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BY
BALZAC.
FAIRE naître un désir, le nourrir, le développer, le grandir, le satisfaire, c'est un poëme tout entier.
GLASGOW:
PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
LTD.
"We can make do for this afternoon, Miss, but the men they're
getting blowed out with shirts. It's the children's shifts as we
can't make shift without much longer." Mrs. James, habitually
doleful, punctuated her speech with sniffs.
"That's a joke, Mrs. James," said Betty. "How
clever you are!"
"I try to be what's fitting," said Mrs. James,
complacently.
"Talk of fitting," said Betty, "If you like I'll
fit on that black bodice for you, Mrs. Symes. If the other ladies
don't mind waiting for the reading a little bit."
"I'd as lief talk as read, myself," said a red-faced
sandy-haired woman; "books ain't what they was in my young
days."
"If it's the same to you, Miss," said Mrs. Symes in a
thick rich voice, "I'll not be tried on afore a room full. If we
are poor we can all be clean's what I say, and I keeps my unders as I
keeps my outside. But not before persons as has real imitation lace on
their petticoat bodies. I see them when I was a
nursing her with her fourth. No, Miss, and thanking you kindly, but begging your pardon all the same."
"Don't mention it," said Betty absently. "Oh,
Mrs. Smith, you can't have lost your thimble already. Why what's
that you've got in your mouth?"
"So it is!" Mrs. Smith's face beamed at the gratifying
coincidence. "It always was my habit, from a child, to put things
there for safety."
"These cheap thimbles ain't fit to put in your mouth, no more
than coppers," said Mrs. James, her mouth full of pins.
"Oh, nothing hurts you if you like it," said Betty
recklessly. She had been reading the works of Mr. G.K. Chesterton.
A shocked murmur arose.
"Oh, Miss, what about the publy kows?" said Mrs. Symes
heavily. The others nodded acquiescence.
"Don't you think we might have a window open?" said
Betty. The May sunshine beat on the schoolroom windows. The room, crowded
with the stout members of the "Mother's Meeting and Mutual
Clothing Club," was stuffy, unbearable.
A murmur arose far more shocked than the first.
"I was just a-goin' to say why not close the door, that being
what doors is made for, after all," said Mrs. Symes. "I feel a
sort of draught a creeping up my legs as it is."
The door was shut.
"You can't be too careful," said the red-faced woman;
"we never know what a chill mayn't bring forth. My cousin's
sister-in-law, she had twins, and her aunt come in and says she,
'You're a bit stuffy here, ain't you?' and with that
she opens the window a crack, not meaning no harm, Miss, as it might be
you. And within a year that poor unfortunate woman she popped off, when
least expected. Gas-ulsters, the doctor said. Which it's what you call
chills, if you're a doctor and can't speak plain."
"My poor grandmother come to her end the same way," said
Mrs. Smith, "only with her it was the Bible reader as didn't
shut the door through being so set on shewing off her reading. And my
granny, a clot of blood went to her brain, and her brain went to her head
and she was a corpse inside of fifty minutes."
Every woman in the room was waiting, feverishly alert, for the pause
that should allow her to begin her own detailed narrative of disease.
Mrs. James was easily first in the competition.
"Them quick deaths," she said, "is sometimes a
blessing in disguise to both parties concerned. My poor husband--years
upon years he lingered, and he had a bad leg--talk of bad legs, I wish
you could all have seen it," she added generously.
"Was it the kind that keeps all on a breaking out?" asked
Mrs. Symes hastily, "because my youngest brother had a leg that
nothing couldn't stop. Break out it would do what they might. I'm
sure the bandages I've took off him in a morning!"
Betty clapped her hands.
It was the signal that the reading was going to begin, and the matrons
looked at her resentfully. What call had people to start reading when the
talk was flowing so free and pleasant?
Betty, rather pale, began: "This is a story about a little boy
called Wee Willie Winkie."
"I call that a silly sort of name," whispered Mrs.
Smith.
"Did he make a good end, Miss?" asked Mrs. James
plaintively.
"You'll see," said Betty.
"I like it best when they dies forgiving of everybody and singing
hymns to the last."
"And when they says, 'Mother, I shall meet you
'ereafter in the better land'--that's what makes you
cry so pleasant."
"Do you want me to read or not?" asked Betty in
desperation.
"Yes, Miss, yes," hummed the voices heavy and shrill.
"It's her hobby, poor young thing," whispered Mrs.
Smith, "we all 'as 'em. My own is a light cake to my tea,
and always was. Ush."
Betty read.
When the mothers had wordily gone, she threw open the windows, propped
the door wide with a chair, and went to tea. She had it alone.
"Your Pa's out a parishing," said Letitia, bumping down
the tray in front of her.
"That's a let off anyhow," said Betty to herself, and
she propped up a Stevenson against the tea-pot.
After tea parishioners strolled up by ones and twos and threes to change
their books at the Vicarage lending library. The books were covered with
black calico, and smelt of rooms whose windows were never opened.
When she had washed the smell of the books off she did her hair very
carefully in a new way that seemed becoming, and went down to supper.
Her stepfather only spoke once during the meal; he was luxuriating in
the thought of the Summa Theologiæ of Aquinas in
leather, still brown and beautiful, which he had providentially discovered
in the washhouse of an ailing parishioner. When he did speak he said:
"How extremely untidy your hair is, Lizzie. I wish you would take
more pains with your appearance."
When he had withdrawn to his books she covered three new volumes for the
library: the black came off on her hands, but anyway it was clean dirt.
She went to bed early.
"And that's my life," she said as she blew out the
candle.
Said Mrs. James to Mrs. Symes over the last and strongest cup of
tea:
"Miss Betty's ailing a bit, I fancy. Looked a trifle
peaky, it seemed to me. I shouldn't wonder if she was to go off in a decline like her father did."
"It wasn't no decline," said Mrs. Symes, dropping her
thick voice, "'e was cut off in the midst of his wicked courses.
A judgment if ever there was one."
Betty's blameless father had been killed in the hunting field.
"I daresay she takes after him, only being a female it all turns
to her being pernicketty in her food and allus wanting the windows open.
And mark my words, it may turn into a decline yet, Mrs. Symes, my
dear."
Mrs. Symes laughed fatly. "That ain't no decline," she
said, "you take it from me. What Miss Betty wants is a young man. It
is but nature after all, and what we must all come to, gentle or simple.
Give her a young man to walk out with and you'll see the difference.
Decline indeed! A young man's what she wants. And if I know anything
of gells and their ways she'll get one, no matter how close the old
chap keeps her."
Mrs. Symes was not so wrong as the delicate-minded may suppose.
Betty did indeed desire to fall in love. In all the story-books the main
interest of the heroine's career began with that event. Not that she
voiced the desire to herself. Only once she voiced it in her prayers.
"Oh, God," she said, "do please let something
happen!"
That was all. A girl had her little reticences, even with herself, even
with her Creator.
Next morning she planned to go sketching; but no, there were three more
detestable books to be put into nasty little black cotton coats, the
drawing-room to be dusted with all its hateful china, the peas to be
shelled for dinner.
She shelled the peas in the garden. It was a beautiful green garden, and
lovers could have walked very happily down the lilac-bordered paths.
"Oh, how sick I am of it all!" said Betty. She would not
say, even to herself, that what she hated was the frame without the
picture.
As she carried in the peas she passed the open window of the study
where, among shelves of dull books and dusty pamphlets, her stepfather had,
as usual, forgotten his sermon in a chain of references to the Fathers.
Betty saw his thin white hairs, his hard, narrow face and tight mouth, the
hands yellow and claw-like that gripped the thin vellum folio.
"I suppose even he was young once," she said, "but
I'm sure he doesn't remember it."
He saw her go by, young and alert in the sunshine, and the May air
stirred the curtains. He looked vaguely about him, unlocked a drawer in his
writing-table, and took out a leather case. He gazed long at the face
within, a young bright face with long ringlets above the formal bodice and
sloping shoulders of the sixties.
"Well, well," he said, "well, well," locked it
away, and went back to De Poenis Parvulorum.
"I will go out," said Betty, as she parted with
the peas. "I don't care!"
It was not worth while to change one's frock. Even when one was
properly dressed, at rare local garden-party or flower-show, one never met
anyone that mattered.
She fetched her sketching things. At eighteen one does so pathetically
try to feed the burgeoning life with the husks of polite accomplishment.
She insisted on withholding from the clutches of the Parish the time to
practise Beethoven and Sullivan for an hour daily. Daily, for half an hour,
she read an improving book. Just now it was The French
Revolution, and Betty thought it would last till she was sixty. She
tried to read French and
German--Télémaque and Maria
Stuart. She fully intended to become all that a cultured young
woman should be.
But self-improvement is a dull game when there is no one to applaud your score.
What the gardener called the gravel path was black earth, moss-grown.
Very pretty, but Betty thought it shabby.
It was soft and cool, though, to the feet, and the dust of the white
road sparkled like diamond dust in the sunlight. She crossed the road and
passed through the swing gate into the park, where the grass was up for
hay, with red sorrel and buttercups and tall daisies and feathery flowered
grasses, their colours all tangled and blended together like ravelled ends
of silk on the wrong side of some great square of tapestry.
Here and there in the wide sweep of tall growing things stood a
tree--a may-tree shining like silver, a laburnum like fine gold. There
were horse-chestnuts whose spires of blossom shewed like fat candles on a
Christmas tree for giant children. And the sun was warm and the tree
shadows black on the grass.
Betty told herself that she hated it all. She took the narrow
path--the grasses met above her feet--crossed the park, and
reached the rabbit warren, where the chalk breaks through the thin dry
turf, and the wild thyme grows thick.
A may bush, overhanging a little precipice of chalk, caught her eye. A
wild rose was tangled round it. It was, without doubt, the most difficult
composition within sight.
"I will sketch that," said Eighteen, confidently.
For half an hour she busily blotted and washed and niggled. Then she
became aware that she no longer had the rabbit warren to herself.
"And he's an artist, too!" said Betty. "How
awfully interesting! I wish I could see his face."
But this his slouched Panama forbade. He was in white, the sleeve and
breast of his painting jacket smeared with many colours; he had a
camp-stool and an easel and looked, she could not help feeling,
much more like a real artist than she did, hunched up as she was on a little mound of turf, in her shabby pink gown and that hateful garden hat with last year's dusty flattened roses in it.
She went on sketching with feverish unskilled fingers, and a pulse that
had actually quickened its beat.
She cast little glances at him as often as she dared. He was certainly a
real artist. She could tell that by the very way he held his palette. Was
he staying with people about there? Should she meet him? Would they ever be
introduced to each other?
"Oh, what a pity," said Betty from the heart, "that we
aren't introduced now."
Her sketch grew worse and worse.
"It's no good," she said. "I can't do
anything with it."
She glanced at him. He had pushed back the hat. She saw quite plainly
that he was smiling--a very little, but he was smiling.
Also he was looking at her, and across the fifteen yards of gray turf their
eyes met. And she knew that he knew that this was not her first glance at
him.
She paled with fury.
"He has been watching me all the time! He is making fun of me. He
knows I can't sketch. Of course he can see it by the silly way I hold
everything." She ran her knife around her sketch, detached it, and
tore it across and across.
The stranger raised his hat and called eagerly.
"I say--please don't move for a minute. Do you mind?
I've just got your pink gown. It's coming beautifully. Between
brother artists--Do, please! Do sit still and go on
sketching.--Ah, do!"
Betty's attitude petrified instantly. She held a brush in her hand,
and she looked down at her block. But she did not go on sketching. She sat
rigid and three delicious words rang in her ears. "Between brother
artists!" How very, very nice of
him! He hadn't been mak ing fun, after all. But wasn't it rather impertinent of him to put her in his picture without asking her? Well, it wasn't she but her pink gown he wanted. And "between brother artists." Betty drew a long breath.
"It's no use," he called; "don't bother any
more. The pose is gone."
She rose to her feet and he came towards her.
"Let me see the sketch," he said. "Why did you tear it
up?" He fitted the pieces together. "Why, it's quite good.
You ought to study in Paris," he added idly.
She took the torn papers from his hand with a bow, and turned to go.
"Don't go," he said. "You're not going?
Don't you want to look at my picture?"
Now Betty knew as well as you do that you musn't speak to people
unless you've been introduced to them. But the phrase "brother
artists" had played ninepins with her little conventions.
"Thank you. I should like to very much," said Betty.
"I don't care," she said to herself, "and besides,
it's not as if he were a young man, or a tourist, or anything. He must
be ever so old--thirty; I shouldn't wonder if he was
thirty-five."
When she saw the picture she merely said, "Oh," and stood at
gaze. For it was a picture--a picture that, seen in
foreign lands, might well make one sick with longing for the dry turf and
the pale dog violets that love the chalk, for the hum of the bees and the
scent of the thyme. He had chosen the bold sweep of the brown upland
against the sky, and low to the left, where the line broke, the dim violet
of the Kentish hills. In the green foreground the pink figure, just roughly
blocked in, was blocked in by a hand that knew its trade, and was artist to
the tips of its fingers.
"Oh," said Betty again.
"Yes," said he, "I think I've got it this time. I
think it'll make a hole in the wall, eh? Yes: it is good."
"Yes," said Betty; "oh, yes."
"Do you often go a-sketching?" he asked.
"How modest he is," thought Betty; "he changes the
subject so as not to seem to want to be praised." Aloud she answered
with shy fluttered earnestness:
"Yes--no. I don't know. Sometimes."
His lips were grave, but there was the light behind his eyes that goes
with a smile.
"What unnecessary agitation!" he was thinking. "Poor
little thing, I suppose she's never seen a man before. Oh, these
country girls!"
Aloud he was saying: "This is such a perfect country. You ought to
sketch every day."
"I've no one to teach me," said Betty, innocently
phrasing a long-felt want.
The man raised his eyebrows. "Well, after that, here goes!"
he said to himself. "I wish you'd let me teach
you," he said to her, beginning to put his traps together.
"Oh, I didn't mean that," said Betty in real distress.
What would he think of her? How greedy and grasping she must seem! "I
didn't mean that at all."
"No; but I do," he said.
"But you're a great artist," said Betty, watching him
with clasped hands. "I suppose it would be--I
mean--don't you know, we're not rich, and I suppose your
lessons are worth pounds and pounds."
"I don't give lessons for money," his lips tightened,
"only for love."
"That means nothing, doesn't it?" she said, and flushed
to find herself on the defensive feebly against--nothing.
"At tennis, yes," he said, and to himself he added:
"Vieux jeu, my dear, but you did it
very prettily."
"But I couldn't let you give me lessons for
nothing."
"Why not?" he asked. And his calmness made Betty feel
ashamed and sordid.
"I don't know," she answered tremulously, ...
"but I don't think my stepfather would want me to."
"You think it would annoy him?"
"I'm sure it would, if he knew about it."
Betty was thinking how little her stepfather had ever cared to know of
her and her interests. But the man caught the ball as he saw it.
"Then why let him know?" was the next move; and it seemed to
him that Betty's move of rejoinder came with a readiness born of some
practice at the game.
"Oh," she said innocently, "I never thought of that.
But wouldn't it be wrong?"
"She's got the whole thing stereotyped. But it's dainty
type anyhow," he thought. "Of course it wouldn't be
wrong," he said. "It wouldn't hurt him. Don't you
know that nothing's wrong unless it hurts somebody?"
"Yes," she said eagerly, "that's what I think.
But all the same it doesn't seem fair that you should take all that
trouble for me and get nothing in return."
"Well played! We're getting on!" he thought, and added
aloud: "But perhaps I shan't get nothing in return?"
Her eyes dropped over the wonderful thought that perhaps she might do
something for him. But what? She looked straight at him, and the innocent
appeal sent a tiny thorn of doubt through his armour of complacent
cynicism. Was she--after all? No, no novice could play the game so
well. And yet--
"I would do anything I could, you know," she said eagerly,
"because it is so awfully kind of you, and I do so want to be able to
paint. What can I do?"
"What can you do?" he asked, and brought his face a little
nearer to the pretty flushed, freckled face
under the shabby hat. Her eyes met his. He felt a quick relenting and drew back.
"Well, for one thing you could let me paint your
portrait."
Betty was silent.
"Come, play up, you little duffer," he urged inwardly.
When she spoke her voice trembled.
"I don't know how to thank you," she said.
"And you will?"
"Oh, I will; indeed I will."
"How good and sweet you are," he said. Then there was a
silence.
Betty tightened the strap of her sketching things and said:
"I think I ought to go home now."
He had the appropriate counter ready.
"Ah, don't go yet!" he said; "let us sit down;
see, that bank is quite in the shade now, and tell me--"
"Tell you what?" she asked, for he had made the artistic
pause.
"Oh, anything--anything about yourself."
Betty was as incapable of flight as any bird on a limed twig.
She walked beside him to the bank, and sat down at his bidding, and he
lay at her feet, looking up into her eyes. He asked idle questions: she
answered them with a conscientious tremulous truthfulness that showed to
him as the most finished art. And it seemed to him a very fortunate
accident that he should have found here, in this unlikely spot, so
accomplished a player at his favorite game. Yet it was the variety of his
game for which he cared least. He did not greatly relish a skilled
adversary. Betty told him nervously and in words ill-chosen everything that
he asked to know, but all the while the undercurrent of questions rang
strong within her.
"When is he to teach me? Where? How?" So
that when at last there was left but the bare fifteen minutes needed to get one home in time for the midday dinner she said abruptly:
"And when shall I see you again?"
"You take the words out of my mouth," said he. And indeed
she had. "She has no finesse
yet," he told himself. "She might have left that move to
me."
"The lessons, you know," said Betty, "and, and the
picture, if you really do want to do it."
"If I want to do it!--you know I want to do it. Yes.
It's like the nursery game. How, when and where? Well, as to the
how--I can paint and you can learn. The where--there's a
circle of pines in the wood here. You know it? A sort of giant fairy
ring?"
She did know it.
"Now for the when--and that's the most important. I
should like to paint you in the early morning when the day is young and
innocent and beautiful--like--like--" He was careful
to break off in a most natural seeming embarrassment. "That's a
bit thick, but she'll swallow it all right. Gone down? Right!"
he told himself.
"I could come out at six if you liked, or--or five,"
said Betty, humbly anxious to do her part.
He was almost shocked. "My good child," he told her
silently, "someone really ought to teach you not to do
all the running. You don't give a man a
chance."
"Then will you meet me here to-morrow at six?" he said.
"You won't disappoint me, will you?" he added
tenderly.
"No," said downright Betty, "I'll be sure to
come. But not to-morrow," she added with undisguised regret;
"to-morrow's Sunday."
"Monday then," said he, "and good-bye."
"Good-bye, and--oh, I don't know how to thank
you!"
"I'm very much mistaken if you don't," he said as
he stood bareheaded, watching the pink gown out of sight. "Well,
adventures to the adventurous! A clergyman's daughter, too. I might
have known it."
She slipped into her place at the foot of the long white dining table, a
table built to serve a dozen guests, and where no guests ever sat, save
rarely a curate or two, and more rarely even, an aunt.
"You are late again, Lizzie," said her stepfather.
"Yes, Father," said she, trying to hide her hands and the
fact that she had not had time to wash them. A long streak of burnt sienna
marked one finger, and her nails had little slices of various colours in
them. Her paint-box was always hard to open.
Usually Mr. Underwood saw nothing. But when he saw anything he saw
everything. His eye was caught by the green smudge on her pink sleeve.
"I wish you would contrive to keep yourself clean, or else wear a
pinafore," he said.
Betty flushed scarlet.
"I'm very sorry," she said, "but it's only
water colour. It will wash out."
"You are nearly twenty, are you not?" the Vicar inquired
with the dry smile that always infuriated his stepdaughter. How was she to
know that it was the only smile he knew, and that smiles of any sort had
long grown difficult to him?
"Eighteen," she said.
"It is almost time you began to think about being a
lady."
This was badinage. No failures had taught the Reverend Cecil that his
stepdaughter had an ideal of him in which badinage had no place. She merely
supposed that he wished to be disagreeable.
She kept a mutinous silence. The old man sighed. It is one's duty
to correct the faults of one's child, but it is not pleasant. The
Reverend Cecil had not the habit of shirking any duty because he happened
to dislike it.
The mutton was taken away.
Betty, her whole being transfigured by the emotions of the morning,
stirred the stewed rhubarb on her plate. She felt rising in her a sort of
wild forlorn courage. Why shouldn't she speak out? Her stepfather
couldn't hate her more than he did, whatever she said. He might even
be glad to be rid of her. She spoke suddenly and rather loudly before she
knew that she had meant to speak at all.
"Father," she said, "I wish you'd let me go to
Paris and study art. Not now," she hurriedly explained with a sudden
vision of being taken at her word and packed off to France before six
o'clock on Monday morning, "not now, but later. In the autumn
perhaps. I would work very hard. I wish you'd let me."
He put on his spectacles and looked at her with wistful kindness. She
read in his glance only a frozen contempt.
"No, my child," he said. "Paris is a sink of iniquity.
I passed a week there once, many years ago. It was at the time of the Great
Exhibition.
You are growing discontented, Lizzie. Work is the cure for that. Mrs. Symes tells me that the chemises for the mother's sewing meetings are not cut out yet."
"I'll cut them out to-day. They haven't finished the
shirts yet, anyway," said Betty; "but I do wish you'd just
think about Paris, or even London."
"You can have lessons at home if you like. I believe there are
excellent drawing mistresses in Sevenoaks. Mrs. Symes was recommending one
of them to me only the other day. With certificates from the High School I
seem to remember her saying."
"But that's not what I want," said Betty with a courage
that surprised her as much as it surprised him. "Don't you see,
Father, one gets older every day, and presently I shall be quite old, and I
shan't have been anywhere or seen anything."
He thought he laughed indulgently at the folly of youth. She thought his
laugh the most contemptuous, the cruelest sound in the world. "He
doesn't deserve that I should tell him about Him," she thought,
"and I won't. I don't care!"
"No, no," he said, "no, no, no. The home is the place
for girls.--The safe quiet shelter of the home. Perhaps some day your
husband will take you abroad for a fortnight now and then. If you manage to
get a husband, that is."
He had seen, through his spectacles, her flushed prettiness, and old as
he was he remembered well enough how a face like hers would seem to a young
man's eyes. Of course she would get a husband! So he spoke in kindly
irony. And she hated him for a wanton insult.
"Try to do your duty in that state of life to which you are
called," he went on: "occupy yourself with music and books and
the details of housekeeping. No,--don't have my study turned
out," he added in haste, remembering how this advice about household
details had been followed when last he gave it. "Don't be a discontented child. Go and cut out the nice little chemises." This seemed to him almost a touch of kindly humour, and he went back to Augustine, pleased with himself.
Betty set her teeth and went, black rage in her heart, to cut out the
hateful little chemises.
She dragged the great roll of evil-smelling, grayish unbleached calico
from the school-room cupboard and heaved it on to the table. It was very
heavy. The scissors were blunt and left deep red-blue indentations on
finger and thumb. She was rather pleased that the scissors hurt so
much.
"Father doesn't care a single bit, he hates me," she
said, "and I hate him. Oh, I do."
She would not think of the morning. Not now, with this fire of impotent
resentment burning in her, would she take out those memories and look at
them. Those were not thoughts to be dragged through the litter of
unbleached cotton cuttings. She worked on doggedly, completed the tale of
hot heavy little garments, gathered up the pieces into the wastepaper
basket and put away the roll.
Not till the paint had been washed from her hands, and the crumbled
print dress exchanged for a quite respectable muslin did she consciously
allow the morning's memories to come out and meet her eyes. Then she
went down to the arbour where she had shelled peas only that morning.
"It seems years and years ago," she said. And sitting there,
she slowly and carefully went over everything. What he had said, what she
had said. There were some things she could not quite remember. But she
remembered enough. "Brother artists" were the words she said
oftenest to herself, but the words that sank themselves were, "young
and innocent and beautiful like--like--"
"But he couldn't have meant me, of course," she told
herself.
And on Monday she would see him again,--and he would give her a
lesson.
Sunday was incredibly wearisome. Her Sunday-school class had never been
so tiresome nor so soaked in hair-oil. In church she was shocked to find
herself watching, from her pew in the chancel, the entry of late
comers--of whom He was not one. No afternoon had ever been half so
long. She wrote up her diary. Thursday and Friday were quickly chronicled.
At Saturday she paused long, pen in hand, and there wrote very quickly:
"I went out sketching and met a gentleman, an artist. He was very
kind and is going to teach me to paint and he is going to paint my
portrait. I do not like him particularly. He is rather old and not really
good-looking. I shall not tell father, because he is simply hateful to me.
I am going to meet this artist at six to-morrow. It will be dreadful having
to get up so early. I almost wish I hadn't said I would go. It will be
such a bother."
Then she hid the diary in a drawer, under her confirmation dress and
veil, and locked the drawer carefully.
He was not at church in the evening either. He had thought of it, but
decided that it was too much trouble to get into decent clothes.
"I shall see her soon enough," he thought, "curse my
impulsive generosity! Six o'clock, forsooth, and all to please a
clergyman's daughter."
She came back from church with tired steps.
"I do hope I'm not going to be ill," she said. "I
feel so odd, just as if I hadn't had anything to eat for
days,--and yet I'm not a bit hungry either. I daresay I
shan't wake up in time to get there by six."
She was awake before five.
She woke with a flutter of the heart. What was it? Had anything
happened? Was anyone ill? Then she recognized that she was not unhappy.
And she felt more than ever as though it were days since she had had anything to eat.
"Oh, dear," said Betty, jumping out of bed. "I'm
going out, to meet Him, and have a drawing-lesson!"
She dressed quickly. It was too soon to start. Not for anything must she
be first at the rendezvous, even though it were only for a drawing-lesson.
That "only" pulled her up sharply.
When she was dressed she dug out the diary and wrote:
"This is terrible. Is it possible that I have fallen in love with
him? I don't know. 'Who ever loved that loved not at first
sight?' It is a most frightful tragedy to happen to one, and at my
age too! What a long life of loneliness stretches in front of me! For of
course he could never care for me. And if this is
love--well, it will be once and forever with me, I know. That's
my nature, I'm afraid. But I'm not,--I can't be. But I
never felt so unlike myself. I feel a sort of calm exultation, as if
something very wonderful was very near me. Dear Diary, what a comfort it is
to have you to tell everything to!"
It seemed to her that she must certainly be late. She had to creep down
the front stairs so very slowly and softly in order that she might not
awaken her stepfather. She had so carefully and silently to unfasten a
window and creep out, to close the window again, without noise, lest the
maids should hear and come running to see why their young mistress was out
of her bed at that hour. She had to go on tiptoe through the shrubbery and
out through the church yard. One could climb its wall, and get into the
park that way, so as not to meet labourers on the road who would stare to
see her alone so early and perhaps follow her. Once in the park she was
safe. Her shoes and her skirts were wet with dew. She made haste. She did
not want to keep him waiting.
But she was first at the rendezvous, after all.
She sat down on the carpet of pine needles. How pretty the early morning
was. The sunlight was quite different from the evening sunlight, so much
lighter and brighter. And the shadows were different. She tried to settle
on a point of view for her sketch, the sketch he was to help her with.
Her thoughts went back to what she had written in her diary. If that
should be true she must be very, very careful. He must never
guess it, never. She would be very cold and distant and polite. Not
hail-fellow well met with a "brother artist," like she had been
before. It was all very difficult indeed. Even if it really did turn out to
be true, if the wonderful thing had happened to her, if she really was in
love, she would not try a bit to make him like her. That would be forward
and "horrid." She would never try to attract any man. Those
things must come of themselves or not at all.
She arranged her skirt in more effective folds, and wondered how it
would look as one came up the woodland path. She thought it would look
rather picturesque. It was a nice heliotrope colour. It would look like a
giant Parma violet against the dark green background. She hoped her hair
was tidy. And that her hat was not very crooked. However little one desires
to attract, one may at least wish one's hat to be straight.
She looked for the twentieth time at her watch, the serviceable silver
watch that had been her mother's. Half-past six and he had not
come.
Well, when he did come she would pretend she had only just got there. Or
how would it be if she gave up being a Parma violet and went a little way
down the path and then turned back when she heard him coming? She walked
away a dozen yards and stood waiting. But he did not come. Was it possible
that he was not coming? Was he ill,--lying uncared for at the Peal of
Bells in the village,
with no one to smooth his pillow or put eau de cologne on his head?
She walked a hundred yards or so towards the village on the spur of this
thought.
Or perhaps he had come by another way to the trysting place. That
thought drove her back. He was not there.
Well, she would not stay any longer. She would just go away, and come
back ever so much later, and let him have a taste of waiting. She had had
her share, she told herself, as she almost ran from the spot. She stopped
suddenly. But suppose he did not wait? She went slowly
back.
She sat down again, schooled herself to patience.
What an idiot she had been. Like any school-girl. Of course he had never
meant to come. Why should he? That page in her diary called out to her to
come home and burn it. Care for him indeed! Not she! Why, she hadn't
exchanged ten words with the man!
"But I knew it was all nonsense when I wrote it," she said.
"I only just put it down to see what it would look like."
Mr. Eustace Vernon roused himself, and yawned.
"It's got to be done, I suppose. Buck up,--you'll
feel better after your bath! Jove! Seven o'clock. Will she have
waited? She's a keen player if she has. It's just worth trying, I
suppose."
The church clock struck the half-hour as he turned into the wood.
Something palely violet came towards him.
"So you are here," he said. "Where's
the pink frock?"
"It's--it's going to the wash," said a stiff
and stifled voice. "I'm sorry I couldn't get here at six. I
hope you didn't wait long?"
"Not very long," he said, smiling; "but--great
Heavens, what on earth is the matter?"
"Nothing," she said.
"But you've been--you are"
"I'm not," she said defiantly,--"besides,
I've got neuralgia. It always makes me look like that."
"My aunt!" he thought, "then she was here
at six and--she's been crying because I wasn't and--oh,
where are we?"
"I'm so sorry you've got neuralgia," he said
gently, "but I'm awfully glad you didn't get here at six.
Because my watch was wrong and I've only just got here, and I should
never have forgiven myself if you'd waited for me a single minute. Is
the neuralgia better now?"
"Yes," she said, smiling faintly, "much better. It was
rather sharp while it lasted, though."
"Yes," he said, "I see it was. I am so glad you did
come. But I was so certain you wouldn't that I didn't bring any
of my traps. So we can't begin the picture to-day. Will you start a
sketch, or is your neuralgia too bad?"
He knew it would be: and it was.
So they merely sat on the pine carpet and talked till it was time for
her to go back to the late Rectory breakfast. They told each other their
names that day. Betty talked very carefully. It was most important that he
should think well of her. Her manner had changed, as she had promised
herself it should do if she found she cared for him. Now she was with him
she knew, of course, that she did not care at all. What had made her so
wretched--no, so angry--that she had actually cried, was simply
the idea that she had been made a fool of that she had kept the tryst and
he hadn't. Now he had come she was quite calm. She did not care in the
least.
He was saying to himself, "I'm not often wrong, but I was off
the line yesterday. All that doesn't count. We take a fresh deal and
start fair. She doesn't know the game, mais elle a
des moyens. She's never played the game before. And she
cried
because I didn't turn up. And so I'm the first--think of it, if you please--absolutely the first one! Well: it doesn't detract from the interest of the game. It's quite a different game and requires more skill. But not more than I have, perhaps."
They parted with another tryst set for the next morning. The brother
artist note had been skilfully kept vibrating.
Betty was sure that she should never have any feeling for him but mere
friendliness. She was glad of that. It must be dreadful to be really in
love.--So unsettling.
The country had been unfortunately barren of interest until his eyes
fell on that sketching figure in
the pink dress. For he respected one of his arts no less than the other, and would as soon have thought of painting a vulgar picture as of undertaking a vulgar love-affair. He was no pavement artist. Nor did he degrade his art by caricatures drawn in hotel bars. Dairy maids did not delight him, and the mood was rare with him in which one finds anything to say to a little milliner. He wanted the means, not the end, and was at one with the unknown sage who said, "The love of pleasure spoils the pleasure of love."
There is a gift, less rare than is supposed, of wiping the slate clean
of memories, and beginning all over again. A certain virginity of soul,
that makes each new kiss the first kiss, each new love the only love. This
gift was Vernon's, and he had cultivated it so earnestly, so
delicately, that except in certain moods when he lost his temper, and with
it his control of his impulses, he was able to bring even to a conservatory
flirtation something of the fresh emotion of a schoolboy in love.
Betty's awkwardnesses, which he took for advances, had chilled him
a little, though less than they would have done had not one of the
evil-tempered moods been on him. He had dreaded lest the affair should
advance too quickly. His own taste was for the first steps in an affair of
the heart, the delicate doubts, the planned misunderstandings. He did not
question his own ability to conduct the affair capably from start to
finish, but he hated to skip the dainty preliminaries. He had feared that
with Betty he should have to skip them, for he knew that it is only in
their first love affairs that women have the patience to watch the flower
unfold itself. He himself was of infinite patience in that pastime. He bit
his lip and struck with his cane at the buttercup heads. He had made a
wretched beginning, with his "good and sweet," his "young
and innocent and beautiful like--like--" If the girl had
been a shade less innocent
the whole business would have been muffed--muffed hopelessly.
As it was, she had cried because he did not come. That was a little
crude, but she had snatched at the neuralgia veil. He had got back on to
firm land after that first imbecile launching of unseaworthy boats.
To-morrow he would be there early. A ship of promise should be--not
launched--that was weeks away--the first timbers should be felled
to build a ship to carry him, and her too, of course, a little way towards
the enchanted islands.
He knew the sea well, and it would be pleasant to steer on it one to
whom it was all new--all, all.
"Dear little girl," he said, "I don't suppose she
has ever even thought of love."
He was not in love with her, but he meant to be. He carefully thought of
her all that day, of her hair, her eyes, her hands; her hands were really
beautiful, small, dimpled and well-shaped, not the hands he loved best,
those were long and very slender,--but still beautiful. And before he
went to bed he wrote a little poem, to encourage himself:
Yes. I have loved before; I know
This longing that invades my days,
This shape that haunts life's busy ways
I know since long and long ago.
This starry mystery of delight
That floats across my eager eyes,
This pain that makes earth Paradise,
These magic songs of day and night.
I know them for the things they are:
A passing pain, a longing fleet,
A shape that soon I shall not meet,
A fading dream of veil and star.
Yet, even as my lips proclaim
The wisdom that the years have lent,
Your absence is joy's banishment
And life's one music is your name.
Page 26
I love you to the heart's hid core:
Those other loves? How can one learn
From marshlights how the great fires burn?
Ah, no--I never loved before!
After that more than ever rankled the memory of that first morning.
"How could I?" he asked himself. "I must indeed have
been in a gross mood. One seems sometimes to act outside oneself
altogether. Temporary possession by some brutal ancestor perhaps. Well,
it's not too late."
Next morning he worked at his picture, in the rabbit-warren, but his
head found itself turning towards the way by which on that first day she
had gone. She must know that on a day like this he would not be wasting the
light,--that he would be working. She would be wanting to see him
again. Would she come out? He wished she would. But he hoped she
wouldn't. It would have meant another readjustment of ideas. He need
not have been anxious. She did not come.
He worked steadily, masterfully. He always worked best at the beginning
of a love affair. All of him seemed somehow more alive, more awake, more
alert and competent. His mood was growing quickly to what he meant it to
be. He was what actors call a quick study. Soon he would be able to play
perfectly, without so much as a thought to the "book," the part
of Paul to this child's Virginia.
Had Virginia, he wondered, any relations besides the stepfather whom she
so light-heartedly consented to hoodwink?--relations who might
interfere and pray and meddle and spoil things?
However ashamed we may be of our relations they cannot forever be
concealed. It must be owned that Betty was not the lonely orphan she
sometimes pre-
tended to herself to be. She had aunts--an accident that may happen to the best of us.
A year or two before Betty was born, a certain youth of good birth left
Harrow and went to Ealing, where he was received in a family in the
capacity of Crammer's pup. The family was the Crammer and his
daughter, a hard-headed, tight-mouthed, black-haired young woman who knew
exactly what she wanted, and who meant to get it. Poverty had taught her to
know what she wanted. Nature, and the folly of youth--not her own
youth--taught her how to get it. There were several pups. She selected
the most eligible, secretly married him, and to the day of her death spoke
and thought of the marriage as a love-match. He was a dreamy youth, who
wrote verses and called the Crammer's daughter his Egeria. She was too
clever not to be kind to him, and he adored her and believed in her to the
end, which came before his twenty-first birthday. He broke his neck out
hunting, and died before Betty was born.
His people, exasperated at the news of the marriage, threatened to try
to invalidate it on the score of the false swearing that had been needed to
get the boy of nineteen married to the woman of twenty-four. Egeria was
frightened. She compromised for an annuity of two hundred pounds, to be
continued to her child.
The passion of this woman's life was power. One cannot be very
powerful with just two hundred a year, and a doubtful position as the widow
of a boy whose relations are prepared to dispute one's marriage. Mrs.
Desmond spent three years in thought, and in caring severely for the wants
of her child. Then she bought four handsome dresses, and some impressive
bonnets, went to a hydropathic establishment, and looked about her. Of the
eligible men there Mr. Cecil Underwood seemed, on enquiry, to be the most
eligible. So she married him. He
resisted but little, for his parish needed a clergywoman sadly. The two hundred pounds was a welcome addition to an income depleted by the purchase of rare editions, and at the moment crippled by his recent acquisition of the Omiliae of Vincentius in its original oak boards and leather strings; and, above all, he saw in the three-year-old Betty the child he might have had if things had gone otherwise with him and another when they both were young.
Mrs. Desmond had felt certain she could rule a parish. Mrs. Cecil
Underwood did rule it--without compromise. She ruled her husband too.
And Betty. When she caught cold from working all day among damp evergreens
for the Christmas decorations, and, developing pneumonia, died, she died
resentfully thanking God that she had always done her duty, and quite
unable to imagine how the world would go on without her. She felt almost
sure that in cutting short her career of usefulness her Creator was guilty
of an error of judgment which He would sooner or later find reason to
regret.
Her husband mourned her. He had the habit of her, of her strong capable
ways, the clockwork precision of her household and parish arrangements. But
as time went on he saw that perhaps he was more comfortable without her: as
a reformed drunkard sees that it is better not to rely on brandy for
one's courage. He saw it, but of course he never owned it to
himself.
Betty was heart-broken, quite sincerely heart-broken. She forgot all the
mother's hard tyrannies, her cramping rules, her narrow bitter creed,
and remembered only the calm competence, amounting to genius, with which
her mother had ruled the village world, her unflagging energy and patience,
and her rare moments of tenderness. She remembered too all her own lapses
from filial duty, and those memories were not comfortable.
Yet Betty too, when the self-tormenting remorseful
stage had worn itself out, found life fuller, freer without her mother. Her stepfather she hated--had always hated. But he could be avoided. She went to a boarding-school at Torquay, and some of her holidays were spent with her aunts, the sisters of the boy-father who had not lived to see Betty.
She adored the aunts. They lived in a world of which her village world
did not so much as dream; they spoke of things which folks at home neither
knew of nor cared for; and they spoke a language that was not spoken at
Long Barton. Of course, everyone who was anyone at Long Barton spoke in
careful and correct English, but no one ever troubled to turn a phrase. And
irony would have been considered very bad form indeed. Aunt Nina wore
lovely clothes and powdered her still pretty face; Aunt Julia smoked
cigarettes and used words that ladies at Long Barton did not use. Betty was
proud of them both.
It was Aunt Nina who taught Betty how to spend her allowance, how to buy
pretty things, and, better still, tried to teach her how to wear them. Aunt
Julia it was who brought her the Indian necklaces, and promised to take her
to Italy some day if she was good. Aunt Nina lived in Grosvenor Square and
Aunt Julia's address was most often, vaguely, the Continent of Europe.
Sometimes a letter addressed to some odd place in Asia or America would
find her.
But when Betty had left school her visits to Aunt Nina ceased. Mr.
Underwood feared that she was now of an age to be influenced by trifles,
and that London society would make her frivolous. Besides he had missed her
horribly, all through her school-days, though he had submitted because of
the aunts' importunity. But he had wanted Betty badly. Only of course
it never occurred to him to tell her so.
So Betty had lived on at the Rectory carrying on, with more or less of
success such of her mother's
parish workings as had managed to outlive their author, and writing to the aunts to tell them how bored she was and how she hated to be called "Lizzie."
She could not be expected to know that her stepfather had known as
"Lizzie" the girl who if Fate had been kind would have been his
wife or the mother of his child. Betty's letters breathed contempt of
parish matters, weariness of the dulness of the country, and exasperation
at the hardness of a lot where "nothing ever happened."
Well, something had happened now.
The tremendous nature of the secret she was keeping against the world
almost took Betty's breath away. It was to the adventure, far more
than to the man, that her heart's beat quickened. Something had
happened. Long Barton was no longer the dullest place in the world. It was
the centre of the universe. See her diary, an entry following a gap where a
page had been torn out.
"Mr. V. is very kind. He is teaching me to sketch. He says I shall
do very well when I have forgotten what I learned at school. It is so nice
of him to be so straightforward. I hate flattery. He has begun my portrait.
It is beautiful, but he says it is exactly like me. Of course it is his
painting that makes it beautiful, and not anything to do with me. That is
not flattery. I do not think he could say anything unless he really thought
it. He is that sort of man, I think. I am so glad he is so good. If he were
a different sort of person perhaps it would not be quite nice for me to go
and meet him without any one knowing. But there is nothing of that
sort. He was quite different the first day. But I think then he was
off his guard and could not help himself. I don't know quite what I
meant by that. But, anyway, I am sure he is as good as gold, and that is
such a comfort. I revere him. I believe he is really noble and unselfish,
and so few men are, alas."
The noble and unselfish Vernon meanwhile was quite happy. His picture
was going splendidly, and every morning he woke to the knowledge that his
image filled all the thoughts of a good little girl with grey, dark
charming eyes and a face that reminded one of a pretty kitten. Her drawing
was not half bad either. He was spared the mortifying labour of trying to
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. In one of his arts as in the
other he decided that she had talent. And it was pleasant that to him
should have fallen the task of teacher in both departments. Those who hunt
the fox will tell you that Reynard enjoys, equally with the hounds and
their masters, the pleasures of the chase. Vernon was quite of this opinion
in regard to his favourite sport. He really felt that he gave as much
pleasure as he took. And his own forgettings were so easy that the easy
forgetting of others seemed a foregone conclusion. His forgetting always
came first, that was all. But now, the Spring, her charm and his own firm
parti pris working together, it seemed to him
that he could never forget Betty, could never wish to forget her.
Her pretty conscious dignity charmed him. He stood still to look at it.
He took no step forward. His rôle was
that of the deeply respectful "brother artist." If his hand
touched hers as he corrected her drawing, that was accident. If, as he
leaned over her, criticising her work, the wind sent the end of her hair
against his ear, that could hardly be avoided in a breezy English spring.
It was not his fault that the little thrill it gave him was intensified a
hundred fold when, glancing at her, he perceived that her own ears had
grown scarlet.
Betty went through her days in a dream. There were all the duties she
hated--the mothers' meetings, the parish visits when she tried to
adjust the quarrels and calm the jealousies of the stout aggressive
mothers, the carrying round the Parish Magazine. There were
no long hours, now. In every spare moment she
worked at her drawing to please Him. It was the least she could do, after all his kindness.
Her stepfather surprised her once hard at work with charcoal and board
and plumb-line, a house-maid posing for her with a broom. He congratulated
himself that his little sermon on the advantages of occupation as a cure
for discontent had borne fruit so speedy and so sound.
"Dear child, she only wanted a word in season," he thought.
And he said:
"I am glad to see that you have put away vain dreams, Lizzie. And
your labours will not be thrown away, either. If you go on taking pains I
daresay you will be able to paint some nice blotting-books and screens for
the School Bazaar."
"I daresay," said Betty, adding between her teeth, "if
you only knew!"
"But we mustn't keep Letitia from her work," he added,
vaguely conscientious. Letitia flounced off, and Betty, his back turned,
tore up the drawing.
And, as a beautiful background to the gross realism of Mothers'
meetings and parish tiresomenesses, was always the atmosphere of the golden
mornings, the dew and the stillness, the gleam of his white coat among the
pine-trees. For he was always first at the tryst now.
Betty was drunk; and she was too young to distinguish between vintages.
When she had been sober she had feared intoxication. Now she was drunk, she
thanked Heaven that she was sober.
Betty stood for full five minutes looking out at the straight fine fall,
at the white mist spread on the lawn, the blue mist twined round the trees,
listening to the plash, plash of the drops that gathered and fell from the
big wet ivy leaves, to the guggle of the water-spout, the hiss of smitten
gravel.
"He'll never go," she thought, and her heart sank.
He, shaving, in the chill damp air by his open dimity-draped window, was
saying:
"She'll be there, of course. Women are all perfectly
insensible to weather."
Two mackintoshed figures met in the circle of pines.
"You have come," he said. "I never dreamed you would.
How cold your hand is."
He held it for a moment warmly clasped.
"I thought it might stop any minute," said Betty; "it
seemed a pity to waste a morning."
"Yes," he said musingly, "it would be a pity to waste
a morning. I would not waste one of these mornings for a
kingdom."
Betty fumbled with her sketching things as a sort of guarantee of good
faith.
"But it's too wet to work," said she. "I suppose
I'd better go home again."
"That seems a dull idea--for me," he said;
"it's very selfish, of course, but I'm rather sad this
morning. Won't you stay a little and cheer me up?"
Betty asked nothing better. But even to her a
tête-àtête in a wood, with
rain pattering and splashing on leaves and path and resonant mackintoshes,
seemed to demand some excuse.
"I should think breakfast and being dry would cheer you up better
than anything," said she. "And it's very wet
here."
"Hang breakfast. But you're right about the wetness.
There's a shed in the field yonder. A harrow and a plough live there;
they're sure to be at home on a day like this. Let's go and ask
for their hospitality."
"I hope they'll be nice to us," laughed Betty;
"it's dreadful to go where you're not wanted."
"How do you know?" he asked, laughing too. "Come, give
me your hand and let's run for it."
They ran, hand in hand, the wet mackintoshes flapping and slapping about
their knees, and drew up laughing and breathless in the dry quiet of the
shed. Vernon thought of Love and Mr. Lewisham, but it was
not the moment to say so.
"See, they are quite pleased to see us," said he,
"they don't say a word against our sheltering here. The plough
looks a bit glum, but she'll grow to like us pres ently. As for
harrow, look how he's smiling welcome at you with all his
teeth."
"I'm glad he can't come forward to welcome us,"
said Betty. "His teeth look very fierce."
"He could, of course, only he's enchanted. He used to be able
to move about, but now he's condemned to sit still and only smile
till--till he sees two perfectly happy people. Are you perfectly
happy?" he asked anxiously.
"I don't know," said Betty truly. "Are
you?"
"No--not quite perfectly."
"I'm so glad," said Betty. "I shouldn't like
the
harrow to begin to move while we're here. I'm sure it would bite us."
He sighed and looked grave. "So you don't want me to be
perfectly happy."
She looked at him with her head on one side.
"Not here," she said. "I can't trust that
harrow."
His eyelids narrowed over his eyes--then relaxed. No, she was
merely playing at enchanted harrows.
"Are you cold still?" he asked, and reached for her hand.
She gave it frankly.
"Not a bit," she said, and took it away again. "The
run warmed me. In fact--"
She unbuttoned the mackintosh and spread it on the bar of the plough and
sat down. Her white dress lighted up the shadows of the shed. Outside the
rain fell steadily.
"May I sit down too? Can Mrs. Plough find room for two children on
her lap?"
She drew aside the folds of her dress, but even then only a little space
was left. The plough had been carelessly housed and nearly half of it was
where the rain drove in on it. Therefore they were very close together. So
close that he had to throw his head back to see clearly how the rain had
made the short hair curl round her forehead and ears, and how fresh were
the tints of face and lips. Also he had to support himself by an arm
stretched out behind her. His arm was not round her, but it might just as
well have been, as far as the look of the thing went. He thought of the arm
of Mr. Lewisham.
"Did you ever have your fortune told?" he asked.
"No, never. I've always wanted to, but father hates gipsies.
When I was a little girl I used to put on my best clothes, and go out into
the lanes and sit about and hope the gipsies would steal me, but they never
did."
"They're a degenerate race, blind to their own interests. But
they haven't a monopoly of chances--fortunately." His eyes
were on her face.
"I never had my fortune told," said Betty. "I'd
love it, but I think I should be afraid, all the same. Something might come
true."
Vernon was more surprised than he had ever been in his life at the
sudden involuntary movement in his right arm. It cost him a conscious
effort not to let the arm follow its inclination and fall across her
slender shoulders, while he should say:
"Your fortune is that I love you. Is it good or bad
fortune?"
He braced the muscles of his arm, and kept it where it was. That sudden
unreasonable impulse was a mortification, an insult to the man whose pride
it was to believe that his impulses were always planned.
"I can tell fortunes," he said. "When I was a boy I
spent a couple of months with some gipsies. They taught me lots of
things."
His memory, excellently trained, did not allow itself to dwell for an
instant on his reason for following those gipsies, on the dark-eyed
black-haired girl with the skin like pale amber, who had taught him, by the
flicker of the camp-fire, the lines of head and heart and life, and other
things beside. Oh, but many other things. That was before he became an
artist. He was only an amateur in those days.
"Did they teach you how to tell fortunes--really and
truly?" asked Betty. "We had a fortune-teller's tent at
the School Bazaar last year, and the youngest Miss Smithson dressed up in
spangles and a red dress and said she was Zara the Eastern Mystic
Hand-Reader, and Foreteller of the Future. But she got it all out of
Napoleon's Book of Fate."
"I don't get my fortune-telling out of anybody's book of
anything," he said. "I get it out of people's hands, and
their faces. Some people's faces are their fortunes, you
know."
"I know they are," she said a little sadly, "but
everybody's got a hand and a fortune, whether they've got that sort of fortune-face or not."
"But the fortunes of the fortune-faced people are the ones one
likes best to tell."
"Of course," she admitted wistfully, "but what's
going to happen to you is just as interesting to you, even if
your face isn't interesting to anybody. Do you always tell fortunes
quite truly; I mean do you follow the real rules? or do you make up pretty
fortunes for the people with the pretty fortune-faces?"
"There's no need to 'make up.' The pretty
fortunes are always there for the pretty fortune-faces: unless of course
the hand contradicts the face."
"But can it?"
"Can't it? There may be a face that all the beautiful things
in the world are promised to: just by being so beautiful itself it draws
beautiful happenings to it. But if the hand contradicts the face, if the
hand is one of those narrow, niggardly, distrustful hands, one of the hands
that will give nothing and take nothing, a hand without courage, without
generosity--well then one might as well be born without a
fortune-face, for any good it will ever do one."
"Then you don't care to tell fortunes for people who
haven't fortune-faces?"
"I should like to tell yours, if you would let me. Shall
I?"
He held out his hand, but her hand was withheld.
"I ought to cross your hand with silver, oughtn't I?"
she asked.
"It's considered correct--but--"
"Oh, don't let's neglect any proper precaution,"
she said. "I haven't got any money. Tell it me to-morrow, and I
will bring a sixpence."
"You could cross my hand with your watch," he said,
"and I could take the crossing as an I.O.U. of the
sixpence."
She detached the old watch. He held out his hand and she gravely traced
a cross on it.
"Now," he said, "all preliminary formalities being
complied with, let the prophet do his work. Give me your hand, pretty lady,
and the old gipsy will tell you your fortune true."
He held the hand in his, bending back the pink finger-tips with his
thumb, and looked earnestly at its lines. Then he looked in her face,
longer than he had ever permitted himself to look. He looked till her eyes
fell. It was a charming picture. He was tall, strong, well-built and quite
as good-looking as a clever man has any need to be. And she was as pretty
as any oleograph of them all.
It seemed a thousand pities that there should he no witness to such a
well-posed tableau, no audience to such a charming scene. The pity of it
struck Destiny, and Destiny flashed the white of Betty's dress, a
shrill point of light, into an eye a hundred yards away. The eye's
owner, with true rustic finesse, drew back
into the wood's shadow, shaded one eye with a brown rustic hand,
looked again, and began a détour which landed the rustic boots, all
silently, behind the shed, at a spot where a knot-hole served as frame for
the little picture. The rustic eye was fitted to the knot-hole while Vernon
holding Betty's hand gazed in Betty's face, and decided that this
was no time to analyse his sensations.
Neither heard the furtive rustic tread, or noted the gleam of the pale
rustic eye.
The labourer shook his head as he hurried quickly away. He had daughters
of his own, and the Rector had been kind when one of those daughters had
suddenly come home from service, ill, and with no prospect of another
place.
"A-holdin' of hands and a-castin' of sheep's
eyes," said he. "We knows what that's the beginnings of.
Well, well, youth's the season for silliness, but there's
bounds--there's bounds. And all of a mornin' so
early too. Lord above knows what it wouldn't be like of a evenin'." He shook his head again, and made haste.
Vernon had forced his eyes to leave the face of Betty.
"Your fortune," he was saying, "is, curiously enough,
just one of those fortunes I was speaking of. You will have great chances
of happiness, if you have the courage to take them. You will cross the sea
You've never travelled, have you?"
"No,--never further than Torquay; I was at school there, you
know; and London, of course. But I should love it. Isn't it horrid to
think that one might grow quite old and never have been anywhere or done
anything?"
"That depends on oneself, doesn't it? Adventures are to the
adventurous."
"Yes, that's all very well--girls can't be
adventurous."
"Yes,--it's the Prince who sets out to seek his fortune,
isn't it? The Princess has to sit at home and wait for hers to come to
her. It generally does if she's a real Princess."
"But half the fun must be the seeking for it," said
Betty.
"You're right," said he, "it is."
The labourer had reached the park-gate. His pace had quickened to the
quickening remembrance of his own daughter, sitting at home silent and
sullen.
"Do you really see it in my hand?" asked
Betty,--"about my crossing the sea, I mean."
"It's there; but it depends on yourself, like everything
else."
"I did ask my stepfather to let me go," she said,
"after that first day, you know, when you said I ought to study in
Paris."
"And he wouldn't, of course?"
"No; he said Paris was a wicked place. It isn't really is
it?"
"Every place is wicked," said he, "and every place is
good. It's all as one takes things."
The Rectory gate clicked sharply as it swung to behind the labourer. The
Rectory gravel scrunched beneath the labourer's boots.
Yes, the Master was up; he could be seen.
The heavy boots were being rubbed against the birch broom that, rooted
at Kentish back doors, stands to receive on its purple twigs the scrapings
of Kentish clay from rustic feet.
"You have the artistic lines very strongly marked," Vernon
was saying. "One, two, three--yes, painting--music
perhaps?"
"I am very fond of music," said Betty, thinking of the
hour's daily struggle with the Mikado and the Moonlight Sonata.
"But three arts. What could the third one be?" Her thoughts
played for an instant with unheard-of triumphs achieved behind
footlights--rapturous applause, showers of bouquets.
"Whatever it is, you've enormous talent for it," he
said; "you'll find out what it is in good time. Perhaps
it'll be something much more important than the other two put
together, and perhaps you've got even more talent for it than you have
for others."
"But there isn't any other talent that I can think
of."
"I can think of a few. There's the stage,--but it's
not that, I fancy, or not exactly that. There's
literature--confess now, don't you write poetry sometimes when
you're all alone at night? Then there's the art of being amusing,
and the art of being--of being liked."
"Shall I be successful in any of the arts?"
"In one, certainly."
"Ah," said Betty, "if I could only go to
Paris!"
"It's not always necessary to go to Paris for success in
one's art," he said.
"But I want to go. I'm sure I could do better
there."
"Aren't you satisfied with your present Master?"
"Oh," it was a cry of genuine distress, of heartfelt
disclaim, "you know I didn't mean that. But you
won't always be here, and when you've gone--why
then--"
Again he had to control the involuntary movement of his left arm.
"But I'm not going for months yet. Don't let us cross a
bridge till we come to it. Your head-line promises all sorts of wonderful
things. And your heartline--" he turned her hand more fully to
the light.
In the Rector's study the labourer was speaking, standing
shufflingly on the margin of the Turkey carpet. The Rector listened, his
hand on an open folio where fat infants peered through the ornamental
initials.
"And so I come straight up to you, sir, me being a father and you
the same, sir, for all the difference betwixt our ways in life. Says I to
myself, says I, and bitter hard I feels it too, I says,
'George,' says I, 'you've got a daughter as begun
that way, not a doubt of it--holdin' of hands and sittin'
close alongside, and you know what's come to her.'"
The Rector shivered at the implication.
"Then I says, says I, 'Like as not the Rector won't
thank you for interferin'. Least said soonest mended,' says
I."
"I'm very much obliged to you," said the Rector
difficultly, and his hand shook on Ambrosius's yellow page.
"You see, sir," the man's tone held all that deferent
apology that truth telling demands, "gells is gells, be they never so
up in the world, all the world over, bless their hearts; and young men is
young men, damn them, asking your pardon, sir, I'm sure, but the word
slipped out. And I shouldn't ha' been easy if anything had have
gone wrong with Miss, God bless her, all along of the want of a word in
season. Asking your pardon, sir, but even young ladies is flesh and blood, when it comes to the point. Ain't they now?" he ended appealingly.
The Rector spoke with an obvious effort, got his hand off the page and
closed the folio.
"You've done quite right, George," he said, "and
I'm greatly obliged to you. Only I do ask you to keep this to
yourself. You wouldn't have liked it if people had heard a thing like
that about your Ruby before--I mean when she was at home."
He replaced the two folios on the shelf.
"Not me, sir," George answered. "I'm mum, I do
assure you, sir. And if I might make so bold, you just pop on your hat and
step acrost directly minute. There's that little hole back of the shed
what I told you of. You ain't only got to pop your reverend eye to
that there, and you'll see for yourself as I ain't give tongue
for no dragged scent."
"Thank you, George," said the Rector, "I will. Good
morning. God bless you."
The formula came glibly, but it was from the lips only that it came.
Lizzie--his white innocent lily-girl. In a shed--a man, a
stranger, holding her hand, his arm around her, his eyes--his lips
perhaps, daring--
The Rector was half way down his garden drive.
"Your heart-line," Vernon was saying, "it's a
little difficult. You will be deeply beloved."
To have one's fortune told is disquieting. To keep silence during
the telling deepens the disquiet curiously. It seemed good to Betty to
laugh.
"Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor," she said, "which am
I going to marry, kind gipsy?"
"I don't believe the gipsies who say they can see marriage in
a hand," he answered quickly, and Betty feared he had thought her
flippant, or even vulgar; "what one sees are not the shadows of
coming conventions. One sees the great emotional events, the things that
change and mould and develop
character. Yes, you will be greatly beloved, and you will love deeply."
"I'm not to be happy in my affairs of the heart then?"
Still a careful flippancy seemed best to Betty.
"Did I say so? Do you really think that there are no happy love
affairs but those that end in a wedding breakfast and bridesmaids, with a
bazaar show of hideous silver and still more hideous crockery, and all
one's relations assembled to dissect one's most sacred
secrets?"
Betty had thought so, but it seemed coarse to own it.
"Can't you imagine," he went on dreamily, "a love
affair so perfect that it could not but lose its finest fragrance if the
world were called to watch the plucking of love's flower? Can't
you imagine a love so great, so deep, so tender, so absolutely possessing
the whole life of the lover that he would almost grudge any manifestation
of it? Because such a manifestation must necessarily be a repetition of
some of the ways in which unworthy loves have been manifested, by less
happy lovers? I can seem to see that one might love the one love of a
life-time, and be content to hold the treasure in one's heart, a
treasure such as no other man ever had, and grudge even a word or a look
that might make it less the single perfect rose of the world."
"Oh, dear!" said Betty to herself.
"But I'm talking like a book," he said, and laughed.
"I always get dreamy and absurd when I tell fortunes. Anyway, as I
said before, you will be greatly beloved. Indeed, unless your hand is very
untruthful, which I'm sure it never could be, you are beloved now, far
more than you can possibly guess."
Betty caught at her flippancy, but it evaded her, and all she found to
say was, "Oh," and her eyes fell.
There was a silence. Vernon still held her hand, but he was no longer
looking at it.
A black figure darkened the daylight.
The two on the plough started up--started apart. Nothing more was
wanted to convince the Rector of all that he least wished to believe.
"Go home, Lizzie," he said, "go to your room,"
and to her his face looked the face of a fiend. It is hard to control the
muscles under a sudden emotion compounded of sorrow, sympathy and an
immeasurable pity. "Go to your room and stay there till I send for
you." Betty went, like a beaten dog.
The Rector turned to the young man.
"Now, sir," he said.
He regretted, of course, deeply, this unfortunate misunderstanding.
Accident had made him acquainted with Miss Desmond's talent, he had
merely offered her a little of that help which between brother
artists-- The well-worn phrase had not for the Rector the charm it had
had for Betty.
The Rector spoke again, and Mr. Vernon listened, bareheaded, in deepest
deference.
No, he had not been holding Miss Desmond's hand--he had merely
been telling her fortune. No
one could regret more profoundly than he,--and so on. He was much wounded by Mr. Underwood's unworthy suspicions.
The Rector ran through a few texts. His pulpit denunciations of
iniquity, though always earnest, had lacked this eloquence.
Vernon listened quietly.
"I can only express my regret that my thoughtlessness should have
annoyed you, and beg you not to blame Miss Desmond. It was perhaps a little
unconventional, but--"
"Unconventional? To try to ruin--"
Mr. Vernon held up his hand: he was genuinely shocked.
"Forgive me," he said, "but I can't hear such
words in connection with--with a lady for whom I have the deepest
respect. You are heated now, sir, and I can make every allowance for your
natural vexation. But I must ask you not to overstep the bounds of
decency."
The Rector bit his lip, and Vernon went on.
"I have listened to your abuse--yes, your abuse--without
defending myself, but I can't allow anyone, even her father, to say a
word against her."
"I am not her father," said the old man bitterly. And on the
instant Vernon understood him as Betty had never done. The young man's
tone changed instantly.
"Look here," he said, and his face grew almost boyish,
"I am really most awfully sorry. The whole thing--what there is
of it, and it's very little--was entirely my doing. It was
inexcusably thoughtless. Miss Desmond is very young and very innocent. It
is I who ought to have known better,--and perhaps I did. But the
country is very dull, and it was a real pleasure to teach so apt a
pupil."
He spoke eagerly, and the ring of truth was in his voice. But the Rector
felt that he was listening to the excuses of a serpent.
"Then you'd have me believe that you don't even love
her?"
"No more than she does me," said Vernon very truly.
"I've never breathed a word of love to her," he went on;
"such an idea never entered our heads. She's a charming girl,
and I admire her immensely, but--" he sought hastily for a
weapon, and defended Betty with the first that came to hand, "I am
already engaged to another lady. It is entirely as an artist that I am
interested in Miss Betty."
"Serpent," said the Rector within himself, "lying
serpent."
Vernon was addressing himself silently in terms not more flattering.
"Fool, idiot, brute to let the child in for this!--for it's
going to be a hell of a time for her, anyhow. And as for me--well, the
game is up, absolutely up."
"I am really most awfully sorry," he said again.
"I find it difficult to believe in the sincerity of your
repentance," said the Rector frowning.
"My regret you may believe in," said Vernon stiffly.
"There is no ground for even the mention of such a word as
repentance."
"If your repentance is sincere," he underlined the word,
"you will leave Long Barton to-day."
Leave without a word, a sign from Betty--a word or a sign to her?
It might be best--if--
"I will go, sir, if you will let me have your assurance that you
will say nothing to Miss Desmond, that you won't make her unhappy,
that you'll let the whole matter drop."
"I will make no bargains with you," cried the Rector.
"Do your worst! Thank God I can defend her from you."
"She needs no defence. It's not I who am lacking in respect
and consideration for her," said Vernon a little hotly, "but,
as I say, I'll go--if you'll just promise to be gentle with
her."
"I do not need to be taught my duty by a villain, sir," the
old clergyman was trembling with rage. "I wish to God I were a
younger man, that I might chastise you for the hound you are." His
upraised cane shook in his hand. "Words are thrown away on you!
I'm sorry I can't use the only arguments that can come home to a
puppy!"
"If you were a younger man," said Vernon slowly, "your
words would not have been thrown away on me. They would have had the answer
they deserved. I shall not leave Long Barton, and I shall see Miss Desmond
when and how I choose."
"Long Barton shall know you in your true character, sir, I promise
you."
"So you would blacken her to blacken me? One sees how it is that
she does not love her father."
He meant to be cruel, but it was not till he saw the green shadows round
the old man's lips that he knew just how cruel he had been. The
quivering old mouth opened and closed and opened, the cold eyes gleamed.
And the trembling hand in one nervous movement raised the cane and struck
the other man sharply across the face. It was a hysterical blow, like a
woman's, and with it the tears sprang to the faded eyes.
Then it was that Vernon behaved well. When he thought of it afterwards
he decided that he had behaved astonishingly well.
With the smart of that cut stinging on his flesh, the mark of it rising
red and angry across his cheek, he stepped back a pace, and without a word,
without a retaliatory movement, without even a change of facial expression
he executed the most elaborately courteous bow, as of one treading a
minuet, recovered the upright and walked away bareheaded. The old clergyman
was left planted there, the cane still jigging up and down in his shaking
hand.
"A little theatrical, perhaps," mused Vernon, when
the cover of the wood gave him leave to lay his fingers to his throbbing cheek, "but nothing could have annoyed the old chap more."
However effective it may be to turn the other cheek, the turning of it
does not cool one's passions, and he walked through the wood angrier
than he ever remembered being. But the cool rain dripping from the hazel
and sweet-chestnut leaves fell pleasantly on his uncovered head and flushed
face. Before he was through the wood he was able to laugh, and the laugh
was a real laugh, if rather a rueful one. Vernon could never keep angry
very long.
"Poor old devil!" he said. "He'll have to put a
special clause in the general confession next Sunday. Poor old devil! And
poor little Betty! And poorest me! Because, however, we look at it, and
however we may have dam well bluffed over it, the game is
up--absolutely up."
When one has a definite end in view--marriage, let us say, or an
elopement,--secret correspondences, the surmounting of garden walls,
the bribery of servants, are in the picture. But in a small sweet idyll,
with no backbone of intention to it, these things are inartistic. And
Vernon was, above and before all, an artist. He must go away and he knew
it. And his picture was not finished. Could he possibly leave that
incomplete? The thought pricked sharply. He had not made much progress with
the picture in these last days. It had been pleasanter to work at the
portrait of Betty. If he moved to the next village?--Yes, that must be
thought over.
He spent the day thinking of that and of other things.
The Reverend Cecil Underwood stood where he was left till the man he had
struck had passed out of sight. Then the cane slipped through his hand and
fell rattling to the ground. He looked down at it curiously. Then he
reached out both hands vaguely and touched the shaft of the plough. He
felt his way along it, and sat down, where they had sat, staring dully before him at the shadows in the shed, and at the steady fall of the rain outside. Betty's mackintosh was lying on the floor. He picked it up presently and smoothed out the creases. Then he watched the rain again.
An hour had passed before he got stiffly up and went home, with her
cloak on his arm.
Yes, Miss Lizzie was in her room. Had a headache. He sent up her
breakfast, arranging the food himself, and calling back the maid because
the tray lacked marmalade.
Then he poured out his own tea, and sat stirring it till it was
cold.
She was in her room, waiting for him to send for her. He must send for
her. He must speak to her. But what could he say? What was there to say
that would not be a cruelty? What was there to ask that would not be a
challenge to her to lie, as the serpent had lied?
"I am glad I struck him," the Reverend Cecil told himself
again and again; "that brought it home to him. He was
quite cowed. He could do nothing but bow and cringe away. Yes, I am
glad."
But the girl? The serpent had asked him to be gentle with her--had
dared to ask him. He could think of no way gentle enough for dealing with
this crisis. The habit of prayer caught him. He prayed for guidance.
Then quite suddenly he saw what to do.
"That will be best," he said; "she will feel that
less."
He rang and ordered the fly from the Peal of Bells, went to his room to
change his old coat for a better one, since appearances must be kept up,
even if the heart be breaking. His thin hair was disordered, and his tie,
he noticed, was oddly crumpled, as though strange hands had been busy with
his throat. He put on a fresh tie, smoothed his hair, and went
down again. As he passed, he lingered a moment outside her door.
Betty watching with red eyes and swollen lips saw him enter the fly, saw
him give an order, heard the door bang. The old coachman clambered clumsily
to his place, and the carriage lumbered down the drive.
"Oh, how cruel he is! He might have spoken to me now.
I suppose he's going to keep me waiting for days, as a penance. And I
haven't really done anything wrong. It's a shame! I've a
good mind to run away!"
Running away required consideration. In the meantime, since he was out
of the house, there was no reason why she should not go downstairs. She was
not a child to be kept to her room in disgrace. She bathed her distorted
face, powdered it, and tried to think that the servants, should they see
her, would notice nothing.
Where had he gone? For no goal within his parish would a hired carriage
be needed. He had gone to Sevenoaks or to the station. Perhaps he had gone
to Westerham--there was a convent there, a Protestant sisterhood.
Perhaps he was going to make arrangements for shutting her up there.
Never!--Betty would die first. At least she would run away first. But
where could one run to?
The aunts? Betty loved the aunts, but she distrusted their age. They
were too old to sympathise really with her. They would most likely
understand as little as her stepfather had done. An inward monitor told
Betty that the story of the fortune-telling, of the seven stolen meetings
with no love-making in them, would sound very unconvincing to any ears but
those of the one person already convinced. But she would not be shut up in
a convent--no, not by fifty aunts and a hundred stepfathers.
She would go to Him. He would understand. He was the only person who
ever had understood.
She would go straight to him and ask him what to do. He would advise her. He was so clever, so good, so noble. Whatever he advised would be right.
Trembling and in a cold white rage of determination, Betty fastened on
her hat, found her gloves and purse. The mackintosh she remembered had been
left in the shed. She pictured her stepfather trampling fiercely upon it as
he told Mr. Vernon what he thought of him. She took her golf cape.
At the last moment she hesitated. Mr. Vernon would not be idle. What
would he be doing? Suppose he should send a note? Suppose he had watched
Mr. Underwood drive away and should come boldly up and ask for her? Was it
wise to leave the house? But perhaps he would be hanging about the church
yard, or watching from the park for a glimpse of her. She would at least go
out and see.
"I'll leave a farewell letter," she said, "in
case I never come back."
She found her little blotting-book--envelopes, but no paper. Of
course! One can't with dignity write cutting farewells on envelopes.
She tore a page from her diary.
"You have driven me to this," she wrote. "I am going
away, and in time I shall try to forgive you all the petty meannesses and
cruelties of all these years. I know you always hated me, but you might
have had some pity. All my life I shall bear the marks on my soul of the
bitter tyranny I have endured here. Now I am going away out into the world,
and God knows what will become of me."
She folded, enveloped, and addressed the note, stuck a long hat-pin
fiercely through it, and left it patent, speared to her pin-cushion, with
her stepfather's name uppermost.
"Good-bye, little room," she said. "I feel I shall
never see you again."
Slowly and sadly she crossed the room and turned the handle of the door.
The door was locked.
Once, years ago, a happier man than the Reverend Cecil had been Rector
of Long Barton. And in the room that now was Betty's he had had iron
bars fixed to the two windows, because that room was the nursery.
That evening, after dinner, Mr. Vernon sat at his parlour window looking
idly along the wet bowling-green to the belt of lilacs and the pale gleams
of watery sunset behind them. He had passed a disquieting day. He hated to
leave things unfinished. And now the idyll was ruined and the picture
threatened,--and Betty's portrait was not finished, and never
would be.
"Come in," he said; and his landlady heavily followed up her
tap on his door.
"A lady to see you, sir," said she with a look that seemed
to him to be almost a wink.
"A lady? To see me? Good Lord!" said Vernon. Among all the
thoughts of the day this was the one thought that had not come to him.
"Shall I show her in?" the woman asked, and she eyed him
curiously.
"A lady," he repeated. "Did she give her
name?"
"Yes, sir. Miss Desmond, sir. Shall I shew her in?"
"Yes; shew her in, of course," he answered irritably.
And to himself he said:
"The devil!"
All the little familiar objects, the intimate associations of the
furniture of a room that has been for years your boudoir as well as your
sleeping room, all the decorations that you fondly dreamed gave to your
room a cachet--the mark of a distinctive
personality, these are of no more comfort to you than would be strange bare
stone walls and a close unfamiliar iron grating.
Betty tried to shake the window bars, but they were immovable. She tried
to force the door open, but her silver buttonhook was an insufficient
lever, and her tooth-brush handle broke when she pitted it in conflict
against the heavy, old-fashioned lock. We have all read how prisoners,
outwitting their gaolers, have filed bars with their pocket nail-scissors,
and cut the locks out of old oak doors with the small blade of a pen-knife.
Betty's door was only of pine, but her knife, made in Germany, broke
off short; and the file on her little scissors wore itself smooth against
the first unmoved bar.
She paced the room like a caged lioness. We read that did the lioness
but know her strength her bars were easily shattered by one blow of her
powerful paw. Betty's little pink paws were not powerful like
the lioness's, and when she tried to make them help her, she broke her nails and hurt herself.
It was this moment that Letitia chose for rapping at the door.
"You can't come in. What is it?" Betty was prompt to
say.
"Mrs. Edwardes's Albert, Miss, come for the maternity
bag."
"It's all ready in the school-room cupboard," Betty
called through the door. "Number three."
She resisted an impulse to say that she had broken the key in the lock
and to send for the locksmith. No: there should be no scandal at Long
Barton,--at least not while she had to stay in it.
She did not cry. She was sick with fury, and anger made her heart beat
as Vernon had never had power to make it.
"I will be calm. I won't lose my head," she told
herself again and again. She drank some water. She made herself eat the
neglected breakfast. She got out her diary and wrote in it, in a
handwriting that was not Betty's, and with a hand that shook like
totter-grass.
"What will become of me? What has become of him? My
stepfather must have done something horrible to him. Perhaps he has had him
put in prison; of course he couldn't do that in these modern times
like in the French revolution just for talking to some one he hadn't
been introduced to, but he may have done it for trespassing or damage to
the crops or something. I feel quite certain something has happened to him.
He would never have deserted me like this in my misery if he were free. And
I can do nothing to help him--nothing. How shall I live through the
day? How can I bear it? And this awful trouble has come upon him just
because he was kind to another artist. The world is very, very, very cruel.
I wish I were dead!" She blotted the words and locked away the book.
Then she
burnt that farewell note and went and sat in the window-seat to watch for her stepfather's return.
The time was long. At last he came. She saw him open the carriage door
and reach out a flat foot, feeling for the carriage step. He stepped out,
turned and thrust a hand back into the cab. Was he about to hand out a
stern-faced Protestant sister, who would take her to Westerham, and she
would never be heard of again?