and the infernal phantoms vanished into smoke before it. It brought with it a breath of Atlantic seas and of winds from the far West.
"You young rascal! so it's you, is it? I didn't know you from Satan, till I saw you turn round after flattening your nose against what's-his-name's plate-glass. I wish I were in your shoes."
"Do you?" said Ted, with a grimace. "H'm. Why?"
"Because your whole expression suggests—partridges!"
"Does it? As it happens, I was thinking about a revolver."
"Potting burglars, eh? About all the sport you poor devils of Cockneys will get on the First."
"Look here, Hardy, this is uncanny. Where did you spring from?"
"Straight from Euston this afternoon, from Queenstown yesterday morning, before that from the other side of the Rockies."
"That accounts for your amazing get-up."
"Yes; and, by Jove! after a year in a log-hut on the wrong side of a precipice, you're glad to get your feet on London pavement, and smell London smells again. And look there, Ted! There isn't a lovelier sight on God's earth than a well-dressed Englishwoman. Where are we going? How about that revolver?"
Ted had forgotten all about it. Hardy's sane, open-air spirits had infected him so far that he had let himself be dragged at a rapid pace up the King's Road, where their progress attracted considerable attention. As Hardy strode on, with his long swinging legs, he appeared to be scattering the crowd before him.
"Never mind the thing now; it'll keep. How that girl stares! Does she take us for banditti?"
"Not you, you puppy, in that coat and topper. No mistaking you for anything but what you are—the sickly product of an effete civilisation. Don't be frightened, you haven't gone off in the least; you're a little pale, but prettier than you were, if anything."
"I say you ought to be in the bosom of your family."
"I haven't got a family."
"Well, what brings you here of all places in the world?"
"My cousin Audrey Craven."
There was no reserve about Hardy. At the name, so unexpectedly spoken, the under-world opened again for Ted, with all its Furies. They walked on for some minutes in silence, then Hardy began again—
"I called to see her. Of course she was out. Hard lines, wasn't it?"
Ted forced himself to speak. "Oh yes, beastly hard."
"You must have met her lately. How is she looking?"
"Oh, remarkably cheerful, when I last saw her."
"When was that?" Hardy asked, a little anxiously.
"The day before yesterday."
"Ah! She'd got my telegram then."
Ted bit his lip. They were too much absorbed, he in his misery and Hardy in his joy, for either to be conscious of the other's feeling.
"Old boy," said Hardy, as they turned out of the King's Road, "what have you got to do?"
"Nothing."
"Then come and help me to hunt up some diggings. How about Devon Street?"
"I don't know; but I suppose we can look," said Ted, dismally. Hardy's spirits were beginning to pall on him.
"I may as well go and look up Katherine, while I'm about it. Dear old Sis, I suppose she'll be out too."
"Not she—she's too busy for that."
"Not too busy to see her old playfellow, you bet your boots."
He was so glad to see everybody again that he was sure everybody must be glad to see him. In his rapture at being in London, the place he loathed and execrated a year ago, he could have embraced the stranger in the street. Those miles of pavement, those towering walls that seemed to make streets of the sky as he looked up, all that world of brick and mortar was Audrey's world, the ground for her feet, the scene of all her doings. The women that went by wore the fashions she would be wearing now. At any moment she herself might turn out of some shop-door, round some corner. A faint hope that he might find her with Katherine had led him to Devon Street.
But Ted's, not Audrey's, were the first hands that touched his; and it was not Audrey, but his "little half-sister," that gave Hardy his first welcome home.
"Well, Sis?"
"Vincent! is it you?"
There was nothing in the words but the glad courtesy of the woman who had been his playfellow in the days when he was a boy and she a tomboy, but they went to Hardy's heart and dried up his speech. They were the first kind words he had heard since he left England.
Katherine put away her work and made him sit in the one comfortable chair the studio afforded; Mrs. Rogers was sent for cakes and cream at a moment's notice; and the resources of the tiny household were taxed to their utmost to do honour to the returned emigrant. Even Ted forgot his gloom for the time being, and took his part in these hospitable rites. Then came the question of Hardy's lodgings. Mrs. Rogers was consulted, and, being unable to name any landlady of greater respectability than herself, and her ground-floor happening to be to let—the rarest thing in the world for her—she suggested that "the gentleman should try it for a week or two, till 'e could suit 'isself elsewhere. But, though I sy it as shouldn't, when a gentleman comes to me, sir, 'e wants to sty. My larst gentleman, 'e'd a styd with me till 'e was took awy in 'is coffin if I'd a kep' 'im; but Lor' bless you, my dear, 'e was that pertic'ler I couldn't do with 'is fads, not at fancy prices, I couldn't. I 'ad to tell 'im to gow, for Mussy's syke, where 'e'd git 'is own French cook, and 'is own butler to black 'is 'arf-doz'n pyre o' boots all at once for 'im." This was the recognised fiction by which Mrs. Rogers accounted for the departure of any of her lodgers. Lest it should seem to speak badly for her willingness and for the quality of the attendance at No. 12, she invariably added, "Not but wot I'd work my 'ead orf to please any gentleman that is a gentleman; and when you've eaten one of my dinners, sir, you won't want nobody else to cook and do for you no more." And though Ted had pointed out to her the sinister ambiguity of this formula, she had never invented any other.
The ground-floor was seen; and after Mrs. Rogers, on her part, had stipulated for cold lunches three days in the week, and not more than one bath in the one day; and after Katherine, on Hardy's part, had suggested sundry innovations, involving the condemnation of all the pictures and ornaments she could lay her hands on,—a piece of sacrilege which Mrs. Rogers regarded more in sorrow than in anger, as indicating a pitiable aberration of intellect,—the rooms were taken from that date.
Was it Chance, or Necessity, or Providence, that caused Ted and Hardy to meet at the parting of the ways?—that waked Ted from the dream of self-destruction, and lodged Hardy under the same roof with Katherine Haviland?
His arrangements completed, Hardy hurried off again to Chelsea. Audrey, he thought, had expected him by a later train, and would be back by six o'clock, waiting for him. This time the footman met him with a little note from his mistress. Audrey had never dreamed that Vincent could get up to town so quickly. She was so sorry she had missed him; especially as she had had to go to bed with a feverish cold and a splitting headache. She would be delighted to see him if he could call to-morrow afternoon, between three and four. And she was always very affectionately his.
He was bitterly disappointed, but his disappointment was nothing to his trouble about Audrey's illness. Feverish colds contracted in August often prove fatal. But he was not utterly cast down. There was still to-morrow.
He went back to Devon Street slowly, for he felt tired, out of all proportion to his muscular exertions that day. During the evening, which he spent in the Havilands' studio, his depression gave way before the prospect of seeing Audrey to-morrow. He looked at Katherine's pictures, gave her a great deal of advice, and expressed the utmost astonishment at the progress she had made. He considered "The Witch of Atlas" particularly fine.
"It was painted four years ago, and as a matter of fact I haven't made a bit of progress since. But never mind, you're quite right. It isn't half bad."
She bent over her picture lovingly, brushed away the dust from the canvas, and turned it resolutely with its face to the wall. She had not looked at it since the day of renunciation. Her work led Hardy on to talk of his, and he grew eloquent about the book, "Sport West of the Rockies," which, as he had once told Audrey, was "to make posterity sit up." He had the manuscript downstairs in his bag. Some day he would read them a chapter or two; it would give them some idea of wild virgin Nature, of what a sportsman's life really was—the best life, perhaps, take it all round, to be lived on this earth; it was to be the Pioneer-book of its subject. Hardy was always at his ease with Ted and Katherine. Self-restraint was superfluous in their company; they knew him too well, and liked him in spite of their knowledge. They were used to his tempestuous bursts of narrative, and would laugh frankly in his face, while he joined in the laugh with the greatest enjoyment. With him ornamental story-telling was an amusing game, in which, if you were clever enough to catch him lying, you had won and he had lost, that was all.
To-night he lay back in his chair and expanded gloriously. He told tales of perilous adventure by flood and field, by mountain and forest; of the wild chase of moose and wapiti among the snows of the Rockies; of the fierce delight of single-handed combat with grizzly bears, the deadliest of their kind; of how he, Hardy, had been rolled down a cañon, locked in the embrace of a furry fiend that he had stabbed in the throat one second before the fatal hug. He told of the melting of the snows in forest rivers; of the flood that swept away the lonely traveller's encampment, and bore him, astride on a log of driftwood, five miles amid wrack and boulders on its whirling current; of deliverance through a pious Indian and his canoe, which he entered as by a miracle in mid-stream, and without upsetting any of the three. He told of long wanderings in the twilight solitudes of Canadian forests; of dangers from wolves and the wild coyotes, half-dog, half-wolf, heard nightly howling round the Indian camp-fires; and from the intangible malice of the skunk, a beautiful but dreadful power, to be propitiated with bated breath and muffled footstep. He told, too, of the chip-munks, with their sharp twittering bark; and he contrived to invest even these tiny creatures with an atmosphere of terror—for it is well known that their temper is atrocious, and that a colony of them will set upon the unfortunate traveller who happens to offend one, and leave nothing of him but his bones and the indigestible portions of his clothing. And over all he cast the glamour of his fancy, as if it had been the red light of the prairie sunsets; in it he appeared transfigured, a half-mythical personage, heroic, if not indeed divine. The whole of it had appeared word for word in the pages of the Pioneer-book.
"Ah, Sis," he observed complacently at the end of it, "that's all copy for 'Sport West of the Rockies.' When that comes out you'll soon see me at the top of the tree. Why aren't you an artist in words? Why don't you use the pen instead of the brush?"
He implied that if her ambition had been literary he would have raised her to a position just below him, on the highest pinnacle of earthly fame. Then he passed, by a gentle transition, to another subject.
"By-the-bye, have you two seen much of my cousin Audrey?"
This second utterance of the name was too much for Ted's overstrained nerves. He got up, stifled a yawn, and held out his hand to Hardy.
"I say, do you mind if I go to bed now? I can't for the life of me keep awake."
"Good-night, old fellow; I'm afraid I've sent you to sleep with my yarns."
"Not a bit. We'll have some more to-morrow."
To-morrow?
"What's the matter with the boy, Kathy? He looks seedy."
"Oh, nothing. He's not over-strong, perhaps, but he's all right."
"What's he doing with himself here?"
"Painting. Oh, Vincent, I should like you to see some of his things, now he's gone!"
All her pride in her brother was roused, perhaps by Vincent's boasting. She lifted the white linen cloth that covered one of Ted's easels, and revealed the portrait of Audrey. She had not guessed the truth; if she had, she would not have looked at Vincent just then. The effect she had produced was unmistakable. The blood rose to his face in a wave that died suddenly away, leaving a yellowish pallor under its sunburn.
"How beautiful!" he said softly, more to himself than Katherine.
He gazed at the portrait as if his eyes would never be satisfied with seeing. The pathos in his face gave it a sort of spirituality; and Katherine noticed his hand trembling as he helped her to cover the picture again.
"It's like her—as only genius could make it."
Only genius? Did he think that only genius had wrought that work of transfiguration, in which Katherine found it hard to see any likeness to the woman as she knew her now? She had read the secret of Vincent's hope. Ought she to let him believe a lie? Did not she, Ted's sister, of all people owe him the truth? No. Vincent's eyes looked as if they wanted sleep before everything. Sufficient unto the night is the evil thereof. And perhaps, after all, she had been mistaken. Hardy held out his hand, said a short good-night, and was gone before she could say more.
There flashed back on her the memory of Audrey's first visit to her. She recalled her little self-conscious air of possession in speaking of her cousin. She was morally certain that Audrey had treated Vincent as she had treated Ted.
"Beware of the woman who kisses you on both cheeks; it's too much for friendship, and too little for love!"
Hardy went out of doors, turned on to the Embankment, and so on to Chelsea, for the third time that day. He wanted to assure himself of Audrey's nearness by one more sight of the brown brick shrine that held her. The house stood as he had seen it once before, asleep in the yellow gaslight, shut in from the road by the trees, screened from the lamps on the Embankment by the storm-shutters folded over its windows, guarding its secrets well, all but two windows on the second floor, which were open to the night. That was Audrey's room, he knew. Little fool! Ill with a feverish cold, and sleeping with open windows! For about half an hour he walked up and down on the Embankment opposite, like a sentry on duty, his long shadow blackening and fading as he passed from light to light.
When he got back to his rooms, he felt a sensation that had sometimes come upon him after a long day's hunting, a feeling of deadly fatigue and stifling emptiness, as if the rest of his body were drained of the blood that choked his heart. He opened his travelling-bag, took out a large silver flask, looked at it, sighed, shuddered slightly, poured about two tablespoonfuls of brandy down his throat; and then, with a gesture of indescribable disgust, emptied the remainder out of the window into the yard below. He undressed and got into bed quickly, turned over on his right side for greater ease, and was soon asleep and dreaming of to-morrow.
CHAPTER XVI
There was no sleep for Ted that night. Towards morning he fell into a doze, broken by unpleasant dreams, and woke with a confused consciousness of trouble. It had been connected in his dreams with Hardy's return, and, once awake, the knowledge that he was in the same house with him was insupportable. Not that he had yet guessed how Vincent stood to Audrey; he had simply a nervous dread of hearing him talk about her. The casual utterance of her name went through him like a sword, and in his present mood Vincent's boisterous spirit disturbed and irritated him. More to get away from him than with any definite idea of work, he spent his morning at the National Gallery, touching up the copy of the Botticelli Madonna which Katherine had begun long ago for Audrey. He had set to work almost mechanically, with a sense that whatever he did at the present moment was only provisional,—only a staving off of the intolerable future; but soon the technical difficulties of his task absorbed him, and he became interested in spite of himself. He was so passive to the spiritual influences of line and colour, that perhaps the beauty of the grey-eyed girl Madonna may have given him something of its own tranquillity.
Unfortunately the good effects of his morning's industry were undone when he got home, by finding Hardy alone in the studio, sitting before Audrey's portrait. He had dragged the easel to the light, and had been studying the canvas for some minutes before Ted came in. The boy stifled an angry exclamation.
"Ted," said Hardy, "what do you want for this picture?"
"I don't want anything for it."
"Nonsense! Every good picture has its price."
"This one hasn't, anyway."
"Look here, and don't be a young fool. This is the best thing you've done in your life or ever will do. I'm in rather low water at present, but wait till I've heard from my British Columbian agent, or, better still, wait till the Pioneer-book comes out, and I'll give you a hundred for it, honour bright, if you'll let me have it at once."
"I can't let you have it at once, and I won't let you have it at all."
"The deuce you won't! Come, fix your own price."
"I'm not a swindling dealer, and I'm not a liar, though you mightn't think it. I told you I wasn't going to let you have it at any price."
"H'm. Do you mind telling me one thing? Are you going to sell it to any one else?"
"I'm not going to sell it to any one. I'm going to keep it myself."
They looked at each other with steady eyes, each understanding and each defying the other's thought. Hardy's face was the first to soften. He put his hand on Ted's shoulders. "All right, old boy. We've hit each other hard this time. The least we can do is to hold our tongues about it." And he left him.
Hardy spoke with the magnanimity of imperfect comprehension. He had been defeated in his purpose of buying Audrey's portrait; but however great his discomfiture, he, being the successful lover, could afford a little pity for Ted as the victim of a hopeless passion. To Ted, on the other hand, the revelation of Hardy's feelings threw light on Audrey's conduct. It accounted for everything that was most inexplicable in it. It must have been the news of Hardy's return that made her break off her engagement so suddenly. His instinct told him that she had probably given her word to her cousin before he left England; jealousy suggested that she had cared for him all the time. He tried to reason it out, but stopped short of the obvious conclusion that, if these things were altogether as he supposed, her engagement to himself must have been merely an amusement hit upon by Audrey to fill up a dull interval. He preferred to regard it as a mystery. And now all reasoning gave way before the desire to see her again, and know the truth from herself once for all.
To Audrey, as the fountain of truth, he accordingly went, choosing a time between half-past two and three when she was most likely to be in. As he reached her door, it was being held open for her to go out, and she was standing in the outer hall buttoning her gloves. She drew back when she saw Ted, but escape was impossible. He saw the movement and the flash of her little white teeth as she bit her lip with annoyance.
She came forward smiling.
"Oh, is it you, Ted? As you see, I'm just going out."
"You will see me before you go?"
"I can't possibly. I've got to go and call on an uncle and aunt at the Hôtel Metropole."
"I'm very sorry. But I won't keep you more than ten minutes."
"I can't spare ten minutes. I'm late as it is, and I have to be back by half-past three. I've got an appointment."
"You've not time to get there and back. You'd better put it off."
"I can't, Ted. They're only up from Friday till Monday. Dean Craven has to preach at the Abbey to-morrow. Come again."
"I can't come again."
"Well, then——" she hesitated. "You may walk part of the way with me."
He went with her down the short flagged path that led to the gate. Once out of the servant's hearing, he stopped, and looked firmly in her face.
"I must see you now, and it had better be in the house. I've only one question to ask you. Five minutes will be enough for that—at least it won't be my fault if it isn't."
She had laid her hand on the gate, which Ted held shut, and her mouth was obstinately set. Something in his voice conquered her self-will. She turned and led the way to the house.
"You had better come into the morning-room."
He followed her; she closed the door, and they stood facing each other a moment without speaking.
"Well, Ted?" Her voice went to his heart with its piercing sweetness.
"Audrey, why did you write that letter?"
"Because it was easier to write what I did than to say it. Do you want to hold me to my word?"
"No. I want to know your reasons for breaking it. You haven't given me any yet."
"I did, Ted. I told you it had all been a mistake—yours and mine."
"Speak for yourself. Where was my mistake?"
"The mistake was in our ever getting engaged at all—in our thinking that we cared for each other."
"I cared enough for you, didn't I?"
"No, you didn't. You only thought you did. Katherine told me——"
"What did Katherine tell you?"
"That you hadn't any feelings, that you really cared for nothing but your painting, that you'd only a ru—rudimentary heart."
"Really? That is interesting. When did she tell you that?"
"The very day we were engaged."
"And you believed her?"
"Not then. I did afterwards."
"How long afterwards—the other day?"
"Ye-yes; I think so."
"I see—when you wanted to believe it. Not before."
She was trembling, but she gathered together all her feeble forces for the defence.
"No, no; don't you remember? At the very first—the day of our engagement—we were both so miserable at the idea of your going away—we did it all so recklessly—before either of us thought. You see, Ted, you were so very young."
"It's a pity that didn't strike you before."
"It did, it did; but I wouldn't think of it. I blinded myself. The fact is, we were both as mad as hatters. You know people can't get married in that state. We should have had to wait for a—a lucid interval."
Ted recognised the miserable pleasantry; it was what he had said to her himself a day or two after their engagement. The phrase had amused Audrey at the time and lodged in her memory. She borrowed it now in her hour of need, and laughed, unconscious of her plagiarism.
"I understand perfectly. You want to get rid of me as a proof of your own sanity. Is that it?"
She looked up in the utmost surprise. "Not to get rid of you, Ted, of course not. I shall still keep you as my best friend."
"Thanks. You had better not try to do that. I'm told I've no talent for friendship."
"Then I suppose, after this, you'd rather I cut you, if we meet?"
"You can please yourself about that."
"You may be sure I shall. Oh, Ted, I didn't expect that from you! But it's quite right. Hit hard, I can't defend myself."
"Please don't attempt it, there's no occasion to. Only tell me one thing."
"Well?" She sat down as if wearied with this unnecessary trifling.
He paused.
"It's evident that you don't care about me. Do you care for any one else?"
"You've no right to ask me that."
"Haven't I? I thought I had; and, if you'll only think a minute, you'll agree with me."
She put her head on one side as if gravely considering the question.
"No. You've no right to ask me that."
"Let me put it differently—since your feelings are sacred, you needn't tell me anything about them. Were you engaged to Hardy before you knew me?"
"That question is even more impertinent than the last."
"I beg your pardon then. Don't answer it, if you don't like to."
He turned away.
"Don't go yet, Ted. I haven't done. Listen. I was thoughtless, I was mistaken" (Audrey was anxious to escape the imputation of a big fault by the graceful confession of a little one), "but I'm not as bad as you think me. You think I cared for Vincent. I didn't. I never cared a straw about him—never. You were the first."
"Was I? Not the last though, it seems."
"Perhaps not. But I deceived myself before I deceived you."
"Well, you took me in completely, if it's any satisfaction to you. Never mind, Audrey; you've done your best to remedy that now."
He had turned, and his hand was on the door to go, when he heard her calling him back softly.
"Ted——" She had followed him to the door, he felt the touch of her little gloved hand on his coat-sleeve; under the black meshes of her veil he saw her eyes shining with tears that could not fall. He hesitated.
"Forgive me," she whispered.
"Not till you have answered my question."
"Which question, Ted?"
"The impertinent one."
"About Vincent?"
Her eyes had been fixed on the ground, now they glanced up quickly.
"Did Vincent tell you I was engaged to him?"
"No."
Her eyelids drooped again; then, urged to desperation by her own cowardice, she raised them and looked in his face to answer. And as she looked, she saw for the first time how changed it was. Its bloom was gone, the lines were set and hard: Ted looked years older than his age.
"Don't believe him if he ever says so. I am not engaged to him, and I never was."
"Thanks. That was all I wanted to know."
He turned on his heel and left her. He knew that she had lied.
He left her in a state of vague consternation. She had been prepared for an outburst of feeling on Ted's part, in which case she would have remained mistress of the field without loss of dignity. As it had happened, the victory was certainly not with her. This was contrary to all her expectations. She had looked for protestations, emotions—in short, a scene; but not for cold, dispassionate cross-examination. It was so unlike Ted—Ted, who was always giving himself away; it was more the sort of thing she could have fancied Wyndham saying under the same circumstances. She had seen something of this impersonal manner once or twice before, in those rare moments when they had discussed some picture, or Ted had talked to her about his work or Katherine's. It had annoyed her then; she thought it showed a want of enthusiasm. Now the boy's heartless self-possession amazed and overpowered her. Audrey was incapable of imagining what she had not seen, and she had never got to the bottom of the Haviland character; never divined its gravity under the mask of frivolity; never proved its will, nor reckoned with its pride. Three days ago she would have laughed at the idea of referring any moral question to Ted's judgment, for she had taken no pains to hide her faults from him; she had been selfish, reckless, vain, capricious, by turns and altogether, and it had made no difference then. Now she felt that he had condemned her. To be sure, she had told him a lie; but what was that in the catalogue of her offences?
It was everything. He could have forgiven anything but that.