Deadham Hard
by
Lucas Malet
Part 9 out of 9
at that--living in lodgings at Stourmouth, he commanded meagre
consideration. But as chosen medical-attendant and, in some sort,
retainer of Sir Charles Verity he ranked. The county came within his
purview. Thanks to this connection with The Hard he, on occasion, rubbed
shoulders with the locally great. Hence genuine grief for his friend was
black-bordered by the prospect of impending social and mundane loss. The
future frowned on him, view it in what terms he might. To use his own
unspoken phrase, he felt "in hellishly low water."
One point in particular just now worried him. Thus, as fish, eggs,
porridge, hot cakes, honey, and jam disappeared in succession, he opened
himself to Damaris and Carteret. A difficult subject, namely that of a
second opinion.--Let no thought of any wounding of his susceptibilities
operate against the calling in of such. He was ready and willing to meet
any fellow practitioner they might select--a Harley Street big-wig, or
Dr. Maskall, of Harchester, whose advice in respect of cardiac trouble
was wide sought.
He had, however, but just launched the question when Hordle entered and,
walking to the head of the table, addressed Damaris.
"Sir Charles desires me to say he will be glad to see you, miss, when you
are at liberty," he told her in muffled accents.
She sprang up, to pause an instant, irresolute, glancing wide-eyed
at Carteret.
He had risen too. Coming round the corner of the table, he drew back her
chair, put his hand under her elbow, went with her to the door.
"There is nothing to dread, dearest witch," he gently and quietly said.
"Have confidence in yourself. God keep you--and him.--Now you are quite
ready? That's right.--Well, then go."
Carteret waited, looking after her until, crossing the hall followed by
Hordle, she passed along the corridor out of sight. Silent, preoccupied,
he closed the door and took a turn the length of the room before resuming
his place at the opposite side of the table to McCabe, facing the light.
The doctor, who had ceased eating and half risen to his feet at the
commencement of this little scene, watched it throughout; at first
indifferent, a prey to his own worries, but soon in quickening interest,
shrewd enquiry and finally in dawning comprehension.
"Holy Mother of Mercy, so that's the lay of the land, is it?" and his
loose lips shaped themselves to a whistle, yet emitted no sound. To
obliterate all signs of which tendency to vulgar expression of
enlightenment he rubbed moustache, mouth and chin with his napkin,
studying Carteret closely meanwhile.
"In the pink of condition, by Gad--good for a liberal twenty years yet,
and more--bar accident. Indefinite postponement of the grand climacteric
in this case.--All the same a leetle, lee-tie bit dangerous, I'm
thinking, for both, if she tumbles to it."
Then aloud--"Has the poor darling girl grasped the meaning of her
father's illness do you make out, Colonel grasped the ugly
eventualities of it?"
Carteret slowly brought his glance to bear on the speaker.
"I believe so, though she has not actually told me as much," he
said--"And now about this question of a second opinion, McCabe?"
The easily huffed Irishman accepted the reproof in the best spirit
possible, as confirming his own perspicacity.
"Quite so. Flicked him neatly on the raw, and he winced. All the same
he's a white man, a real jewel of a fellow, worthy of good fortune if the
ball's thrown his way. I wonder how long, by-the-by, this handsome game's
been a-playing?"
With which, as requested, he returned to the rival claims of Harley
Street and Harchester in respect of a consulting physician.
Carteret proved a faithful prophet, for in truth there was nothing to
dread the beloved presence once entered, as Damaris thankfully
registered.
The sun by now topped the hollies and shone into the study, flinging a
bright slanting pathway across the dim crimson, scarlet and blue of the
Turkey carpet. Charles Verity stood, in an open bay of the great window,
looking out over the garden. Seen thus, in the still sunlight, the tall
grey-clad figure possessed all its accustomed, slightly arrogant repose.
Damaris thrilled with exalted hope. For the young are slow to admit even
the verdict of fact as final. His attitude was so natural, so unstrained
and unstudied, that the message of ghostly warning yesterday evening was
surely discounted; while the subsequent terror of the night, that hideous
battle with pain and suffocation, became to her incredible, an evil dream
from which, in grateful ecstasy, she now awoke.
Her joy found expression.
"Dearest, dearest, you sent for me.--Is it to let me see you are
really better, more beautifully recovered than they told me or I
ventured to suppose?"
Her voice broke under a gladness midway between tears and laughter.
"The envious blades of Atropos' scissors have not cut the mortal thread
yet anyhow," he answered, smiling, permitting himself the classic conceit
as a screen to possible emotion. "But we won't build too much on the
clemency of Fate. How long she proposes to wait before closing her
scissors it is idle to attempt to say."
He laid his hands on Damaris' shoulders. Bent his head and kissed
her upward pouted lips--thereby hushing the loving disclaimer which
rose to them.
"So we will keep on the safe side of the event, my wise child," he
continued. "Make all our preparations and thus deny the enemy any
satisfaction of taking us unawares.--Can you write a business
letter for me?"
"A dozen, dearest, if you wish," Damaris assented eagerly. Yet that
image of the scissors stayed by her. Already her joy was sensibly
upon the wane.
"Oh! one will be sufficient, I think--quite sufficient for this morning."
Charles Verity turned his head, looking seaward through the
tranquil sunshine.
"That Indian appointment has to be suitably thanked for and--declined."
Damaris drew back a step so as to gain a clearer view of him. The
hands resting on her shoulders were oddly inert, so she fancied,
forceless and in temperature cold. Even through the thickness of cloth
jacket and silk shirt she was aware of their lifelessness and chill.
This roused rebellion in her. Her instinct was for fight. She made a
return on McCabe's suggestion regarding further advice. She would
demand a consultation, call in expert opinion. The dear man with the
blue eyes--here her white face flushed rosy--would manage all that for
her, and compel help in the form of the last word of medical science
and skill.
"Might not your letter be put off for just a few days?" she pleaded, "in
case--until"--
But Charles Verity broke in before she could finish her tender protest,
a sadness, even hint of bitterness in his tone.
"You covet this thing so much," he said. "Your heart is so set on it?"
She made haste to reassure him.--No, no not that way, not for her. How
could it signify, save on his account? She only cared because greedy of
his advancement, greedy to have him exalted--placed where he belonged, on
the summit, the apex, so that all must perceive and acknowledge his
greatness. As to herself--and the flush deepened, making her in aspect
deliciously youthful and ingenious--she confessed misgivings. Reported
her talk with Carteret concerning the subject, and the scolding received
from him thereupon.
"One more reason for writing in the sense I propose, then," her father
declared, "since it sets your over-modest doubts and qualms at rest, my
dear. That is settled."
His hands weighed on her shoulders as though he suddenly needed and
sought support.
"I will sit down," he said. "There are other matters to be discussed, and
I can, perhaps, talk more easily so."
He went the few steps across to the red chair. Sank into it. Leaned
against the pillows, bending backward, his hand pressed to his left
side. His features contracted, and his breath caught as of one spent
with running. And Damaris, watching him, again received that desolating
impression of change, of his being in spirit far removed, inaccessible
to her sympathy, a stranger. He had gone away and rather terribly left
her alone.
"Are you in pain?" she asked, agonized.
"Discomfort," he replied. "We will not dignify this by the name of pain.
But I must wait for a time before dictating the letter. There's something
I will ask you to do for me, my dear, meanwhile."
"Yes"--He paused, shifted his position, closed his eyes.
"Have you held any communication with--"
He stopped, for the question irked him. Even at this pass it went against
the grain with him to ask of his daughter news of his son.
But in that pause our maiden's scattered wits very effectually
returned to her.
"With Darcy Faircloth?" she said. And as Charles Verity bowed his head in
assent--"Yes, I should have told you already but--but for all which has
happened. He was here the day before yesterday. He came home from church
with me.--That was my doing, not his, to begin with. You mustn't think he
put himself forward--took advantage, I mean, of your being away. If there
is any blame it is mine."
"Mine, rather--and of long standing. God forgive me!"
But Damaris, fairly launched now upon a wholly welcome topic, would have
none of this. To maintain her own courage, and, if it might be, combat
that dreaded withdrawal of his spirit into regions where she could not
follow, she braced herself to reason with him.
"No--there indeed you are mistaken, dearest," she gently yet confidently
asserted. "You take the whole business topsy-turvy fashion, quite wrong
way round. I won't weary you with explanations of exactly what led to
Darcy Faircloth coming here with me on Sunday. But you ought to know that
he and Aunt Felicia met. I hadn't planned that. It just happened. And she
was lovely to him--lovely to us both. She made him stay to
luncheon--inviting him in your name."
"I seem to possess a singular gift for saddling my relations with the
payment of my bad debts," Charles Verity remarked.
"But there isn't any bad debt--that's what I so dearly want you to
believe, what I'm trying so hard, Commissioner Sahib, to tell you,"
Damaris cried. "Afterwards, when he and I were alone by ourselves, the
ice broke somehow, he gave himself away and said beautiful things--things
about you which made me delightfully happy, and showed how he has felt
towards you all along."
Simply, without picking of her words, hesitation or artifice, Damaris
repeated that somewhat sinister tale of the sea. Of a sailing ship,
becalmed through burning days and stifling nights in tropic waters. Of
the ill-doings of a brutal, drunken captain. Of a fly-blown eating-house
in Singapore. Of the spiritual deliverance there achieved through sight
of Charles Verity's name and successful record in the columns of a
Calcutta newspaper; and the boy's resultant demand for the infliction of
some outward and visible sign, some inalienable stigmata, which should
bear perpetual witness to the fact of his parentage.
"So you see"--
Damaris kindled, standing before him, flamed indeed to a rare
carelessness of convention, of enjoined pruderies and secrecies.--
"You gave him the beautiful gift of life to begin with; and saved his
life later when he was so miserably tempted to end it. As he loves life,
where then is the debt?--Not on your side certainly, dearest."
Listening to which fondly exalted sophistries--for sophistries from
worldly and moral standpoint alike must he not surely pronounce
them?--Charles Verity still received comfort to his soul. They ought to
be reckoned mistaken, of course, transparently in error, yet neither son
nor daughter condemned him. Neither did his sister, in the pathetic
innocence and purity of her middle-age maidenhood.
This moved him to thankfulness, none the less genuine because shot with
self-mockery. For he was curious to observe how, as the last urgings of
ambition and thirst of power fell away from him,--he riding under escort
of Death, the black captain--all tributes of human tenderness and
approval gained in value.--Not the approval of notable personages, of
those high in office, nor even that of sympathetic critics and readers;
but of persons in his own immediate voisinage, bound to him by
friendship, by association, or the tie of blood.--Their good-will was
precious to him as never before. He craved to be in perfect amity with
every member of that restricted circle. Hence it vexed and fretted him to
know the circle incomplete, through the exclusion of one rather
flagrantly intimate example. Yet to draw the said member, the said
example, within the circle, yielding it the place which it might
rightfully aspire to occupy, amounted--after half a lifetime of
abstention and avoidance--to a rather tremendous demonstration, one which
might well be hailed as extravagant, as a courting of offence possible
only to a sentimental egoist of most aggravated kind.
And he was tired--had no smallest inclination towards demonstrations. For
the threatening of heart spasm, to which he lately denied the title of
pain, though of short duration, affected him adversely, sapping his
strength. His mind, it is true, remained clear, even vividly receptive;
but, just as earlier this morning, his will proved insufficient for its
direction or control. He mused, his chin sunk on his breast, his left
hand travelling down over the long soft moustache, his eyes half closed.
Thought and vision followed their own impulse, wandering back and forth
between the low-caste eating-house in the sweltering heat and perfumed
stenches of the oriental, tropic seaport; and the stone-built English
inn--here on Marychurch Haven--overlooking the desolate waste of
sand-hills, the dark reed-beds and chill gleaming tides.
For love of Damaris, his daughter, while still in the heat of his prime,
he had foresworn all traffic with women. Yet now, along with the tacitly
admitted claims of the son, arose the claim of the mistress, mother of
that son--in no sensual sort, but with a certain wildness of bygone
romance, wind and rain-swept, unsubstantial, dim and grey. Ever since
conviction of the extreme gravity of his physical condition dawned on
him, the idea of penetrating the courts of that deserted sanctuary had
been recurrent. In the summing up of his human, his earthly, experience,
romance deserved, surely, a word of farewell? Damaris' story served to
give the idea a fuller appeal and consistency.
But he was tired--tired. He longed simply to drift. It was infinitely
distasteful to him definitely to plan, or to decide respecting anything.
Meanwhile his continued silence and abstraction wore badly upon Damaris.
She had steeled herself; had flamed, greatly daring. Now reaction set in.
Her effort proved vain. She had failed. For once more she recognized that
an unknown influence, a power dark and incalculably strong--so she
figured it--regained ascendency over her father, working to the insidious
changing of his nature, strangely winning him away. Waiting for some
response, some speech or comment on his part, fear and the sense of
helplessness assailed, and would have submerged her, had she not clung to
Carteret's parting "God bless you" and avowed faith in her stability, as
to a wonder-working charm. Nor did the charm fail in efficacy.--Oh!
really he was a wonderful sheet-anchor, "the shadow of a great rock in a
weary land," that dear man with the blue eyes! Consciously she blessed
him.--And, thanks to remembrance of him, presently found voice and
purpose once again.
"You aren't displeased with me, dearest?" she asked.
"Displeased?" Charles Verity repeated, at first absently. "Displeased, my
dear, no--why?"
"We didn't do wrong?"--labouring the point, the more fully to recall and
retain him--"Didn't take too much upon ourselves--Aunt Felicia, I mean,
and I--by persuading Darcy Faircloth to stay on Sunday, by entertaining
him when you were away? Or--or have I been stupid, dearest, and
thoughtlessly wearied you by talking too much and too long?"
"Neither," he said. "On the contrary, all you have told me goes to lessen
certain difficulties, make the crooked, in some degree, straight and
rough places plain."
For, if Faircloth had been here so recently, broken bread too in the
house, so he argued, it became the easier to bid him return. And Charles
Verity needed to see him, see him this morning--since purpose of
farewells, to be spoken in those long-deserted courts of romance,
stiffened, becoming a thing not merely to be turned hither and thither
in thought, but to be plainly and directly done.--"Send for him in your
own name," he said. "Explain to him how matters stand, and ask him to
talk with me."
And, as Damaris agreed, rejoiced by the success of her adventurous
diplomacy, making to go at once and give the required instructions--
"Stay--stay a moment," her father said, and drew her down to sit on the
chair-arm, keeping her hand in his, and with his other hand stroking it
wistfully. For though certain difficulties might be sensibly lessened,
they were not altogether removed; and he smiled inwardly, aware that not
even in the crack of doom are feminine rights over a man other than
conflicting and uncommonly ticklish to adjust.
"Before we commit ourselves to further enterprises, my darling, let us
quite understand one another upon one or two practical points--bearing in
mind the blades of Atropos' envious scissors. My affairs are in
order"--Damaris shrank, piteously expostulated.
"Oh! but must we, are we obliged to speak of those things? They grate on
me--Commissioner Sahib, they are ugly. They hurt."
"Yes--distinctly we are obliged to speak of them. To do so can neither
hasten nor retard the event. All the more obliged to speak of them,
because I have never greatly cared about money, except for what I could
do with it.--As a means, of vast importance. As an end,
uninteresting.--So it has been lightly come and lightly go, I am afraid.
All the same I've not been culpably improvident. A portion of my income
dies with me; but enough remains to secure you against any anxiety
regarding ways and means, if not to make you a rich woman. I have left an
annuity to your Aunt Felicia. Her means are slender, dear creature, and
her benevolence outruns them, so that she balances a little anxiously, I
gather, on the edge of debt. The capital sum will return to you
eventually. Carteret and McCabe consented, some years ago, to act as my
executors. Their probity and honour are above reproach.--Now as to this
place--if you should ever wish to part with it, let Faircloth take it
over. I have made arrangements to that effect, about which I will talk
with him when he comes.--Have no fear lest I should say that which might
wound him. I shall be as careful, my dear, of his proper pride as of my
own.--Understand I have no desire to circumscribe either your or his
liberty of action unduly. But this house, all it contains, the garden,
the very trees I see from these windows, are so knitted into the fabric
of my past life that I shrink--with a queer sense of homelessness--from
any thought of their passing into the occupation of strangers.--Childish,
pitifully weak-minded no doubt, and therefore the more natural that one
should crave a voice, thus in the disposition of what one has learned
through long usage so very falsely to call one's own!"
"We will do exactly what you wish, even to the littlest particular, I
promise you--both for Faircloth and for myself," Damaris answered,
forcing herself to calmness and restraint of tears.
He petted her hands silently until, as the minutes passed, she began once
more to grow fearful of that dreadful unknown influence insidiously
possessing him and winning him away. And he may have grown fearful of it
too, for he made a sharp movement, raising his shoulders as though
striving to throw off some weight, some encumbrance.
"There is an end, then, of business," he said, "and of such worldly
considerations. I need worry you with them no more. Only one thing
remains, of which, before I speak to others, it is only seemly, my
darling, I should speak to you."
Charles Verity lifted his eyes to hers, and she perceived his spirit as
now in nowise remote; but close, evident almost to the point of alarm. It
looked out from the wasted face, at once--to her seeing--exquisite and
austere, reaching forward, keenly curious of all death should reveal,
unmoved, yet instinct with the brilliance, the mirthfulness even, of
impending portentous adventure.
"You know, Damaris, how greatly I love and have loved you--how dear you
have been to me, dearer than the satisfaction of my own flesh?"
Speech was beyond her. She looked back, dazzled and for the moment
broken.
"Therefore it goes hard with me to ask anything which might, ever so
distantly, cause you offence or distress. Only time presses. We are
within sight of the end."
"Ah! no--no," she exclaimed, wrenching away her hands and beating them
together, passion of affection, of revolt and sorrow no more to be
controlled. "How can I bear it, how can I part with you? I will not, I
will not have you die.--McCabe isn't infallible. We must call in other
doctors. They may be cleverer, may suggest new treatment, new remedies.
They must cure you--or if they can't cure, at least keep you alive for
me. I won't have you die!"
"Call in whom you like, as many as you like, my darling, the whole
medical faculty if it serves to pacify or to content you," he said,
smiling at her.
Damaris repented. Took poor passion by the throat, stifling its
useless cries.
"I tire you. I waste your strength. I think only of myself, of my own
grief, most beloved, my own consuming grief and desolation.--See--I will
be good--I am good. What else is there you want to have me do?"
"This--but recollect you are free to say me nay, without scruple or
hesitation. I shall not require you to give your reasons, but shall bow,
unreservedly, to your wishes. For you possess a touchstone in such
questions as the one now troubling me, which, did I ever possess it, I
lost, as do most men, rather lamentably early in my career. If you suffer
me to do so, I will ask Darcy Faircloth to bring his mother here to me,
this evening at dusk, when her coming will not challenge impertinent
observation--so that I may be satisfied no bitterness colours her thought
of me and that we part in peace, she and I."
Damaris got up from her seat on the arm of the red-covered chair. She
stood rigid, her expression reserved to blankness, but her head
carried high.
"Of course," she said, a little hoarsely, and waited. "Of course. How
could I object? Wasn't it superfluous even to ask me? Your word,
dearest, is law."
"But in the present case hardly gospel?"
"Yes--gospel too--since it is your word. Gospel, that is, for me. Let
Darcy Faircloth bring his mother here by all means. Only I think,
perhaps, this is all a little outside my province. It would be better you
should make the--the appointment with him yourself. I will send to him
directly. Patch can take a note over to the island. I would prefer to
have Patch go as messenger than either of the other men."
She walked towards the door. Stopped half-way and turned, hearing her
father move. And as she turned--her eyes quick with enquiry as to his
case, but inscrutable as to her own--Charles Verity rose too and held
out his arms in supreme invitation. She came swiftly forward and kissed
him, while with all the poor measure of force left him, he strained her
to his breast.
"Have I asked too much from you, Damaris, and, in the desire to make
sure of peace elsewhere, endangered the perfection of my far dearer
peace with you?"
She leaned back from the waist, holding her head away from him and laid
her hand on his lips.
"Don't blaspheme, most beloved," she said, "I have no will but yours."
Again she kissed him, disengaged herself very gently, and went.
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH WHICH IS ALSO CHAPTER THE LAST
At Lady's Oak--an ancient forest boundary--where the main road forks,
Damaris swung the dog-cart to the left, across the single-arch stone
bridge spanning the Arne; and on, up the long winding ascent from the
valley-bottom to the moorlands patched with dark fir plantations, which
range inland from behind Stourmouth. This constituted the goal of her
journey; for, the high-lying plateau reached, leagues of open country are
disclosed north and west, far as the eye carries, to the fine bare
outline of the Wiltshire Downs. She asked for wide prospects, for air and
ample space; but as floored by stable earth rather than by the eternal
unrest and "fruitless, sonorous furrows" of the sea.
Ever since the day of the funeral, now nearly a fortnight ago, Damaris
had kept within the sheltering privacy of the house and grounds. That
day, one of soft drizzling rain and clinging ground fog, had also been to
her one of hardly endurable distraction. Beneath assumption of respectful
silence, it jarred, boomed, took notes, debated, questioned. Beneath
assumption of solemnity, it peeped and stared. Her flayed nerves and
desolated heart plagued her with suspicions of insincerity.
In as far as Colonel Carteret controlled proceedings all had been marked
by reverent simplicity. But where the carcass is, the eagles,
proverbially, gather. And unfeathered fowl, in their own estimation
eminently representative of that regal species, flocked to Deadham church
and to The Hard.
If--to vary our metaphor--some, in the past, inclined to stone the living
prophet, these now outvied one another in their alacrity to bedeck his
tomb. Dr. Cripps, for example, hurried to offer himself as pall-bearer--a
request the more readily disposed of that there was no pall. While
Archdeacon Verity, to cite a second example and from a higher social
level, supported by his elder son Pontifex--domestic chaplain to the
Bishop of Harchester--insisted on sharing with Canon Horniblow the
melancholy honour of reading the burial service.
For the rest, the head, and lesser members of the family, from the big
house at Canton Magna, were solidly, not to say rather aggressively in
evidence. With them Mrs. Cowden and her husband-satellite, the Honourable
Augustus joined forces on arriving from Paulton Lacy.--Lord Bulparc drove
over from Napworth Castle. The country, indeed, showed up with
commendable indifference to depressing atmospheric conditions. Marychurch
sent a contingent. Stourmouth followed suit in the shape of General
Frayling--attended by Marshall Wace in full clerical raiment--bearing a
wreath of palm, violets, and myrtle wholly disproportionate in bulk and
circumference to his own shrivelled and rather tottery form.--Of this
unlooked for advent more hereafter.--Other distinguished soldiers came
from Aldershot and down from town. A permanent Under Secretary, correct
but visibly bored, represented the India Office.
The parish, neglecting its accustomed industries and occupations,
mustered in strength; incited thereto, not only by the draw of recently
resurrected scandal, but by news of the appointment recently offered Sir
Charles Verity, which had somehow got noised abroad. The irony of his
illness and death occurring precisely when he was invited to mount
nothing less--according to local report--than an oriental throne,
sufficed to stir the most lethargic imagination. Moralists of the
Reginald Sawyer school might read in this the direct judgment of an
offended deity. Deadham, however, being reprehensibly clannish, viewed
the incident otherwise; and questioned--thanks to an ingeniously inverted
system of reasoning--whether the said Reginald Sawyer hadn't laid himself
open to a charge of manslaughter or of an even graver breach of the
Decalogue.
Theresa Bilson--in whose hat artificial buttercups and daisies hastily
made room for bows of crape--lurked in the humble obscurity of the free
seats near the west door. To right and left she was flanked by a guardian
Miss Minett; but these ladies to-day were but broken reeds on which to
lean. They still laboured under a sense of having been compromised, and
of resultant social ostracism. This, although their former parsonic
lodger had vanished from the scene on the day following his threatened
immersion--a half-hearted proposition on his part of "facing out the
undeserved obloquy, living down the coarse persecution" meeting with as
scant encouragement from his ecclesiastical superior, the vicar, as from
themselves. Theresa--it really was hard on her--shared their eclipse.
Hence the humble obscurity of the free seats, where she sniffed, dabbed
her eyes and gurgled, unheeded and unseen.
Finally young Tom Verity--home on his first long leave--having
accompanied the family party from Canton Magna and feeling his sense of
humour unequal to the continued strain of their sublime insularity,
benevolently herded two stately, though shivering, turbanned native
gentlemen, who reached Deadham during the early stages of the ceremony no
one quite knew whence or when. In the intervals of his self-imposed
duties, he found time to admire the rich unction of his father, the
Archdeacon's manner and voice.
"_Plus ca change, plus la meme chose_," he quoted gleefully. "What a
consummate fraud the dear old governor is; and how deliciously innocent
of the fact, that he imposes upon no one half so successfully as he does
upon himself!"
Our young man also found time, from afar, to admire Damaris; but, let it
be added, to a very different tune. Her beauty came as surprise to him
as having much more than fulfilled its early promise. He found it
impressive beyond that of any one of the many ladies, mature or callow,
with whom it was his habit largely to flirt. So far he could
congratulate himself on having successfully withstood the wiles of
matrimony--but by how near a shave, at times by how narrow a squeak! If
that fine parental fraud, the Archdeacon, had but known!--Tom,
undeterred by the solemnity of the occasion, hunched up his shoulders
like a naughty boy expecting his ears boxed.--But then--thank the
powers, the Archdeacon so blessedly and refreshingly didn't, and, what
was more, didn't in the very least want to know. He never asked for
trouble; but, like the priest and Levite of sacred parable, carefully
passed by on the other side when trouble was about.
Our young friend looked again at Damaris. Yes--she had beauty and in the
grand manner, standing there at the foot of the open brick-lined grave,
calm, immobile, black-clad, white-faced, in the encircling melancholy of
the drizzling mist. With the family grouped about her, large-boned,
pompous, well-fed persons, impervious to general ideas as they were
imperviously prosperous, he compared her to a strayed deer amongst a
herd of store cattle. Really, with the exception of his cousin Felicia
and--naturally--of himself, the Verity breed was almost indecently true
to type. Prize animals, most of them, he granted, still cattle--for
didn't he detect an underlying trace of obstinate bovine ferocity in
their collective aspect?
Damaris' calm and immobility exceeded theirs. But in quality and source
how far removed, how sensitive and intelligent! Her mourning was in the
grand manner, too, her grief sincere and absolute to the extent of a
splendid self-forgetfulness. She didn't need to pose; for that forgotten
self could be trusted--in another acceptation of the phrase--never to
forget itself.
And here Tom Verity's agreeable frivolity, the astute and witty
shiftiness of mind and--in a degree--of practice, for which he so readily
found excuses and forgave himself, made place for nobler apprehensions.
Not merely Damaris', just now, rather tragic beauty moved and impressed
him; but some quality inherent in her upon which he felt disposed to
confer the title of genius. That was going far.--Mentally he pulled
himself up short.--For wasn't it going altogether too far--absurdly so?
What the dickens did this excessive admiration portend? Could he have
received the _coup de foudre_?--He had to-day a fancy for French tags, in
reaction from the family's over-powering Englishness.--That wouldn't suit
his book in the very least. For in the matters of the affections he held
it thriftless, to the confines of sheer lunacy, to put all your eggs into
one basket. He, therefore, politicly abstained from further observation
of Damaris; and, with engaging assiduity, reapplied himself to herding
the two native gentlemen through the remainder of the ceremony and, at
the conclusion of it, into the mildewed luxury of a Marychurch landau.
Deadham parish went home to its tea that evening damp, not to say
dripping, but well pleased with the figure it had cut in the public eye.
For it had contributed its quota to contemporary history; and what parish
can, after all, do more! Reporters pervaded it armed with note-books and
pencils. They put questions, politely requested a naming of names. The
information furnished in answer would reach the unassailable authority of
print, giving Deadham opportunity to read the complimentary truth about
itself. Still better, giving others opportunity to read the complimentary
truth about Deadham. Hence trade and traffic of sorts, with much
incidental replenishing of purses. Great are the uses of a dead prophet
to the keepers of his tomb! Not within the memory of the oldest
inhabitant had any funeral been so largely or honourably attended. Truly
it spelled excellent advertisement--and this although two persons,
calculated mightily to have heightened interest and brought up dramatic
and emotional values, were absent from the scene.
For Lesbia Faircloth, giving her barman and two women servants a holiday,
closed the inn at noon. Alone within the empty house, she locked the
outer doors. Drew the blinds, reducing the interior to uniform,
shadow-peopled obscurity, with the exception of her own bed-chamber.
There she left one small square window--set deep in the stone work of the
wall--open and uncurtained.
It faced the causeway and perspective of lane skirting the warren and
leading to the high road and village. Looking out thence, in winter when
the trees were bare, she could see Deadham church, crowning its
monticule, part of the sloping graveyard and, below these in the middle
distance, the roofs and gables of the village street.
To-day the view was obliterated. For here, at the river level, mist and
drizzle took the form of fog. Opaque, chill and dank, it drifted in
continuous, just perceptible, undulations past and in at the open
casement. Soon the air of the room grew thick and whitish, the dark oak
furniture and the floor boards furred with moisture. Yet, her methodical
closure of the house complete, Lesbia Faircloth elected to sit in full
inward sweep of it, drawing a straight-backed chair, mounted on roughly
carpentered rockers, close to the window.
A handsome woman still, though in her late fifties, erect and of
commanding presence, her figure well-proportioned if somewhat massive.
Her dark hair showed no grey. Her rather brown skin was clear, smooth and
soft in texture. Her eyes clear, too, watchful and reticent; on
occasion--such as the driving of a business bargain say, or of a drunken
client--hard as flint. Her mouth, a wholesome red, inclined to fullness;
but had been governed to straightness of line--will dominant, not only in
her every movement, but in repose as she now sat, the chair rockers at a
backward tilt, her capable and well-shaped hands folded on her black
apron in the hollow of her lap.
Putting aside all work for once, and permitting herself a space of
undisturbed leisure, she proceeded to cast up her account with love and
life in as clear-headed, accurate a fashion as she would have cast up the
columns of cash-book or ledger--and found the balance on the credit side.
So finding it, she turned her head and looked across the room at the wide
half-tester wooden bed, set against the inner wall--the white crochet
counterpane of which, an affair of intricate fancy patterns and
innumerable stitches, loomed up somewhat ghostly and pallid through the
gloom. A flicker of retrospective victory passed across her face,
attesting old scores as paid. For there, through sleepless nights,
nursing the ardours and disgust of her young womanhood, she lay barren
beside her apple-cheeked, piping-voiced spouse, his wife in name only.
There later, times having, as by miracle, changed for her, she gave
birth to her son.
If somewhat pre-christian in instinct and in nature, the child of a more
ancient and a simpler world, she was in no sort slow of intelligence or
wanton. What had been, sufficed her. She cried out neither for further
indulgence of passion, nor against barriers imposed by circumstance and
class. That which she had done, she had done open-eyed, counting and
accepting the cost. Since then wooers were not lacking; but she turned a
deaf ear to all and each. A frank materialist in some ways, she proved an
idealist in this. No subsequent love passage could rival, in wonder or
beauty, that first one; since, compared with Charles Verity, the men who
subsequently aspired to her favours--whether in wedlock or out--were, to
her taste, at best dull, loutish fellows, at worst no more than human
jackasses or human swine.
And, through it all, she possessed the boy on whom to spend her heart, in
whose interests to employ her foresight and singular capacity of
money-making. For love's sake therefore, and for his sake also, she had
lived without reproach, a woman chary even of friendship, chary, too, of
laughter, chary above all of purposeless gaddings and of gossip.
Business, and the boy's sea-going or returning, might take her as far as
Southampton, Plymouth, Cardiff, more rarely London or some northern port.
But Deadham village rarely beheld her, and never, it is to be feared, did
the inside of Deadham church.
Yet Deadham church bell plaintively, insistently tolling, the sound
reaching her muted by the thickness of the fog, kept her attention on the
stretch for the ensuing hour. Startling as it was poignant, Charles
Verity's demand to see her, six days ago, brought the story of her love
to full circle. Their meeting had been of the briefest, for he was
exhausted by pain. But that he had sent, and she had gone, was unlocked
for largesse on the part of fortune, sufficient to give her deep-seated
and abiding sense of healing and of gain. And this stayed by her now,
rather than any active call for mourning.
She inhaled the dank chillness of the fog gratefully. It suited the
occasion better far than sunshine and bright skies. For winter,
darkness, sullen flowing waters and desolate crying winds furnished the
accompaniment of those earlier meetings. Hearing the tolling bell she
strove to relive them, and found she did so with singularly mounting
wealth and precision of detail. Not only vision but sense pushed
backward and inward, revitalizing what had been; until she ached with
suspense and yearning, shrewdly evaded dangers, surmounted obstructions
by action at once bold and wary and tasted the transfiguring rapture of
the end attained.
In the soberness of her middle years, occupied as she was with the rough,
exacting business of the inn, and with the management of accumulating
landed and other property--anxiety born of her son's perilous calling
never absent from her thought--Lesbia Faircloth inclined to live
exclusively in the present. Hence the colours of her solitary passion had
somewhat faded, becoming clouded and dim. Recent events--led by the ugly
publicity of Reginald Sawyer's sermon--served to revive those colours.
To-day they glowed rich and splendid, a robing of sombre glory to her
inward and backward searching sight.
The bell tolled quicker, announcing the immediate approach of the dead.
Lesbia listened, her head raised, her face, turned to open window, felt
over by the clammy, impalpable fingers of the fog.
Now they bore the coffin up the churchyard path, as she timed it. She
wondered who the bearers might be, and whether they carried it shoulder
high? The path was steep; and Charles Verity, though spare and lean,
broad of chest and notably tall. Bone tells. They would feel the weight,
would breathe hard, stagger a little even and sweat.
And with this visualizing of grim particulars, love, bodily love and
desire of that which rested stark and for ever cold within the narrow
darkness of the coffin--shut away from all comfort of human contact and
the dear joys of a woman's embrace--rushed on her like a storm, buffeted
and shook her, so that she looked to right and to left as asking help,
while her hands worked one upon the other in the hollow of her lap.
Nor did Darcy Faircloth figure in Deadham's record funeral gathering.
Upon the day preceding it, having watched by Charles Verity's corpse
during the previous night, he judged it well to take his new command--a
fine, five-thousand-ton steamer, carrying limited number of passengers
as well as cargo, and trading from Tilbury to the far East and to Japan,
via the Cape.
In his withdrawal, at this particular date, Miss Felicia hailed a counsel
of perfection which commanded, and continued to command, alike her
enthusiastic approval and unfeigned regret. For that he should so
seasonably efface himself, argued--in her opinion--so delightful a
nature, such nice thought for others, such chivalrous instincts and
excellent good taste!--All the more lamentable, then, effacement should
be, from social, moral or other seasons, required.--Yet for the family to
gain knowledge of certain facts without due preparation--how utterly
disastrous! Think of her half-sister, Harriet Cowden, for instance, with
a full-grown and, alas! wrong-way-about, step-nephew bounced on her out
of a clear sky, and on such an occasion too.--The bare notion of what
that formidable lady, not only might, but quite certainly would look and
say turned Miss Felicia positively faint.--No--no, clearly it had to
be--it had to be--or rather--she became incoherent--had not to be, if
only for dearest Charles's sake. Yet what a ten thousand pities; for
notwithstanding the plebeian origin on the mother's side, didn't
Faircloth--these reflections came later--really surpass every male Verity
present, young Tom included, though she confessed to a very soft spot in
her heart for young Tom?--Surpass them, just as her brother Charles had
always surpassed them in good looks and charm as in inches, above all in
his air of singular good-breeding? And how extraordinarily he had
transmitted this last to Faircloth, notwithstanding the--well, the
drawback, the obstacle to--Miss Felicia did not finish the sentence,
though in sentiment becoming sweetly abandoned. For how she would have
revelled, other things being equal--which they so deplorably weren't--in
shaking this singularly attractive nephew in the family's collective
face, just to show them what dearest Charles--who they never had quite
understood or appreciated--could do in the matter of sons, when he once
set about it, even against admittedly heavy odds!
As it was, she had to pacify her gentle extravagance by subjecting the
said nephew's hand to a long tremulous pressure at parting.--He, worn,
blanched, a little strange from the night's lonely and very searching
vigil; she patchily pink as to complexion, fluttered, her candid eyes
red-lidded.--Pacify herself by assuring him she could never express how
deeply she had felt his unselfish devotion during this time of
trouble--felt his--his perfect attitude towards her dearest brother--his
father--or the consideration he had shown towards Damaris and herself.
"You can count on my unswerving affection, my dear Darcy," she had
said. Adding with, to him, very touching humility--"And any affection
you have to give me in return I shall cherish most gratefully, be very
sure of that."
All which, as shall presently be shown, brings our narrative, though by
devious courses, back to Damaris sweeping the dog-cart to the left across
the bridge spanning the Arne, and on up the long winding ascent, from the
woods and rich meadows in the valley to the wide prospects and keener air
of the moorland above.
Until now, as already chronicled, she had remained in house or garden,
prey to an apathy which, while not amounting to definite ill-health,
refused interest and exertion. She could not shake it off. To her all
things were empty, blank, immensely purposeless. Religion failed to touch
her state--religion, that is, in the only form accessible. The interior
of some frowning Gothic church of old Castile, or, from another angle, of
some mellow Latin basilica, might have found the required mystic word to
say to her. But Protestantism, even in its mild Anglican form, shuts the
door on its dead children with a heavy hand.--And she suffered this
religious coldness, although any idea that death of the body implies
extinction of the spirit, extinction of personality, never occurred to
her. Damaris' sense of the unseen was too ingrained, her commerce with it
too actual for that. No--the spirit lived on. He, her most beloved, lived
on, himself, his very self; but far away from her. In just this consisted
the emptiness, the unspeakable and blank bitterness--he was somewhere and
she could not reach him. The dreadful going away of his spirit, against
which she had fought during the thirty-six hours of his illness, had
reached its ordained consummation--that was all.
The body which had contained and by that beloved spirit been so nobly
animated, in its present awful peace, its blind dumb majesty, meant
scarcely more to her than some alabaster or waxen effigy of her dead. It
was so like, yet so terrifyingly unlike Charles Verity in life!--She had
visited it morning and evening, since to leave it in solitude appeared
wanting in reverence. Throughout each night she thankfully knew that
either Carteret, McCabe or Faircloth watched by it. Yet to her it hardly
retained as much of her father's natural presence as the clothes he had
worn, the books and papers littering his writing-table, the chair he
preferred to sit in, his guns and swords upon the wall, or the collection
of fishing-rods, walking-sticks and his spud stacked in a corner.
After the strain and publicity of the funeral her apathy deepened,
perplexing and saddening Carteret and bringing Miss Felicia near to
veritable wailing. For while thanking them both she, in fact, put them
both aside. This in no sour or irritable humour; but with a listlessness
and apartness hopeless to overcome. She prayed them to give her time.
Soon she would begin again; but not just yet. She "couldn't begin again
to order--couldn't make herself begin again. They must not trouble, only
be patient with her, please, a little longer--she wasn't, indeed she
wasn't, pretending"--a statement which, in its simplicity, cut Carteret
to the quick--for "she meant to begin again directly she could."
To-day the weather took an encouraging turn for the better. Following
the spell of fog and wet a northerly wind at last arose. It swept the sky
clear of clouds, the land of melancholy vapours, begetting a brilliance
of atmosphere which wooed our maiden to come forth and once more affront
the open. She therefore ordered the dog-cart at two o'clock. Would
herself drive; and, "if Aunt Felicia didn't mind and think her
unsociable, would take Patch for sole company, because then"--renewed
apologies--"she needn't talk and she felt disinclined to do so."
During the first half mile or so, as must be confessed, each prick of
the black horse's ears and change in his pace sent a quake through her,
as did the sight of every vehicle upon the road she passed or met. Her
nerve was nowhere, her self-confidence in tatters. But, since this
parlous state was, in the main, physical, air and movement, along with
the direct call on her attention, steadied the one and knit up the
ravelled edges of the other. By the time the plateau was reached and the
hill lay behind her, she could afford to walk the horse, tentatively
invite her soul, and attempt to hold communion with Nature. Sorrow--as
well as the Napoleonic Patch--still sat very squarely beside her; but
the nightmare of mortality, with consequent blankness and emptiness, was
no longer omnipresent. Interest again stirred in her, the healthy
instinct of going on.
Except in the foreground, where foxy browns of withered bracken and
pink-shot browns of withered heather gave richness of tone, the colouring
of the great view was somewhat cold. It dealt in thin, uncertain green,
the buff of stubble, in sharp slate-like blues blended in places with
indigo, the black purple of hawthorn hedges and grey-brown filigree of
leafless trees.--This did her good, she asking to be strengthened and
stimulated rather than merely soothed. To feel the harsh, untainted wind
break against her, hear it shrill through the dry, shivering grasses of
the roadside and sturdy spires of heath, to see it toss the dark crests
and tufted branches of the outstanding firs at the edge of the
plantation, brought up her morale. Brought her resignation, moreover--not
of the self-indulgent order, of bowed head and languidly folded hands;
but of the sort which acknowledges loss and sorrow as common to the sum
of human experience, places it in its just relation to the rest, and,
though more heavily weighted than before, takes up the onward march,
sobered perhaps yet undismayed.
Sins of omission began to prick her. The domestic establishment ran on
wheels, even during the recent stress and agitation, though she had
ceased to exercise control over it. Now it must be reorganized--and
probably on a less liberal footing.--But these were minor questions,
comparatively simple to cope with. Her life had been full, it must find
fresh purpose, fresh interest and occupation, in a word, be refilled.
Literature allured her. She dreamed of wonderful tellings, dreamed of the
engrossing joys of the written word. But in what form--poetry, essay,
history, novel?--The extreme limitation of her own knowledge, or rather
the immensity of her own ignorance, confronted her. And that partly
through her own fault, for she had been exclusive, fastidious, disposed
to ignore both truths and people who offended her taste or failed to
strike her fancy. Hitherto she had been led by fancy and feeling rather
than by reasoned principle. She must at once simplify, broaden and
democratize her outlook. Must force herself to remember that respect is,
in some sort, due to everything--however unbeautiful, however even vile
or repugnant--which is a constant quantity in human affairs and human
character, due to everything in the realm of Nature also, however
repellent, if it _is_ really so, actually exists.
In this connection the mysterious and haunting question of sex obtruded
itself. And, along with it, the thought of two eminently diverse persons,
namely Lesbia Faircloth and the dear, the more than ever dear, man with
the blue eyes. That, in his agony, her father should have desired the
visit of the former, once his mistress, had been very bitter to bear,
provoking in Damaris a profound though silent jealousy. This had even
come in some degree between her and Faircloth. For, in proportion as
that visit more effectually united father and son, it abolished her
position as intermediary between the two.
Recalling the incident jealousy moved her now, so that she gathered up
the reins hastily and touched the horse with the whip. It sprang
forward, danced and behaved, before settling down to the swinging trot
which, in so handsome a fashion, ate up the blond road crossing the
brown expanse of moor.
Damaris was surprised and distressed by the vehemence of her own emotion.
That her jealousy was retrospective, and belonged to a past now over and
done with, she admitted. Yet, thinking of her father's demand to see
Lesbia, how amazingly deep it went, how profound, and lasting is the
empire of "feeling in _that_ way"--so she put it, falling back on her
phrase of nearly three years ago, first coined at St. Augustin.
And this was where Carteret came in.--For he alone, of all men, had made
her, Damaris, ever consciously "feel in _that_ way."--A fact of immense
significance surely, could she but grasp the full, the inner meaning of
it--and one which entered vitally into the matter of "beginning again."
Therefore, so she argued, the proposed simplifying, broadening,
democratizing of her outlook must cover--amongst how much else!--the
whole astonishing business of "feeling in _that_ way."
She shrank from the conclusion as unwelcome. The question of sex was
still distasteful to her. But she bade herself, sternly, not to shrink.
For without some reasoned comprehension of it--as now dawned on her--the
ways of human beings, of animals, of plants and, so some say, even of
minerals, are unintelligible, arbitrary, and nonsensical. It is the push
of life itself, essential, fundamental, which makes us "feel in _that_
way"--the push of spirit yearning to be clothed upon with flesh, made
visible and given its chance to enter the earthly arena, to play an
individual part in the beautiful, terrible earthly scene. Therefore she
must neglect it, reject it no longer. It had to be met and understood, if
she would graduate in the school of reality; and in what other possible
school is it worth while to graduate?
Reaching which climax in her argument, the selfishness of her recent
behaviour became humiliatingly patent to her. From the whole household,
but especially from Carteret and Aunt Felicia, she had taken all and
given nothing in return. She had added to their grief, their anxieties,
by her silence, her apathy, her whimsies.
"Patch," she asked suddenly, "which is the shortest way home, without
going through Stourmouth and Marychurch? "--And, under his instructions,
turned the dog-cart down a grassy side-track, heading south-east--her back
now to the wind and inland country, her face to the larger horizon, the
larger if more hazardous freedom of the sea.
Conversation, started thus by her enquiry, flourished in friendly,
desultory fashion until, about three-quarters of an hour later, the front
gates of The Hard came in sight. By then afternoon merged itself in early
evening. Lights twinkled in the windows of the black cottages, upon the
Island, and in those of Faircloth's inn. The sky flamed orange and
crimson behind the sand-hills and Stone Horse Head. The air carried the
tang of coming frost. Upon the hard gravel of the drive, the wheels of
the dog-cart grated and the horse's hoofs rang loud.
Another Damaris came home to the Damaris who had set forth--a Damaris
rested, refreshed, invigorated, no longer a passive but an active agent.
Nevertheless, our poor maiden suffered some reaction on re-entering the
house. For, so entering, her loss again confronted her as an actual
entity. It sat throned in the lamp-lit hall. It demanded payment of
tribute before permitting her to pass. Its attitude amounted, in her too
fertile imagination, to a menace. Here, within the walls which had
witnessed not only her own major acquaintance with sorrow, but so many
events and episodes of strange and, sometimes, cruel import--super-normal
manifestations, too, of which last she feared to think--she grew undone
and weak, disposed to let tears flow, and yield once more to depression
and apathy. The house was stronger than she. But--but--only stronger,
surely, if she consented to turn craven and give way to it?--Whereupon
she consciously, of set purpose, defied the house, denied its right to
browbeat thus and enslave her. For had not she this afternoon, up on the
moorland, found a finer manner of mourning than it imposed, a manner at
once more noble and so more consonant with the temper and achievements of
her beloved dead? She believed that she had.
On the hall table lay a little flight of visiting cards. Her mind
occupied in silent battle with the house, Damaris glanced at them
absently and would have passed on. But something in the half-deciphered
printed names caught her attention. She bent lower, doubting if she could
have read aright.
"Brig.-General and Mrs. Frayling."--Two smaller cards, also bearing the
General's name, ranged with two others bearing that of "The Rev. Marshall
Wace." A written inscription, in the corner of each, notified a leading
hotel in Stourmouth as the habitat of their respective owners.
This little discovery affected Damaris to a singular extent. She had
small enough wish for Henrietta Frayling's society at this juncture;
still less for that of her attendant singer-reciter-parson. Yet their
names, and the train of recollections evoked by these, made for the
normal, the average, and, in so far, had on her a wholesome effect. For
Henrietta, of once adored and now somewhat tarnished memory--soulless,
finished, and exquisitely artificial to her finger-tips, beguiling others
yet never herself beguiled beyond the limits of a flawless
respectability--was wonderfully at odds with high tragedies of
dissolution. How had the house received such a guest? How put up with her
intrusion? But wasn't the house, perhaps, itself at a disadvantage, its
sting drawn in presence of such invincible materialism? For how impress a
creature at once so light and so pachydermatous? The position lent itself
to rather mordant comedy.
In this sense, though not precisely in these phrases, did Damaris
apprehend matters as, still holding Henrietta Frayling's visiting card
in her hand, she crossed the hall and went into the drawing-room.
There, from upon the sofa behind the tea-table, through the warm soft
radiance of shaded lamps and glowing fire, Felicia Verity uplifted her
voice in somewhat agitated greeting. She made no preliminary affectionate
enquiries--such as might have been expected--regarding her niece's outing
or general well-being, but darted, not to say exploded, into the
declaration:
"Darling, I am so exceedingly glad you weren't at home!--Mrs.
Frayling's card?"
This, as the girl sat down on the sofa beside her.
"Then you know who's been here. I didn't intend to see anyone--unless
poor little Theresa--But no, truly no one. Both Hordle and Mary were off
duty--I ought not to have let them be away at the same time, perhaps, but
I did feel they both needed a holiday, don't you know.--And either they
had forgotten to give Laura my orders, or she lost her head, or was
talked over. I daresay Mrs. Frayling insisted."
"Henrietta is not easily turned from her purpose," Damaris said.
"Exactly.--A very few minutes' conversation with her convinced me of
that. And so I felt it would be unfair to blame Laura too severely. I
should suppose Mrs. Frayling excessively clever in getting her own way.
Poor Laura--even if she did know my orders, she hadn't a chance."
"Not a chance," Damaris repeated.
Once convalescence initiated, youth speedily regains its elasticity; and
Aunt Felicia with her feathers ruffled, Aunt Felicia upon the warpath
thus, presented a novel spectacle meriting observation. Evidently she and
Henrietta had badly clashed!--A nice little demon of diversion stirred
within Damaris. For the first time for many days she felt amused.
"Excessively clever," Miss Felicia continued.
--Without doubt the dear thing was finely worked up!--
"And, though I hardly like to make such accusation, none too scrupulous
in her methods. She leads you on with a number of irrelevant comments
and questions, until you find she's extracted from you a whole host of
things you never meant to say. She is far too inquisitive--too
possessive."
Miss Felicia ended on an almost violent note.
"Yes, Henrietta has a tiresome little habit of having been there first,"
Damaris said, a touch of weariness in her tone remembering past
encounters.
Miss Felicia, caught by that warning tone, patted her niece's rather
undiscoverable knee--undiscoverable because still covered by a heavy
fur-lined driving coat--lovingly, excitedly.
"If you choose to believe her, darling," she cried, "which I, for one,
emphatically don't."
Following which ardent profession of faith, or rather of scepticism, Miss
Felicia attempted to treat the subject broadly. She soared to
mountain-tops of social and psychological astuteness; but only to make
hasty return upon her gentler self, deny her strictures, and snatch at
the skirts of vanishing Christian charity.
"Men aren't so easily led away," she hopefully declared. "Nor can I think
Mrs. Frayling so irresistible to each and all as she wishes one to
imagine. She must magnify the number and, still more, the permanence of
her conquests. No doubt she has been very much admired. I know she was
lovely. I saw her once ages ago, at Tullingworth. Dearest Charles," the
words came softly, as though her lips hesitated to pronounce them in so
trivial a connection--"asked me to call on her as I was staying in the
neighbourhood. She had a different surname then, by the way, I remember."
"Henrietta has had four in all--counting in her maiden name, I mean."
"Exactly," Miss Felicia argued, "and that, no doubt, does prejudice me a
little against her. I suppose it is wrong, but when a woman marries so
often one can't help feeling as if she ended by not being married at
all--a mere change of partners, don't you know, which does seem rather
shocking. It suggests such an absence of deep feeling.--Poor thing, I
dare say that is just her nature; still it doesn't attract me. In fact
it gives me a creep.--But I quite own she is pretty still, and
extraordinarily well dressed--only too well dressed, don't you know, that
is for the country.--More tea, darling. Yes, Mrs. Cooper's scones are
particularly good this afternoon.--I wish I liked her better, Mrs.
Frayling, I mean, because she evidently intends to be here a lot in
future. She expressed the warmest affection for you. She was very
possessive about you, more I felt than she'd any real right to be. That,
I'm afraid, put my back up--that and one or two other things. She and
General Frayling think of settling in Stourmouth for good, if Mr. Wace is
appointed to the Deadham curacy."
"The curacy here?" Damaris echoed, a rather lurid light breaking
in on her.
Miss Felicia's glance was of timid, slightly distressed, enquiry.
"Yes," she said, "Mr. Wace has applied for the curacy. He and General
Frayling were to have an interview with Canon Horniblow this afternoon.
They dropped Mrs. Frayling here on their way to the vicarage, and sent
the fly back for her. She talked a great deal about Mr. Wace and his
immense wish to come here. She gave me to understand it was his one
object to"--
The speaker broke off, raised her thin, long-fingered hands to her
forehead.
"I don't know," she said, "but really I feel perhaps, darling, it is
better to warn you. She implied--oh! she did it very cleverly, really, in
a way charmingly--but she implied that things had gone very hard with Mr.
Wace that winter at St. Augustin, and that all he went through has
remarkably developed and strengthened his character--that it, in fact,
was what determined him to take Holy Orders. His difficulties melted
before his real need for the support of religion. It would have all been
most touching if one had heard a story of such devotion from anyone
but--but her, about anyone but him--under the circumstances, poor young
man--because--darling--well, because of you."
"Of me?" Damaris stiffened.
"Yes--that is just the point. Mrs. Frayling left me in no doubt. She was
determined to make me understand just what Mr. Wace's attitude had been
towards you--and that it is still unchanged."
Damaris got up. Pulled off her driving coat, gloves and hat. Threw them
upon the seat of a chair. The act was symbolic. She felt suffocated,
impelled to rid herself of every impediment. For wasn't she confronted
with another battle--a worse one than that with the house, namely, a
battle with her long-ago baby-love, and her father's love
too--Henrietta.--Henrietta, so strangely powerful, so amazingly
persistent--Henrietta who enclosed you in arms, apparently so soft but
furnished with suckers, octopus arms adhering, never letting you go? She
had played with the idea of this intrusion of Henrietta's and its effect
upon Miss Felicia, at first as something amusing. It ceased to be
amusing. It frightened her.
"And my attitude is unchanged, too," she said presently, gravely proud.
"I didn't want to marry Marshall Wace then. I was dreadfully sorry when
Henrietta told me he cared for me. I don't want to marry him or have
him care for me one bit more now. I think it very interfering of
Henrietta to trouble you with this. It is not the moment. She might at
least have waited."
"So I felt," Miss Felicia put in. She watched her niece anxiously, as the
latter went across to the fire-place and stood, her back to the room,
looking down into the glowing logs.
For she had--or rather ought she not to have?--another communication to
make which involved the fighting of a battle on her own account, not
against Henrietta Frayling, still less against Damaris, but against
herself. It trembled on the tip of her tongue. She felt impelled, yet
sorrowed to utter it. Hence her wishes and purposes jostled one another,
being tenderly, bravely, heroically even, contradictory. In speaking she
invited the shattering of a dream of personal election to happiness--a
late blossoming happiness and hence the more entrancing, the more
pathetic. That any hope of the dream's fulfilment was fragile as glass,
lighter than gossamer, the veriest shadow of a shade, her natural
diffidence and sane sense, alike, convinced her. For this very cause, the
dream being of the sweetest and most intimate, how gladly would she have
cherished the enchanting foolishness of it a trifle longer!--Her act of
heroism would earn no applause, moreover, would pass practically
unnoticed. No one would be aware of her sacrifice. She would only gain
the satisfaction of knowing she had done the perfectly right and generous
thing by two persons who would never share that knowledge.--She
blushed.--Heaven forbid they ever should share it--and thank her.
"Mrs. Frayling--I don't want"--
Miss Felicia stopped.
"What don't you want?"--This from Damaris over her shoulder, the pause
being prolonged.
"To set you against her, darling"--
"I think," Damaris said, "I know all about Henrietta."
"She insinuates so much," Miss Felicia lamented.--"Or seems to do so. One
grows wretchedly suspicious of her meaning. Perhaps I exaggerate and
misjudge her.--She is quite confusingly adroit; but I extremely disliked
the way in which she spoke of Colonel Carteret."
Damaris bent a little forward, holding her skirt back from the scorch of
the fire, her eyes still downcast.
"How did she speak of him?"
"Oh! all she said was very indirect--but as though he had not played
quite fair with her on some occasion. And--it's odious to repeat!--as if
that was his habit with women, and with unmarried girls as well--as if he
was liable to behave in a way which placed them in a rather invidious
position while he just shuffled out of all responsibility himself. She
hinted his staying on with us here was a case in point--that it might
give people a wrong idea altogether. That, in short--at least thinking it
over I feel sure this is the impression she meant to convey to me--that
he is indulging his chronic love of philandering at your expense."
"And thereby standing in the light of serious lovers such as
Marshall Wace?"
After a moment Damaris added:
"Is that your idea of Colonel Carteret, Aunt Felicia?"
"Ah! No, indeed no," the poor lady cried, with rather anguished
sincerity. Then making a fine effort over herself:
"Least of all where you are concerned, my darling."
And she drifted hastily on to her feet. The curtains were still undrawn;
and, through the window opposite, she caught sight of a tall figure
coming up across the lawn in the frosty twilight.
"Pardon me if I run away. I've forgotten a note I meant to send to poor
little Theresa Bilson.--I must let Laura have it at once, or she mayn't
catch the postman," she said with equal rapidity and apparent
inconsequence.
As Felicia Verity passed out into the hall, at one end of the avenue of
stumpy pillars, Carteret came in at the other end through the garden
door. He halted a moment, dazzled by the warmth and light within after
the clair-obscure of the frosty dusk without, and looked round the room
before recognizing the identity of its remaining occupant. Then:
"Ah! you--dear witch," he said. "So you're home. And what of your drive?"
Damaris turned round, all of a piece. Her hands, white against the black,
the fingers slightly apart, still pressed back the skirt of her dress as
though saving it from the fire scorch, in quaintly careful childish
fashion. Her complexion was that of a child too, in its soft brightness.
And the wonder of her great eyes fairly challenged Carteret's wits.
"A babe of a thousand years," he quoted to himself. "Does that look grow
out of a root of divine innocence, or of quite incalculable wisdom?"
"I told you if you would be patient with me I should begin again. I have
begun again, dear Colonel Sahib."
"So I perceive," he answered her.
"Is it written so large?" she asked curiously.
"Very large," he said, falling in with her humour. "And where does the
beginning lead to?"
"I wish you'd tell me.--Henrietta has begun again too."
"I know it," he said. "Our incomparable Henrietta overtook me on her way
from here to the Vicarage, and bestowed her society on me for the better
part of half an hour. She was in astonishing form."
Carteret came forward and stood on the tiger skin beside Damaris. Mrs.
Frayling's conversation had given him very furiously to think, and his
thoughts had not proved by any means exhilarating.
"Does this recrudescence of our Henrietta, her beginning again, affect
the scope and direction of your own beginning again, dearest witch?" he
presently enquired, in singularly restrained and colourless accents.
"That depends a good deal upon you--doesn't it, Colonel Sahib?" our
maiden gravely answered.
Carteret felt as though she dealt him a blow. The pain was numbing. He
could neither see, nor could he think clearly. But he traced Mrs.
Frayling's hand in this, and could have cursed her elaborately--had it
been worth while. But was anything worth while, just now? He inclined to
believe not--so called himself a doating fool. And then, though
tormented, shaken, turned his mind to making things easy for Damaris.
"Oh! I see that," he told her. "And now you have got hold of your
precious little self again and made a start, it's easy enough to manage
your affairs--in as far as they need any management of mine--from a
distance. This beginning again is triumphant. I congratulate you! You're
your own best physician. You know how to treat your case to a marvel. So
I abdicate."
"But why? Why abdicate? Do you mean go away? Then Henrietta was right.
What she said was true. I never believed her. I"--
Damaris grew tall in her shame and anger. The solemn eyes blazed.
"Yes--pray go," she said. "It's unwarrantable the way I kept you
here--the way I've made use of you. But, indeed, indeed, I am very
grateful, Colonel Sahib. I ought to have known better. But I didn't. I
have been so accustomed all my life to your help that I took it all for
granted. I never thought how much I taxed your forbearance or encroached
on your time.--That isn't quite true though. I did have scruples; but
little things you said and did put my scruples to sleep. I liked having
them put to sleep.--Now you must not let me or my business interfere any
more.--Oh! you've treated me, given to me, like a prince," she declared,
rising superior to anger and to shame, her eyes shining--"like a king.
Nobody can ever take your place or be to me what you've been. I shall
always love to think of your goodness to--to him--my father--and to
me--always--all my life."
Damaris held out her hands.
"And that's all.--Now let us say no more about this. It's difficult. It
hurts us both, I fancy, a little."
But Carteret did not take her proffered hands.
"Dear witch," he said, "we've spoken so freely that I am afraid we must
speak more freely still--even though it pains you a little perhaps, and
myself, almost certainly very much more. I love you--not as a friend, not
as an amiable elderly person should love a girl of your age.--This isn't
an affair of yesterday or the day before yesterday. You crept into my
heart on your sixth birthday--wasn't it?--when I brought you a certain
little green jade elephant from our incomparable Henrietta, and found you
asleep in a black marble chair, set on a blood-red sandstone platform,
overlooking the gardens of the club at Bhutpur. And you have never crept
out of it again--won't do so as long as body and mind hang together, or
after. It has been a song of degrees.--For years you were to me a
delicious plaything; but a plaything with a mysterious soul, after which
I felt, every now and again, in worship and awe. The plaything stage came
to an end when I was here with you before we went to Paris, four years
ago. For I found then, beyond all question of doubt, that I loved you as
a man only loves once, and as most men never love at all. I have tried
to keep this from you because I have no right to burden your youth with
my middle-age."
Carteret smiled at her.
"It has not been altogether easy to hold my peace, dearest witch," he
said. "The seven devils of desire--of which you knew nothing, bless
you"--"I'm not sure that I do know nothing," Damaris put in quietly.
She looked him over from head to heel, and the wonder of her great
eyes deepened.
"It isn't wrong?" she said, brokenly, hoarsely. "I don't think it can
be wrong?"
Then, "You will be good to my brother, to Darcy Faircloth, and let me see
him quite, quite often!"
And lastly, her lips trembling:
"It is beautiful, more beautiful than I ever knew about, to have you for
quite my own, Colonel Sahib."
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