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This text has been proofread but is not guaranteed to be free from errors. Corrections to the original text have been left in place.
Title: Gallia, an electronic edition
Author: Dowie, Ménie Muriel., 1867-1945
Publisher: Methuen & Co., Ltd.
Place published: London
Date: 1895
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 GALLIA MORRISON AND GRIER, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH. GALLIABY  MÉNIE MURIEL DOWIE AUTHOR OF  "A GIRL IN THE KARPATHIANS' "The youngest storks are content with being told: 'Cribbly-crabbly, plurry-murry.' They con-  sider this capital; but the elder ones want a deeper meaning, or at least something about the family."  The Marsh King's Daughter- Hans Christian Andersen METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET,W.C. LONDON 1895 TO MY HUSBANDΧάλκα   ΧρυσείωνGALLIACHAPTER IA LITTLE thought will usually show where a story begins. Gurdon
considered very rightly that his began with a visit he paid to old
Mrs. Leighton in Cornwall Gardens. At least he knew it did not begin
when he was at home, nor when he was at Rugby, nor yet when he spent
two years at the Lycée in Bordeaux (though he hesitated about
this part, and sometimes wondered if that had been the prologue). The
interval of his life in Munich and his life in London, and again at
Oxford, where he passed his examination for the Civil Service, was a
barren period, with no suggestion of a story about it. But the call he
had felt himself impelled to make in Cornwall Gardens, because
Mrs. Leighton was a connection of the Secretary of State for the
Colonies, and by no means aquantité negligeable, had something about it
of an inaugurative character, and when he looked back upon it, he
perceived that this was because it had quite certainly ushered in an
incident.The incident was his journey to Paris."It is about Robbie," Mrs. Leighton had said, as the last visitor
swept round the corner of the screen."Ah!""Yes. You will know that I do not care a rap about Robbie, although
he is my only grandson--but I think of the family.""Just so," said Gurdon, who knew that Mrs. Leighton cared
innumerable raps about Robbie, and didn't think for a second about the
family. "And what about him?""He is getting into the ways of wicked Paris. You know what I
mean?"Gurdon wasn't qualifying as a silent servant of his country for
nothing; he didn't know in the least what she meant. He waited,
looking steadily at her."Ah, well, you have always been so steady," she went on, with a
faint sigh, as though this were regrettable; "but--er--Paris--the ménage à deux. Ah, these artists--and
their models!"Mrs. Leighton was a very rusée and
clever old lady, and her uplifted eyes as she said "these artists," coupled with the quaint, dry twist in her voice
when she said "their models," were quite funny.Gurdon never smiled, although perhaps Mrs. Leighton meant him
to. He knew the old lady's foible was to be credited with a vast
knowledge of wickedness and that tenderness for the wicked which is
supposed to proceed from "tout comprendre." He
had heard Robbie say that the stories his grandmother could get out of
one glass of Chartreuse, about the days when she was a young girl and
stayed with her aunt at the French Embassy, licked anything a man
could find in three times the quantity of Kümmel, and Robbie
didn't mean it as a compliment. Although he might be a bad boy, he had
all that feeling of particularity about the minds of his female
relatives which is an Englishman's trait as exclusive as it is
touching. He was too young to perceive that, being two generations
younger than his grandmother, his idea of humour must be immeasurably
different. She belonged to the day when a clever woman of undoubted
propriety made a reputation for wit by an audacity that was nicely
calculated."You were not thinking of going to Paris for your holiday,
perhaps?" Mrs. Leighton went on, after a little pause.Mark Gurdon was not without politeness. "Well, in point of fact, I
rather was!" he said quickly, being careful to make it seem as though
she had by chance lit upon a plan he had been turning over.It wouldn't be a bad thing for him to do Mrs. Leighton any little
favour, but it would have been a very bad thing if he had let her
suspect that he thought he was doing her a favour."If you do, I wish you would just burst in upon Robbie."Gurdon had no difficulty in suppressing a smile at the picture
Mrs. Leighton had so evidently formed of her grandson's
surroundings."Has he been exceeding his allowance?" was all he said,
however."Now, how like a man!" cried Mrs. Leighton. "Of course, if he
didn't exceed his allowance, you cannot imagine that there should be
anything to criticise in his way of life. Good Heavens, what a moral
code!""My dear lady"--Gurdon began, with great deference and in defence,
but he was drowned immediately."Let me tell you that these people are not all disastrously
expensive! On the stage, in books, I grant you; but in real
life--especially French real life in the neighbourhood of the
studios--they are often remarkably thrifty and
careful. Models, drawn from the peasant class, they have not forgotten
the habits of their parents. They are not all young and pretty and
fond of dress (as for that, models are never pretty in real life);
they are middle-aged and plain, their minds set on economies, their
only expense to keep a big blue bow on the neck of the odious little
white dog they usually cherish!""My dear Mrs. Leighton, your intimate knowledge"--began Gurdon, now
frankly laughing, but she swept him up brusquely again."Of course, never tell me! Wasn't Paris my home, and don't I know
it--grille, entresol, grenier, and sous le toit?"She made a funny little upward movement with the gold double
eyeglass, and Gurdon never paused to ask himself how a life at the
Embassy could have furnished so vivid an insight into these byways; he
merely noticed what an esprit the old soul had,
and what a perfect French tongue she spoke with.He rose and held out his hand, smiling. Mrs. Leighton liked Gurdon,
his smiles and his silences and his appreciation; she often said to
her step-sister, who, though twenty years her junior, was her great
friend, "Mark will go far." And she did not like him less because he so obviously thought as much himself. She was
old, and she knew that no man goes far who doesn't think he will go
far and mean to all the time."You will hear from me in Paris. I foresee myself strangling that
dog in its own blue bow, and pitching the lady after it into the
street. But, you known, Robbie is no infant; he may have his own ideas
of manly independence.""Robbie has no ideas of any kind," said his grandmother with
scorn--"no ideas at all beyond plein air
and--and that sort of thing. That is what I dislike about it. There
are two ways of being vicious, my dear boy--one of them commands at
least a little respect. Some men are vicious from conviction--but of
the men who are vicious from convention what are you to say?" The
little movement of her pretty old white hands with which she
accompanied this mot, gave Gurdon an
opportunity of kissing one of them in leave-taking. The skin felt like
fine crumpled tissue-paper, and had a little breath of fleur de limon about it--the old French scent
Mrs. Leighton habitually used."Some from conviction, others from convention," repeated Gurdon to
himself when he got into the street. "What a dear, queer, charming old
humbug she is!"CHAPTER IIIt was by means of a little blue poste-télégraphe that Gurdon
announced his arrival in Paris to his old college friend Leighton, who
lived, or at anyrate had a studio, far out in the Passage des
Favorites; and it was another little blue poste-télégraphe which came to his
hotel, the Lille et d'Albion in the Rue de Rivoli, and carried
Leighton's welcome and his invitation to join him at a certain public
studio in the Latin Quarter, where he still studied rather
fitfully."Dear old man, this is a rare surprise!" Leighton said, when, later
in the day, he saw the tall, English-looking figure of his friend at
the edge of the blue smoke that filled the men's studio. They shook
hands and looked at each other. They had shaken hands last in the
impossible flurry of the Oxford railway platform, and no one who had
seen them there would have wondered that the porter followed quite
another young man with the portmanteaux, and
stared wildly among fifty more in a vain endeavour to recognise the
gentleman who had engaged him. They were like any thousand of young
men at that time; now, only two years later, they had changed
immensely. Leighton's fair hair was four inches long where it had been
barely half an inch, he had a weird beard of rough tow-coloured stuff
which partially covered his white throat. He was extremely décolletté. A horrid rag of a tie
disappeared into a stained blue waistcoat front, and a grey jacket
with gaping side pockets modelled his muscles effectively with its
greasy shine. Gurdon? Well, Gurdon looked exactly as one would have
expected. He wore a brown travelling serge, a white shirt, and a black
bow tie. He was clean shaven, his rather hatchet-shaped face pale and
sallow, his reddish-dark hair just long enough to part in the middle,
and rigorously flattened below a brown crush hat. There was about him
that suggestion of baths and shaves and tailors and general precision,
of which one is ashamed to feel a little tired, because it is in
itself so admirable."One must spend one's holiday somewhere," Gurdon was
murmuring. "Thought I'd look you up. Paris is always all right for a
holiday.""The only place in the world fit to live in, I say," the other replied. "Now I'm just done. The light has
been vile all afternoon, and I'm tired of sweating after the tone of
that mossy old beggar over there. I'll get my traps, and we'll come
along and have a yarn somewhere."Gurdon's eye travelled towards the model, whom his friend's phrase
had most aptly pictured."Magnificent chest and shoulders." he said admiringly."Ha, ha! rather! That's old Lemuel's strong point. He travels on
that chest and shoulders, I can tell you. Here's a friend of mine
thinks you've got a beau torse, Lemuel, hein?"A few gurgling laughs and chuckles followed this sally, and one or
two men looked up lazily at Gurdon for a moment. It seemed to be an
old studio joke, and some muttered comments in French, American, and
other foreign languages rumbled about the studio.The old Hercules upon the platform smiled a little, as at a
familiar compliment; without altering the pose, he seemed to stiffen
proudly; the muscles in his right arm swelled, and the strong old
fingers grasping the wooden spear contracted a trifle more firmly. It
was the end of the last hour of the afternoon, when models get slack
sometimes; and the half-jocular bit of praise, as well as the
knowledge that a stranger was looking at him,
served to brisk up the splendid old figure, on which forty pairs of
eyes had been fastened more or less all day."He understands English, then, does he?" Gurdon asked, with some
curiosity."Oh, he is English. Lemuel is a character,
too, I can tell you. Hasn't always been a model, by any means.""No, I should say not. He never developed that muscle in this
atmosphere.""Pretty foul, isn't it? I expect it strikes you. I'm used to
it. They will smoke that Petit Caporal, and
that's what does it. Well, there is not any tobacco in France,
anyhow.""I daresay you'll welcome a pound or two of the old stuff,
then?""My dear fellow! How fearfully decent of you! You can't beat
England for some things--pals and tobacco."They made their way into the grey and dismal little street. It was
winter, but not cold. Neither of them wore an overcoat, and they
stepped out briskly in the direction of the Gare Montparnasse.They may have had a good deal to say, but they talked only in
snatches. There was much cordiality in their voices, but their
interests were now so different, and their lives had strayed so far apart, that there could be no consecutive talk
between them all at once.When they had struck obliquely into the Rue Vaugirard, Leighton
paused suddenly."I was taking you to my old barracks in the Passage," he said, "but
I don't see the good. The light has gone, and you won't be able to see
my things--that is, even if you want to." Mark interjected something
friendly. "And I really don't see the good.""Well, let us consider what we are going to do to-night," said
Gurdon, noting what he imagined to be his friend's reluctance to go to
the studio. That was so like Leighton--never to consider how far he
was going to admit his friend to the intimacies of his new life until
they were half-way to the very scene of them, then to pull up and
bungle out something about the light.In which reflection Mark utterly misjudged Robbie."I'm out of things here, of course. It's ages since I was in
Paris. I look to you, Rob, to take me about.""I'll take you round," Rob answered, with a burlesque wink. "And I
suppose you don't mean Bulliers and that sort of haunt; you mean the
Divan Japonais and the Alcazar, eh?"Mark nodded."Well, I'll have to shine out in some other togs. So we'll go to
the studio, and you'll wait and look about you, while I adorn in a
corner behind a wide-meshed fishing-net."They set out at a swinging pace, and Mark pondered. This time they
didn't talk; Mark looked about him after the fashion of a man who
notices things, not effects, and Leighton got all the society he
wanted out of the cigar Mark had handed him at the studio door."How about the old lady? But I suppose you never see her much?""On the contrary, I sat opposite to her at dinner at the Fearons'
the other night, and I have even called. She is brisker than ever, and
of a freshness that shamed half the young women in the room--or should
have done.""Say anything about me?""Oh, hoped I would see you when I went to Paris, and no doubt will
expect me to tell her how you are getting on. She is interested in
you, you know.""Rather; and I believe she's the only member of the family who
wasn't disappointed when I turned painter. She sent for me when she
heard it. She said, 'Robert, you are an independent boy, and I like
you. Go to Paris. Never mind what your uncle says; he doesn't know Paris. It's the only place to qualify as a
human being who understands his world. Be a painter. I don't mind if
you are a failure or a success, only don't give it up; stick to it and
get all you can out of it. You start on Thursday? Very well. Taste all
the flavours of the art life, it is very developing. I will stop your
allowance from Thursday. It would never do for you to have money; you
would not develop character, you would not see real life."Leighton had attempted some little imitation of his grandmother's
manner, and Mark roared with laughter at the climax of her advice."Was she as good as her word?" he asked."Every bit!" said Robbie, with enthusiasm. "She's a rare old woman,
and I'm proud of her. Never you believe in her wickedness; she isn't
half as bad as she'd make you think, nor half as fond of the devil as
she says.""I have no doubt that she wouldn't be hard on a man, though,
if--er--if he wasn't quite straight?" Gurdon said, and looked
tentatively at the houses and the evening sky."She abdicated her right to oversee my conduct when she stopped
that four-fifty," Robbie said, with a shrewd chirp in his voice.Gurdon felt amazed, but volunteered no comment."Your uncle still holds out, I suppose?" he asked carelessly."Yes; he used to make up my grandmother's money to six
hundred. That was in Oxford days, you remember. A daughter was not
expensive, he said, and he could afford it. I should just about say he
could. He was pretty sick when I made a break for Paris, but the money
goes on, thank God! for it's all I have. And of course he was not
bound to do anything at all, as he's only an uncle by marriage--and
that with a difference. Besides, he's as close as a locked door, the
worthy Hamesthwaite."The subject of Leighton's worldly goods dropped, and they swung
along in silence for a good way."Now, it's not far off. I warn you, you'll be surprised when you
see the kind of place I build in. Anything lonelier or less
attractive--from an average point of view--than the Passage des
Favorites never was conceived by mortal architect or builder. I've
often wondered what Favorites? Most favourites
wouldn't care to live here, I take it."Gurdon turned a pair of hazel-grey eyes slowly upon him, but there
was nothing to be made of Robbie's open face; the blue eyes looked
straight before him, the lids narrowing
themselves from time to time as he tasted a snatch of composition in
the surrounding buildings or the street. Gurdon gave it up."We turn on our left sharp now."They had been walking about half an hour. The road was unmade and
muddy, no longer a street, but a road; there were bleak gardens with
dying shrubs in them, and great glass balls set up on small pillars,
and heaps of shells, and stones, and coloured glass, and other
excrescences of bad taste in suburban horticulture. The houses were no
longer in rows, they were scattered, and occasional blank
building-fields could be seen over wood palings; fields edged by a
segment of a street consisting of one block of painfully narrow houses
with raw edges. Over everything there was an air of neglect, of
disappointed, disheartened effort, or candid squalor; it made an
impression of the utmost desolation upon Gurdon, and he wondered what
in heaven's name could cause a man whose very profession presupposed a
love of beauty, to choose such a spot."Grand place for an artist this," Leighton broke out with warm
enthusiasm, and flung the end of his cigar at a broken statue which
was set up behind a bush of hemlock in the garden they were
passing. "You have no idea of the queer things
you see here sometimes. You'd hardly think Paris had an edge like
this, would you? Over there is the barrière," waving a hand on which charcoal
had formed an effective background to a turquoise set in silver, in
the direction of the sunset. "The lights that travel over this plain
sometimes are magnificent. Now, for instance, look now how the thing
composes! You see where they have been pulling down the backs of these
houses--you see that heap of yellow sand with the puddle in the middle
where they've been making mortar, and that heap of concrete there for
the new facade, and the yellow freestone with the saw still in it?
Look how the sun leaps into that puddle and catches hold of that
saw. Jove! I've got to paint that thing one of these days."Gurdon felt instructed, and really did think he saw something
rather fine about it."I shall call it 'Well begun is ill done,' if I send it to England;
they love titles at the Academy," Leighton went on, with the same
warmth, already seeing the thing packed for delivery at a London
exhibition. "I wonder if I've got the key. Oh, perhaps Arsénie
will be home by now. Here, Gurdon, stop! this is our door. Where were
you off to?"CHAPTER IIIWHO is Arsénie?" Gurdon asked, as lightly as he could, and
smiling."Arsènie? Have I not mentioned her?" Leighton looked at him
in frank surprise. "Oh, she lives with me, and cooks, and looks after
me, and keeps me out of mischief." He laughed--laughed like a Paris
art student."You're pretty well acclimatised," Mark managed to say, with
admirable carelessness, for the fact was, he had never believed a word
of old Mrs. Leighton's story, and with every step he took towards the
Passage des Favorites it had seemed more and more improbable.Leighton laughed again, this time with just a shade of colour in
his forehead. "You mustn't expect a great beauty. She's not
that. Queer name, isn't it--Arsènie? Everybody calls her
Arsenic, but that really is a bit rough."They had been standing at the door all this time, Robbie striking
the key on the iron handle as he gave these hurried particulars. Now a
step sounded inside, and the door was opened
from within."J'amène un ami à moi, belle, mais ne te
dérange pas," Leighton said in execrable French as they went
inside."Tiens, bon--s'il ne veut pas manger!" cried the woman, in a voice
very shrill, but gay. She had the coarse, rough black hair of the
Midi, and the sallow skin and large features, but there was a
possibility of drama in her pose, of repartee upon her thick lips, and
of immense practicality in her shrewd, bold eye. She looked about
thirty-four as she stood there, carelessly dressed, and with no figure
in particular. In point of fact, she had the most perfect classic
build of any model in the Quartier. It was because she was so like
Venus that she was dowdy in common clothing. There were lines of
temper, and power, and dominance in her forehead. She had a small
casserole in one hand and a spoon in the other; she was cooking the
evening meal, and after she had looked at Gurdon a moment with a very
direct but friendly stare, she turned back to a corner where a
ridiculous little fourneau and charcoal stove had been
accommodated."I could never keep out of debt in this world if I hadn't
Arsènie," said Robbie, bringing his
glance from the stove to Gurdon's inexpressive face. "I don't owe a
penny, and I don't believe I've been drunk since last
Mi-Carême. If I had that four-fifty I could afford to do
without her, and go to the bad--as it is, I couldn't. Hello,
Lou-lou!"A very small fluffy white dog got up from a heap of drapery in a
corner, and came wagging and wriggling towards Leighton; it wore an
immense blue bow upon its neck. Gurdon passed his hand over his
forehead, and walked a few paces to a dark corner, where a shabby
divan was constructed below a big brown barge-sail. He was a good deal
perplexed."I shall change now, Mark; take a squint at those croquis over there."Gurdon moved nearer to the divan. It was a big, barn-like studio,
and at the other end he could hear Arsènie playing with the
little dog in a voice like the sharpening of a carving-knife, and with
a rough show of affection that made him shudder. All round, the walls
were pinned over with sketches, studies, schemes for pictures,
caricatures, verses, impertinences and toys from Carnival time. On the
floor a few mats were lying, and skins. All was wonderfully clean,
nothing but the ashes of cigarettes lay upon the divan or the floor. A
pair of wooden sabots were in a corner, a few
hats hung on pegs. Gurdon made a careful inspection of these things,
because he felt really interested, and he saw that his friend's hand
was strong and sure, and utterly different from what it had been when
he drew dons and proctors and freshers in the old days.He turned to go over to the stove and talk to Arsènie, but
at that moment she opened a little door and disappeared, striking
matches, and evidently engaged in getting a light.He pushed aside a heap of clothes on the divan, and sat down to
rest a minute till she came back.To his amazement, a head reared itself at the other end of the heap
of clothing,--a head with a good deal of black-brown hair cut short,
and a pair of very round, very sleepy eyes; two feet thrust themselves
out of his end of the bundle and swung to the floor. The figure sat
and then stood up and shook herself; she seemed a girl of about
eighteen."Qui donc?" she said, looking candidly and laughingly at
Gurdon. Just then Leighton came in, hitching his shoulders into a
black coat, which was less familiar to him than his grey jacket.Hullo, young Lemuel, you here?" he said in English."Yes; been asleep, though. Who is this?" She pointed to Gurdon as
though she ought to be told at once of any intruder into the
circle."Friend of mine from England, Gurdon by name. Look here, Lemuel,
don't you make love to him."The girl leapt into the air with a high, curious shriek of
amusement and delight. She was a round, well-developed creature, but
she was light and fearfully agile, and it made a wonderful
effect. When she descended, she cut a strange step towards Gurdon,
flung both her arms round his head, and kissed him on his severe,
neatly-shaven lips. Then she went off into the gayest, most squealing
of laughs."You see how I begin," she said, and danced over the floor and
swung round and looked at them, and doubled herself up to scream and
laugh again.There was something so mocking and provoking about the creature,
that Gurdon, laughing, but tingling curiously in a way he did not stop
to understand, jumped up from the divan and caught her, and said--"I'm going to box your ears, you saucy child!" He gave her two
light pats on each side of her head, took her by the elbows firmly,
and said, "Now, are you sorry? Not a bit?" She
was tremendously pretty. "Will you do it again?""No, I just won't," she said demurely, but with a nod of such
shrewdness that Leighton fell to guffawing in the corner."Voyons, mes enfants,--du café!" shouted Arsènie from
the stove, and brought forward a little tray.The girl they had called Lemuel flew round the studio and sat on
the floor beside Robbie, pretending to laugh when she looked at
Gurdon, and throwing her dress skirt over her head as she rocked about
in mock paroxysms. Mark's mind was full of bewilderment as he took his
place in this strange circle. Who was this wild creature, a child and
not a child? How was she with Leighton and Arsènie? He looked
from one to the other of them, intending to ask about her, but they
were playing ball with the little white dog, and Lemuel's round eyes
were peeping at him from under her skirt hem."I think we'd better not say who you are; you've behaved yourself
so disgracefully," Leighton just then said, looking over his
shoulder. "She is the daughter of our friend with the beau torse, and she is called young Lemuel.""Moi, aussi," she began to scream, but Robbie put his hand out and caught her by the hair, and they played
together till they nearly upset the coffee. Gurdon took up Lou-lou and
fingered the beast's big bow, while he wondered what old Mrs. Leighton
would make of the only element that had been wanting in her picture of
Robbie's surroundings.CHAPTER IVIT was not only to look after Robbie Leighton, and oblige that
young man's grandmother, that Gurdon had come to Paris. A notable
feature of his mind was a peculiar power of forming small but
effective combinations; the power was now more than a natural
faculty. Mark had discovered, early in life, that he had such a
quality, and he had had many opportunities of becoming impressed with
a sense of its usefulness; he therefore determined to develop it as
another man might decide to develop his talent for music or
sculpture. On the principle that the greater includes the less,
Gurdon, while capable of forming a scheme of very respectable
magnitude, was also sensible of the importance of the smallest
details, and made a practice of never neglecting them. You might have
met Gurdon anywhere,--at dinner, in a train, between the acts, on a
racecourse, in the cabin of a steamer,--and after half-an-hour's
conversation you would have put him down merely
as an excellent specimen of the average man; in which judgment you
would have been mistaken. For this very power I speak of is by no
means part of the average man's equipment, and it was just this and
nothing else that distinguished Mark from the crowd. It is very
habitual to use the phrase regarding a young man that he must "make a
career for himself"; and there is nothing quite so rare as to see the
young man who has done it. Circumstances, when not relatives or an
accident of birth, are the usual agents in the manufacture of this
article; and to come across the man who, not having either the
relatives or the accident of birth, and not being favoured by the
circumstances, has deliberately set to work to construct the
circumstances, to connect them with the motor engine of his own will,
and, having set the whole a-going, to contrive that a career shall be
the result,--to come across such a man is to have found something
approaching the human equivalent of a blue rose.Gurdon's father had been an engineer, and a fairly successful one,
too; his mother a curate's daughter, who to the single effort of
giving birth to him had added the second of selecting his Christian
name, and then died. Mark always did his mother justice when he
thought of her. He was far too keen and
fair-minded not to see that she had done very well by him; she had
given him a splendid constitution, a very nice nose, which was not too
suggestive of talent to be handsome and even aristocratic, and a very
useful kind of name. She might just as easily have called him
Jeremiah--for she was the daughter of a Low-Church curate who still
read in the Old Testament, and had brought his daughter up to do
likewise. He knew that he owed a great deal to his mother, and he
forgave her handsomely, since on the whole it lay very flat, for the
fine and slightly rippled hair which had also been of her
bestowal. There is nothing in his personal appearance that a man
resents more fiercely than a tendency to curl or crinkle in his
hair.His father's was a life of change and chance. Sometimes there was
more money than at other times, and it had been in one of their
brightest moments that young Mark's four years at Rugby were paid
for. Then came the French experience, and while his father held a post
as manager of some extremely expensive and complicated wine-pressing
machinery, Mark had crossed the Bordeaux Jardin Public four times
daily, on his way to and from the Lycée. French, even when
acquired in Bordeaux, is a tremendous arrow in
a young man's quiver when he comes to shoot at a mark in the world;
and young Gurdon took to it like a cluck to water, and all his life
would drop into a French book for preference; and, having sat through
one fortnight of performances at the Français, arose and left the
building with an exquisitely chastened accent, which never forsook
him. Even as it is customary to look for no grit in the schoolboy who
keeps his nails clean, so the morals of the Englishman who speaks
French like a native are very justifiably doubted by people of
experience; but on both these points an exception may perhaps be
claimed in favour of Mark. When Gurdon, senior, was sent to put up and
superintend certain brewing plant at Munich, his son naturally
accompanied him, and thereupon set himself to conquer first his
intuitive antipathy to the Germans, and then his no less fierce
objection to their declensions, with the result that his midday
Bairisch suited him as well as his previous Médoc had done, and
he thought out for himself, combining an immense dispassionateness
with the hot logical fervour of two-and-twenty, the Franco-German
question, to his own complete consequent peace of mind in this
matter.The Munich life appearing for the time a
permanency (if such a misuse of terms be forgivable), Mark came to
England and to Oxford with an education so peculiar, and in some
respects so in advance of that of men of his age, that he felt
moderately certain of making his exams. for his chosen career, and
entering the Civil Service with good numbers. He found he had to work
harder than he had expected, but, nevertheless, events fell out to his
satisfaction, and his first reverse came after he had acquired a
much-yearned-for stool in the Colonial Office. It was the death of his
father. All Mark's life had been so matter of fact thus far, that he
was dismayed to find how much he regretted the man who, in life, had
meant very little to him. He put on his decorously correct mourning
with a puzzled brow, and then went to look after the investment of the
£1500 which was all the money he had to expect as capital. His
father had been his only relative; he was now alone in the
world--without the least sense of loneliness; the curious sadness that
would fall upon him when he laid down the afternoon paper, when he
waited for the next course of the abominable club dinner, when he
looked across the water in St. James's Park towards that circle of
buildings in which his hopes and his future lay--seemed to
him inexplicable, because illogical. But in
time the sadness wore away, and only the puzzled remembrance of it
stirred sometimes in his brain.It was characteristic of Mark that he invested that £1500 as
it stood."There may be a time when I shall want just such a sum of money for
some particular step in my career," he told himself; and perhaps he
phrased it, There shall be a time, and not, There may be.And then the dull months went over, painted only by the minute
social advances the young man made. The friendship of Robbie Leighton
had introduced him to a circle which ideally represented the desire of
his very wide-awake dreams; this might be looked upon as one of the
adventitious circumstances mentioned before, but how many young men
could have made any capital out of a single afternoon call, with a
number of other people in the room?It was Mark's own cleverness that told him to make a conversational
opportunity, not for himself, but for his brilliant hostess--and to
make it in French. When he thought over the visit, he discovered that
beyond "How do you do?" and " Good-bye," it was his unique utterance
in that drawing-room; but it drew from
Mrs. Leighton a very delightful sort of command to Robbie to tell
Gurdon to call upon her, and Mark never misled himself as to its
importance.So much for Mark's character ; his appearance has been
indicated. As to his belief, it was concretely rooted in himself, and
his creed was that it behoved a man--not every man, but such a man as
himself--to succeed. Success on the one hand implies a failure
somewhere or of some one on the other. Mark quite saw the admirable
justice of this. Some people of course had to fail, it was what they
were intended for and it suited them, only he was not of these. He was
born to be a successful, honourable, gentlemanly, "decent" kind of
fellow; just as some men were born to be low, ruffianly devils, or
seedy, pitiable failures. As he had a decidedly kind heart, and
wouldn't have hurt a fly, he thought it fearfully hard on them, and
would like to have given them each a sovereign, poor chaps. This, in
rough outline, was Mark's ethics.So he stood, fresh and handsome, on the steps of the Lille et
d'Albion, pulling on a pair of French Suède gloves, and
prepared to pursue his second object in coming to Paris. It was about
eleven o'clock, so he stepped out for Neal and a glimpse of
yesterday's Times; at twelve it would be time to look up some of the men at the Embassy;
they would have had time to address about five envelopes apiece, and
would be ready for luncheon. In the afternoon he was going to Auteuil
to see St. Crispin, the marvellous colt belonging to his friend the
Marquis de Mont Voisin, come in fourth, that being the place assigned
inevitably to young Mont Voisin's horses. He owed this very desirable
acquaintance also to Mrs. Leighton. The old Marquise having been a
friend of her girlhood, it was natural that, when the boy came to
London, she should have made a little dinner for him, and collected
such young men as she thought he would like to meet. Mont Voisin spoke
just as little and just as much English as every other Frenchman, and
it had fallen to the lucky Gurdon to show him London, and answer all
his questions in his own tongue. A card discreetly left at the Hotel
Mont Voisin on his way to Leighton at the studio had procured for
Gurdon a cordial invitation to "team down" (this was how Mont Voisin
put it, and it is certain he imagined himself to be employing an
extremely showy bit of London slang) on his coach.Now it was an annoying thing to Gurdon that, as he conscientiously
read his Times, there should crop up continually the insufferable remembrance of that
half-hour in Leighton's studio. For one thing, the cropping-up of
recollections was not what he was accustomed to expect of his own
mind; for another, they interfered materially with the digest of the
South African intelligence which he was bent on making. It was part of
Gurdon's daily routine to read first the news of the great Empire
whose ends he was called upon in the humblest of fashions to serve,
then to think about them, and finally to know what he thought about
them. He had the clearest possible head. One thing at once, and that
thing thoroughly, was his rôle; but if a man is to be disturbed
by the recurrence of an atmosphere, such as the atmosphere of the
studio, and that atmosphere accompanied by a sensation, such a
sensation as the insolent kiss of a minx of a girl, how in the world
is he to reflect upon the rights and wrongs of the Swazis? Gurdon had
barely got rid of this problem when he set out for the
Legation.CHAPTER V"HULLO, that can't be! By Jove, it is though! I say, here comes
Miss Essex."The two men were walking across the Jardin du Luxembourg after a
déjeuner at the Hôtel Foyot, for
which Gurdon had paid an exceedingly round number of francs, and it
was of course Robbie Leighton whose careless youth still expressed
itself in a number of such ejaculations. Gurdon saw a tall girl coming
towards them in the sunshine that filtered through the plane trees; he
noticed that she was fair and slim and English; he moved his stick
into his other hand, so as to be ready to take his hat off; and he
also observed the light and colour that seemed to overspread his
friend's face. As for Robbie, he saw the pompons of the planes
patterned black upon a pale sky dappled in opaline colours of winter
clearness; he heard the firm, sharp beat of her slim feet upon the
orange path, and felt something severe and virginal and beautiful in her walk; and then he swept his hat from his
head in an ardour of smiles, which was made very noticeable by the
correct courtesy of Gurdon's gesture. The next instant both men came
to a halt, brief enough, but sharp and simultaneous, amazement, in a
dull colour of mounting blood, painting itself in their faces. The
girl had cut Leighton dead. It had been clear, intentional, and
effective. The pale, fair face had seemed a little paler as she passed
them by, the clear blue eyes had fixed a quiet gaze between their
shoulders."In God's name!" began Leighton rather gaspingly, as they settled
into a vacant seat,--"In God's name, what can she mean?""You appear to have mistaken the lady," Gordon said, with a faint
sarcasm below the lightness of his tone."Mistaken her? Well, if anything was plain, it was that she knew me! What in the world has happened?""Did you say Essex? Not the sister of Dark Essex, of Balliol, by
any chance?""By every certainty. Last year he wrote and told me she was coming
out, and asked me to be of use to her in any way I could. I have been
of use to her in a hundred ways, and we've been the best of
friends....Some brute has been telling lies
about me!" Leighton wound up in a voice of sudden passion."Or perhaps the truth?" Gurdon had the kind of personal courage
which can say a little thing like that."Oh, you mean--Arsènie?"Their eyes met as Leighton turned and looked at Mark. It appeared
to be an opportunity to get at his friend's mind on this subject; it
appeared to be the moment for doing Mrs. Leighton a favour."My dear fellow," Gurdon began in expostulatory cordiality, "this
art circle of yours up here is a very small thing, and it is not to be
expected that the light of day is to be screened off from one especial
building in the Passage des Favorites. What in the world have you
hoped for? Did you mean these people who frequent the same studio as
yourself all day, not to know this thing? Really, Leighton, you are
not going to tell me you were not prepared for an incident of this
kind?""Prepared for it?" cried Robbie. "Prepared to have Margaret Essex
cut me as though I were a blackguard not fit to be spoken to, or to
have her eyes rest on? Would you have been
prepared for it?"Leighton was snorting with indignation and a sense of outraged
virtue."Of course I should have been; always supposing I could have
contrived so idiotic a situation for myself. You can't reckon without
public opinion, and people's idea of life. Such women as Miss Essex
are public opinion, and while they inhabit the same part of Paris as
yourself, you must count them in your schemes. Why should Miss Essex's
views be any different here from what they would be in London?"Leighton sank together in a dismayed and perplexed heap, and Mark
continued to talk over the ruins without apparently noticing the havoc
he was causing. "It must be one thing or the other, and you have to
choose which," he concluded presently, after a monologue to which
Robbie had given gloomy and disgusted attention. "Besides, I know the
sort of woman Miss Essex is; it was written all over her--in her walk,
her face, the swing of her gown." Poor Robbie had only read the poetry
of these elements. "You can't mistake them. Made of a very fine
material, but cold and inhuman as the grave itself." He leaned back
complacently, folding his arms. "Measuring all men with a measure, and
that measure made of wrought steel.""Rot!" said Leighton simply, and with that got up, and made as
though to pursue his way towards the studio.There was a silence of several minutes. Even when they paused again
while Gurdon bought a couple of bunches of violets at the gate of the
Jardin, no word was spoken.It was Leighton who broke the silence, and his voice was careless
and gay again. "We'll go and sit in the courtyard and have a yarn with
old Lemuel; he isn't sitting to-day, and you'll find him a queer old
chap." The meeting with Miss Essex was not apparently to colour the
whole afternoon, and Gurdon caught himself wondering how deep it had
gone with Leighton. "I thought so; there he is, lifting weights just
to show off to the men."The old Hercules was dressed in seedy black, wearing a sombrero
which made him handsomer and more picturesque than ever. He had a
couple of big iron bars in his hands with balls at the ends of them,
and he was raising these above his head and twirling them in the
air. Gathered round him, just outside the sculpture studio, upon the
greenish-grey flagstones, were some of the men students, waiting for
the afternoon work to begin. It was a Monday afternoon, and the broad
stone steps that led down into the courtyard were covered with
Italians, women in garish aprons, head-cloths, and skirts; men, in
more or less ragged everyday clothes, carried
bundles which contained costumes of various sorts. Children, all with
immense black eyes in gingerbread-coloured faces, tumbled about like
guinea-pigs, sang and screamed, or were portentously still and silent,
according as they were accompanied by an elder sister of some nine
summers or not.To the outsider it was a very picturesque scene. To the student it
was Monday afternoon."You must have been painted an immense number of times, Mr. Lemuel,
you're so completely the classic type," Gurdon said politely to the
old man, who had put down his weights and was wiping his broad, fine
brow."Well, I may say I have!" the Hercules replied, in a remarkably
small, insignificant voice. "Munkacszy's design for the ceiling of an
audience hall at the Champ de Mars last year--I was the Zeus in
that. You will have seen Laurent's fresco at the Panthéon? I am
there. I posed for three figures there and for the head of one. Oh,
and in the last ten years--yes! That group of the new Ajax--if you
were at the Salon three years ago, you might have seen it--it created
a great sensation, because poor young Suvain shot himself beside it on
varnishing day; it was his, you know, and they hadn't given him the
place he expected. I worked seven months with
him for that. It was a grand thing."Insensibly, as they talked, they had been moving in the direction
of the street, and before he knew it, Mark found himself pushing open
the swing-door of the marchand de vin at the
corner."But before this part of your career, what were you engaged in?" he
asked, after little glasses had been handed them."Ah, before that I was a sculptor myself, and slapped clay with as
good a will as any."The old man's face darkened, and his small voice sounded as though
the Amer Picon had got into it too."But I never made anything of it, and I had a wife and family to
keep."Good heavens! it was this man's daughter, Gurdon remembered."And so many asked me to pose--for high terms too--that I saw I
could do better at it."Mark suspected a fine talent for idleness in this powerful old
Jove, but he only said, "Sculpture ought to be a fine thing for the
muscles."" Ah, my muscles were made before ever I saw a mallet or dreamed of
touching one. You must make the muscles when they're young, sir, and
they'll never quite disappear. Boxing made
mine, when I was at the University. A performer with the gloves
yourself, perhaps?"Gurdon said he was fond of it, but more for the exercise than the
science."I lead a fairly sedentary life,--I'm in a Government office,--and
I find an hour three times a week keeps me wonderfully fit," he added
in a conversational way, and perhaps impelled to give some confidence
about himself as a means of putting himself on an equality with the
old man."It is long since I darkened those doors," old Lemuel said, slowly
and musingly. "Who knows, you may be sitting in the same seat.""You were--?" Gurdon began in some surprise.The white head nodded slowly several times. Gurdon got the idea
that the Paris model did not wish to talk about those days. He was
wrong: there was nothing old Lemuel didn't want to talk about."I had a sort of an ambition once,--oh, I've seen the folly of it
long since,--and it was out of place there."This made Mark uncomfortable. He called sharply to have their
glasses filled again, and, with his brows knitting, quickly asked
Lemuel what he meant?"Well, I wanted to get on, you see; the whole thing was too slow
for me. I'd no money and precious little interest, and--I wanted to
marry." He stopped, but Gurdon accepted this pause in silence, and,
after putting his lips to his glass, the old model went on
musingly. "Yes, I wanted to marry; ah, it's a very long while ago,
that! I had energy, I had some push about me then. A salary on a
crawling scale, with a pension at the end of it, seemed to me too poor
a thing to sit down and wait for. I thought I might do something to
get myself into notice. What was the use of my being one of hundreds
whose names were unknown except to their immediate superiors in office
and to the hall porter? A mere coral insect, one of thousands, raising
a mountain reef of pink tape!"Mark's lips folded themselves in and yet more tightly in. He was
young enough, although twenty-eight years of age, to be surprised, to
imagine something of a coincidence about his meeting with this man,
about the similarity in his own feelings now and that other Government
clerk's then. He looked rather fixedly, at old Lemuel's physique, the
set of his neck upon his shoulders, the pose of his head. He imagined
him young; to look at he must have been a man in a thousand; his
manner, too, was smooth, easy and
dignified. Years of being bandied about in a studio had given little
unfamiliar touches of servility to it in places; but these still
struck oddly and incongruously upon the ear, and in no wise seemed
natural to the man. Had not old Lemuel of the beau
torse and the Paris studios had more in his favour thirty years
ago than he, Gurdon, at this moment? Mark was not by any means a man
of sentiment; it was not so much that he despised it as that it was
the very last attitude his mind was likely to assume, but no human
being can be wholly without this impractical quality, and Gurdon had,
of course, a little of it--so little that it was just enough for
himself. His clear head showed him that the points in which he was
superior to the young man Lemuel must once have been, were not upon
the surface, were not easily discoverable. And the conversation made
the more dent upon his brain, because, only the evening before,
driving home upon the box-seat of Mont Voisin's coach, he had thought
to himself, "I am not getting on." With the upper octave of his brain
he was discussing with the Marquis the breed of English racehorses and
the inferiority of French blood; then there had come rushing to him on
the sharp wind that tightened the skin upon his face, this sudden
thought, "I am not getting on," and at once the
deeper octave had played with variations upon this theme. Mark had had
a socially successful afternoon, following upon a socially successful
luncheon; if he had been thinking about himself at all, he might have
been thinking that on the whole he was doing very fairly well. But he
liked racing, and he liked Mont Voisin's Paris chatter, and he had not
been thinking about himself at all. Then the evening breeze had
brought him that uncomfortable thought; so clear and crisp and
definite, that it had the effect upon him of the utterance of a being
who knows better than one's self. An argumentative fellow in the main,
Mark didn't argue with this impersonal dictum; he tried his best to
discover upon what collocation of half-liquid ideas it had been based,
but he could trace none of these, although he searched and filtered
his brain to the utmost.Failing this, he had set himself to sum up his position, and had,
so to speak, heaved a mental log to determine by dead reckoning at
least his rate of professional progress. A very few minutes served to
show him that the dictum could be justified. What would the next year
bring him, in all likelihood? At the best, if the Government held on,
chance might put him ahead of some senior. His chief, Lord Hames-thwaite, might perceive him more nearly, might
suspect his ability, might differentiate him, in his own mind, from
his fellows. Ah, how much that differentiation would mean! That was,
at the best, the very best. At the worst? At the worst, he would dine
out a little oftener, meet a few more important people, be caught up
to the paradise of Lady Hamesthwaite's Wednesday dinners. That was
all. Quite certainly he was not getting on.The thoughts engendered by that dictum were in no way dissipated or
diluted in their discomforting strength by an evening at the
theatre. A morning at the Cluny and Panthéon, which he had
always previously failed to see, and to which Leighton now dragged
him--these also were powerless to lead his thoughts from a more or
less profitless contemplation of his own future. Now, having chanced
against a queer old studio-character, that the conversation should
take this very turn, and his companion appear in the shocking
character of a disappointed appointment-seeker, with a background
which, in a tray full of human experiences, could not be distinguished
from his own, was sufficiently disquieting. The thoughts set flowing
by old Lemuel's brief confidences had so absorbed Mark's attention
that he missed even a sentence or two of the
slow, musing talk. The soft, small voice of the man, his fixed eyes,
the backward throw of his big head, with its cover of shining white
curls and tangles--all these things made up the impression that he was
unwinding his thoughts from the silver cobwebs of the past."Get to know something;--yes, that is the scheme, I was right so
far;--get to know something--and don't print it. The mistake was that
I did."It was this phrase, very emphatically spoken, which captured and
led back Gurdon's excursive mind. He was just going to put a question,
when the door burst open and Leighton came in with a rush."Gad, I thought as much!" he exclaimed, shouldering up to them past
a group of blue cotton ouvriers. "When in doubt
as to old Lemuel's whereabouts, try the wine-shop, eh?" He caught the
old man a whack on his big shoulder, and laughed as he ordered a
little glass for himself.When the Marmorweib of romantic legend felt
the first pink shaft of morning sunlight on her stony bosom, the life
that night and the green moonbeams had given her stopped suddenly, and
so long as the sun shone she was cold upon her pedestal. This change
meant a moment of keen pain for her, we may
fancy. There was a blasting touch of the morning about young Leighton
and his greeting, and it wrought some such change in old Lemuel. On
Gurdon, too, it was not lost. Something forbade him saying, "We were
speaking of early days," or anything of the kind. He was silent. The
whole foregoing conversation began to seem unreal and shadowy. It was
to be remembered often at other times; but now he listened with an odd
expression in his face as Robbie announced that he was off work for
the afternoon; the new model was too vile for anything, and he wasn't
going to paint her. No modelling, just a hundredweight or two of Frankforterwurst without the spice."Look here, I'll make a sketch of you instead, if you like. There's
a line in your jaw that I like rather.""All right. How long will it take?" asked Mark."Oh, depends; say an hour or two, and then we'll go over the river
and dine. Lemuel, can we go up to your place? There's a very fair
light there, and I don't suppose little Lem will think it an
intrusion.""She's not at home, she's sitting for Carlo Deo's
wood-nymph. You're very welcome."In a few minutes they were mounting the five flights to the old
model's appartement.CHAPTER VIThe twenty years between Mrs. Leighton and her stepsister, Lady
Hamesthwaite, made no sort of difference to their friendship, which
was of the closest possible kind, but it would have been very
difficult for an outsider to discover in what the very distinct bond
between the two women consisted.It is almost unusual for relations to come into any such close
connection as will make them deep and lasting friends. But, a good way
back in Julia Hamesthwaite's life, there had been a moment at which
Mrs. Leighton had played the part of a friend, rather than that of a
half-sister, and the younger woman never forgot it. She owed her very
excellent marriage to Mrs. Leighton; or, to speak more clearly, she
owed her escape from a very unfortunate marriage to that sympathising
and clever woman. The incident has nothing to do with this story, and
need not be detailed. But Lady Hamesthwaite, fitted in every way to be
the wife of a distinguished servant of the
Crown, had as nearly as possible missed this brilliant vocation, and
she owed it to her half-sister that she had not quite missed it.The intercourse between the house in Cornwall Gardens and the house
in Grosvenor Place was very constant and very cordial, and it was to
be expected that, the very afternoon of the Hamesthwaites' return to
London from their country place, Mrs. Leighton should have looked in
to greet her sister Julia."And you know I have Gallia with me," Lady Hamesthwaite had said,
as they sat over their tea in the smallest of the tiresomely immense
drawing-rooms which seemed fitted for nothing but big political
receptions. "It is not often that I am so fortunate." A little laugh
followed this remark; it was certainly remarkably seldom that this
mother and daughter could be found together."I hope she is in, and that she will be coming down. I take the
deepest interest in Gallia," Mrs. Leighton said quickly."You know that you are a little responsible for her peculiarities;
it was you who advised me always to let her have her own way, and
dispose of herself as she pleased.""It was my advice for the time being; you
would have done no good by thwarting Gallia when she chose her path
years ago. She has been lost to us both since then."Lady Hamesthwaite hastened to cover with a smile the sigh that
involuntarily escaped her."But--I think Gallia will come home. My theory is that the modern
girl has also a crop of wild oats to sow; not the usual sort, of
course,--Dieu soit béni,--but wild oats
nevertheless. Perhaps she will have finished soon, and then, you will
see, Gallia will come home."There was confidence and reassurance always to be found in
Mrs. Leighton's remarks. She had lived a long time with her eyes open
and seen many things, and she was usually right in what she
predicted.The little pause that fell between the two women was broken in upon
by a step crossing the parquet of an adjoining floor; a second later
Gallia Hamesthwaite appeared beside a curtained archway."How do you do, Aunt Celia?" she said, coming to kiss the old lady
on the cheek.Mrs. Leighton took both her hands, and smiled up at her with a
penetrative and slightly interrogative smile.Whether she was satisfied or not with the inspection did not
appear. It had the effect of annoying Gallia
excessively. She turned to her mother."Have the afternoon papers come yet?""I don't know, dear, but ring and ask Bowles; they are usually sent
up to my dressing-room, you know.""Do you not think mother looking very well?" Gallia began, after
she had rung the bell. "I do; I can't imagine why she should come
rushing up here now, of all times in the year, when London never fails
to give her that bronchial trouble.""Her social duties, my dear"--Mrs. Leighton began."But she has no social duties. Of course, if she were anyone else,
and I were someone quite different, she would have to get me married
and all that, but as it is--Come, it must be admitted that I have
lifted the burden of social duties pretty thoroughly off mother's
back. Thank you; but, Bowles, please send out for the other papers,
and bring them to me when they come."A very few minutes later she retired to the window with a sheaf of
journals, and was entirely lost to the conversation at the other side
of the room."Do you think she is on the way home?" asked Lady Hamesthwaite a
little wistfully."She is still very young, and proportionately earnest. She will
slough this skin in time, but one always fears a little what skin will
be found underneath."The crackle of the newspapers at the window covered the clear,
precise tones of Mrs. Leighton's voice, and Gallia read on
undisturbed."Anything of interest, darling?" Lady Hamesthwaite called out
presently."Yes, there is some rather good correspondence about--but you
wouldn't care to hear about it.""Tell us what is interesting you, dear Gallia," her Aunt Celia
said, with bland encouragement.Gallia did not lay down her paper, but in a tone of level
indifference replied, "There is an agitation about the State
regulation of vice.""My dearest child!" "Dear Gallia!" came from
the ladies on the sofa."But I don't suppose it will come to anything. One man very justly
observes that the result of it has been the abolition of regulation,
not the abolition of vice. I wonder who he is. He writes rather
well."Mrs. Leighton got up and went over to the window with her soft,
elegant step; she put the fine crinkled hand
Gurdon had kissed upon the girl's head, and sank upon the other end of
the settee."Dear Gallia, I'm not an illiberal old woman, now am I?" she said,
with a delightfully light French note in her voice.Gallia looked quietly into her face."I hardly know. I'm not good at summing up people, Aunt Celia.""Well, I will make you a little proposition, and you shall judge at
the end of it if I am illiberal in my opinions."Gallia's lip curled to a smile--a very old smile for so young a
face."Ah, you are going to say"--"I think you will find I am not going to say that," Mrs. Leighton
interrupted humorously. "I am not going to say it is not a fit subject
for you to read about or think about. I am only going to suggest that
it is a waste of time--your valuable time"--her voice was very serious
now--"to make up your mind upon so exceedingly complicated a subject
as this one," tapping the paper with her taper old fingers, "for the
simple reason that you are unable to assist its settlement one way or
the other! That's all. Now?""But, auntie, how can you say I am unable to assist its settlement? I can't make the State do this or
that,--I couldn't even cause father to support a Bill,--but I, in my
own person, must read about and think about it, because it is a
question that only girls can settle ultimately."Mrs. Leighton was- infinitely too tactful to demur to this sweeping
statement. She paused for a moment, trying to think what it would be
best to say."One likes to know the amount of one's indebtedness to people,"
Gallia went on, without enthusiasm, but simply and firmly. "I could
not be happy--I mean that I could not have a feeling of
self-respect--unless I had estimated just the amount of my debt to
that class of society which assures my class a good deal of its
immunity."There was a terrible, portentous pause."I think, dear, if you knew how much phrases of that kind can hurt
and distress other women who have--who have striven to play their part
of wife and mother well, you would perhaps reserve them."It was Lady Hamesthwaite who came up and made this very gentle
remark, through the curls that hung over her daughter's ear. Then she
dropped a kiss upon the curls and moved away through the big
drawing-rooms. Gallia flew after her and caught
her, and rubbed away the two tears that were pausing at the top of the
pretty, delicately-coloured cheeks."Dearest mother, don't you misunderstand me,
for Heaven's sake! I was a fool to speak as I did to Aunt Celia,--one
always is a fool to say what one thinks about anything,--but you know, mother, I never trouble
you with my views upon these, or any other of the subjects that puzzle
me. Whoever they may concern, they do not touch you in the very least! How you can have found any
offence to yourself, in your--in your delightful position, in what I
said, beats me altogether. I wasn't talking about wives and mothers--I
was talking about"--"Don't, dear Gallia! it distresses me so much!""I wasn't going to say anything then, I wasn't really!" Gallia
explained, with childlike eagerness. "I only want to say that wives
and mothers were as far from my thoughts as pigs and whistles. I won't
attempt to tell you what I did mean. I won't refer to it again. Auntie
Celia is not like you; she pretends to know the world,--yes, she has,
I know, she has lived a very long time in it in a measure,--and she
leads me into argument, and then I am idiot enough to say what I
think, and sometimes idiot enough to refer to
something that is true! But never mind that; it shan't happen again if
I can help it. Only, mother, don't you be distressed. I can't bear that. Do me the justice, mother, to say
I don't bother you with such subjects," she pleaded in genuine
distress, and with the most single-minded pursuit of her subject, she
blundered into yet another pitfall, as youth will."I never, never confide any difficult thoughts to you on the
subjects over which I am really puzzling--now do I?"Unlike her sister, Lady Hamesthwaite had no great sense of humour,
or she would have noted the pathetic absurdity of her daughter's
apology for having hurt her feelings. As it was, she saw and felt the
pathos of the stab conveyed in this last remark, which Gallia was so
eager to drive home, but not the absurdity of her doing so at such a
moment. It was but too true that Gallia never confided to her mother
the thoughts that really occupied her extraordinary brain, and that
such peace of mind as Lady Hamesthwaite enjoyed regarding her daughter
sprang from this very reserve."I am angry with Aunt Celia for driving me into saying such things
before mother! It was abominable of me to do it, anyhow. I have broken
my record that I meant so hard to keep. I
always recognised mother's unfitness for any discussion of serious
moral problems, and yet the first worldly-minded old woman who comes
along with a cambric bandage for my weasel eyes, irritates me into
wounding mother with an expression of my views about realities. It's
too disgusting. It's shown me how little self-control I've got, so it
may do good that way; but--I'm angry with Aunt Celia all the
same."In some such channel as that Gallia's thoughts were running when
her mother had kissed her and smiled before rejoining
Mrs. Leighton."I wonder, is there anything so difficult as to be a good mother
now-a-days?" Lady Hamesthwaite said, with a sad little smile, as she
felt her sister's arm go round her waist with a comforting
pressure. "But you must forgive dear Gallia," she went on quickly,
with that beautiful instinct of protection that few mothers seem to be
without, in spite of their growing difficulties and trials. "She is
exceedingly penitent about her want of tact. Gallia has a great
feeling for tact, and--and for propriety. I know she is really grieved
to have introduced so unsuitable a topic."Mrs. Leighton could not forbear a smile."If one had any doubt as to what century one were living in, it
would be cleared up by the occurrence of such
an incident as this!" she said, with the little light French turn in
her voice again. "What is dear Gallia penitent about? About having
discussed an impossible subject before her mother! Ah, once it was
another way, and we had to whisper behind our fans for fear the shell
ears of little daughters caught a murmur of the coarse tide of
life. Ay de mi! which is better--or which is
worse? But you are right, Julia--Gallia is still a long way from
home.""I think--although I don't understand her--still I think that my
sympathy is of use to her. I began a long time ago to let her go her
own way. I cannot draw back now. Sometimes it seems long to wait for
her, but I have never lost her love, and even her curious care of me
is very sweet sometimes. Yes, I know she will come back some day.""You are the sweetest mother-woman in the world, my Julia,"
Mrs. Leighton said, kissing her, and noticing with apprehension a
moisture in her own carefully-pencilled eyes. "Good-bye, dear. Don't
forget you and Gerald are dining with me on Thursday. Would Gallia
come, I wonder? If she will, I shall be delighted. Let me know in the
morning, and another man shall be found.""She may come home," Mrs. Leighton said
reflectively, as she lay back in her victoria, "but I fear she'll find
veal a rather insipid staple after the modern style of husk."Gallia stood at the window, watching the carriage drive away; her
mother had left the room with Mrs. Leighton, and had not returned to
it. Gallia was alone with the supremely uncomfortable feeling not
uncommon with her.To look at, Gallia Hamesthwaite was no ordinary girl, but her mind
and character were by no means very uncommon. She was dark and tall
and slender; if her expression had been simpler, she would have been
extremely attractive. Her face might have been called beautiful, by
reason of the skin, hair, and eyes--particularly her skin, which was,
perhaps, perfect. But a girl of far less natural beauty would have
been twice as attractive, both to men and women of average
taste. Gallia's very expression was one we are beginning to know, and,
if the truth must be confessed, to resent a little. A young, healthy
girl, with good features, good temper, good nature, and good faith, is
so delightful an object, and so welcome in the world, that we are
selfishly annoyed when charming-looking girls abdicate their right to
these qualities, and refuse the pleasure and satis-faction that results from their contemplation. For her
height, Gallia's face and head were classically little, but they made
the strongest impression of divergence from the ideal of girlhood. Her
eyes were clouded with wonder upon wonder about matters which have
strained the strongest and toughest brains the world has ever
seen. Her brows forgot to wear the smile-wreaths we have thought
becoming to her years, and knitted themselves with painful intensity
in contemplation of some misty peak of Darien.All this was the result of her particular sort of education on her
particular nature.Up till the age of seventeen, Gallia had received the best form of
home education. The time that some girls devote to music, she had
devoted to languages, and knew three very well, besides her own. She
had absorbed the same amount of geography, history, science, and
mathematics that most clever girls do absorb now-a-days, and none of
it had interested the individual part of her brain. Natural sciences
had arrested her most, and then, unassisted and unadvised, she made
excursions in sociology, and became enraptured. Social ethics captured
her; Mill and Herbert Spencer, whom she skimmed over like a swallow,
fired and delighted her. A year or two later, just when she was to
have come out, she went to Oxford. Her mother
and her father regarded this departure with dismay. The daughters of
Lady Hamesthwaite's friends never wanted to do anything of the kind:
why should Gallia? Gallia was essentially a middle-class creature; her
father's father had been a business man, her mother, the daughter of a
monumentally successful London physician. Both these grandparents had
made places for themselves in society owing to the possession of
something society had not got, that mixture of energy and the instinct
of success and advancement.The girls who came to call with their mothers on Lady
Hamesthwaite--who might have been, in the nature of things, Gallia's
companions--were utterly remote from her. Sleek creatures, with small
ears, long oval faces, narrow-fronted mouths, and smooth-netted heads,
they sat there in their neat, stupidly-imagined clothes, and were
coldly conscious of their unlikeness to Gallia. This girl's free
movements, free play of feature, free mode of thought, free mode of
dress,--this last brought to better perfection than all the rest
because more easily understood,--made up an enigma which their blood
rather than their brains divined.Gallia had developed late; at seventeen she
was a tall girl rather than a young woman; thus her head was older
than her body, and had already acquired a brisk, boyish habit of
thought. When femininity descended upon her, there was a struggle; she
did not want it; was prepared to do without it; found it an added
source of puzzlement to life, which was already a hot-bed of
complications for her; and, as all late-developed women do, resented
it fiercely; fought separately and subdued every sign of it.As a child, Gallia had never had a doll; had never played at
keeping house, teaching school, having callers, as most other
girl-children do. If there was a baby about, she had shivered and left
the room. Nothing terrified her like the society of young married
women. The least mention of the semi-prurient subjects so many women,
and even the best-bred women, habitually discuss, sent her from the
scene. In like manner she disdained as vulgar, though she was not
frightened by, every sign of coquetry in girls; if she had had girl
friends, she could never, save mockingly and with a curling lip, have
listened to love-confidences. She adored animals, and they were her
nearest companions; she doted on natural history, and studied the
strange characteristics of different beasts with astonishing zest: yet
she was so young and raw and contradictory,
that the broad facts of nature, if applied to herself, revolted her to
sickness. She aroused a certain amount of admiration in the world, but
no word of love had been whispered to her even at twenty years of age,
when she had been some time a free-lance at Oxford. Such is an outline
of her character, no uncommon one, as I said before. There are a great
many Gallias in the world now-a-days, and they are, for the most part,
very unhappy people.CHAPTER VII"SO this is who you are?" A dark, tall, thin young man, with a very
handsome face, was offering his arm to Gallia Hamesthwaite on the
evening of Mrs. Leighton's dinner-party, and he made this remark in a
tone of insolence so effective and attractive that the girl coloured
curiously, and replied to him with a look of concentrated dislike;
dislike and something else as well. The man passed over the dislike,
and laughed scornfully at the other ingredient, which did not seem to
surprise him."I pardon your astonishment at discovering my parentage," she said
lightly. "But you may consider me a sport; we can't all take after our
parents, and clever people may have stupid children." Gallia hated to
find that annoyance, or some other feeling, was making her a little
unnatural."I fail--as usual--to apprehend the drift of your remarks; my mind
is ill fitted to appreciate such subtleties. But a longing for justice
is ever present with me. My opinion of you is
of little moment, but I had never imagined you so fatuous a person as
the man I discover to be your father."Mr. Essex--it was the very man whom Gurdon had referred to as Dark
Essex of Balliol--let his words dribble forth with an amount of
affectation almost too dazzling even in the Fellow of a college."You have dropped your serviette already," he added, handing it to
her. "Don't keep on doing it, please. Should one eat the soup, here? I
have only lunched with Mrs. Leighton before."Gallia reassured him about the soup, and made absolutely no defence
of her father. She let her eyes wander round the table to see who
composed her aunt's party, for the Hamesthwaites had been the last
arrivals, and dinner being announced very soon, she had only time to
notice Dark Essex at the other end of the room, and establish her
composure before he came to take her in. Although she looked about the
table, and went to work naturally enough with her dinner, she was, in
reality, palpitating with anxiety to hear his next remark. She had
come to know this man at Oxford, at some lecture, a little over a year
ago. Their meetings had been very irregular, and character-ised by some peculiarity. Essex was as reactionary
as his kind of man always is, and he had never before come upon a
woman without a trace of coquetry in her. He didn't believe in such a
woman as a possibility. He was forced to converse in her own key with
Gallia, but he liked to use her roughly at the same time. Once he had
taken her out in his boat, and they had spent at least four hours
together. Another time he had come upon her out on a long walk in the
direction of Abingdon, when he too was going the same way, and they
had gone along together. Once at Abingdon, it seemed necessary to have
some tea, and then there was no particular occasion to hurry back, and
it was nine o'clock before they reached Oxford.When he forgot all his assumed rudeness of manner, he could be
charming. Vain men are not rare, but a man who well-nigh smothers
himself in a cloak of vanity is less common. When Essex forgot to be
rude, and forgot to be vain, he was an interesting companion. He would
talk freely on all the subjects that interested Gallia, and treat her
opinions with the same want of deference he would have shown to a
man's. And in all the small ways and manners of life he exercised all
the admirable politeness of an ordinary
Englishman. It could be seen that the old-fashioned style of woman was
his ideal, but Gallia did not quarrel with this, for, sentimentally,
the old style of woman was her ideal. "You cannot," she would say,
"make yourself the old style of woman; you cannot interfere with the
clock of evolution that is wound up and goes on in each one of us; you
cannot arbitrarily put back its hands to the time of fifty years
ago. Some people's clocks go slower than others, that is all. It isn't
that I'm pleased with my pace, or that I like myself as I am, but I'm
a quick clock."Very often she and Essex found themselves plunging about in some
such arguments. He could not free his mind from the single and only
conception of woman of which he was capable, and he looked on what are
called, tiresomely enough, new developments in women as fresh forms of
wiles, the arts of the nineteenth-century Eve. All this humbugging
about at college and wrangling after "degrees and things" was to him a
part of the misguided artfulness of modern women. He couldn't believe
in women seriously. Let Gallia talk with her whole soul in her mouth,
he would, at his most intolerable, shake his head with a smile,--a
sort of "My dear, I see through you" expression, which whipped her up
to the point of longing to hit him. This mental
attitude of Essex's is very commonly met with, and often in men quite
brilliantly clever in their own lines. And the very worst of it is,
that they are never to be convinced. One of two things inevitably
happens to such men. Either they marry the pretty foolish-kitten style
of person, and say triumphantly, "Of course I was right; just look at
Mabel, dear little soul!" when they cannot be contradicted; or the
undying womanhood in the woman who burns and argues with them falls a
victim to their masculinity, and she spends the rest of her life,
after marrying them, in adapting or concealing the parts of her nature
which offend the lord god, her husband.This seems hopeless? Well, it is hopeless. Look at Gallia's
case. She didn't know it,--that sort of girl never would know it,--but
she had fallen in love with Essex. She had now left Oxford. There
could be no more punting and no more walks. They had met in society,
she had been introduced as Lord Hamesthwaite's daughter. Essex had
seemed anxious to show her that he could be even ruder to her in that
capacity than in her other of simple student; and the upshot of it all
was with God and the Fates."You will forgive my silence," he said presently. "At a dinner one is expected to amuse the lady on one's
right, and fill up gaps left by the other man for the lady on one's
left, is it not so? My left appears to have a healthy appetite, and is
filling up her own gaps, so we may score her off.""Well, then, I claim the amusement due to the lady on your right,"
she exclaimed quickly, and smiled with a touch of girlish
pleasure."I beg you won't look up at me like that," Essex said, with a note
of protest. "Have I not told you before that it would upset my whole
scheme of life to fall in love with you?""And mine.""Yours--to fall in love with me?""I didn't mean that--and I didn't say it," Gallia said, with sudden
stubbornness."Funny; now I consider that you both meant it and said it, but
we'll pass that over. Please bear in mind that I am not to be tampered
with, that's all. We meet in quite a new fashion; the landscape has
changed, the figures in the landscape must change too. We are in
London: you on your own ground; I, because Mrs. Leighton knew my
mother, wanted another man in a hurry, and heard that I had grown up
handsome and had a chance of getting disliked into notice some
day.""Very well. Then you can indulge me with a new form of treatment,"
said Gallia, with a nod."By the way, the man across there, now gnawing a salt almond, has
honoured you with a number of savagely covetous stares.""That is Sir Edmund Bruce.""It is so delightful to be in the society of some one who is au fait with little social details of that kind--to
a commoner like myself the greatest treat," said Essex, with
exaggerated enthusiasm."You are simply abominable; can you never stop sneering?""I breathe again. If you consider me simply abominable, I believe
you will not--at least not immediately--fall in love with me! In the
meantime, I may tell you that you have improved greatly in doing your
hair.""Too flattered!" said Gallia, with a curling lip, but she
experienced a thrill of gratification all the same."Merely justice, I assure you. Have I ever paid you a
compliment?""One!" she looked up and laughed in his face."And that was--?""The compliment of disliking me."A shadow came in the middle of Essex's forehead, just between the
brows."Mr. Essex, we are wondering if you can give the explanation of
Mark Gurdon's sudden flight to the interior of Africa?" A very pretty
little woman, Lady Mary Mortimer, fired this sudden question into the
idle bickering Gallia and Essex usually maintained."Is it really the interior? When he left, there was word of Cape
Town, and since then rumour has pushed him farther and farther towards
the tracks of Stanley and others.""Oh, well, it's somewhere in Africa," Lady Mary explained
easily. "Was it true about his cough?""Surely Gurdon didn't mean us to take that seriously? I had no idea
it was intended to go further than his chief.""Well, he had a cough! Dear Mrs. Leighton,
you said he had a cough, didn't you?" applying in the most plaintive
fashion to her hostess. "And I have always heard the climate of South
Africa was so wonderful for anything of that kind! The air there is so
extraordinarily dry, you know.""Or so extraordinarily moist, Lady Mary?" Essex interjected
gravely."Oh yes, I believe that was it. Yes, so singularly moist, you know;
and of course that is everything in a--in a--bronchial trouble--isn't
that what Mr. Gurdon had?""I can't remember if the cough was in his throat or in his chest,"
Mrs. Leighton said, with affectionate solicitude."I fancy it lay about here," said Essex, laying a finger in the
middle of his brow; "but I don't think the Colonial Office would mind
where it was.""You have got to do something for him, Gerald, when he comes home!"
Mrs. Leighton said warmly. "Mark Gurdon is a young man I like.""His future is assured, Celia." Lord Hamesthwaite made her a little
bow; she kissed the tips of her fingers to him in return."He is not to be kept licking envelopes all his young days," she
went on severely. "And when he comes back from Africa--""I wish I knew which part of Africa," Lady Mary wailed softly.Lord Hamesthwaite shook his head."Ah, I believe he was mistaken in going there," he said."What does he want to endanger his future and his country's future
for, by getting to know anything about her dependencies?" Essex said
to Gallia, with a little air of irritation which was very well
done.Lord Hamesthwaite looked over quickly to the
Oxford man and his daughter, but he did not make any remark."Yes; I don't see why he needed to go to Africa," Mrs. Leighton
went on."His cough," said Lady Mary tenderly."He had just been to Paris too," her hostess went on, as though
this formed an effective reason against a man's going anywhere. "His
French is delicious--quite the French of my own day!""Talking of Paris, what news is there of young Robbie?" Lady
Hamesthwaite inquired, disengaging herself dexterously from an elderly
flirtation with a Dean."I very seldom hear from Robbie," Mrs. Leighton replied, with a
marked absence of her usual tact, or a conspicuous display of
it. Everybody at once felt that Robbie had been "naughty.""My dear," looking down the table to a very sweet young woman in
white, "have you any news of my grandson to give us?""The prettiest girl in the room is blushing; don't miss it,"
murmured Essex to his neighbour, and Gallia craned her neck to see who
it was he distinguished thus."There is very little news to give of an artist before he has
arrived," the prettiest girl said, in a voice
of such beauty as made her most ordinary utterance a kind of
favour. "Mr. Leighton is to be seen very regularly at the
studio--and--that is all! In the spring"--she raised the very
glistening grey eyes and swept a glance to Lady Hamesthwaite--"in the
spring, who shall say?""You were speaking, Mrs. Leighton?" said the courteous peer on her
left."No, I think not--was I?"The peer attacked his soufflé with renewed ardour, wondering
what the words "I couldn't have done it better myself" meant. For
those words he had certainly overheard."Do you really think her so pretty?" Gallia asked, with an
elaborate air of criticism."She is not only the most beautiful, she is the best woman I have
been privileged to know," Essex replied, with a very new expression,
amounting almost to worship, on his face.It was no wonder if Gallia Hamesthwaite looked up at him in
interest and surprise.The smile with which she was so much more familiar succeeded that
new look."Don't distress yourself, my dear; she is my sister.""Sometimes, you know, Mr. Essex,--or perhaps you don't know?--your
rudeness not only oversteps the bounds of what
is permissible--but it ceases to be amusing."Gallia turned superbly to the man on her other hand, who chanced to
be an old friend."Maurice, you are eating far too much pudding! Don't," she said,
with cordial roughness."I wondered when you were going to notice me," the young man
replied ruefully, in a very high, thin falsetto voice. "I have made no
less than three distinct remarks to you during dinner, and once I even
told you my best story. Not the one about Gladstone and the
muffins,--that was my best last season,--but the one--""I expect I know the one," Gallia remarked coldly."No, you can't really; you've been at Oxford all the time! It's the
joke they played Rosebery with his racing-glass. You'll like it
awfully. Look here, I'll tell you now, if you'll shunt Essex for a
bit.""I'm afraid there isn't time; I see Aunt Celia looking at
mother. It will keep, won't it?""Yes, if you are really--Oh, this is your glove, I expect?" Maurice
Forrester was still babbling harmlessly when the ladies left the
room."Give it to me, I will take it to Miss Hamesthwaite," Essex said,
and said it with so cool an assurance that the glove was meekly handed
over to him. A moment later Sir Edmund Bruce dropped into Gallia's
vacant chair, and Forrester had to name the men to each other, and
observe the neatness with which Essex had got the glove out of sight
before Sir Edmund's eye could have fallen on it."Let me put it on for you," Essex said ten minutes later, when he
came on Gallia alone in the green gloom of Mrs. Leighton's little
palm-house. He took her hand in his, turned it over, then spread out
the fingers one by one, and folded them together again. Gallia made no
sign. She was as though under chloroform, breathing naturally,
slightly, her muscles flaccid and limp, her power over herself simply
nil. Was this the next style of treatment she had asked for?Essex raised the hand--a white, slim, charming hand it was--a
little higher up; he was sitting opposite her on the immense tub of a
woolly-stemmed palm. He was going to kiss her hand, she knew; and she
knew she was glad that he was going to kiss it: she had one fear which
came and went with the throb of her even pulse--that he would put it
down without kissing it."I wish I were as beautiful as your sister," Gallia was impelled to say, and she said it with some
carelessness and a smile."I am glad you are not--or I should worship you," said Essex,
speaking low."And if you did?" she asked, looking at him still lightly, and with
a curl of amusement on her lips which masked perfectly her curious
feelings."If I did--I should want you," he said slowly.His head was bent and she could not see his face, but she did not
care to, she was occupied with her own feelings. Still, it was a
strange phenomenon, this Essex with a note of ordinary passion in his
voice, a note that Gallia was hearing for the first time in her
life. All she knew in the strange confusion of the moment was, that
this was not herself, not the old self she had eaten and slept and
risen and walked with for so many years. It was a self she had never
known or suspected the existence of; she was sure she would be ashamed
of it afterwards--at the time it was too strong for her, and had to
have its way and sway. Next, he looked at her, seeming to appraise
her, and not unkindly. Few women but have to live through this
discomfort, which arises through their having awaked at the wrong
moment for the wrong man. "I should want you," he had said."But my life has no need of you, Gallia, and I don't--I don't." The
head-shake and the sad smile with which he said the last words tore
something down in Gallia's soul. The veil of the temple was rent in
twain. It was not that the worst had come, it was that everything had
come. There could be nothing any more.Gallia was in the drawing-room, rallying Maurice about his fund of
wit and humour, before that big minute had closed and gone to make up
its little hour."Never happy any more,"--where had she heard the line? It was some
refrain, apparently, that had stuck in her mind, and she marvelled to
hear it beaten out so clearly in the hoof-strokes of her father's
horses as they drove home.Essex sat on the edge of a palm-tub and laughed to himself, and
wiped his eyes with a long thin pearl-coloured glove.CHAPTER VIIIFIVE weeks had passed since the dinner at Mrs. Leighton's at which
Gallia had met Dark Essex, and she had not yet succeeded in comforting
herself. Outwardly she had been the same; her way of life was in no
wise altered, and at luncheon and dinner, when she joined her father
and mother, her dark face sparkled and her sharp young tongue clacked
with all their wonted brightness. It was when she got upstairs to her
own rooms that the brunt of that meeting made itself felt. She had
come to observe narrowly the manner of the recurrence of that
recollection,--not that this made it any easier to bear, only she was
trained to the verbatim reporting of her own feelings, and would not
have known how to cease from it. Suppose she was wandering towards her
desk, or kneeling on the rug beside her dog, or dislodging the Grand
Vizier, as she called her big Persian cat, from his nest among the
divan cushions, a blankness would fall upon her mind."I remember; there was something that has made me unhappy: what was
it?"Thus her mind would go to work; then suddenly the sharpness of
remembrance would lay hold of her nerves, and a little inarticulate
cry would escape her; her hands would go up to hide her face, and a
shiver, not in her limbs, but in her body, would shake and sicken
her. Then with a smile she would say, "I told him that I loved him,
Grand Vizier,--no, I asked him to love me,--and he pushed me aside
like a Piccadilly cab-tout. O God!"Done with smiling, the shame and the bitterness choked her, and she
would bury her face in one of her dozen cushions."I used to think no feeling was eternal, or even should be
eternal," she said one day, after some such turn of suffering. "Life
blots out life no less than death does, I used to say to some of the
girls. But I was wrong. Some bits of life have a longevity in
proportion to their bitterness. Some things one doesn't forget or live
out; some feelings have a strength--"To Gallia, talking aloud was as congenial and familiar as it is to
all somewhat separated beings who are in the habit of thinking. She
was not, as are many people, self-conscious when left alone with
herself, she was at her ease, at home, in the
society of someone she at least knew and had tried always to
understand."I wonder, does the same division obtain in the kingdom of
sentiment as obtains in the world? Are there feelings with the life of
little animals and birds, and if one strikes them with the will,
firmly, do they bleed to death in five minutes; and are there others
with the life of the wild beasts in them, that grow stronger and
wilder and savager the moment they are wounded, and fight us worse and
die hard? Surely the good, kind, sweet feelings are the little
animals; how quick charity and good temper and generosity will bleed
to death and be forgotten! Passions are the brutes, the lions, tigers,
and leopards of that kingdom: they leap up and hit harder and maul
worse after the first bullet behind the shoulder. But the reptile
feelings--what are they? Slow-lived, poisonous things, that crawl and
crawl and drag their wounds with them in no discomfort. Shame is a
snake, and you may cut its head off and it will live still. Jealousy,
humiliation--the vipers of the feeling world. But shame--shame is a
snake, and it is knotted all round me."Tears did not come readily to Gallia, but the dry, gasping sort of
cries that shuddered through her closed lips
every now and then had each the bitterness of many tears.It was a big, third-floor, three-windowed room looking far into the
Green Park that was Gallia's study in the Grosvenor Place house; she
had furnished it herself with a keen eye to well-considered shapely
spaces of fine flooring. It was not a matter of parquet and
prayer-carpets; a wide and wonderful velvet pile in dove-grey and with
bouquets of pink and purple flowers in faded tints ran clear to the
skirting-board. Upon a dais, so strange a lounge as could never be
called a divan had been arranged; a canopy in dull purple and duller
gold hung over it, and from a bronze chain a lamp depended, with four
purple eyes in its old metal-work, eyes that glowed in the early
winter dusk--for Gallia had not switched on her lights yet.Partly because the room was so wide, partly because the scheme of
decoration had been so broadly carried out, Gallia made a very small
heap of human suffering kneeling there beside the Grand Vizier, with
whose plush existence nothing could ever interfere. Her dark violet
cloth gown--so much of herself as not to seem a dress at all--fell
sparsely round her, and one meagre purple beam of the little lamp made
a violet pool on the cream-coloured nape of her neck.But Gallia roused herself, and, kneeling and sitting on her
heels, looked up towards the light with all the appearance of a young
girl before a shrine."Why I, with all my interests, should care for any man at all, and
that man in particular--I wish I knew if I did really care for him,
and I wish I knew what leads him to act, intermittently, as if he
cared about me. If I were ever to see him again, I would behave more
straightforwardly. I deserved what I got for that vulgar reticence I
showed. There is no other word for it. Vulgar; utterly, vilely,
customarily, crustedly vulgar. Why couldn't I look up bravely at him?
why couldn't I say plainly and simply, 'Dark Essex, I love you, do you
not love me too?' But no! I am too half-and-half--neither a good woman
of the old kind nor a good woman of the new. Surely he would have
treated me with respect? No woman--no decent woman--scoffs or jeers at
a man who tells her he loves her. If he had not loved me, he could
have said so. I would have borne the disappointment with as much pride
as I could find, and I should have been able to
respect myself; there would have been no shame. But what have I
done? Let him play with me; take my hand and
toy with it, and feel it, like a hired
creature, without even the satisfaction of
doing my duty, and fulfilling my part of the bargain, which a hired
creature would have had. Lower than the women in the street I've been;
lower than the poor, poor women in the street. Oh!"She had come back to the same bitter shudder and the same sickening
sense of degradation. Her head was buried between her knees now, her
white hands squeezed whiter in their convulsive pressure. Gallia was
at the age for what must be described as "tall" sentiment. This sort
of thing was just as real to her as would have been any of the real
sorrows of life. And the tiresome part of sorrows is that they do not
hurt in proportion to their validity and excusability. If we are to be
sympathetic, we can remember always that silly suffering hurts just as
much as sensible suffering. A love-trouble, even when you love the
wrong person without having any business to, is just as bitter as
having a relative carried off by a railway accident.The soft mumble of the lift-ropes sounded from without, there was a
footstep or two in the passage, the door opened, and the footman said,
"Mr. Essex," in the strange, hard voice he used upon the big staircase
at parties.The odious rush of blood in Gallia took from her the power to think
clearly. She knew that, since the door was
round a corner, he would not have seen her; she knew that the room was
almost in darkness; would Hendon turn on the light or not? If he
didn't, and she kept quiet, perhaps Essex would not see. This jumble
of thoughts went through her like a rifle bullet; there was a little
click just before the door closed, and three constellations gleamed
out among the wall draperies.She raised herself softly inside her silken skirt, but the rustle
caught his ear, and he saw--there was no means of disguising it--that
she had been kneeling, that she had been giving way to emotion, that
her self-possession was to seek.She stood and looked at him for a few moments, saying nothing,
holding out no hand, using the time to collect herself and decide how
to deal with him since he was in her presence.His smile, his whole air, the way in which he held his hat and
stick, were those of any and every man of manners who makes a
call.She could read nothing in them.But she was not like any woman receiving a visitor; there was no
reason to battle through the surf of commonplace with Essex before
riding upon the deep waters. So she said nothing till he had
spoken.He took no notice of the fashion of his reception; he produced a
little package."I wanted to return you this myself--because I have been so
terribly unfortunate as to burn one page with some cigarette ash," he
said, very easily and well. "Before replacing the volume with another,
which anybody might have done, I wanted to show it you and ask you to
let me mend it. You see, I thought, as there are some marks in it, you
might value this copy. Now, it can be mended by means of this other
copy I bring. Dear Miss Hamesthwaite, what is the matter with you? you
are not suffering from a stiff neck, I hope?"In spite of herself Gallia laughed."I believe that is it," she said drily."Well, I daresay you are not in the mood for visitors, but give me
your attention for three minutes, and then I will go."This alarmed her very much indeed: unprepared for his coming, she
was less prepared to have him go. But she said no word till they had
opened the little book and discussed its wound. She would have nothing
done to it; she knew the word that was missing in the verse, and it
might have been her own cigarette any day in the week. She forgave it
freely."Since you are so good, I will go.""Since I am so good, I think you might stay. I want to ask you
something. Sit down somewhere."He took a chair, put his hat and stick upon the floor, and leaned
towards her with his hands--very fine sallow hands--dangling between
his knees. It was an attitude of uncompromising attention. For the
moment Gallia was unnerved. She altered her plan of attack."Why are you so different to-day?" she said, in a manner very
natural and frank."That cannot have been what you wanted to ask me, but I will answer
it if you wish. This is my afternoon manner; I put it on with this
coat." He glanced down the front of himself, and dusted a slight speck
from its lodgment between two buttons. As he sat there, he was an
infinitely elegant and correct presentment of a man of his
world. Gallia wondered how he could conceal so much divergence from
the type inside one frock-coat."I am going to ask you to let me refer to our last meeting," she
said gently and very gravely, "or rather parting.""You got up and rushed off, if I remember." Gallia believed he was
nervous underneath his smile."I greatly regret my manner all through that interview--it was not sufficiently frank or
straightforward."He looked genuinely surprised."I don't know if you will agree with my summary of the interview,
so I will put a question to you first. Will you really say what you
think in reply?""No, I can't make any such promise.""But you will try to answer truly?""If I can, I will.""What did you think were my feelings for you that
evening--particularly during the time we sat in the palm-house?""I am glad to be able to speak by the book. You thought me 'simply
abominable.'""Ah, no, don't joke--that is only another complication. But if
jokes are to count," with a feminine whisk of her tactics, "did you
think I was really in danger of doing so when you asked me not to fall
in love with you?""Every woman is--are we to say in danger?--very well--is in danger
of falling in love, as they have agreed to term it, with every man
when the people in question are your and my ages, and have
corresponding appearances and gifts.""Is every man in danger of falling in love with every woman,
then--given the same conditions as you name?""Certainly.""Well, did you think then--do you think now--that I have fallen in
love with you?""How could I be so vain as to say so, if I did think it?""I perceive that I have begun ill--you are not replying well. We
must do it some other way. I am going to grant that my manner in the
palm-house could readily have given you the impression that I was in
love with you.""If it did, if you were, if I was, if neither of us is--what
matter, so long as we say nothing about it to each other?""I can't agree with you there.""Of course not, because you are a woman, and must continually be
pulling up a plant to see how it is growing. Now, for Heaven's sake,
don't snatch at that wretched metaphor and turn it some other way
on!""I am going to do nothing of the kind."She got up from her chair some yard or two away, came up to him and
put her hands on his shoulders; as he didn't look up, she raised his
chin with one stiff finger. Her eyes had a different kind of light,
her lips were parted, and her voice, when it came, was rich, tender,
beautiful as he had never heard it."Listen! I owe you a straight speech, and even if you don't want to hear it, bear with me, for it hurts so
to know one has not been true to oneself--that one hasn't had courage. Oh, there isn't anything women want except
courage--they have to use so much, much more than men. If I spend all
mine in the next minute, it will be good; I shall have been true. The
other night, I don't know what took hold of me; I have felt once or
twice that you were different from any other man I've seen, and made
me feel different. I think, in a crowd, if you had been somewhere
behind me, I'd have known you were there. The other night, though you
said one rude thing after another, and didn't use even the commonest
civility to me, my whole soul wrapped itself up in one thought; it
seemed to sit with folded arms inside me, waiting for you, wanting you
to kiss my hand. I didn't know it then, but I believe now that that
means that I love you. Hush!--wait. It is all right--I know you said
it--your life has no need of me, and I am not beautiful enough for you
to worship--that on one side. You have no need of me. I don't think
you told me as kindly as you might. One never knows, but I
think--well, yes, I think if it had been you
showing me that you loved me, and if I had felt
like you--I think I would have spoken differently! But, however, it
came! I am young, and I can put up with it. I
have loved you--it is right that you should know it; I love you still,
and may do so for a long time; but I want you to forgive me for the
other evening. It was immodest, flagrant, shameless, the way I sat
there and said nothing, and let you use me as you did. That was
disgraceful, and though I have tried, I can't forget the shame of
it. But it was so new to me then, I was taken by surprise. I had not
an idea that I loved you, or I would have been ready to speak. I would
have said, 'No, none of these simulacra with me; I really love you,
and they insult me.' But I will forget those to you, for perhaps you
did not guess I loved you. Will you try to
forgive me my want of honesty, since I have tried to make up for it
now?"CHAPTER IXSHE stood back from him, her arms at her sides, waiting, as though
for a sentence, for his reply. He got up and went over to lean upon
the mantelshelf. With an elbow in one of its dusky oak crevices, and
his face finely thrown up by the background of carving, he was still
at his full height, and he felt free, his own man.For a moment, as she watched him keenly, Gallia thought he was
going to be natural, to be what she knew he might be if ever he would
give his inner self free play; but next instant a smile rose, and her
head rolled from side to side in the impatience she immediately felt
of the manner he was assuming."It has been a question in good society," he began very slowly,
"how far it is justifiable for one person to place another person in
an impossible position; you will, since you are a member of that
society, know doubtless better than I do how this question has been
decided. But out of the depths of a somewhat sickly experience of the world, I am able to tell you one
thing--that, had you said these things to nine out of ten other men,
they would have seized and kissed you, and said God knows what, that
you wouldn't have been prepared to hear. And they would have been in
no sense to blame. You are going to say that they would not have been
gentlemen.""I wasn't; I was going to say they could hardly be so dull of
apprehension as to so mistake me," cried Gallia hotly."It would not have been a matter of apprehension, dull or the
reverse. It would have been a matter of convention. Men are always
expected, in certain positions, to show passion." He smiled very
drily. "They are expected--by women at least--to be what women call
men. Nine out of ten women would have meant that speech to end in a
smother of embraces. One moment. I am not in the least certain that
you are the tenth woman, I am only sure that I am the tenth man. You
will admit that I have not kissed you?""Why should I mind if you had, when I love you?" Gallia asked
simply. "You know I didn't mean things to end in one way or another. I
said what I thought I ought to say to save my own self-respect, and
you were and are free to act exactly as you
think right or feel inclined. "Though I would, of course, prefer you
to understand rather than misunderstand me."A footman came in at this moment."Her ladyship wished me to say Mr. Gurdon was in the drawing-room,
and if you were disengaged, she would like you to come down,
miss.""Say to her ladyship, Hendon, that I am not able to come down this
afternoon."He went out, and Gallia turned to Essex again."Why can you not treat me with the same decency a woman is expected
to show a man when he tells her he loves her? What is the
difference?""I daresay from your point of view there is no difference, and I
hope you will think that I have behaved myself as becomingly as any
woman could have done.""Well, you have not acted like the nine men you mention, from one
of two reasons. Perhaps because you had the sense to see that I
expected nothing of the kind, perhaps because you did not happen to
have the feelings you say they would have had.""I am not in the least moved to explain which," said Essex
calmly. "The subject of what you and a number
of other people call love may be one I have never studied, or it may
be that I have read further into it than you have done. Perhaps I call
love by some other names, perhaps I don't even see it to be a fine and
desirable feeling. We needn't go into that.""No, we needn't; there is no question of it. I had merely to
explain conduct I was ashamed of, to explain it for my own sake; I
have done. I am glad and proud again; I have not, if you have
understood me, anything more to feel ashamed of." She came up to him
and took his hand. "Thank you. You at any rate listened to me,--I am
grateful for it."If ever a pair of sincere eyes looked up at a man, they were
Gallia's. Essex, even through his priggishness and affectation, was
conscious of being at a disadvantage."By the way," with a complete change of tone, "you had a glove of
mine--will you please give it me?""Are you afraid I may make a trophy of it?"She shook her head and smiled a little wistfully. "No, you won't
make me believe you really credit me with so unworthy a thought.""I haven't it with me now; I will post it to you.""Thanks.""And--don't you think the world is still a little too raw for your
very advanced treatment of it?"He went to get his hat and stick."No," said Gallia firmly, and sitting down among her cushions; "the
world is never too raw for a woman to do what she thinks right. She
would help to keep it raw by playing down to its rawness. There can be
no excuse for not acting in accordance with the light one has. One may
be misunderstood, one may be disliked, but we have to save our own
souls for ourselves.""And the dramatic faculty inherent in all women makes the saving
process so much the more picturesque."A disheartened note of sad laughter came from her."Good-bye," was all she said."If one could believe you sincere, you would be worth loving, by
some better man than I. Good-bye, O New Woman, who is yet the
old!""Good-bye, epitome of unbelief." Gallia was smiling too. "If only
you have not put out my soul's little light!" she added, half to
herself, in a frightened whisper.This time Essex laughed musically as he went to the door."Let me know if I have," were the last words she heard him say;
then the door shut, the lift-ropes rumbled again, and two minutes
later she watched him cross the road towards the Park gates.She drew a nervous breath or two, and passed her handkerchief below
the curls on her forehead."That is the end of that," she said. "If I had foreseen his coming
at all, I should have foreseen his going too. It is no worse and no
better than I might have imagined it." She walked up and down the big
room several times, not so much thinking as struggling to get hold of
her feelings, and know what she thought."Life is no different now from what it was," she told herself, "and
yet I feel as though I had to gather up the threads and see into what
kind of knot I can tie them, and how I can get them to hold. Nothing
has really happened, only now I know that something is not going to
happen--for instance, love is not going to happen. What did he mean
about the name he might call it by? Of course he must see it very
differently from me. He hinted that he thought it neither fine nor
desirable. That was very honest of him. I was
too hard; I didn't think--one never does think till afterwards--that
of course he cannot respect love. What man can be honest with himself
and about himself? I wish I had told him that I saw that, that I knew
that! And I wish--oh, how I wish I had asked him to kiss me once!
Perhaps he would have said no; but if he would have consented to be
simple, surely he would not have minded kissing me just once! A woman
always grants as much as that, and shines in doing it. It is looked on
as a sacrifice on her part, and no one thinks the worse of her. Could
anyone, even himself, have thought the worse of him? Ah, how I wish--I
wish"--a rush of emotion almost choked her, but she flung her head up
and ran to the window to look at the lights twinkling across the Park;
with her hands clinging to the casement bar, she leaned there a
moment. "For now I shall never be kissed, and it cannot be good never
to have been kissed at all! Well, there will be one of the flowers of
life I shall never have picked--a love-kiss. Surely, surely no woman
can be so mean and poor a creature as not to be worth and worthy of
one man's kiss?"Her earnestness was pitiful. Essex had fatuously mistaken Gallia:
she had absolutely no dramatic faculty, was
never conscious of her attitude or her expression, or the strength of
the feeling from an outside point of view. She was only bitterly and
clearly honest in herself and to others; her ideal was high, and her
ideal was absolute reality. She had never buried any truth from
herself, and could not easily understand the desire to do so which is
so common. In spite of a very wideawake mind, she had no idea to what
extent compromise enters into the most honourable man's idea of
honour. As a woman, she took honour and honesty very seriously, well
knowing them to be among the latest branches of study opened to her
sex, and deeply sensible of their importance; but of the necessity for
compromise even in such holy of holies she knew nothing.Entirely without conceit and self-consciousness, her whole life was
a desire to know, and then to be true to what she knew. Crude and
perhaps ludicrous as she might now and then appear, her
single-mindedness was her most marked characteristic. Had she been
different, had she had the skill of any of the nine women Essex had
cited, she would have been nine times better fitted to win his
love--only she would never have striven to do it.She suffered at this time because her views were nobler, she herself a little better than common; such
human creatures as differ thus from their fellows are rarely made
welcome in the world of men and women in which she lived.It was so late now that she hurried to her rooms. There were no
tears to dry, no eyes that needed bathing, no sign for a maid's keen
eyes to notice that her mistress had lived through any scene. When she
came running from her bath, she brought a calm, quiet face with her,
and immersed herself quite naturally in the evening papers while her
hair was being dressed. Her mother was in the drawing-room, with a
magazine and a paper-cutter, as usual, when she went in; they were to
dine alone, and to pick Lord Hamesthwaite up at eleven at the House on
their way to a reception."So sorry, dear, that you could not come down when Mark Gurdon was
here; he was so interesting about Africa," Lady Hamesthwaite said
pleasantly, with her customary proud smile at her daughter's beautiful
face."Mr. Essex came in, and I really think he must have stayed two
hours with me," Gallia replied, naturally."Do you like Mr. Essex very much?"Gallia paused to weigh her words."No, mother; I don't think I like him particularly at all.""Who is Essex, by the way?" Lord Hamesthwaite had come in and
overheard these remarks."He is an Oxford man; a Fellow and a tutor. He writes a good deal
for the literary weeklies, I think," Gallia answered; "and he is often
in London, for his mother is a great invalid. They have a house,--in
Hammersmith Terrace, I believe he said,--and they are very poor.""His sister is a very beautiful woman," said Gallia's father
judicially."Yes; I would like to know her so much.""You are sure to meet her at Aunt Celia's; she is a great pet
there."They rose to pass in to dinner."A handsome family, then," Lord Hamesthwaite said; "that young man
had a very unusual type of good looks, but I am afraid he is a
prig."Gallia was not at a point whence she could perceive the rugged
truth of this dictum. Besides, she would have persisted in loving him
even had she been convinced of his prighood. He was the first man she
had loved, and the first man is never a woman's free choice. Like the
first fish of the amateur trouter, he is an acci-dent; neither science, skill, nor selection has a hand in
landing him. Sometimes he is a handsome and creditable accident. I
have known the first man in more than one case to be a meritorious
person--oftenest, though, he is a very mean, small-finned little
accident.The conversation drifted off to Mark Gurdon again and his African
experiences."I believe he is to be at Axminster's dinner at the Reform
to-morrow; I must keep my eye on him if Celia wants him helped into
something."Nothing seemed more natural to Lord Hamesthwaite than that a young
man should want to be helped into something; whereas to hear that a
man wrote for literary weeklies was to hear something that made it
very difficult to realise his personality."Poor old Mr. Quittenden has had another stroke," Gallia remarked
presently, feeling within herself a strong need of the relief of the
commonplace. And someone else's tragedy is just as often our
commonplace as our tragedy is theirs."Where did you see that?" Lord Hamesthwaite asked quickly."All the papers have the telegram.""This child may be trusted," Lady Hamesthwaite began laughingly, "to see and know of what is
happening"--She was interrupted by a fit of coughing; her husband
looked quickly up at her, but said nothing."Ah, that was the second stroke, wasn't it? It can only be a matter
of weeks--or, at most, months--for the member for Hollowhampton.""Poor old thing! I liked him so much that one day he lunched here,"
Gallia said. "It is really very sad.""'m, yes!" replied her father, who keenly remembered
Mr. Quittenden's action regarding a certain Bill, and wasn't so sure
that it would be so very sad for his party."He was always such an admirer of yours, Gerald!"Lord Hamesthwaite looked doubtfully at his wife."I remember so well his saying to me, 'There isn't another man in
England who so completely fills the idea of a"--Again Lady
Hamesthwaite was interrupted by the same strange, choking cough."Now, Julia," Lord Hamesthwaite burst out, bringing his fingers
sharply on the table, "this settles it. London is not for you. Don't
say a word--I will have my own way about it. Gallia, your mother must
go abroad at once. I've been very
patient. I've watched this getting worse daily, and I've seen the
futility of treatment. No doubt I've been a fool to hold my tongue so
long about it. But go she must, and that immediately.""But my dinners, my receptions--the invitations are all out!" poor
Lady Hamesthwaite interjected pathetically. "And Gallia, whom I
thought I was to have the happiness of taking about with me this
year"--"Gallia will go with you, as I cannot leave town. She has finished
with Oxford. You can take her, or she can take you, about the Riviera,
if you like."Gallia had one moment of communing with herself, then she said
cheerfully, "I'll tell you where we'll go, mother, we will go to
Algiers. It will do you heaps of good."And so they spent most of the evening discussing and forming
plans.The last post brought Gallia a small registered package. Within it
was one long glove and one of Mr. Essex's cards.She turned them over several times, amused at the over-care, in
which she detected more than a spice of scorn, which had registered
the tiny parcel, hurt somehow by the formality of the visiting
card. She turned over the doubled sheet of
notepaper and looked inside the envelope. There was no word, not a
pen-scratch. Just the address in Essex's little cramped Greek
handwriting."Yes, mother, let it be Algiers. And--let us go to-morrow. We can
spend a week in Cannes to get anything you may need.""My dear, I need nothing but what can be telegraphed for to Paris;
but to-morrow--""Do let it be to-morrow, if you can, dear. I
am so sick of--I hate--hate--hate this place so!" She flung herself
back in her chair so violently, and threw her arms above her head with
so much vehemence, that the little matters on her knees, the glove and
its belongings, fell upon the floor. Lady Hamesthwaite noticed them
with her kind, tactful eyes, and came over to Gallia and kissed
her."To-morrow or next day, dear, at latest. Now, away to bed; we shall
be so busy all day seeing people, and explaining things, and writing
notes."CHAPTER XMRS. LEIGHTON happened to be giving a little luncheon party, when
Lady Hamesthwaite ran in on the following morning to announce the
Algiers programme, and find condolence for the necessity of giving up
all her social ploys for the winter. Margaret Essex, whom
Mrs. Leighton frankly delighted in because she was so beautiful, and
Mark Gurdon were of the party, and they sat next each other.Every man has, at the bottom of his heart, an admiration, more or
less strong according to his temperament, for the delicately
beautiful, beneficent-faced, and gracious married woman--the woman of
the kind eyes and tender mouth. It is less the beauty of this sort of
woman than her beneficent air that wins him. She is the woman who
draws most souls to follow after her, she has the face which could
start a crusade. She may have moments that are humanly pranksome, but she is guilelessness itself. She is more
wonderful at thirty than at twenty, for the persistent beauty of her
character, as it grows stronger and stronger, can draw only beautiful
lines in her face. We may thank our stars and gods that hers is an
inextinguishable race, that there will always be some of these women
to be found, that where they walk, things hopelessly wicked will bud
out into goodness, and good things be better. We can only have one
quarrel against them; that their immemorial fine forgiveness may
perpetuate things indifferently good and bad.Margaret Essex was young yet, but the mark belonging to this race
of souls was set on her forehead already. She was not very clever, she
had not much brain, and her training had been desultory; but none of
those things matter in such a woman. I think she may be exempted from
tediously practical formulae, and the set duties of a dull world; in
the advancement of women she must always be franked. On the whole, it
is admitted by right that woman's sense of law, order, and judgment
should be taught as they are being taught now; but this must not apply
to the soul-woman I am speaking of. She has a track of her own to
follow, lonely and lovely. She is amenable to
laws as mysterious to us as those that tell the tides when to
turn.Enough of her. This was the race to which Margaret Essex belonged,
and Gurdon had summed her up coldly and foolishly on that day when she
passed him by in Paris. He knew now that he had been wrong. He had
never talked to any woman in his life who gave him the same feelings
as this one. Man is approached through his simple senses first; a
goddess may sit at his elbow, and the turn of her wrist as she handles
a fork will be the first of her charms to arouse his regards. Mark
found himself watching Margaret's fingers as she crumbled her bread,
and wondering if it were merely that he had never observed women's
fingers before, or if hers were really so infinitely more delicate in
colouring and contour than those of any other woman? They were
flower-fingers. Then her voice, her habit of speaking with her eyes
cast down in thought, and at the end of her sentence, or if she put a
question, raising them with so clear and direct a glance; this
unconscious charm he caught himself waiting for, with an eagerness
that was utterly foreign to his whole nature as he knew it. That she
had not recognised him as the man who had been walking that day in the
Jardin du Luxem-bourg with Leighton was quite
certain; so far she had only heard of him as being newly returned from
Africa, and he had carefully refrained from mentioning Paris. Strange,
but he would have been unanxious for her to identify him as Leighton's
friend at this early moment of their acquaintance. She disapproved of
Leighton. She must have learned--she couldn't have failed to learn--of
Leighton's relations with Arsènie, and Gurdon didn't find it
anything but natural that her favour was removed from a man who openly
kept a mistress. Gurdon was a man of no imagination whatever; for him,
what was, was. It was habitual for women to disapprove of a man who
kept a mistress and took small pains to conceal this fact; just as it
was habitual for them to receive intimately, and finally marry, men
who had connections, decently regulated and properly concealed, of a
more casual nature. Gurdon hadn't a shadow of doubt in his mind that
Margaret's moral views were of this complicated but no less universal
pattern; he felt sure she would recognise the same difference between
the two kinds of men that he did; and he sympathised with her in the
shock she must have experienced in discovering Leighton's lapse from
this high standard, and felt that she was entirely justified in
dropping his acquaintance. There was one
little faint distinction, which he would have admitted, but which did
not happen to occur to him. He would have excused Leighton everything
but the publicity of his behaviour; and Margaret would not. But this
was, after all, a very, very faint distinction, although in the
present case it had been the direct cause of Leighton's losing her
friendship.Margaret had been what may be described as "carefully brought up";
she had lost her father early, but her mother, who was a clever and a
charming woman, had herself accompanied her to Germany, and then to
France, for educational purposes; and it was only during the last
year, when Mrs. Essex had become too much of an invalid to leave her
home, that she had consented unwillingly to her daughter's studying
art in Paris. So far as it could be, everything that could be done was
done, and every precaution taken; with the result that Margaret's
sojourn gained greatly in dulness and propriety, while it certainly
lost in gaiety and charm. The five hundred a year which was
Mrs. Essex's income amply sufficed to keep going the little house in
Hammersmith Terrace, and Essex, though he was not particularly
generous, provided his sister's dress allowance from his own not over
well-filled coffers.They were the widow's only children, and though the son had her own
dark kind of beauty (so much so, that his real name, Hubert, had
fallen into disuse, and most people spoke of him as Dark, a sobriquet
he had acquired at Winchester), it was on Margaret's face, the fair
refinement of her dead husband's, that Mrs. Essex loved best to
look."Do you know, I haven't seen your brother for years, and once I was
very much indebted to him down at Oxford," Gurdon said, gliding
carefully away from the subject of art, which was too nearly allied to
Paris to be safe for discussion."What did he do for you?" Margaret asked."Oh, he read with me; gave me a short cut when I had been
neglecting my reading badly, and was becoming scared at the thought of
the exams.""He can't be much older than you?""No; but he had had the benefit of a consistent classical
education, and was years ahead of me in most things," Gurdon answered;
and was amused to find a man of his experience speaking of a
consistent classical education as a benefit."He is fearfully clever," Margaret said, betraying a simple
worship, which Gurdon thought as delightful as it is now-a-days
proportionately rare. Though he did not know
many women, Gurdon was dimly aware that they were no longer in the
habit of thinking men "fearfully clever"; he knew that some totally
different spirit was abroad. How refreshing to come across a beautiful
woman, a woman of spirit too, like Margaret Essex, who was still able
to look up in worship of the man she thought fearfully clever!"Would he be likely to be at home if I were to call some day a
little after five?" Gurdon said, rather disingenuously, and meaning
"Would you be at home?""He goes down to Oxford to-morrow. What a pity!" The eyes rested on
him again, with their frank, glistening look. "He is at home to-day,
going over his books.""If it would be convenient, I might drive down to-day. It is
Hammersmith, is it not?" Gurdon did not ask himself why he was so
anxious to get a footing in that Hammersmith house--time enough for
reflection afterwards; but he knew very well what he wanted, and he
saw proudly that he had secured it.Luncheon was over at last, and guests left early, as everybody knew
that Lady Hamesthwaite had come for a last interview with her sister;
and a few people who had heard her cough, and
who felt that easy lack of responsibility in disposing of their
friends which is so common, thought that it might indeed prove to be
her last interview."You will let me see you to the train?" Gurdon was saying to
Margaret in the hall, as she stood fastening her little sable close
round her neck."Thank you, but I am going to walk up Gloucester Road and take an
omnibus; the train is nearer and quicker, of course, but we don't
often have so bright an afternoon as this.""Then perhaps I may see you to the omnibus?" Mark said, with a
smile."If it is your way.""Did you not tell me I could find your brother this afternoon?""Oh, you are coming out too? " She did not seem to have grasped
this, and she turned to him with a little sparkle of surprise."However innocent a woman may be, it is safer not to presume too
much upon that innocence," thought the cautious Mark very wisely. A
sun of shrewdness and womanly intuition is apt to break through those
poetic blue mists of unsuspicion."It would be a pleasure to me to see him again, and this seems to
be my only chance," he replied coolly.A few moments later they had scaled the stairway of a red
"road-car," and settled themselves easily and simply in the close
quarters of a garden-seat."For real exhilaration, give me the top of an omnibus on a fine
afternoon in London," Margaret exclaimed, with evident enjoyment, as
they rolled quickly over the good wood pavement. "The men drive so
splendidly, and it seems to me an omnibus always gets through things
before every other conveyance. I love to feel the on and off of the
brake, and to watch the way the pole seems to feel its way through the
traffic. The lightness and balance of these poles must be wonderful,
you know--a touch sways them. Then the horses are so nice and fat and
strong, and you never see a lame horse in an omnibus, whereas nearly
all the horses in cabs have something the matter with them.""I confess these things never struck me before, but you are
perfectly right," Mark said, feeling a genuine interest for the moment
in noticing the points she referred to."Oh, without its omnibuses London would lose half its charm for
me.""Do you know, your power of observation must be very keen indeed?
Of course, that is what makes you an artist.""Oh no! You are quite wrong--really you are! The observation that
detects shades of lameness in cab-horses is not a bit the sort an
artist ought to have. And that happens to be one of my great
difficulties. I am far too careful of detail. 'Cherchez le mouvement,' one of the professors says
to me twice a week. 'Mais, mademoiselle, il faut
cligner les yeux.'""Well, but surely--""Yes; but he doesn't mean the peculiarities of movement in a
cab-horse," said Margaret, laughing; "it is the effect I have to
search for, and the central principle movement. I can't explain it at
all,--I never could explain anything,--but you know that an artist has
to look at effects through half-closed eyes; if you are to be broad,
if you are to get your planes of colour right and your values, you
mustn't go darting weasel-gimlet glances here and there for little
minor details.""You have cleared up the whole matter for me in a
phrase. 'Weasel-gimlet glances' is excellent. I never thought of this
before, but I see there are many distinctions even among good powers
of observation. My own are fairly good, and they are neither like
yours nor those you want to acquire. My eyes seem to have little
independence. I can walk a mile and see nothing, but if I bring my
head into play, my eyes will register with a
photographic accuracy, and I have complete pictures of places, people,
and things fixed firmly on the retina of my brain--which I would swear
by in a court of law afterwards, if need were."Margaret looked at him critically, listened carefully, and then
said, with a very ingenuous touch of admiration, "That is a splendid
power to have at command. I expect you have trained it greatly?""I have tried to strengthen it, I think. But," smilingly, "I have
never tried to talk of it before, and you must look kindly on my
egotism for once."She had no need to reply except with a smile, for they were at
Hammersmith, and obliged to clamber carefully down. The way Margaret
swung the tails of her skirt round her, and positively ran down the
stair, while every other woman blundered into more or less of an
exposure of boot-top, thick, shapeless leg, and repellent underskirt,
was another point which Gurdon registered politely in Margaret's
favour."We have a little walk now," she said, and they set off down the
bustling, horrible King Street, having continually to avoid the
footpath on account of the crowds at the doors of multifarious
gin-shops.It was not a moment for conversation, and Gurdon was busy wondering
how he was to account to Essex himself for the enthusiasm which had
brought him down. If he remembered, Essex was a silent, severe,
satirical person, who would be quite keen enough to see through the
object of Mark's visit, and who would further be quite cool enough not
to help him to carry off the situation with éclat. The two men had never actually been
friends, though they had known each other very well and met very
frequently; and though, as Gurdon had said, Essex had helped him
materially when reading for his degree, yet they had never passed that
indefinable barrier between knowing one another well and being
friends.But small difficulties only whetted Mark's courage, and he followed
Margaret into the drawing-room with a good air of
self-possession.CHAPTER XIAS a matter of fact, that call in Hammersmith turned out
exceedingly well. It is only necessary to go to a place in sufficient
trepidation, and a visit always will turn out well, provided the
trepidation does not bereave the caller of his senses. Gurdon's
trepidation did not so bereave him; he was only conscious of having
padded out a college intimacy slightly, and this for his own excellent
purposes. Once inside the house, he had a quarter of an hour in which
to get on terms with Mrs. Essex; this was the kind of social
enterprise in which success was certain to him. Mrs. Essex brought out
her best conversation, and imagined that she had been entertaining a
young man of public importance, as well as a young man whom Margaret
must like, or else why had she brought him down--upon an omnibus, too,
that very hob-nobby and familiar vehicle? Her son, coming into the
room and finding them talking and laughing with such freedom and
good understanding, himself being a remarkably
self-centred person, accepted Gurdon as his sister's and his mother's
friend, remembered him as a very decent fellow when he was "up," and
chimed in agreeably in the mutual harmony of the moment.Mark left, feeling that Essex was improved since college days; that
he was more a man of the world and more human. "I remember, I believe,
that I liked Essex very well," he said to himself as he went westwards
in a train; and certainly Gurdon was not the man to notice the amazing
narrowness of mind which was one of Essex's worst faults, and which
the life open to a Fellow of an exclusive college does nothing to
minimise.During the long, wintry spring the two men met a number of
times. When Essex was in town, he dined at the club with Mark; and
once, when a big statesman went down to speak at Oxford, Gurdon was
Essex's guest for a couple of days.But before they encountered one another again at the house in
Hammersmith, Mark had established a habit of going to supper there on
Sunday evenings; and it was an odd week when he did not manage to see
Margaret somewhere, at least once, in between times.The fact was, that he was desperately attracted towards her, and
when in her presence did not recognise himself
for the same man: his nature seemed changed; he expressed opinions
with unimpeachable sincerity, which were in direct opposition to the
opinions he would have expressed to the men he was in the habit of
dining and talking with at the club. He couldn't fail to notice the
extraordinary effect the girl had on him. Sometimes he knew he was in
love with her; he knew that he was going to ask her to marry him if he
had any sort of chance to do so; he knew that he would be ruthlessly
cutting up his schemes for his own life and future, and he knew he
would be acting like a fool. At least, he knew these things when he
got back to his own milieu; he did not know
them at Hammersmith, and he did not know them in the train;--the train
formed a kind of hot, yeasty interlude, when he sat still and read his
papers with difficulty, feeling all the time a restlessness and a
desire to gaze into space with a smile upon his face which must have
betrayed his errand to the stockbroker opposite.At his rooms, in the big leather arm-chair which had been his
father's, and which had faithfully hatched out schemes of transcendent
ambition in all his years of office life, Mark had terrible hours. He
was a traitor to these schemes at heart. He was a traitor to that chair. One part of his brain looked on in a sort
of cold horror, while the other part sketched out a future which
should be more successful because of the lovely wife who would share
it. "It all depends on whom a man marries," he
would say didactically to himself, well knowing that it does not. A
woman with a great deal of money would not have retarded him; any
other woman, no matter how clever and beautiful and distinguished,
certainly would; Mark knew, as well as any man in Whitehall, that the
day is past when women could play a part in the diplomatic world by
reason of personal talent or beauty. Money, and money only, and a
great deal of money at that, would have helped him. He was an
exceptionally clear-eyed person; he had studied all the possibilities
of advancement in parliamentary and diplomatic circles; also he had
looked round him. He could, with the help of a rich wife, buy a
capital position as a junior politician. But Margaret was poor. Double
and treble milled was each one of these thoughts, yet, once at
Hammersmith and in the room, they left him. He was at his ease and
natural again; natural with the nature Margaret had called up in
him.Both mother and daughter thought him "delightful," and very clever
and full of power and determination. They
magnified his good qualities, as kind women will, and they never
observed his bad qualities at all; for which they are not to be
blamed, as these were very negative in Mark, and might almost be said
to be non-existent at that time. However innocent Margaret may have
been of the construction which might be put upon Mr. Gurdon's visits,
and the meaning he managed to throw into them,--and it is permissible
to imagine Margaret just as innocent as a "nice" girl ought to be,--it
was not to be supposed that their intention escaped Mrs. Essex. She
saw perfectly well, with matronly clearness, in fact, that "young
Mr. Gurdon was interested in dear Margaret," had, in fact, fallen in
love with her."I suppose we shall have Mr. Gurdon as usual about seven o'clock,"
she said, smiling indulgently, as she prepared to snatch a few
moments' sleep in her arm-chair after tea."I daresay," Margaret answered from the piano, and without
interrupting the "Schlummerlied" she was softly playing."I like to see a determined lover," Mrs. Essex went on, still with
the same complacence. The "Schlummerlied" came to an end."A determined what?""My dear child, of course you are aware that he may propose any day?" Mrs. Essex roused herself a little
at Margaret's tone, and a moment or two later she saw that her sleep
that afternoon must be given up."It is a little hard that every intimacy with a man may have to be
terminated just at the comfortable point--because he thinks it
necessary to propose," Margaret said, with a sense of injury, but an
air of great self-possession. "Not that I have seen any signs of his
forgetting himself in that way," she added, smiling."You may be perfectly assured that he is going to propose to
you. He has singled you out, ever since he came here, by the most
marked attention. He has sent you books and songs; he has brought you
flowers; he has come early--and--and--not gone away till very late;
and he never takes his eyes off you when he is in the room."Mrs. Essex enumerated these points in a helpless tone, and Margaret
nodded, and ticked each one on her slim fingers. Very true--what can a
man do more?"In fact, he has shown all the polite signs of being in love," she
said, laughing, and looking very pretty. Any girl will laugh and look
pretty when she hears of the subjection of a presentable victim; she
is only haughty and insulted if the victim is
not presentable. Her own feelings for the man do not come into the
question at all at this stage. "Well," she went on, still smiling, and
still looking pretty, "we will exhibit all the polite signs in the
reverse direction. As I am not going to accept him, and shouldn't
think of doing so, we must begin at once. For instance: I will have a
headache, and be lying down upstairs when he arrives. You will
entertain him till supper-time. I will struggle down to supper,
looking very pale.""That of course will bring matters to a head immediately,"
Mrs. Essex broke in, and herself unable to prevent a smile at
Margaret's nonsense."Oh, but I won't be lackadaisical and floppy. My headache will be
of the severe kind, and my manner will be as severe as the
headache. You, in the meantime, will have prepared the way by talking
about other men I have known and liked. I think, you know, one gets
through these things quicker and more painlessly if one conducts them
on the 'someone else' tack; a man will go away if he is made to
understand that there is another man, but he won't if he thinks you
are fancy-free. Well, he hardly could--it would be rude of him. He has
to stay and teach you to care for him. I owe these ideas entirely to
novels, but novelists make a study of such
points. So you will tell him about other men.""But what other men? I don't at this moment know of any other
men. You see, Margaret, you have not been like most girls of the
present day; you have not had batches of 'men friends.'"Margaret nodded. "I've had a mother-friend," she said."Now, let me think whom you have known. But, in any case, it would
not be honourable or true of us to mix up any man's name with
yours--merely to put off Mr. Gurdon. I should not at all like it.""Dear mamma, you take it too seriously; you haven't to say anything
at all. After all, I'm quite as likely to marry any of the men I've
known as Gurdon.""Mr. Gurdon, dear; don't get into the habit of speaking of men by
their surnames--even to me. It is very fast, I think.""Not exactly fast, now, mamma, surely, though it may have been
once. I expect I have caught the habit among the girls in Paris. They
do it, but not from fastness, merely from economy of time.""It occurs to me that the only young man you have known is
Mr. Robert Leighton." The word "Paris" had obviously suggested him
to her mother, and Margaret, who was standing
over by a window that looked upon the river, felt suddenly
frightened."I wouldn't mention his name, mamma. In fact, I agree with you that
perhaps it wouldn't be at all a good plan to do as I said.""The best thing for you to do is to tell him firmly and quietly
that you don't, and never can, care for him--if that is the case."
Mrs. Essex sighed--from mixed motives, for she had never been able to
contemplate the idea of Margaret's marriage with equanimity, and it
was also true that she had had pangs of sheer jealousy when she had
seen Gurdon and the girl laughing and chatting in a certain youthful
intimacy that she of course could never have with her daughter; at the
same time, as a woman, she had to be sorry for a lover."I will not have a headache at all, on second thoughts," Margaret
announced presently."Well, then, I think I will," Mrs. Essex said lightly, and rising
from a chair. "The room is very warm, Margaret, and I have missed my
sleep." Mrs. Essex had heard the wheels of a hansom, but she was
already on the upper flight of stairs before the front door bell
rang.And this was the first Sunday evening on which Mark Gurdon did not
stay to supper.CHAPTER XIIA MAN feels his rejection either in proportion to his depth of
feeling for the woman, or in proportion to his depth of feeling for
himself; without severity it may be said, usually the latter.With Mark it was strongly the latter, and a little of the former
mixed in.He had really admired Margaret very much; he was greatly puzzled to
understand why she had not admired him. He couldn't suppose it was
because he was poor that she would not marry him, and he equally could
not suppose it was because she couldn't love him; he therefore
declined upon the supposition that it was because he had not given her
time enough to discover his good points. A girl--that is, a nice
girl--is a very inexperienced creature, he told himself, and no doubt
she had known so few men in her beautiful, carefully supervised life,
that she was not able to see how superior he was to most other fellows
from whom she might have expected
proposals. He was a gentleman, and looked like one (a great advantage,
this); he was poor, certainly, but he had a future; his manners and
character--well, he didn't know anybody with better manners or
character--this frankly and without any egotism, in fact, speaking as
an outsider.It is neither a man's nor a woman's fault that a proposal is
usually such a fearful and ridiculous farrago. No woman with a sense
of humour can listen to it without inward smiles--supposing that she
is quite cool towards the man. If she is not quite cool towards him,
she takes it in as well as the other woman who has no sense of
humour. For falling in love blots out a sense of humour, of necessity,
for the time being. Who looses his falcon to the flight, leaving his
hood still on? Yet is the proposing man more closely hooded than the
gay gosshawk. Mark did remarkably well with his proposal, and made
very fair use of his materials; it is not his fault that details of it
sound silly: all real proposals sound rather silly, and no novelist in
the world but can make up a much sweeter and more attractive one out
of his own head.He knew she was particular about some things, Mark said to her,
when the moment came (he meant Leighton and his escapade by "some things"). Well, he shouldn't like to brag about
it, but--and then he made the well-known speech without which no
proposal is really complete. He wore that air of humility and
seriousness, combined with a rigid sense of right and wrong. He
wouldn't like to call himself a good man; no man who sat beside Miss
Essex could have the presumption to call himself good; but he would
say that most men would call him a very decent specimen. He had
"lived" to a certain extent (he was very careful to put in this
ambiguous qualification, and tradition justified him; no man with any
respect for himself ever leaves it out)--to a certain extent he had
lived the life of an ordinary man of the world, but he had had his
limitations, and there were lengths to which he had never gone. These
were not things that she would understand, nor that he would like to
speak of further, but, at any rate, he had lived a sort of life that
enabled him to come into the presence of the woman he loved with his
head up because he could show a clean record.Margaret was, as I have insisted more than once, exceedingly
inexperienced, and she was inclined to think this very fine; not
knowing in the least what it meant, and further unaware that it formed
part of the time-honoured shibboleth of
proposal, she was decidedly impressed by it. And if anything could
have won her to accept Gurdon, it would have been more of this
high-minded and yet humble expatiation on his spotlessness.Miss Essex looked prettier than ever, with her dark-grey, serious
eyes holding two tears which never fell; and Gurdon was then moved to
take her hand, very gently and respectfully. It was she who gave the
pressure. "Thank you--thank you so much," she said, rather brokenly,
"for what you have said. I feel very much--I mean I am quite sure
that--that--but, oh, please, Mr. Gurdon, don't think me odious, but I
really never thought of you in that light, and I"--with a good deal
more of the same.Thus the moment of deepest emotion was reached over Gurdon's
touching picture of the precise degree and shade of grey in which he
had painted himself out of the devil's black paint-pot.Margaret felt it to have been a pathetic and impressive moment in
the interview, and in her own mind afterwards she called him "poor
fellow" once or twice: whether because he had not allowed himself a
better time in this vicious old world, or because she could not hand
him the reward of this praiseworthy self-denial, she never explained to herself, not having the analytical
temperament.As was natural, she saw less of Gurdon in the weeks that
immediately followed, although it had been arranged that this was not
to interfere with their "friendship." It was not likely to, as it in
no way trenched upon that most mythical and shadowy of
relations. Gurdon looked more serious, talked a little less at the
club, and folded his lips ominously as he walked between the Colonial
Office and his rooms. He turned in one night and heard part of a
concert at St. James's Hall, but came out because it seemed to him
that he could not bear to hear a "Polonaise" of Chopin's, which
Margaret had played indifferently well, faultlessly given by "some
foreign fellow, with a beastly head of hair," as he mentally
designated the eminent artist upon the platform. Coming out into
Piccadilly, he ran against a man he knew slightly--that is, a man he
had known slightly for a number of years. This individual, Lauriston
by name, was a good-natured, weak-minded being, with a taste for what
he called "sport," and night clubs, and gardenias that reeked
intoxicatingly of opoponax as well as their own odious scent. Gurdon,
being "a serious-minded chap," had little in common with Lauriston as
a rule, but he was just then at a loose end,
and allowed himself to be hailed and his arm taken, and finally borne
off in a fit of overdone chumminess to see something of which "ten
stone," "six rounds," and " a purse," formed descriptive elements. As
a matter of fact, Gurdon would just as soon have sat at the National
Sporting Club, and clapped feebly, and listened to cheers, either
raucous or affectedly treble, as he would have done anything else. In
his own belief he was a badly cut-up man, but he hoped he was "taking
it as a man ought"; without going into this point, he was certainly
taking it as a man often does. He sat in silence, with a half-smile of
satire on his face, and watched Lauriston hang over the peacock-plush
edge of the box, as he exchanged the time of day with fat gentlemen in
exceedingly tight check suits and a tendency to a display of Parisian
diamonds upon their ties.It was late enough when Mark found himself passing along Piccadilly
on his way to his rooms in Ryder Street. Already the impression of his
unusual evening was passing out of his mind; in his younger days Mark
had seen as much of that sort of evening as a steady fellow ever does,
and he took it very calmly. Champagne in a big tumbler did not
matter greatly to him. He was not
unconsciously observant, as he had once told Margaret; the scenes of
Piccadilly passed him by, or he shook them off casually, and entered,
although unwillingly, upon his private gloom again.Suddenly, when he had passed one woman, a shaft of recollection
shot into his mind, and he looked round instinctively. The
recollection was accompanied by some revulsion of feeling, but he
turned with an impulse and raised his hat."Miss Lemuel?" he said. It was as much a protest as a question, and
for once the face that met his had no smile."Well, I never!" she exclaimed in surprise; "to think of its being
you!""No," he replied; "to think of its being you! Why are you out alone
like this? How are you in England? Where is your father?""Ah, well, that will be the whole story if I tell you all that,
won't it?" She smiled now, but it was half-heartedly. "We're in
England because father has a job here. He came over to sit to Gilford
for his 'Death of Greek Art.'""Well, but how are you out at this time of day? But perhaps I am
not minding my own business as I ought?" his tone became reserved."Perhaps you aren't. I'm looking for father, if you want to know. Father has been drinking a good bit
lately, and I'm not sure how he'll get through with this affair of
Gilford's, unless I keep a pretty tight hold on him. The landlady
fired us out of our lodgings to-day, and I got all packed and taken to
a friend's--well, she's the charwoman who cleans Gilford's studio; and
then father said he'd go and have a look round, and come back sharp
for me when he'd settled something. I waited till about one o'clock,
and then I knew something had happened, so I've been going round the
dens."She told all this very simply, and it was obviously only the
inconvenience of her father's action, mixed with a fear that he would
not be able to take up his "job," that disturbed her. As they walked
on together, Gurdon reflected quickly. Though he had met her half a
dozen times in Paris only, and they had never talked much, he had an
inexplicable liking for this girl. Used to roughing it she might be,
but he could not allow her to walk alone down Piccadilly when he was
there to prevent it. He looked down at her, on to the top of her
shabby little hat, as it proved."Take my arm," he said curtly. "Your father was to look for rooms,
you say? What if he has found none--where have you to go?""Nowhere," was all her answer."Well, we must devise something. Is it not possible he may have
returned to the char-woman's while you have been out looking for
him?""Yes, he might have done."He could tell that she thought this very unlikely."Well, let us get into a cab and go there at once. Is not that the
best thing to do?"She admitted that it might be; and even though he could have put
her into a cab and sent her off, he believed it his duty to see her
safely even to that poor shelter. He hailed a cab, and they drove away
together down to Kensington.On the way, she plucked up her spirits, and told him many things
that had happened in Paris since the winter when he had been there. At
the end of May, Leighton had gone to Spain for the summer. When he
returned, Arsènie had made other arrangements, since when
Leighton had ceased to live at his studio, and had removed to a hôtel meublé. He had become so
extravagant that he had been obliged to have another man share his
studio. His bill at the restaurant where he fed grew so large that he
had had to move on to another. He had an arrangement at the artists'
colourman's to give him all his studio studies
in return for material, and he had taken to working his Académies in oil colours instead of
charcoal, painting in a tiger-skin and a drift of muslin afterwards,
and calling them "Après le Bain," "Belle Baigneuse," and
kindred titles.All this chatter rippled pleasantly through Gurdon's mind, and,
combining with the motion of a good cab, soothed him
considerably. Cara Lemuel had a sharp and amusing tongue; often he was
moved to a tired laugh at what she said; and when she took his hand
and thanked him for being so good to her, it seemed only natural to
put an arm round her thin shoulders with a comforting
pressure. Altogether, he did not mind much how long this drive
lasted.But at length, in some of the narrow slummy byways near Queen's
Gate, the cab drew up, they got out, and Cara undertook to find the
door.Gurdon stopped irresolutely for a second, then he told the man to
wait, and followed her.CHAPTER XIIIOLD Lemuel had not come in. That was the first thing that struck
Gurdon when he passed upstairs behind Cara. The key was below the mat
just where she had placed it, the paraffin lamp was smelling as it had
done ever since she turned it down hours before. They sat down
opposite one another in the stuffy, evil-smelling little room."What can have happened to father? Oh, there must have been some
accident!" Then she cried. She was that simple sort of creature that
cried unrestrainedly and exuberantly when she was sorry, even as she
laughed when she was glad. She dropped her face into her hands with a
howl. Her short brown curls parted from the back of her neck, and fell
forward in a thick shock at each side. The pointed girlish shoulders
shook in a convulsive way. The backs of her narrow arms, pressed to
her sides, had something young and pitiable about them; she was a
horribly lonely, forsaken little thing. Gurdon
made a quick step towards her, and patted her reassuringly on the
back."Come, this won't do," he said, with the exaggerated cheerfulness
one uses to a child. "What is the good of making up your mind that the
very worst has happened? Depend upon it, your father is with a friend
somewhere. There, that's right: be a woman."He might have kissed her, perhaps, but the thought of Margaret,
whom some weeks ago he had dreamed of kissing, prevented him for the
moment. Instead, he essayed more practical comfort. He found a
spirit-lamp among her belongings, and with a little encouragement she
produced some cheap red wine, which he heated and made her drink. She
sat beside this meditatively for a little, then she raised her crying
face, which had a prettiness about it in spite of tears and reddened
eyelids. This time, as he looked at her, no thought of Margaret
occurred to him: his love for her had been compounded of idealised
passion and fancy--they are very poor wear.With her jacket off, and in some soft, limp sort of brown material,
Cara looked pretty. Her dark skin, ripe colour, and easy eye had a
single meaning. There are some women in the social state, as it is at
present, fitted exclusively for "the oldest of
all professions for women." They are to be met in all ranks of
life. What sort of wives do they make? What sort of sweethearts? What
sort of mothers? Whosoever selects them for a position of any
permanency is mistaken. Women of abnormal sensuality, of incurable
lightness, are private scourges. In a ballroom, for example, they will
exercise every one of the arts and lures that have only one intention,
then they will step into their carriages and sweep away with a final
glitter in their lascivious eyes, and the poor creature in the street,
whom they would not touch, is their victim.The friends of women are not wise to declare that none are born
scorpions.That is the dark side of the picture. Of the light side and its
effect, Gurdon is an example. Since his refusal by Margaret Essex, he
had been fighting down a severe attack of passion; this night on which
he came across Cara had sensually roused him. Under his cold, calm,
measuring nature were buried smothered fires, on whose embers no wind
of circumstance had yet blown strongly. His sensuality, as in other
words he had told Margaret, had been slight; he made the mistake of
imagining that he had resisted such temptations, whereas they had, in
reality, never come his way, and he had never
felt or seen them. He had carried what he called "decency " to the
chilliest business pitch, in a gentlemanly manner--that is, in the
manner usual to a fastidious gentleman. The time came when, standing
opposite Cara, he remembered only one thing; remembered with the
greatest astonishment the means he had taken in the past to work
himself up to the pitch of carrying through certain experiences with
some air of relish. His training, his carefully nurtured ideas upon
these subjects, had led him, even when alone, in his own mind and
memory to banish the recollection of moments of almost wholly forced
abandonment. He conceived a great horror of that old self of his; it
passed over his mind as a wave: whether he had found anything better
or not might be a question, he felt that his old feeling had been
wrong. His brain worked with the spasmodic, whirring activity of the
roulette wheel. The girl was in his arms without his having
consciously taken her in them. Before passion quite swamped reason, he
was questioning her hurriedly, in a voice whose very tones were quite
new to him. The answers she made, which were an encouragement to
passion, would have wounded love; but Gurdon was not in a condition to
see distinctions, or to give feelings
names. Things themselves are infinitely less confusing than the names
they go by. One may recognise the thing itself, and one may even
understand and feel familiar with it, but, over and above this, one
must know its exact name. This difficulty is increased because things
are not equally well named. The appositeness of all names to the
objects and feelings they describe is nothing like so obvious as the
appositeness of the title pig for the animal pig; for, as the old lady
remarked, anybody could see for himself it was a pig.The moment you leave the dry-land region of pigs and such-like easy
instances of careful and adequate nomenclature, you set forth upon a
turgid sea of difficulties. It is the things that swim dimly below the
surface of the thick water that are so hard to recognise and to
name. Numberless people, be it said, sail out and never suspect the
existence of these things; to them they are unthinkable. Others are
conscious of them, but avoid the effort of clear comprehension and
classification; to these they are unnameable. And a larger body of
people than either of these, or indeed both these put together, are
content to name them wrongly and confuse one hopelessly with another;
to these they are undistinguishable. Such things as these, that fin slowly through the gloom of deep green
waters, are chiefly feelings. There are among them passion, cruel and
kind; desire, physical and spiritual, the same in form, but differing
utterly in clearness of colouring: the one swimming on his belly in
the mud, the other undulating through the bright weed, where the light
of day shines down. If love, the flying fish, drop among them for a
space, straightway he is confused to his own hurt until he swoop
upward into the air again. The psychologist with his water-telescope
is apt to be as wrong as anyone, and this has made many sensible and
clever people decide that it is better to sit upon the shore beside
the pig--who is so like a pig that you cannot mistake him; or, if you
sail over the water, to keep your eyes lifted to the clouds of
tradition, superstition, and legend. It will be a good day when one
shall arise and tell us whether it is happier to live than to know,
and at what level we should keep our dim, imperfect human eyes, as we
pass about in the world that we think was made for us and that we have
improved for ourselves. If Gurdon's case could have been put before
Margaret Essex and Gallia Hamesthwaite,--poor Gallia, away with her
sick mother in Algiers, living a life of pulses and temperatures, and
utterly divorced from her previous
interests,--how differently they would have seen it! Gallia, whose
watchword used to be "Truth"--Margaret, whose watchword was
"Goodness." And if it could have been put before Gurdon himself, whose
watchword was "Decency," or before Leighton, whose was "Life, and
don't be ashamed of it"?Gurdon's justification for his action lay in the fact that he had
been won from his even, decent life when he fell in love with Margaret
Essex. The hopes that had then risen in him had altered the aspect of
his mind. His emotional territory had been changed in character by the
volcanic upheavals during those weeks of close intercourse. He had sat
in the little Hammersmith drawing-room and watched Margaret's fine
flower-like hands moving over the yellow keyboard of the old sweet
Broadwood, and his cold nature had warmed and warmed as he looked.
"All, the throats of thunder!Ah, the dulcet lips!Ah, the gracious tyranniesOf her finger-tips!"
Or he had seen her singing. Margaret singing was a picture for the
gods. Then they had talked a long time about all sorts of abstract
matters; and the conversation had been of that curious kind which love directs, of which love is ever the
under-note. Then, when he went into town again and sat at dinner by
himself at the club, or read in his own rooms afterwards, the mist of
Margaret's influence still hung in the air around him. It was not that
she gave him any token of love, or let drop one word on which he could
build, but she was gracious, smiling, and her reception of him was
kind, and she would play and sing when he asked her, liking apparently
to give him pleasure; liking, at any rate, to make music for one who
seemed to love it as any musical-souled being will.If he had been a man of high moral tone (instead of being what he
was, a man of "decent" moral tone), he might have had a quarrel
against her for destroying the placid fabric of his daily life, and
then turning him off, to weave the fragments of it in what pattern he
could, accommodating the red thread of passion, of which he was
conscious for the first time.He had come through all the experiences of the single man who,
loving one woman, alters and rearranges his future to admit her share
in it; he had tuned himself up to the new pitch of marriage; he had
fostered, nurtured, been glad of the new feelings that had come to
him, and which in that particular connection were creditable and decent, and then--he had been sent away;
sent away single and unsatisfied, with havoc in his heart. But the
feelings were still there. He was softened, warmed, plastic, and
single. Whereupon the girl Lemuel crossed his path, and attracted his
quickened sympathies. Here was where he might give himself rein and be
no wise to blame: he assured himself on this point before he took her,
for, as he said to himself, he was not a blackguard. He did not love
her, although, oddly enough, he told himself that he did; he did not,
for if he had, he would have hated the French artist of whom she
naively told him; as it was, that was his permission. And not having a
mind that traced its inspirations to their sources, Gurdon was unaware
that Margaret Essex was a more or less direct cause of his protection
of Cara.CHAPTER XIVIT is difficult to understand why, as Gallia Hamesthwaite sat
beside her dead mother, in the big bedroom of the white hotel upon the
hillside, she should have thought of Dark Essex. At a moment so lonely
that it seemed to her an iron gateway had closed across the avenue of
life, and she should never go any farther down that avenue, this man,
with whom, after all, she had never been closely intimate, who had
certainly never been kind to her, seemed nearer to her than any other
human being. If there were anyone in the world whose hand-clasp she
would have been passionately glad of, that person was Essex.He had not been very often in her mind during the three months'
sojourn in Algiers; she had, during that time, thought almost
ceaselessly of her mother. Lady Hamesthwaite had not benefited by the
change; she had seemed wonderfully feeble, with an unexplained,
gentle, sweet-natured feebleness, which grew only more evident day by day. In the mornings, Gallia had walked
beside her invalid chair; in the afternoons she had taken her place in
the comfortable European victoria which had been sent over from France
for their use. In between whiles she seemed to have read aloud an
infinitude of novels and books of travel, looking up frequently to see
if her mother's cheeks were flushing with fever, or if she appeared
ready for a little sleep.At first Gallia had provided herself with books that interested her
more, and when the poor lady laid her head back on the cushions and
closed her eyelids, Gallia had been wont to dip into these more
congenial volumes. But after a time she could not give them her
attention, and she put them aside and sat quietly in her place,
letting her eyes wander to and fro between her mother's face and the
view from the window of the white town down the hill.When Lady Hamesthwaite's illness became more marked, when she had
to send for her father, her thoughts and her daily life became
confused: she lived in a dream. She could not have remembered, at the
end of the day, whether some scene by her mother's bedside had
happened in reality, or whether her brain had pictured it for her in a
terrified foresight into what was coming upon them."And most of the time while she was well, I lived away from her,
and thought it a great thing to follow out my own life and my own
ideas. Why couldn't I have postponed that? I shall have such a long
time for my own life and my own ideas, and I have had so short a time
with mother! But I don't think I am ever going to care for the things
I used to care for! Perhaps it is really right, after all, to
sacrifice oneself to other people and live for them--but to me that
has always seemed so immoral."Poor Gallia sighed away the wreckage of her creeds, and devoted
herself, as whole-souledly as though she had never had any, to the
duty and the privilege of nursing her mother, to whom she felt herself
almost a stranger.And Lady Hamesthwaite died because she had to; died in a fit of
beautiful, painless unconsciousness, with her daughter and nurse
beside her, her husband in England, and no good-byes or last words of
any kind. On the next day, when the funeral was to take place, Gallia
spent the long hours of the morning in the darkened room beside the
coffin; spent it with her thoughts. She was not crying--had not cried
at all. Tears, at moments of emotion, seemed to be more remote even
than laughter from Gallia's nature. The habit of her mind reasserted itself, and she stared before her,
following through winding ways the ideas that arose like phantoms and
fled in front of her."What happiness or pleasure have I ever had from mother?" she asked
herself honestly. "What has she meant in my life--sweet woman that she
was? Almost nothing! I have hardly known her, really; there has been
no communion between our minds, and none in our lives. Now she is
dead, and--unless remorse for what was quite right and should not have
been helped changes me--the loss is hers. How is my life any
different? If I am still honest, if I do not start to build up in my
mind the notion that mother was everything to me, and that now she is
gone, all is gone--if I don't teach myself that pious lie, my life
will be just the same. Can I have ever loved her at all? If I had ever
loved her, I must have shown it in some fashion--and I don't remember
that I ever did. It would be far more comfortable and far more
respectable to give way to paroxysms of grief now, to fling myself
about, to shriek to her sweet body lying here, and say, 'Mother, I
always loved you, and I am finding it out too late!'"The girl paused; she had a sudden impulse to do this, she had a
sudden wonder if perhaps this was, after all, what she meant. But
Gallia had been too long accustomed to tell
herself what she felt, having decided that after an interview with
what it was reasonable for her to feel, and she lifted her sad look
from the coffin and went on with her thoughts again."All the time mother loved me; Aunt Celia knew, and her letters
might have told me, only, somehow, I knew it. Why is all the sweetness
and passion and exquisiteness confined to the side of one party to the
contract; why is it so certainly sweet to be a mother,--apparently no
matter of what sort of child,--and why has the child on its side no
instinctive sense of the exquisiteness of parentage?" She mused a long
time upon this theme, and then another thought rose before her, and
she followed it, as before, through the byways of her strange
mind."The charm of motherhood must be innate: it has nothing to do with
the child, or how it turns out, or what it proves to be. It is started
once for all at the child's birth-time, and every woman has the sense
of motherhood according to her emotional capacity. A mother has those
feelings, which are more than mere love, because she has done
something for the child, because she has borne it. She has performed a
sort of self-sacrifice, which I have always thought the most subtle
kind of selfishness in the world. Motherhood
is selfish after all. So it comes in with my belief that the highest
sort of selfishness is the only true and good religion--the only one
that really makes for goodness. A woman gets a good deal out of
motherhood; more than she does out of marriage: motherhood is, on the
whole, better suited to her than marriage, I believe."She got off her chair and looked into the coffin, which was filled
with flowers, save where her mother's exquisite hands were crossed on
her breast, and where her face, immeasurably more beautiful than it
had been in life, with the colouring still perfect in its transparent
delicacy, looked up at her with shut eyes."Were you very happy with father, I wonder? or did you really love
my coming more than all the rest?" she asked gently and wistfully of
the quiet face. "I wish you could have told me before you went which
is best--love or motherhood? At this minute, mother, you are the most
beautiful woman in the world; your spirit may be gone from your body,
but it has left its loveliest reflection on your face. If only you
could have told me that one woman's secret!"It was characteristic of Gallia that, in spite of her amazing
belief regarding selfishness and its continuous practice as the
highest form of virtue, the questions she
framed just then were entirely abstract ones. She was not thinking of
love for herself, she was not remembering how she had said good-bye to
it in that upstairs room in Grosvenor Place. She was asking because
she would have liked to know. Perhaps she thought her mother's spirit
might have lent her some beam of the illumination it must by that time
have found in the place whither it was gone.She was called away to receive her father, who had been telegraphed
for several days before, and, travelling with greatest possible speed,
had arrived too late.He looked a very broken man indeed, as he advanced into the
sitting-room and met his daughter. One look at Gallia's face told him
his wife was dead, and he could for the moment only take her two
hands, and with his head turned away to hide his grief, press them
with the terrible shuddering pressure of a man in the first throes of
grief.She took him silently to the room, and, closing the door, let him
find his way through the dim light to his wife's coffin.In two hours he came out, but she did not see him; he had gone to
his own room, and was to be left undisturbed till the funeral started,
so his man brought word.So Gallia went back to be companion to the dead woman till the
narrow door should be shut that was to close her from this world--and
it was then that the yearning arose in her for the hand-clasp of
someone she loved--and she thought of Dark Essex.She had no grudge against him that he did not love her, and, on the
whole, she had forgiven him the method in which he had explained this
to her. It made no difference to her love for him, which was deep, had
not grown from liking, and was unaffected by manifestations of
dislike; which was also entirely without vanity or egotism, and had no
support from his admiration or love of her; which was, therefore, if
one may judge by its immunity from these earthly characteristics, the
best kind of love there is.If, by some impossible occurrence, he could be with her for five
minutes! if, without speaking, she could have him clasp her hand
firmly for one moment!"I believe I should even be able to bear it if he were a little
sorry for me. I wonder if it would touch him to hear that
someone--anyone whom he knew--had lost her mother? I wonder if he
would give the news one second's pity?"She heard them in the adjoining room walking about, waiting for her
to come out."Yes, I think he would be different now, and also--I know he
wouldn't. Good-bye--for just now, mother: it has not all been for
nothing. If you loved me all my life, some time, no doubt, we shall
meet, and I will love you. I would have loved you if you had been my
child, and perhaps, when I am a mother myself, my child may be like
you, and I shall love it, and make the score even in that way."She took one of the white roses that lay near her mother's hands
and kissed it, and began to put it inside her dress; then she stopped
and looked at the slim bud again."Now, why do I do that?" she thought; "it will die, and go brown,
and all crumble, and I shall have it in a piece of paper somewhere,
and forget where I've put it, and it will be forgotten, and get lost,
or be dropped. No; one is not meant to remember--as we know by the sad
case of all souvenirs. Mother, I'll give you back your rose. How much
I remember you, I shall see in time,"--she smiled anxiously,--"but I
will not give my humanity a chance to insult your memory."And these odd words were the last Gallia ever said to her
mother.CHAPTER XVMRS. LEIGHTON was very sorry for her niece. "It is the greatest
possible misfortune for Gallia," said the wise old lady. "In time she
would have come to know her mother, and, of course, to love her; and
now--ah, it is a terrible misfortune." For Mrs. Leighton did not
mistake for love the care and kindness Gallia had shown to her mother;
she herself had a fairly clear perception of the bent of Gallia's
mind, and so far she believed that the girl lived entirely within
herself, and that she had no friends.If it be not good for man to live alone, it is even worse for
woman, the old lady believed. Gallia must now be three or four and
twenty, and she had no one to love. For Lord Hamesthwaite, although a
good and amiable and even a distinguished gentleman, was not the kind
of man anybody would have made the mistake of loving. Besides, since
his wife's death he had immersed himself more deeply still in
politics. During the Easter recess he
addressed meetings in the provinces, and worked even harder than while
Parliament was sitting. Gallia lived with him in Grosvenor Place, but
she was able to pursue an almost entirely separate existence in the
big house, for there were no entertainments and few visitors during
the first months of mourning. She had not returned immediately to
England after the loss of her mother; she had spent two months very
quietly in a small mountain town in the Alpes Maritimes. Here,
accompanied only by her mother's maid, a conventional-minded French
servant, who suffered untold tortures of tristesse and ennui, she had
lived and dreamed the days away; reading very little, and quite
unconsciously hastening the departure of certain qualities of her
youth and the charm that she had never recognised in herself and never
used--unless dimly among her fellow-students at Oxford in the old
days.She liked to watch the mule traffic up the steep rocky path, she
liked to look at the people pursuing their everyday avocations. She
took no photographs, collected no flowers, made no sketches, put no
impressions on paper. She merely walked and stood about, a curious
smile of observance and silent kindliness upon her face. She made no
charities, intruded in no kitchens, was known
only by sight, and received none of the sentimental demonstrations of
affection such as are histrionically proper to a situation of the
kind.Her maid, with thimble in pocket and scissors at her side, turned
over sadly the four simple dresses that formed Gallia's entire
wardrobe at this time. They were very strange dresses indeed. The
dressmaker in Nice, a very important artiste, had had the fashioning
of them, and never remembered having like restrictions imposed upon
her. As they expressed in a measure Gallia's mind at this time, they
have a certain interest. All were black, all were made in the same
manner, absolutely plain in skirt, with bodice and band, high to the
neck and long to the wrists, no fleck of white or flake of cambric
anywhere at all. They tied at the throat with a black satin bow, and
each was lined in the thickest satin of dove grey--though of this
their wearer was possibly never aware: a dressmaker must have some
excuse for the bill. In the cool mornings the maid laid out the cloth
gown; on warm mornings the soft black linen. Also, according to the
temperature of the evening, Gallia passed the last three hours of her
day in velvet or in silk. She was far too clever a girl not to have
taken great pains with her dress in her
happier days, and she had a beautiful figure of the heaven-born kind;
now, however, she watched with a sense of dreary amusement the careful
routine of her bedroom so punctually performed."Mademoiselle met?" occurred as regularly
twice a day as though a galaxy of gowns was to be chosen from; and
"Celle de soie," Gallia would answer, or "Celui en velours," as the case of robe or costume
came up for decision.It was in one of these same simple vestures that she made her
appearance in her aunt's drawing-room, about a week after she came
home. Mrs. Leighton was herself in mourning, but it was a mourning
most tastefully tempered to a garish world. She felt herself shudder
when Gallia came in and sat among the pink and pale blue sofas, some
of which were believed to have belonged to the very Louis
themselves. The old lady was seated in what she called her "Salon
Trianon," and there was someone else in the room whom Gallia did not
immediately observe; someone who wore the coolest of dresses of a June
green shade, a muslin fichu, and a muslin hat with hop-wreaths on it;
someone who sat near a green curtain, and was, that day, the very
prettiest thing in Kensington."I think you know Margaret Essex?" said the hostess, as Gallia's
severe folds settled themselves in the most frivolous of seats, and
seemed to hold aloof from a carpet strewn with baskets tied with
ribbons, from which pink roses poured luxuriantly.The girls said something and shook hands. Each was interested in
the other. Of course Margaret remarked that her brother knew Gallia
well in Oxford."I think I feel a little alarmed about Miss Hamesthwaite's brain
capacity in consequence of what he has said," she added smilingly, and
she felt even more alarmed at the look Gallia bent on her, although it
was only a look of inquiry. But very soon Miss Essex went away,
feeling certain that the aunt and niece had not met for some time, and
guessing that Mrs. Leighton must have much to hear from
Gallia. Nothing surprised her more than Miss Hamesthwaite's simple
request that she would come and see her in Grosvenor Place."I shall be so very pleased to," Margaret had said cordially; and
"You will find that the very sweetest piece of china in London,"
Mrs. Leighton had remarked when the door closed on her pretty
visitor."I thought it would be interesting to inspect a real girl," Gallia said tranquilly; "they are so very
rare."And indeed a tropical butterfly couldn't have seemed a less
familiar thing to her than did Margaret."And now, darling, tell me all about dearest Julia."Mrs. Leighton had risen, and as she spoke she pressed her niece's
firm shoulders tremulously, and sat down close to her and took her
hand."Ah, my love, my love!" she sighed.Gallia had known this interview was before her, and had been
bracing herself for it for a long time. Only the knowledge that Aunt
Celia had loved her mother, and particularly the knowledge that her
mother had loved Aunt Celia, had enabled her to bear it as she did;
but she marvelled at the awful sort of hardness in her voice and in
her heart as she detailed the history of those weeks.She thought afterwards that it was then that she had noticed the
change in her that was afterwards so clearly marked; a change that
altered her whole manner and character, no less than it altered her
face and her dress. Mrs. Leighton also noticed this change, and was
more assured than ever of the misfortune Lady
Hamesthwaite's death had been to the lonely girl. It was not that
Gallia's face was older, but it had altered. Her idle, out-of-door
mountain life had made her more beautifully healthy than usual, and
her eye, instead of seeming clouded by the impossible problems she had
a taste for considering, had the far outward look of a person who had
thought through something, who had found foothold beyond. I think it
was Herbert Spencer who considered that a thinker should regard each
solution reached, not as solid ground, but as a raft that would bear
him for a time. Gallia, having swum strongly in fell currents, had
climbed to a new raft.An hour later, when most of the sorrowful particulars had been
given, and silences were becoming frequent in the room, the butler
made his appearance, and announced that Mr. Gurdon was below, and had
inquired if Mrs. Leighton would receive him."Of course, dear, I have been seeing nobody," said the old lady pathetically to her
niece. "Yes, Linton, say to Mr. Gurdon that I shall be glad if he will
wait a little in the library.""I am just going, Aunt Celia; I think I will say good-bye at
once. You will come and see me soon, will you not?"Noticing this leave-taking, Linton waited by the door to show out
Miss Hamesthwaite; and thus it was that Gurdon, sufficiently familiar
in the house to put aside some of the formalities, and standing
therefore half in and half outside the library door, examining an
amazing Moorish portière that had been a present from Lady
Hamesthwaite to her stepsister, saw a lady come downstairs of whose
face and figure he caught just one astonishing glimpse. Gallia never
noticed him at all--she was looking straight in front of her, and
waiting while the butler looked for her carriage."What a magnificent girl!" said Gurdon to himself, as he followed a
footman to the drawing-room.CHAPTER XVIONE side of Edwards Square is formed by the backs and belongings of
houses fronting the Kensington High Street, the other two sides by
very nice small houses looking into Edwards Square garden, the fourth
side by a row of interesting buildings which were originally stables,
and in some cases are so still, but of which many have been
appropriated to other and more amusing purposes. They are buildings
which differ fundamentally from the average of all London buildings in
that they have a character; this character is of the most romantic and
picturesque kind--it is to have no character. You look at them as you
pass by,--or at least you would look at them if you did pass by,--and
feel that anything might happen in them--that they might be anything;
you know that Gaboriau would have made thousands of francs out of any
one of them; you wonder how they have escaped F. W. Robinson. As a
matter of strict fact, you never do pass by Edwards Square--nobody ever does. There is no reason to enter its
quiet and very agreeable precincts unless you live there--unless your
destination be your own front door, on one side of the Square or the
other.The few people, other than the residents, who have ever come there
have done so because they have been lost, deservedly, in a vain
attempt to find that non-existent thoroughfare between South
Kensington and Kensington High Street. It was when once so lost that
Gurdon came there. He entered the Square from the South Kensington
side, and looked about him in his quick, clear-headed way. On the wide
side of him stretched forward the row of quiet houses; on the other,
in a horizontal direction, the row of buildings which were once
stables. He worked upon the paving-stone with the ferule of his
umbrella in a moment of thought. Then he turned upon his left, walked
down past the buildings, stopped for a moment to copy the address on a
notice-board above one of them, turned back upon his tracks, and was
in the High Street in two minutes.The building that bore that notice of "To let" lay about the middle
of the row. It had a coach-house door painted green; a harness-room
door in the same colour, and above this second door a window, which had obviously replaced the flap-door to
a hayloft. There was also a good skylight, which showed signs of
having been improved. In a word, a stable made into a studio.On an evening when the blackened trees and shrubs were heartening
up in a pale green manner inside the garden railings; when sparrows
were chirping in the trees in a way to suggest only the sharpening of
dozens of slate-pencils, combined with the hearthstoning of dozens of
steps, there mixed with these indications of a metropolitan spring
evening, the cricket-note of a guitar, that seemed to be played in a
purposely subdued manner by a very skilful hand. In chorus with the
guitar, two siskins in a cage beside the coach-house door woke up and
began in an irresponsible way a sort of tune to which they were
unaccustomed. Whether the guitar, or a shaft of late sunlight that
invaded the cage, had aroused them, one could not know; but soon the
guitar ceased, the door opened, and a girl came out and reached up for
the cage, and bore the siskins, in a futile flutter, to the room
within.Inside, the harness-room wore the air of a hall or anteroom, and a
curtain crossed the approach to the coach-house or studio, which was a long, narrow apartment, matchboarded and
painted green, and could not have made a single brougham feel more at
home than the young woman and the tea-kettle and the sofa looked.The wooden platform on castors, which had supported a model in a
chair many times, was covered with a mattress and some rugs and
cushions, and made an odd sort of lounge, which travelled slightly
when one sank upon it.Hereon the girl flung herself, and picked up the guitar angrily,
like a person who, although tired of its companionship, had nothing
else to talk with.The guitar spoke, in response to her sweeps and clutches upon its
strings, and her ill-trained but effective little voice scraped out
the phrases of a gipsy song. In between the verses, which were
innumerable, the guitar stormed, sobbed, or twittered, as demanded by
its wilful friend, with a sympathy which, though mechanical, seemed
spontaneous and personal to itself.Cara Lemuel's playing was as unlike that of the myriad young women
who play the guitar "a little" as any playing could well be. Her
mother had been a Spanish gipsy before she became a model, and long
before the days of which she had any memory, the girl had carried the shabbiest of tambourines among the cafe
tables in shabby parts of Seville.The two siskins, now hung on a nail upon the inside of the big
coach-house door (which was no longer made to open) shrugged their
wings as they listened, and put away their bills safely for the night
amid a plumage of which at this evening hour they made the very
most. Tiring at last of her playing, the guitar was laid aside, and
Cara slept as easily and simply as she had often slept before on the
sofas of other studios in Paris. When Gurdon came in some hours later,
she was just awaking, and her awaking was as easy and smiling as her
sleep. Irritation marks the waking of most western-bred beings; smiles
dawned slowly upon the features of the southern Cara."Don't move, little woman, you look so pretty," Gurdon said, as he
threw his bag into a corner. "I've come for a couple of hours only,
and have to dress and be at the other end of London by half-past
eleven. Any coffee?"She pointed lazily to a covered pot upon the stove, and he found
himself a cup upon a shelf and sat down beside her. She did not talk
much, but she smiled a great deal, and was caressing in a very
attractive manner, and her black-brown hair, which was of a locky
cha-racter, heavy, full of form, and making
effective masses no matter how arranged, fell against his check as she
kissed him, and had a spicy scent about it which was delicious and a
little intoxicating."I have a new song for you," she said; "at least I have remembered
it bit by bit, and I expect my mother used to sing it. What a pity you
don't know Spanish!""You shall teach me Spanish. I learn languages pretty easily, and
it will be a good thing for me to know a little Spanish." Gurdon's
mind, characteristically, saw the proposition at once in the light of
its possible advantage to himself."Well, now, I'll tell you. This is the song of a gipsy girl who
loves a man not of her own people, and she is saying all the time, in
each verse, how he is so white and so fair and that sort of thing, and
the chorus always is--oh, how would it be in English? It won't sound a
bit the same, but she always sings--
'So in the chestnut avenue,All the day I wander, wander;This side of the hill pathThe brown chestnuts grow;And white magnolia blossoms shineIn the dark gardens down below.'
Oh, I've made a rhyme, haven't I? Well, now,
I'll sing it to you. First, it's about the lover, all very quiet like
this."She bent over the guitar and picked a mournful prelude from the
strings; then her voice, dramatic in spite of, or perhaps because of,
its want of training, rose in the recitative of the verse part. Gurdon
listened; he was passionately fond of music, or rather of singing, and
he looked as much as he listened. Cara's small curved brown fingers,
thin and taper, with the articulations appearing whitish through the
skin, skipped nimble above the strings, and she bent lower over the
neck of the instrument, her hair falling in free locks from her head;
but for the chorus head and hair were jerked backwards, the guitar was
clutched passionately against her body, and the sadness of the weird
gipsy plaint rang out in a very agony of descriptive music."Sing that bit that begins 'Yo soy la castaña marrón'
again," cried Gurdon; "that's the bit I like!""Ah, that's 'I, the brown chestnut,'" Cara said, smiling with
immense fascination in his face. Then she shot from her low seat and
stood a dozen feet away, in the attitude so peculiar to Spanish women,
the shoulders and head thrown far back, one foot advanced, her guitar
seeming to strain upon the troubadour ribbon
that passed round her right shoulder. Thus she sang the chorus with a
stormy melancholy; at the end, sweeping the guitar behind her back,
where her left hand held it head downwards, she stepped the opening
movements of one of those Spanish dances, so haughty, so restrained,
so solemn, that they seem to double the burning of the fire
beneath.She was below the medium height, but with the national port of head
and shoulders, she seemed a queen in stature, and the effect was
electric when a few swift paces brought her with a laugh to Gurdon's
feet. Neither of these two loved the other, but passion was a religion
with the half-Spanish creature, and religion will soon become a
habit. To toy dramatically and convincingly with the simulacra of
strong feeling is just as successful, is perhaps more successful, a
means of arousing passion in another, and Gurdon found an unnatural
abandon made easy to him by the wiles and magic
of the girl's walk, or song, or strange dance. He took the guitar from
her neck, and caught her in his arms and feasted upon her
face.CHAPTER XVIITHE friendship which grew up between Margaret Essex and Gallia was
wholly of Miss Hamesthwaite's making; from the first and to the last
she frightened the picturesque Margaret considerably. Margaret would
have confessed to an interest in her conversation, would have admitted
volubly a deep admiration of her manner, mind, and appearance, but
would have been conscious all the time of the courage of a
tortoise-shell guinea-pig when she found herself in her friend's
society. The turn in the Park which they were now taking, Margaret
having lunched--timidly and tête-à-tête--in
Grosvenor Place, was entirely Gallia's idea, and had been undertaken
with the excuse of seeing Miss Essex on her homeward way; but the
unlooked-for apparition of Gertrude Janion was an accident, and the
sort of accident that Margaret deplored.As the three walked along together, they presented the oddest
contrast: Gallia, in the middle, was as severe
as black of the plainest cut could make her; Margaret, on her left,
was draped rather than clothed in Madonna blue, softened with lace the
colour of old stucco, and wore a hat with wide black eaves arching
over her palely brilliant hair, the whole deftly combined to create
the air of inevitability that a really becoming gown will ever
present.Beside these two Miss Janion felt happy that she knew how to dress,
and was at that moment, as at every moment of her public appearance,
dressed to perfection. To be fashionably clad is given to many women,
and often a perfectly original personality is concealed by clothes
which are original only within the strictest limits; it is unusual to
issue from the hands of Felix or of Worth in a garment which, besides
taking rank as their latest and most wonderful creation, has also the
added merit of describing exactly its wearer's mental plane. The
Janion girl was in herself exactly what her clothes looked; as it
happened, neither Worth nor Felix had the credit of her, though she
would have disgraced neither. It was her proud boast that she dressed
on £250 a year, "for everything, my dear girl," and she could
certainly, as regards "smartness," have cut out women with three times
that sum at disposal.She was a small, very neatly built person; nothing was exaggerated
about her figure. Nature had been friendly towards her, and even
seemed to know her aspirations from the beginning, and to sympathise
with them; had dowered her with a waist that needed wonderfully little
compression, and bore that little remarkably well; had given her a
beautifully modelled throat, bust, and arms: the throat and arms she
left alone and was glad of; the bust she enhanced artificially, in
obedience to the prevailing notion that a young woman shall not await
nature's own development.With regard to features, she had nothing to complain of; she was
not really pretty, and so the effect of prettiness which she never
failed to make was all the more meritorious. The acute angle of her
jaw, which made her face, broad at the brows, come off to a very
sprightly point, was much in her favour; so were her eyebrows, which
had a double curve in that the sharp, closely feathered ends of them
turned upwards again. Certainly her eyebrows were most piquant. As to
complexion, she would tell you frankly that she had always found the
"Norwich man" best of anyone; you could rely on his things, and they
were not so madly expensive as some of the other people's."He doesn't sell that Sauce Béchamel sort of stuff for
evening wear, and then swear that it's not a paint, only a 'cream,' as
most of the other people do," she would exclaim, in her very high,
shrill little voice.Perfect frankness about these various aids to beauty was Miss
Janion's line.To Gallia, such a woman was what the discovery of the ass-like
horse of the Central Asian plains was to Przevalsky: she listened
eagerly, greedily, with her face all lighted up, to the stream of
chatter about laces and people and powder, and silk-covered hair-pins,
and the last book, and Mrs. Tree's dresses in the last play, and the
new system of paying a yearly sum to a milliner and taking your hats
on hire by the week or fortnight, and other kindred topics, very
brilliantly touched on. Margaret, her grey eyes shining, her face
beneath the delicate, sunbeamy colour which was its most usual
surface, listened in horror, wondering vaguely what on earth Miss
Hamesthwaite would think, and if she would take Gertrude to be a type
of all her companions.So engrossed were the three, that in the crowd they missed seeing
two well-known faces; a rare thing for the Janion girl, who had the
fashionable trick to a nicety, of seeing and
not seeing everybody at her own expedient whim."Hullo! A queer team for a troika!" exclaimed Lauriston, who had
just joined Gurdon and Dark Essex, when his eyeglass focussed the
backs of the three girls.Gurdon was on horseback (he rode every day while he was in London,
because all the men who succeeded in climbing into big places in the
Services rode every day while they were in London, and were in the
habit of saying they could never have lived without it). He looked
round quickly."Your sister, Essex, and I believe--""Miss Hamesthwaite in the middle," said Lauriston glibly, "and the
Janionette on the off. Think I'll catch up with them and hear how they
are getting on. I've often wanted to know Miss Hamesthwaite, and the
little girl will introduce me.""Should we all move down?" Gurdon inquired tentatively."I shall reserve the pleasure for another occasion," Essex said,
with his stone smile.Gurdon had by this time thought that more suitable surroundings
might be found for his introduction to Lord Hamesthwaite's daughter;
so Lauriston strolled off alone, and, having
become exceedingly short-sighted, owing to his lifelong habit of
insisting that he was so, failed to discover the trio, and brought up
ignominiously beside a very brilliantly-painted and high-hung
barouche, the occupant of which would have been (so she always
declared) a marchioness in actual fact, if divorce were on a sensible
basis in this foolish old country."Your sister is a great friend of Miss Hamesthwaite's?" Gurdon
said, looking down very keenly upon, as it happened, the dazzling disc
of Essex's silk hat."They meet pretty frequently, I believe; but I fail to apprehend
why either of them should take up Miss Janion.""I have met Miss Janion, I fancy, at a ball.""A subscription ball.""I believe it was.""It certainly would be.""Is a subscription ball to be made a cause of reproach in your
exclusive mind?" Mark asked lightly."Far from it. I have, all unknown to her, a deep and lasting
admiration for Miss Janion. She is the most unaffected woman I know,
save one. She is incurably vulgar, she is shrewd enough to know it,
and yet I have never found her making the
least attempt to disguise it. She doesn't pose. My sister does pose a
very little, and it comes near to spoiling her. She thinks she cares
for art, but that will pass off quite satisfactorily when she
marries.""You are against a woman having an interest, then?""My dear Gurdon, I don't believe I have even got an opinion about
women. A quiet man doesn't need to have, now-a-days. Women have taken
men's opinions of them for granted, and there is nothing they seem to
quote with more freedom. But I know," he yawned, quite genuinely, "I'm
on the safe side. I'm 'against' nothing. If I were, it might be
against a woman having more than two interests--herself and the man
she marries.""And her children?""You will not prevent a woman having an interest in her children,
if she has been woman enough to have had an interest in herself and
her husband. And as far as my observation goes, the posing woman will
care for her children too. She can't afford not to. Maternity is a
strong pose with your platform woman. She has to be regarded as a
'thorough wife and mother,' it fills the cheap seats so. Yes, women
have a lot of courage. But I don't believe the woman breathes, who, if she didn't care for her children,
would have the courage to say so. Which brings us back to Miss Janion,
who never poses.""If my memory of Miss Janion is correct, she wore a very low dress
at the ball; I remember this because she asked me if I thought it too
low, and I was a good deal embarrassed."Essex laughed; just a couple of bars of deep, rich-noted laughter,
then he drooped his head, leaned upon the railings, and went on making
a little mound of sand, and burying a small tuft of grass with his
foot."But, as I was going to say, she is nothing like so attractive a
woman as your sister."Essex raised his eyes with a serious expression in them. It was as
though he had half expected Gurdon to discuss his sister in the same
tone they had used concerning Miss Janion, but Gurdon had no such
idea, and Essex, reassured, spoke in the way and with the conviction
he always showed when he mentioned his sister."She is the only type of woman left us, capable of attracting in
the romantic way," he said thoughtfully. "This sort of subject comes
easy to me just now, because, as I think I told you before we left the
club, my publishers recommend the expansion of
that monograph of mine into a book, and I've been working upon it for
the past two months at a quiet little place I've found in Surrey. In
The Comparison of Emotion in the Human and other
Animals, most of the arguments against Darwin are drawn from an
unprejudiced consideration of the emotional capacity in women. I have
decided to recognise three kinds of attraction, although I might
reasonably decide against this division into three. Intellectual
attraction--very common now-a-days, and responsible for at least half
the marriages in middle-class society, where marriage still remains
and will remain a matter of attraction. Physical
attraction--accountable for all the other marriages in the world (not
counting those of position, interest, and so on, which don't concern
me, as they are marriages of no attraction)--accountable for all the
others, Gurdon, except a small number still founded on romantic
attraction. My sister Margaret is a type of the sort of woman who
makes that last form of marriage possible. To be romantically
attractive, a woman has got to be innately good (I am using such words
in the old-fashioned sense, you understand) and innately beautiful;
but beyond this, as we have hounded the old timidity and simplicity
and insipidity and such other idities from our
doors, she must be semi-talented and semi-independent. There is a rage
for talent and independence now-a-days; a girl can't have the
commonest sort of success, poor thing, unless, forsooth, she does
something independent!""I agree with every word you say of your sister.""It's a pity she happens to be my sister, for the sake of argument,
but I refer to her merely because she is a picture, an etching of the
type--a silver-point.""She is indeed; but I was going to say that I think her clever. Her
music, her painting, are ever and ever so far above the amateur
average, you must admit?""Oh, I do; but so is every other girl's, you know.""Well, I don't know. Miss Janion now, I'm sure, if she plays, it's
in just the usual way.""Doesn't play a note, doesn't paint a stroke. You don't appreciate
Gertrude. Her talent is to be better dressed than any one else, and
she always is, in my judgment.""I am becoming anxious to know more of this shining example of the
modern girl.""Then you had better hasten forward, and if they haven't had enough
of it, you'll meet them coming up. I'm going
to the Natural History Museum to talk to an old friend who has written
to me. Will you dine with me to-morrow? A note in the morning will
do. I'm only in town till Saturday.""Devonshire again?""No, Surrey. An inn three hundred years old; everything three
hundred years old except the cat and the bitter ale.""Well, I envy you." Mark gathered up his reins."You don't now, but if you were seedy, you would yearn for a week
in my village."CHAPTER XVIII"Oh dear, I believe I want my tea!" exclaimed Miss Janion, with the
same manner, and certainly in the same key, that a green paroquet
would have made a similar remark. The three oddly assorted companions
had chosen three isolated chairs, which had the merit of being
somewhat private, and yet commanding a fair view of the
drive. "There's nothing I look forward to with the same yearning
anticipation as tea. I begin about three o'clock; I tell myself how
delicious tea is going to be; at four, I console myself by thinking
that I can ring for it a little early, and that will be a quarter to
five. I don't think there is anything that excites me more than the
thought of tea; and how beastly it always is when it comes!""And men think we get so much out of it!" Gallia said drily, having
greatly appreciated Miss Janion's extravagant little speech."It's men who, by chaffing women about tea-drinking, have got up the idea of tea being such a
godsend. There's a conspiracy among men to make women stick to tea and
think they like it. Hear men sighing, 'Ah, I wish I dare,' when they
steadily refuse it day after day. Catch them taking any!""I'm always trying new teas, and new ways of making tea," put in
Margaret. "I think I sometimes enjoy it when it's very weak and has a
great deal of cream and sugar in it.""Depend upon it, you only think so," laughed Gallia."It's a woman's bitterest disappointment--tea and men," Gertrude
wound up sagely."I'm not a bit disappointed in men--on the whole," Margaret
declared."Nor am I," from Gallia; "I think men are quite good enough.""Good? you don't mean to say you think men good?""I don't think I mean that sort of good," with a smile to
Gertrude. "But they are good-looking enough, and strong enough, and
healthy enough. They compare favourably with women in these
respects."Margaret had her eye fastened on Gallia's face."One has two views of men, I think: one of men in relation to the
world,--the world of war and letters and
statesmanship and trade, and so on,--and one has to admire them there;
the other, of men in relation to oneself, and there it seems to me
most important that they should be well-grown and healthy and
sound--in wind, limb, and temper." She ended up with a little
laugh. Margaret was conscious of not understanding her, but Gertrude,
being a person of absolutely no insight, replied glibly--"I like men to be amusing and jolly, and of course as good-looking
as possible. I don't think I mind much if they are what Miss
Hamesthwaite calls sound.""But you would if you were going to marry them.""I don't know. But, any way, one can't marry them all.""But there are other women--""They've got to look out for themselves. And now that so many have
taken up nursing, it can't be quite the slavery it used to be to have
an invalid husband." Miss Janion was quite unaware of being on the
wrong track. "I do think life--I mean domestic life--is beautifully
easy now; one needn't do a thing oneself, one can get someone in! At
home we are always getting people in. Papa has his masseur every day;
mamma has her nursemaid--I mean maid-nurse;
Alfred has his electric shock person and galvaniser--he can't raise a
slipper before eleven, when this person comes, and afterwards he's
awfully larky until it wears off. Ella Lane, who lives next door,
shares my hair man, who comes in. We get in the butler; we get in a
woman--I think she's a lady--to do the flowers for parties. One
needn't really have any trouble now-a-days, or do anything; one can
always get someone in.""It's the tendency to-day. In the next century we shall have
organised things more perfectly, and shall be able to get even more
people in, in other capacities.""Well, hasn't there been a fuss lately about getting all the
cooking in?" asked Margaret. "I'm sure a central depôt for that
would be a great blessing.""It would indeed. We may live to see that, but we shan't live to
see the real advance; which will be the getting in of fathers and
mothers, or rather husbands and wives to be fathers and mothers."Gertrude shrieked; Margaret was silent and startled."I was speaking quite seriously; and if you think, you will see
that such a scheme would be eminently rational. The outcome of the
present health movement must lead that
way. People will see the folly of curing all sorts of ailments that
should not have been created, and then they will start at the right
end, they will make better people. How can we wonder that only one
person in ten is handsome and well made, when you reflect that they
were most likely haps of hazards, that they were unintended, the
off-spring of people quite unfitted to have children at all? There are
people fitted, for instance, to be mothers, which every woman isn't;
there are women fitted to bring up children, who may not be
mothers. Think of this: a man may love a woman and marry her; they may
be devoted to each other, and long for a child to bring up and to
love; but the woman may be too delicate to run the risk. What are they
to do? What would be the reasonable thing to do? Sacrifice the poor
woman for the sake of a weakly baby? No, of course not, but get in a
mother!"A moment's silence fell upon the three. Their brains were a little
burdened, and no wonder, by this astounding piece of social
reform."But why not adopt a child?" ventured Margaret at length."But it wouldn't belong to either of them, and they couldn't tell
in what odious surround-ings it had been
born. Surely much more reasonable to get in a mother?"A light dawned upon Miss Janion, and she began, "But this strange
woman"--"She wouldn't be a strange woman; she would be a splendid,
beautiful, healthy, accredited woman, and probably physically very
attractive. The man's sentiment, if he had any, would be greatly in
her favour; men have wonderfully little sentiment, as their whole way
of life shows, in a matter of that kind. He would have been able to
indulge his very highest feeling in the choice of his wife. It would
make enormously in favour of morality.""Do you think it would?" said Margaret."Surely; by making in favour of health, by making in favour of
justice, by lifting a burden from the shoulders of the weak and
placing it on the shoulders of the strong.""And the--the poor journeyman mother--would she like giving up her
child?" the gentle Margaret asked again."It wouldn't be her child only, it would be his child, by
agreement"--"Now, I wonder, if one was married, whether one would like another
woman supplying the baby element in the family?""If one were not strong enough to supply it oneself, Miss Janion, surely? And don't you see that if this
plan were adopted, there would be far fewer delicate men and women in
the world? The plan would be worked from both sides equally, and the
strong, finely-bred children growing up happily, well distributed over
the homes of the country, instead of there being eight in one and none
in another, as is the case just now, these children would have a much
better chance. People are not above 'getting in' a wet-nurse
now-a-days, and in the most casual fashion; it seems to me this is
only a step farther."Again a silence,--on Margaret's part a sunset-coloured silence; on
Gertrude's a silence pointed by twitching lips and eyebrows; on
Gallia's, the silence of a shrewd and hopeful saint."It sounds like treating the world as a sort of farm, and men and
women merely as animals," said Margaret, with some distress."Precisely my idea," said Miss Hamesthwaite calmly. "At present
half the world is not as well treated as the best class of animals,
and there isn't a political economist living who wouldn't say that if
the increase of the lower classes could be taken out of their own
hands and supervised on scientific lines, crime as well as a number of
diseases would be stamped out. If it could
only be done--if it could only be done!" Gallia's clear, earnest face,
with the thin, dark line deep between her eyebrows, looked straight in
front of her, and that was how Gurdon saw her, and again thought her
magnificent, as he rode by, about thirty paces away."And what would you do with people like that in your world?" said
Miss Janion, pointing to the brilliant barouche which was turning
opposite them in order to take its beautiful occupant to the corner in
time to see the Duchess."Who is it?" inquired Gallia innocently.Miss Janion informed her with some ceremony. "I really know her
well by sight," she added, "because we both get our hair at the same
shop--there is really no one like Hugo for hair-pin fringes.""I have no quarrel with her," Gallia replied, with a certain bitter
quiet."Vile creature!" sputtered the Janion girl.Gallia looked shocked, and rose from her seat."I hope you don't mean that," she said; "you have the greatest
possible reason to be grateful to her whole class and to pity them. I
must go home now, I think." She had looked at the sky and the trees'
shadows, and then compared their time with her
small black-enamelled watch."You should write about your ideas," said Margaret, smiling up at
her from under the black-eaved hat.Gallia shook her head briskly."One would only be grouped with all the other women who are said to
be leading the 'Sexual Revolt,' and that would do the ideas harm, for
no one would take them seriously.""But so much attention is paid to what women write now."Gallia smiled drily, and swept her eyes over the Park before
bringing them to Margaret's face; then, taking her hand at the same
moment, she said--"That's just it! What they say makes so much noise that nobody
hears properly what it is. A woman who really feels these things
shouldn't write about them now, until what they call the boom of women
is over.""But couldn't she write under a man's name?""Men don't think these things, you see.""No men?""I don't think any man.""But how is that?""Because"--Gallia smiled a little, and then her face grew wistful as she returned her answer, unspoken, to
her own mind. "Good-bye, Margaret. Don't dislike me on account of this
crusade against the copy-book. Good-bye, Miss Janion.""It's been an awfully jolly afternoon," remarked that sprightly
young woman, as she and Margaret stood to watch the quiet figure in
black go up the path. "She is amusing," she added heartily."She doesn't mean to be.""People so seldom mean to be, and so often are.""But she's perfectly serious in all she says and even more serious
in the things she thinks and doesn't say.""Really, now? Do you think she can have been jilted or had a
disappointment? It sounds like it, doesn't it?"CHAPTER XIXGALLIA'S life at this time was a very lonely one, and that, she
would say to anyone who commiserated her, was its very best
feature. She liked to be alone, at least she thought, like many other
young people of her temper, that she liked it; but she was happier and
better in every way when she was not alone, and her father, a man of
small insight in domestic matters, but occasionally right in his
judgments for all that, decided that she should not moon about the
country home in Surrey for six weeks all by herself, but should
persuade "one of her young friends" (Lord Hamesthwaite was perfectly
unaware that she had none--he believed that every girl had a number of
young friends) to go down and spend the time with her."Very well," Gallia had said, and she determined to see if
Mrs. Essex and Margaret would come."Quietly, of course," Lord Hamesthwaite had added, with a sigh. "No
party. Quite quietly. And I have asked
Shillinglee and Oswald--I think you have met Oswald? We are going to
have a week's work upon the Bill. Later on Denyer will join me.""Has Mr. Denyer left Africa, then?""My dear child, you surely remember the whole business of Denyer's
leaving the Cape not six weeks ago? He is in the Auvergne at present
for his health, but by the end of July he will be in England."Gallia nodded; she took no interest in the South African business
and Mr. Denyer, but it was impossible to take up a paper without
coming upon a mention of her father's name and the name of Denyer in
connection with the great question.These few words were spoken at the beginning of the hot fortnight
in June. There always is a hot fortnight every June in London, and it
was just beginning about the time that Lord Hamesthwaite made known
his summer plans to his daughter.What a quiet summer it was going to be! how different from the
summers Gallia had always run away from in her mother's lifetime, when
a large political party was gathered in the breakfast-rooms every
morning, and important talks--talks which were going to colour the Parliamentary business of the day--went forward
among the old-fashioned flower-beds; then the quiet that fell when a
midday train had borne all the political tools and implements to the
big London workshops. On Wednesday nights, the immense dinner-parties
at which Gallia had sometimes been present; parties at which
unexpected political constellations scintillated, and the working-man
member sat down with the nursing peer, and a satirical writer, some
Tory leopard, lay down with the Radical kid.It all seemed very far away now, and now that it seemed so far
away, Gallia wondered if she would not have done better to be in the
midst of it. She could be brilliant in society if the mood was upon
her; but in those days she had been so serious, because so young, that
the men who held the country's destiny in their hand had appeared too
frivolous for her."They never seemed to be interested in real things," Gallia
explained to her aunt when she dropped in upon her to detail her
father's plans, and they got talking about past times together. "All
they said and all they thought seemed so far away from real things as
they really are. It seems to me, that if you live the perfectly
engineered life of public men,--put down by a brougham in time to be
picked up by a Pullman, turned out of a
Pullman into a waggonette or a dog-cart; just time to dress for
dinner; just time to sleep before being called and dressed and
breakfasted; just time for a few words, quite lightly and unseriously
spoken, and usually taking the form of a chaffing comment upon an
opponent, or a good story of a mistake in one of the Offices, or an
amusing misunderstanding at one of the Embassies; then the waggonette
and Pullman and brougham again, and the House for a few hours,--what
leisure have they to look at real things as they really are? In the
train men look at the afternoon papers--or they read one of a mass of
pamphlets from inside an elastic band. I don't see,--unless they
remember things they saw when they were boys and loitered about and
birds-nested,--I don't see how they are to know about any of the
things that really are.""To hear these wild sentiments from your father's daughter!" cried
the vivacious old lady in reply. "Why, child, there is no particular
occasion to know about things as they really are. Men in your father's
position have no time for that, and it wouldn't advantage them the
least bit if they had. They know most accurately, I am sure, about
things as they are reported to be. They read and get up reports; and
when you would have them looking out of
railway carriage windows across flying fields--""Well, they might see something.""What in the world could they see? A few labourers going home,
perhaps.""Or a few wood-pigeons," interjected Gallia softly. Then, "But
surely laws are made to make things better than they are," she went
on, "and if they don't ever"--"My dear child, you are really too old to talk like that--in your
position too!""Dear Aunt Celia, you must forgive me. You know I am very, very
backward in all such things, having never paid them the least
attention; but I think I am going to be more interested in papa's work
now.""I hope you will sympathise with it, dear," said Mrs. Leighton
gravely. "It might be as well not to go so far as to be interested in
it;--that is a term that seems to represent so unpleasant an attitude
now-a-days;--but to sympathise with it would be very graceful, dear,
very graceful indeed, and very gratifying to your father, I am
sure."Gallia smiled in her wistful manner, and passed to another
subject."When will you come down to the Hall, Aunt Celia?""You really want to have me, dear? So good of you both! Well, I
shall be a month at Aix, and--shall we say the early part of
August?""Any time that suits you will do perfectly, of course. Papa
mentioned this morning that Lord Shillinglee was coming down for a
week--perhaps Mr. Oswald too, on political business.""Have you ever thought, my dear Gallia, of marrying Lord
Shillinglee?""Certainly I have not.""Ah! because in some ways it might suit very well."Gallia laughed. "I don't know whom it would suit in any way," she
said; and added quickly, in order to change the subject, for on
marriage Aunt Celia was dangerous, "And Mr. Denyer is expected.""At the Hall? You don't say so? It is always so difficult to get
any information about public business. I never think of asking your
father, unless I am prepared to pretend that I know already; and
Mr. Gurdon persists in saying that he knows no more than the pigeons
in the courtyard. But Denyer has certainly played a great part
recently, and I want very much to see the man himself."Mrs. Leighton was referring to what was at that time "the South
African question"; it does not in the least
matter which South African question. The Government had, as usual,
quite scandalised one-half of the public either by its action or its
inaction in the matter. Lord Hamesthwaite had been severely
criticised, publicly and privately; then something had been taken back
and something else explained away, and a great deal more ignored, and
the whole matter was forgotten save by the people who were leisurely
engaged in compiling a Blue Book to be published in a few years' time;
a Blue Book which might be used in Board Schools as a model of the
complete letter-writer."But I often feel," went on Mrs. Leighton, "that Mark Gurdon--who
has been in Africa and has his eyes so wide open--could tell me a
great deal, but he will only dilate upon the 'Karroo.'" The door
opened at this moment, and Gurdon himself almost anticipated the
announcement of his name."So magnetically sympathetic of you to come in just now! your name
was upon my lips," said Mrs. Leighton, as they shook hands. "Let me
present you to my niece, Miss Hamesthwaite. Dear Gallia, Mr. Mark
Gurdon, to whom I have become quite attached!" This was made very
playful and complimentary, and something in the old lady's manner put
Mark at his very best. The old lady's easy and
genial artificiality acted like a sun upon persons who possessed the
social art; they behaved delightfully in her rooms, and went away
happy because successful. As for herself, it was her habit to remark
that she was entirely satisfied with the manners of the present day,
about which she heard so much complaint. There was all the courtesy
that one could wish, if one merely gave it an opportunity to come
out.Gallia watched Mark carefully as he spoke to her aunt. She seemed
to have heard of him often, considering that he was an unimportant
person as yet; his name had appeared on the lists her mother had
sometimes sent her of guests at a reception; his name was on her
visiting list, and she would have to ask him to parties herself in the
future. She listened, and admired his speaking voice, it was so much
lower and rounder than the usual modern man's. "I mistrust falsetto
voices; they mean weakness, when they don't mean worse," she had said
to herself in the days when she had been accustomed to sum up
everything with great promptitude; the days before she was
three-and-twenty.His voice was not the only good thing about Mark to strike a girl's
fancy; there was a firmness and a faint pinkness about his face
which did not suggest a London life in any
way, and yet would have been too delicate for a country-man. His eyes
were bright and clear--those curious ringed eyes of grey and hazel;
his teeth were perfect; not too small, and very white. Gallia saw all
these things rather as a dealer might notice the points in a horse
than as a lady might perceive a young man's claims to
handsomeness."And you are so good as to think my moment has come?" he was
saying, smilingly, to Mrs. Leighton, and Gallia watched thoughtfully
all the time."Your moment for what?" she suddenly inquired, and her
uncompromising eyes fixed themselves upon him when he turned to
her."My moment to emerge from the covert of mediocrity into the open
of--what shall we say?""Predestination," said Mrs. Leighton, with a touch of solemnity
under her smile."You are going in for public life?" said Gallia, taking a quite
impersonal interest in the subject."It is the only thing for me to attempt. When a man has no
position--no private position of any kind, I mean--and no duties,
except towards himself, he had better be trying to succeed, don't you
think, in something? It employs his leisure," Mark replied
genially."Oh, if he has no interest in outside things--in agriculture, or literature, or art--I suppose he may as
well"--"Be his own field, and book, and marble, Miss Hamesthwaite? I think
he may. And it has the merit of being exceedingly difficult," he went
on, with his well-calculated indifference, and a smile that had the
curves of satire. "To some men, success and advancement is, as
Mrs. Leighton has said, predestined. But my education was not of the
right kind; it was scattered and varied.""It has made you a man of the world," Mrs. Leighton put in
briskly."But not of the world of public service," said Mark, with a shake
of his head. "I ought to have been at Eton; whereas I wasted three or
four years at a great public school, learned nothing, and had to do
without the kudos as well. At Eton a man gets
known by his Christian name, if he gets nothing else,--or, better
still, by a diminutive of his Christian name,--and it is all that he
requires. You will not believe, Miss Hamesthwaite," with a dry,
whimsical smile upon his face, "what a difference it makes to a man's
career. To have been 'Eddy'--better still, to have been 'Bobsy'--at
Eton, is a guarantee of place and progress! But," with a glance of
deprecation, "your sympathy encourages one too much. It is a long
subject, and I must pray forgiveness for
talking so much about myself." He looked at Mrs. Leighton, but turned
a glance finally on Gallia. He was not sure if she were despising him
for his determination to make something of himself; but he was
patient, and he felt that she would not despise him when she knew him
better. Mark had discovered that there is no kind of woman who will
not admire personal ambition in a man--irrespective of the object of
that ambition. Women, Mark knew, will respect a clever murderer if he
shows sufficient dexterity. Her next remark, therefore, surprised him,
simply spoken though it was."The desire to 'get on,' as it is called, is something I have never
been able to comprehend," she said. Then she turned to her aunt: "I
have forgotten to say till now that papa is coming to dinner to-night,
if you are not engaged.""That is very charming of him. I quite wondered when we were to
meet again, as I go to Aix on Thursday. Are you coming too, dear?
Do. I will make Mr. Gurdon stay to entertain you, and we can all go on
to Holland House together. Yes?""Thank you, Aunt Celia, but I hadn't intended going to Holland
House." Gurdon had murmured that he would be delighted."My dear child, we must have you go about a very little. It is time now that you appeared in some
places. You can be quiet without being immured."Gallia apparently gave in."Then I will go and tell papa: he is at the House of Lords--I may
just catch him."Gurdon thought the little movement of au
revoir that she made, and her slow step to the door he was
holding, very beautiful in their way. He was quite satisfied to have
met her at last. She was driven to Westminster, and sent in a tiny
note with the evening plans in it; then with an idle whim she alighted
at Dean's Yard and sent her carriage to wait beside her father's.She liked this old, strange part of London, so unlike London as it
is; she liked to wander in the precincts of the Abbey, and look up at
the dull red-brick houses, which seemed so comfortable, which seemed
to mean something quite apart from all the other buildings in all the
great City. It was long since she had strolled into the cloisters, and
it would be cool there this hot June day. She took her way past the
constable, to that passage, flagged and grey, where mysterious
dull-red doors have the air of closing the burrows of canons and other
cobwebby and unreal dignitaries. She turned aside into the little
court that opens on the left. Did big London know that such a place
was in existence? Surely not, or it would tear
brick from brick, cast the heavy, time-eaten, wrought ironwork of lamp
and sconce and knocker into its metropolitan dust-heap.She went on, past more red doors, down the long passage to the
small, square, grass-centred Court; the air, that had smelt of stone
and bone, and lime and time, grew fresher here; the patterns of the
tracery in the arches were touched in places by the sun; it was light
again--for the open air came there. Gallia, who had not a tear for
human ill or sorrow, turned back into the dim flagged passage with her
handkerchief to her eyes; she had suddenly grown conscious, as human
beings do at times, of the disposition to peace, beauty, dignity, and
spiritual loveliness about some places,--and it marks the contrast to
man and his fret and unrest. Some such dim sense of discord and
disparity with a beautiful world had touched Gallia--she stopped,
where a shaft of sunlight from the little Court invaded the cloister
for a few feet."Quite a Royal Academy success," said a voice behind her, and she
looked up, startled, to perceive Mr. Essex."How are you? You'd be a boon to some struggling fellow who
couldn't get in; you'd be the picture of the year."CHAPTER XXIN the moment of shaking hands, Gallia discovered a strange thing;
her feelings for Essex had undergone some change. She looked quietly
into his face, with some idea, perhaps, of seeing whether his glance
had any effect upon her; it had an effect, but the effect was
different. The thing amounted to this: she had grown, her mind had
grown, and she had arranged a scheme of life for herself, had arranged
a series of ideas, in none of which Essex could have the least
part. Essex, the Essex she had loved, could not touch her now in the
same way; the part of her that he had touched and had hurt was
atrophied. So much the better or so much the worse for Gallia."I had forgotten about you," she said, in faint surprise at
herself."Really? But why not?" he asked lightly; "though I had not quite
forgotten you."She did not take up this cue."What are you doing now?" she inquired."Just now I am looking at your hat; a moment since I was wondering
how you came here. You can't have been calling on an old college
friend?""For one thing, I have no old college friend to call on. If you
know men who live here, can you tell me if this environment affects
them in any way? I should change my whole mind if I lived here."Essex looked at her whimsically."Am Ito understand that, not having lived here, you have not
changed your mind, and that"--She interrupted him, again with the same half curious, half
surprised, but very quiet expression."You need not go so far out of your way to understand or
misunderstand me. Come here and sit down for a moment--I want to see
how you make me feel.""I can give you a quarter of an hour," he answered, after a glance
at his watch."I sha'n't rob you of all that. Where were you last December?"December?--I was in Oxford.""I was in Algiers with my mother, and she died at the end of the
month. That was when I last thought of you seriously. Then--how odd it seems!--I would have liked so much to see
you.""Why didn't you telegraph?""You needn't say that sort of thing! I am quite aware that I seem a
very strange style of person to you, but, you see, to you I say
exactly what I mean; when one has once been frank at a very big
moment, it seems foolish to be terrified of the effect of little bits
of frankness in quite small moments. So I asked you where you were,
because I wondered if I came into your mind at all when I was wanting
to see you so much.""So far as I can recollect, not less or more than usual."Gallia laughed--an unamused, unmerry sort of laugh it was."And is the world beginning to grow accustomed to the measure of
honesty you decided to mete out to it?" Essex asked pleasantly."I have, just at present, very little to do with the world. One has
not to mind being thought peculiar by a number of people; it doesn't
break the skin, that I know of.""If adverse opinion took the form of what I believe is called
'chaps,' how raw we should all be," remarked Essex. "And I suppose,"
he went on, with an inquiring air, "it is absolutely impossible to a woman of your nature to let things slide,
and be happy, and look pretty, and marry, and love, and bring up
children, and work out an amiable, not too complicated or fatiguing,
sort of destiny?""I certainly hope to bring up a child. I think it is all I do
want," Gallia answered."But the other things you cannot give way to?""I am as happy as anyone when I see cause. A sail, a good gallop, a
day's shooting, will often--in fact, will always make me happy; that's
because I'm young and strong, and my blood moves. I do not comprehend
the emotional kind of happiness to be got out of some man's admiration
of me--or whatever it is that gives it to women. Love did not seem to
me a happy thing. It attacked my pride, my independence, the whole
fabric of my character; it lowered my crest--I think you might have
seen?" She turned to smile at him."You still think that you loved me?" Essex asked, almost quite
naturally."We needn't go into it again; but whatever my feelings may be, and
however ill-regulated and untimely, I don't mistake them. I told you
that I loved you, and you know why I told you. I wish it had not been
necessary, God knows, but you made it necessary."He turned fully towards her, leaning his back into the corner of
the stone seat and holding his knee with both hands."Gallia, I am terribly sorry for you. Don't mistake me; it is
nothing to do with your having loved or not having loved me. It is
simply because you are the perfectly hapless kind of modern
woman. Your whole make-up is an egregious mistake--a complete waste of
material. There is no place in all the world for you. You are not
wanted, because you are for no use.""The earwig of humanity," she interjected, with a wistful kind of
smile."You have a beautiful face," continued Essex, speaking with unusual
entrain. "Good heavens, child, what eyes you
have! And what use are those eyes to you? They are shaped to look
things of which you have no knowledge. Your lips,--one could imagine,
if one saw a picture of you, the most emotional moments in the world
made by your lips. And you use them--good Lord!--you use them to talk
the flimsiest philosophy--the sociology of a schoolgirl's
half-holiday!"Gallia's face was quite grave, was sometimes sad, but a light was
growing at the back of her eyes, the light she had gleaned since she
saw Essex last."Physically you are so lovely," he went on in a more argumentative
key, "that one regrets you have no grain of coquetry to make play with
all these bodily gifts, even if it were cruel play. I think--do you
know this?--I think that when I made some sort of love to you at
Mrs. Leighton's, I was only misled by your appearance into thinking
you the sort of woman that you looked. You are not heartless in the
way of being cold and indifferent,--that has gone out with women
now,--you are simply incapable of an ordinary feminine feeling." Essex
had no idea that this was said with a strong note of irritation, of
resentment. "As I look at you now, you are the sort of being an
amorous-minded man, which you know I am not, would sell his whole
career to kiss. It is your outward form that looks so; it does not
suit your mind; it will give you trouble yet, for men will fall in
love with it. That will not be your fault, but the bitterness will be
all yours. For you are a misshapen woman."Gallia heard all this with very little surprise, it was not so new
to her; and though she felt the touch of scorn in Essex's voice, she
knew the scorn was not his, but was his outraged sex speaking in
him. When he applied his last epithet to her, she never
winced."But there is something more than love in the world, is there not?"
Her voice was a whisper, an anxious whisper."For women? Nothing! What else should there be?""There is motherhood." This time her voice was calm, only her eyes
looked wistfully before her.Essex looked a little more curiously at her. "A mad anomaly!" he
exclaimed."One should be beautifully made and beautiful to be a mother," she
said again, still staring wistfully before her. "Perhaps"--she seemed
to recollect him and turned towards him with a half-hearted smile and
her eyes magnified by the tears in them--"perhaps there is a bigger
object in my appearance than the satisfaction of any man's
senses.""Good heavens, what a coil! Then you have some sort of feelings?"
He was genuinely surprised."Listen," Gallia said. "At any rate one can talk to you
and--you--don't gasp. Listen. The first sort of love, the amorous
love, is over and done in me. I hadn't a seam or a big vein of it. I
think I had only a 'pocket'--and it's worked out; wouldn't pay to sink
another shaft for that. The capacity for mother-love, I think, is very large in me; I think I should make a good
mother: I can't tell you how I know, but I have been finding it out
ever since my own mother died, and I began to know it when I sat
beside her dead body. I could spend myself and lose myself in my
child, if I had one, and ask for no return; for everything else I come
first; but I shouldn't come first there. When I marry, I shall, of
course, marry without love. For that is used up. It is my misfortune,
and has come out of the crookedness of things, that I didn't love the
right person at the right time."Essex was looking at her with more of himself in his eyes than
anyone had ever seen there before. When her voice dropped, an impulse
taught him to take her hand. He took it, but she did not appear to
notice him or his action. She was just talking out her soul to the
grey stones, softened oddly by their influence, and also because she
was beside the only human being who understood her."But that has nothing to do with the rest. On the whole, it may be
an advantage. If I were to fall in love again, it might be with
someone quite unsuitable to be the father of my child--someone who
would not be fine and strong and healthy, and of a healthy stock. As
it is, when I marry,--I talk of it quite as a certainty because it is
a certainty to me, being rich and
good-looking, and the only child of my father,--I shall marry solely
with a view to the child I am going to live for." She turned towards
him again in a rising tumult of feeling, and clasped the hand he had
given her in both hers. They were trembling a little, he noticed, but
though he felt some strong emotion himself, he concealed it bravely,
for he knew it had nothing in common with the emotion she felt. "So
don't you think--don't you think that there may be a place in the
world for me after all?"At the moment she had told her love for him, she had left him cold
and normal; now, describing a greater and more spiritual feeling, she
lit strange fires. Two passers-by went down the cloister passage at
this moment, men hurrying along; oddly enough, they did not observe
the pair sitting on the seat, hand held in hand. It gave Essex a
moment to control himself, to fold his lip and batten down some flame
that would have been half articulate only. Then he kissed both her
hands with a quietness that came natural to him at this moment of
passionate feeling, he even laid them for a moment upon his breast,
then, still holding them, looked into her eyes."I am not making love to you now, Beautiful, Beautiful..." he said, very, very low; then, having told
this momentous lie for her sake, he kissed the hands once more and put
them down."I know you are not," she said simply. "You have heard, and you
know,--for you said it yourself,--I am not the sort of woman to be
made love to." Essex's lips twitched uneasily once or twice in
something that was not unlike a smile. "But I need not be cut down
like the green fig-tree on that account, for I may be of some use
after all; there must always be room in the world for a good mother of
children, and I will teach them none of the unhappy things I know when
I bring them up.""Gallia," Essex began hesitatingly, and moving a little closer to
her, "have you thought--with that odd clear head of yours--about the
thing you propose?""Motherhood? Often and often. I am very strong, and I have never
known what it is to be frightened at anything. I am not
frightened.""Not motherhood," he said, still speaking low and with his dark
eyes curiously intent upon her face. "Marriage without love."Gallia was silent a moment; then she nodded her head. "The same
answer as before," she said."Because there would be years of it; and
marriage is not"--Essex would have roared with laughter at this
stupendous phrase if he had heard it in cold blood--"is not all
mother-hood." But the strength of the whole moment was that Essex's
cold blood was hot."Other women bear the same sort of thing.""They have married for money or position, and they have reckoned on
the price all along.""Ah, but other women, who have very little
money and no position; who have often a difficulty to get a living;
women who are not married. My position will be just this much better
than theirs, that I shall be a mother." The triumph in her voice was
somehow pitiful.He shivered a little."They are not bred as you are, they haven't your feelings.""Why not? Some of them must be well bred; and just now you said I
hadn't any feelings!""I never said you had no feelings of delicacy or refinement," Essex
replied, with quick severity."It does not seem to me," she spoke cynically and coldly, "judging
merely by pathological facts such as come under everyone's notice,
that marriage can have much to do with delicacy and refinement."He shook his head."My dear, you are becoming the modern woman again, and a moment
since you were primary--and exquisite.""Well, we'll put that aside. Of course," lowering her tone and
making it hard and crisp, "I quite know it, if I were differently
made, I might dread it; but I look at it like the women who marry for
position and money--as a price. It is a pity, as I heard a girl say
the other day, that it is not an affair of 'money down'--that one
cannot write a big cheque, and be done. But these things are the
inherent disadvantages that cannot be done away with. And it leaves me
very clear in mind. To be marrying for love might bring about one's
object less satisfactorily. If I were living fifty years hence, I
should not probably have to marry at all. But our yoke is the
ignorance of our day. Dark, I have talked enough. I am going now." She
stood up. He remained seated, thinking. It was a beautiful deep
twilight in the cloister now."How is it you have talked so inwardly to me?" he asked, with a
shadow in his eyes."Because with you I have no mauvaise
honte. How should I have? Did I not take the very widest step
that afternoon in my room last year?" She seemed quite free and simple
with him, but there was a warm colour in her cheek and a light in her eyes. If his life had depended on it,
Essex could not have prevented the words that rose in him, or stemmed
the flood that brought them."Was it true then--what you said?" he asked, in a low voice that he
kept even with difficulty."Quite true then.""Then." He repeated the word gravely. His head was bent, his face
hidden. He stood up beside her. "And now I cannot bear to think of how
cruel I was to you. How brutal!" He put his arms round her
shoulders. "May I kiss you and be forgiven? The man you loved, who is
to be the only man you love, may kiss you now? It is quiet here, but
all the world might be present for me." His voice rocked unevenly for
a moment, but he steadied himself, and Gallia's eyes fed on his
excitement. "How cold you found me! We suffer for the degeneracy of
our day. But I have enough passion"--his voice broke in a note like
laughter--"to kiss you once." He threw back his head when his lips
left hers. "Love, love! My love--love," he said, and the word, which
feeling made sing in the air, had that in it which seemed to cradle
Gallia's heart; she leaned and rested on these tones, tasting
something of the peace of sleep. Then his head bent forward, and
she felt its weight upon her own, the curve of
his cheek was against her forehead. Quick to learn and to respond,
this new moment was teaching her fast, but he raised his head and
said, "You will know that for half an hour you were worshipped, for a
minute you were kissed...and..."She looked up at him with the only look of its kind her face ever
wore, then she turned and walked away towards the gate.In the odd harmony that had come to be between them, Gallia was
conscious of some strange chord that sounded curiously. That Essex was
sincere, for the first time in his life perhaps, she felt, and that
was enough.She could not know the inside of this man's mind, nor tell that the
odd chord was Essex's own amazement at himself. The man was finding
another self. For years he had sown and reaped in the home pastures of
his soul, but, straying vaguely to an unsought hill-top, had
unwittingly climbed the ridge and set foot in an undiscovered
country.CHAPTER XXIESSEX, leaving the cloister, now dimly lamplit, some hour or so
after Gallia flitted away, came across a friend and dined with him at
the House of Commons, and was during dinner, as the friend was fain to
remark, even more himself than usual. Then, having walked up and down
the terrace till half-past ten, he said good-night, and took his way
on foot to Hammersmith. Some men believe greatly in the calming
effects of long walks, though what calm does a tiger find, who pads
almost ceaselessly the length of his cage? During the dinner and the
after-talk, Essex had not once thought of Gallia; no sooner, however,
was he striding through the network of Belgravian streets, than his
mind seemed to pick up the turmoil of his thoughts just where he had
dropped them when Shale clapped him on the shoulder.What proved--had not everything in his whole character proved
previously--that Essex was a man of the least
possible emotional experience, was the fact that he was surprised when
his memory failed to give back a detailed and phonographed replica of
his and Gallia's conversation. He remembered a number of isolated
sentences that had fallen from her lips, but what, he wondered, had
been his answers to them? Were such subjects as these ever
contemplated by the religious-minded, his aberrations might be alluded
to as a merciful dispensation. No truthfully recorded conversation of
the highly emotional kind could fail to sound ridiculous, were one to
observe it with a frigid or even with a tepid mind. Slightly warmed
and relaxed the mind must be to judge such matter. (It is fortunate
that the people whose opinions matter, have only time to read novels
in the evening, or late at night.) The finest love-scenes ever written
are those that can be read at eleven A.M., without sounding sickly or
silly.To a cynic such as Essex, with a thinness of skin like his in the
matter of seeming absurd, the details of that half-hour in the
cloisters would have appeared farcical indeed. But all that remained
to him was a confused memory; a memory startling, but puzzling,
pleasurable. That he should have acted as he had done surprised Essex, but it did not disconcert him; no, not
though it seemed so unusual and astonishing; he remained fully
satisfied with himself. That some people might perceive an indelicacy
in kissing and professing to love a lady to whom he had no idea of
offering marriage, Essex was unaware, or if he were aware, would have
waived as trivial. Besides, he knew that in Gallia's mind, as in the
minds of many other thoughtful people, love and marriage were regarded
as justly separate. He knew Gallia had understood him; he was
sure--and he was quite right in being sure--that he had left her a
sense of satisfaction, of fulfilment. She would proceed on her way, he
on his, and they walk to their separate destinies.As he passed down Kensington, he saw the long line of carriages
going up to Holland House; but he had not Mark Gurdon's acquaintance
with people's crests and arms and liveries, and, having no psychic
sense, he was quite unaware that Gallia, more lovely than ever before,
was sitting beside Mrs. Leighton in one of those carriages, and that
her father and Mark Gurdon were seated opposite to her.Love is a very short, small, and frequently unimportant incident in
the lives of most people. It is meant to be. If the days of a man's
life be threescore years and ten, during which
he gets up and goes to bed between the performance of stupid but
necessary duties, it is only reasonable that at the most he should
offer up a sacrifice of six months or so to love. The Honourable
Gallia Hamesthwaite, unphotographed, unparagraphed, and ungossiped
about, passed in the plenitude of her beauty from room to room;
kinder, more tolerant of stupidity than usual; more gracious and more
approachable, but with a superbness about her that is only to be seen
in the face and manner of a woman who has picked her aloe-flower.Mark Gurdon was often beside her; Mrs. Leighton observed and
admired and approved her, and, clever old lady as she was, never
suspected Mark's dawning ambition. Whether it woke definitely then, or
whether he had felt thrills of it before, cannot be told. But he was
annoyed to think, when he shut their carriage door upon the ladies,
that he had thought of going to Edwards Square that night, since he
was in the neighbourhood, and had not seen Cara for two or three
days. He walked briskly to Edwards Square, his face flushing and his
eye kindling with thought induced by the scene he had left, not the
scene he was going to. What we call delicacy is a quality wholly unknown to Life and Nature; Nature has no regard
for the fitness of things, and Life arranges the most tasteless
contrasts. For instance, it was far from agreeable of them both to
make Gallia attract Mark with the light lit by Essex's kisses, and it
was equally outré in them to send Mark
to the arms of his mistress with his head filled with thoughts of
another woman. But none of the persons concerned were to blame for
these contingencies. Life and Nature were alone responsible, and can
only be excused on the ground that neither is really well-bred.The studio was lighted when he knocked, and a step which was not
Cara's came towards the door. It was opened by the charwoman who had
befriended Cara when her father met with his accident and when she met
with Gurdon; the woman now came daily to do what service she
required."She's very bad, poor dear," said Mrs. Miles, in a voice of deep
sympathy; and Mark's face, which a moment before had been fired by
ambition, fell hastily to lines of genuine anxiety."Ill? How? Since when?"Without waiting for an answer, he pushed past the portière, and came swiftly to the broad
couch on which, among a number of bright
cushions and rugs, he saw the girl's pale face.She was awake and knew him, though her first words showed her mind
was wandering. In an instant Mark's cloak was off, and he was kneeling
beside her, raising up her head and putting the wild-looking hair out
of her eyes."Whatever she would 'a done if it hadn't of been my day a' comin',
God knows," said the woman fervently."But have you done anything? Have you sent for a doctor? When was
she taken ill? Did you find her so?"Mrs. Miles posed herself, with her arms wrapped across the strings
of her three aprons."Hight o'clock is my hour a' comin', which I 'ave to git Miles's
breakfuss before 'e goes hout of a mornin'. I 'adn't got down our
court before I says, 'There, I've forgot the baskit,' it came over me
all of a minute, and there, I says, 'Little miss 'll never 'eed if I'm
a minit late,' for punkchell's been my motter since hiver I took to
charin', which was wen Miles took to drink"--"But when you got here, my good woman, when you got here--was she
ill?""Wen I 'ad the baskit, sir," Mrs. Miles continued, with an air of one who rigidly adheres to truth, and will
not step aside for anything,--"Wen I 'ad the baskit, I came on in a
'urry, and come hup to the door, sir, same as you might, that
unthinkin'.""And I was dancing--dancing," Cara was saying in a low whisper, and
playing upon the covering with her fingers, as though in imitation of
the figure of a dance."Which she wasn't, sir, for knock and knock I did, and then at last
I 'eard a groan. Aoh!" Mrs. Miles placed one hand below her waist and
just in front of the ample curve of her hip. "I don' know as ever I
came over the same since I was carryin' Hemmer; which I was took so I
couldn't kerry a bucket, not the shillin' size, and Miles 'ad to
borrer off the landlord of the 'King o' Denmark,' which he wouldn't
lend him more than fourpence in the shillin' on 'is score."With a patience that did him credit, Gurdon forbore to interrupt
Mrs. Miles again; he employed himself in very gently straightening the
rugs and covers and cushions of the lounge, and making the poor soul
more comfortable; but he was ready, on the instant that Mrs. Miles
should reach the kernel of the story, to leap up and fetch a
doctor."An' I 'eard a sound," continued the good
woman, who had detailed at least one family reminiscence in the
meantime which Mark's ear had failed to catch, "like you was polishin'
one of them parky floors with a clawth, an', aoh my! it was 'er
a-draggin' 'erself along the wall and floor to hopin the door.""What did she say to you?" put in Mark sharply."Say? She was pas' speakin', and took 'er up in my arms I did, and
kerry her in 'ere on the sofa. She's been talkin' a deal of furrin
talk, but wen I undress her I soon give a guess wot was up, pore young
woman--not but wot I've 'eard these furrin natures 'as it easier, but
I did wot I could, and got 'ot water and give 'er fermentations same
as the doctor hordered me, an' made all neat, for it's a hawkward spot
with illness--""Have you had a doctor?" Mark broke in, feeling his brain turning
with Miles's chatter.The woman looked at him rather sharply, and her expression, as he
afterwards recalled it, puzzled him greatly."I didn't know wot might be your wish, sir; an' I done wot I could,
bein' accustom' to illness; there's beef-tea a-makin' now, and I give
'er beef-jelly, wot I run to the chemiss for, and was obliged to take
'er purse, but you'll see as one and ninepence
was every bit I took, sir. It's strengthening stuff she needs and
careful nursin', but then I can't leave Miles, 'e do drink that
shockin' wen I'm away, and negleck 'is family something shameful,
still I could stay most of the time and run 'ome hivery now and then
if you was willing.""Thank you," Mark said, gladly accepting as kindness what was
probably merely the avid relish of illness common to her class. "But I
will have a doctor now, and if you can come every day, I will nurse
her myself all night. The first thing to do is to find out what is the
matter." A sharp look from the faded eye of Mrs. Miles was lost upon
him. "What, dear?" bending over Cara; "you were dancing? And did you
fall? And why were you dancing so much?" His voice was very tender
indeed, and his face kind and gentle as he looked at her.A look of intelligence came into her eyes. "I was frightened, and
so I thought I would dance and dance..."He shook his head vaguely."Bein' no stairs to come up and down," said Mrs. Miles in a furtive
undertone, and glancing round the building in a depreciatory
manner."Stay by here and watch her, and I will fetch a doctor," said Mark, getting up. "Or no, better you go--you
will know the neighbourhood; I will stay and look after her. Tell him
to come at once.""There's two in the Square, but perhaps you wouldn't wish"--"Either of them; whichever is youngest and will come out quickest:
it must be past two o'clock. And you need not come back."He shut the door after her carefully, and then came back to walk to
and fro in the room with a puzzled face. Once he stopped to open the
big skylight, through which the pale June stars looked very far
off. Gurdon was a humane man, although he had had few opportunities of
making the discovery. He was now much disturbed in mind, and with
strange accesses of unselfish kindliness assailing him. He looked
frequently at Cara's flushed face and tossed hair; sometimes he
stopped and smoothed her forehead with his hand, but for the most part
he strode up and down quickly and silently, his black evening shoes
making no noise upon the boards and rugs of the studio.Three-quarters of an hour passed before the brisk step of a man
outside announced the arrival of a doctor, hurried and a trifle
irritable, as a man might well be who had gone to bed at twelve, after a long day, and been roused at 2.30
from his deepest sleep.He looked sharply at Mark and his evening dress, and appeared to
think someone else would come forward to explain what had occurred,
and what was wanted.Mrs. Miles had gone home, and the burden of the situation was with
Mark. The doctor's manner and the nature of his questions caused him
some embarrassment, but the seriousness of the interview made him
forget it again.He could give very little information about the illness, and the
doctor had to be contented with the fact that Mrs. Miles would give a
full account in the morning. But Mark held the lamp while Dr. Hudson
made a hurried examination, and waited eagerly for the temperature to
be mentioned."She will do nicely if this fever can be kept down: I will send you
something at once to fight that; there is a messenger call at my house
in the Square, and several all-night chemists. Inconvenient? Oh, she
might be in many a worse place. Plenty of good air here, and the
quietest spot in London." He began to write a prescription on a leaf
of his pocket-book. "You say you can get someone to look after her at
night. Very well; but I will send in a nurse
first thing in the morning, with your permission, to attend to the
patient and prepare her for my visit about ten. No, we can do nothing
more now, save keep up the strength a little and get the temperature
down. To-morrow I shall be able to make a definite statement about the
cause of trouble." He looked up, this keen, worldly-wise young man,
and met Mark's still rather puzzled eyes. "I have no doubt I am
leaving the patient in the most careful hands,
meanwhile. Good-night."When he had gone, Mark sat down by Cara in the empty, quiet studio,
and looked long at her little face, pale again now with a fine saffron
pallor. "Poor little thing, I suppose you owe this to me," he
said.CHAPTER XXIIDURING the fortnight that followed the party at Holland House,
Gallia had been rather busy socially.A number of her mother's old friends, people whom she knew only in
the traditional family way, sent invitations of a quiet kind to her;
almost every day she seemed to be lunching with someone, and she
appeared at a number of the fashionable afternoon concerts. In the
mornings, after her ride, she more than once secured Margaret to do
some shopping with her, and in the course of time a silvery grey and
white plumage replaced the black of her earlier mourning months. Then
suddenly Lord Hamesthwaite decided to make an immediate move to the
Hall, and some housemaids were despatched to help the permanent staff
of servants there to be ready earlier for the coming of the
family.Mrs. Essex and Margaret had to he prevailed upon to come sooner,
for Gallia had no desire to be left alone in
the country. She had appeared to fall in with her father's idea, and
there was to be a constant succession of guests throughout the summer,
since she refused to go abroad.Mrs. Leighton, immersed in the formalities of the cure at Aix, was
feeling astonishingly miserable."I am not sure that I have ever been so ill as during the first
week at this atrocious place. I should leave immediately if I were not
too prostrate to travel. How infinitely preferable a nice English
attack of rheumatism would be. But I needn't distress you with the
wails of a tiresome old woman, particularly when I have something
quite important to say, and the pains in my right arm threaten to
prevent all correspondence. This, then, dear Gallia, is what troubles
me. Robbie is coming home. He has not dared to write to your father
since the dreadful letter he received about two months ago, the
result, I have always been convinced, of an entire
misconception. Spain still seems to be a very difficult country to
travel in, especially when one leaves the beaten track, as Robbie in
his adventurous way naturally hastened to do. He gives me the entire
explanation of the gambling episode; and you will remember I
endeavoured to assure your father at the time
that he was taking too severe a view altogether. It seems that Robbie
had engaged a mule, and packed all the delightful draperies and
embroideries he had secured upon the beast, as well as his luggage,
containing, foolish boy, his reserve sum of money. At the end of an
exhausting journey across the mountains, he drove this beast into a
stable, and actually in the time that he was eating a most unsavoury
meal, the animal and all the baggage disappeared, stolen, of
course. He wasted about a week in fruitless endeavours to secure the
attention of the authorities, and it was only
then, when he was at his last penny, that he gambled for pesetas--for his dinner really, poor boy--in the
low inns and among the gipsies. I want you to have him at the Hall at
once, if you can; you will find him full of delightful stories, and
you will persuade your father to be more lenient to him than he has
been before. If we back him up, he says he will have no difficulty in
establishing himself in London, now that his course of study is
over."That merely made one more for Gallia's little house-party, and she
remembered Robbie as an engaging, open-natured, happy-minded fellow,
who would be a certain acquisition in any country house.She came down the staircase from her own rooms after reading
Mrs. Leighton's letter, dressed for going out. In the passages and on
the landing were plenty of signs of a hurried flitting. The servants
were at work rolling up carpets and taking down curtains, and making
other preparations in view of the house being closed for three or four
months. The mechanism of housekeeping was a dead letter to Gallia; she
had no idea of the time and trouble, the myriads of small duties, that
go towards managing a house. If she had known, she would have been
filled with a very wholesome and active contempt for half of the
accepted formulæ; she would have
instituted a sweeping simplification.Just at that moment, passing down the stairs, her eye fell on a
soft-headed brush with a brass attachment in the middle of its
abnormally long handle, and a wonder as to its use seized her
suddenly, and she paused in idle irony with her hand on the
balustrade.At that moment came a crash, a cry, and some detached screams, from
behind one of the big white drawing-room doors. She hurried into the
room, and her appearance seemed to add to the confusion of the knot of
maid-servants gathered round a fallen step-ladder, opposite one of the
four windows. A heap of pale yellow silk
damask mixed up with the latter suggested immediately that a servant
had fallen while taking down a curtain. As the window was some twelve
feet high, there was the material for a very pretty accident, and
Gallia crossed the room at her swiftest pace to see what was
amiss."Which of you is hurt?" she demanded of the astonished group, two
of whom were on the floor supporting an older woman, and one
mechanically gathering up the curtain, and seeming to examine it for
possible damage."Never mind the curtain, Emily. What is this? who has been
hurt?""I don't know if the ladder could give way, miss, or if she
overbalanced herself," the maid began. "I didn't see it myself," she
went on, with the usual haste of a domestic to clear herself in view
of possible blame; "I was over at the mantelpiece moving the
corner-pieces.""It's the charwoman, miss, that was on the ladder," broke in
Fraser, the second housemaid, "and I think it must have been in
reaching up too high above her head. I told her to go up a step more
and she'd have been more at her ease.""You told her? How could you do such a wicked, lazy thing? You were
too idle or too frightened to go up
yourselves, and so you sent an old woman up to do your work. I am
ashamed to have such women in my service. Emily, go for Mrs. Bostock
at once."The words fell slowly and coldly from the dispassionate
Gallia. Very seldom indeed had she occasion to address any of her
servants, with the exception of her own footman and her maid. She was
held in the awe with which all servants regard a mistress who is
habitually unconscious of their existence.The girls flushed hotly at her reprimand, but did not dare to offer
any excuse. Gallia took the place of one of them beside the injured
charwoman, and in a few minutes Mrs. Bostock, the housekeeper,
arrived."I think we must have a mattress and carry her to the nearest
bedroom; I fear it is serious."It was wonderful how quickly the poor soul was carried to a
bachelor bedroom on the same landing, by the now eager servants,
reinforced by the footman; but it was Gallia's own hand that applied
the restoratives and brought back groaning consciousness to the
sufferer.Mrs. Bostock had left the room with a maid on a search for
different bedding; Emily had borne a message to the carriage which was
awaiting Gallia, and now drove off for a doctor; and Fraser, as principal culprit, had escaped to a more
sympathetic milieu in the servants' hall. Gallia was alone when the
charwoman came to her senses."It's my side, m'm,--my lady,--an' my back. Oh for! oh dear! My
back struck the floor and the ladder come a-top of me; I 'ope I
'aven't broke my column! But it's my side as feels the wrinch; it
never 'as been right since a fall I 'ad in our mews when I was going
with Johnnie; stipped on the cat, I did, a nasty little sandy cat
Miles kep' in the stable--'e was drivin' for Serumfry Paget
then. Oo--ooh!""Yes; now lie still for a minute, and first drink some of
this. When you feel a little stronger, we will get your clothes
off.""Thank you, my lady. It is a gnoring pain just above the 'ip joint,
an'"--"Now pray be silent, or you will exhaust your strength, and won't
be able to tell the doctor how you feel," Gallia said, in her firm,
quiet voice. The effect of this remonstrance lasted several minutes,
no doubt by virtue of the last touch, which appealed strangely to
Mrs. Miles's pride of ailment.It was Gallia who assisted her own maid to undress Mrs. Miles; it
seemed to her the Frenchwoman's hands moved fussily about the
task.'Six years have I come in an' out this house, and nothink never
happened," Mrs. Miles maundered on in an undertone. "'Twas me as took
down the drawing-rooms when they was cherry and cream--cherry and
cream with gold galoon, 'ung in panels, they was"--"Can you bear me to turn you just a little, to unfasten your skirt?
That will do. Now, then, just a moment--yes, I am sure it pains you,
but you will feel better when they are off."With that tender firmness which some women have by nature, some
others learn in the hospitals, and most never learn at all, Gallia
removed the poor outer clothing, multifarious in strings and
pins. Further than this she hesitated at first to go: would the poor
thing feel more uncomfortable to have a lady or a servant made
familiar with her shifts and makeshifts? Gallia's good sense decided
for her, and she proceeded with her task."Me lyin' here," began the woman, in a more excited key, "and poor
Missie with no one to 'ot 'er beef-tea for 'er, nurse bein' out, for I
promis' to run in at dinner-time, it's only ten minutes in the
bus!""What are you anxious about? Do you wish a message sent to your
home? That will be easily done; I will call Emily, and you shall tell
her"--"Oh, it isn't that, my lady. Oo--ooh!""Bear up a little longer; see, take another drink of this. There. I
shan't take off the bodice, just loosen it upon your chest a
little."An instinct taught Gallia that small soothing sentences, at short
intervals, kept the patient's attention from her hurt."Never mind," as something slipped to the floor from Mrs. Miles's
shawl-spread bosom; "it's only a letter, I'll put it on the
mantel-piece ""Oh dearie dear, whatever shall I do?" the poor creature wailed
suddenly. "Missie told me to be sure and send it! I had to put it in
the pillar before twelve, so as 'e'd have it early this
afternoon.""Make yourself quite easy about it! Ah, I hear the doctor coming! I
shall give orders for you to be well looked after, and shall be back
in two hours to see you myself. The letter? It shall be sent at once
by one of the servants." Gallia took it hastily, and called a soft
"Come in!"Mrs. Bostock ushered in the doctor, and, after a few words of
explanation, Miss Hamesthwaite hurried to the carriage. She was
over-due in Hammersmith Terrace, where her mission was to prevail upon
the Essexes to hasten their visit to the
Hall. In the outer lobby she stopped."Knowles, I wish William to take this letter at once to"--she
turned it over as she spoke, and her eyes fell on the address. The
note was directed to "Mark Gurdon, Esq., The Colonial Office,
Whitehall." But this was not what surprised Gallia, or convinced her
that her own footman had best not deliver it. "Never mind, Knowles, I
shall not require William."She got into the carriage, and sat reflecting while Hendon waited
for his order."Stop at the first boy-messenger office," she said.All the way down Kensington Road she kept thinking. Gallia's was a
very alert and ready mind, but she was puzzled to think how Mrs. Miles
should be in possession of a note from a sick person, to whom she
referred as "Missie," which was addressed to Mark Gurdon--in Mark
Gurdon's own handwriting.CHAPTER XXIIITWO days later, Gallia and her father left for the country, and
they left in Lord Hamesthwaite's favourite manner, namely, in their
own carriage.Without being enormously wealthy people, they were decidedly rich,
and for a man in his position Lord Hamesthwaite's expenditure was
inconsiderable. He could afford, he averred, to sacrifice a pair of
carriage-horses every year; for this his coachman never failed to
convey to him was what must happen if he insisted upon driving the two
weary roans, fat and artificially spirited, over forty miles of Surrey
turnpike in the middle of July. A second pair was therefore ordered
from the Hall, to be in readiness at Guildford, and, covered with
dust, father and daughter duly arrived at their beautiful Surrey home,
which had been restored by Gallia's grandfather, and still preserved
the quaint charm it had possessed as an old red-brick and timbered
manor house.Those two days had been busy ones for Gallia. She had saddled
herself, considering it the barest duty, with the care of the poor
charwoman who had been injured in her service, and Mrs. Miles was now
established in the neighbouring hospital, with two fractured ribs and
an easy conscience. For had not Miss Hamesthwaite, than whom no one
was more delicately reserved in the matter of befriending and
patronising the poor, herself sent down to "the Mews" and arranged
that one pound a week should find its way to the pocket of "Halice,"
the thirteen-year offspring of the drunken coachman and the poor
hard-worked soul, who had said piteously, and without any sense of its
humour, "If you'll believe me, my lady, I've never 'ad a day's illness
nor a day's 'oliday since I was married,"--regarding both as equally
desirable respites.These arrangements had not been concluded without a second and even
third conversation with Mrs. Miles, in which further information
regarding Mark Gurdon's connection with "little Missie," as well as
the illness of the latter, had formed a large part of Mrs. Miles's
superfluous running commentary. The accident and the attention she was
exciting made Mrs. Miles more talkative than usual, and she insisted
upon choosing Gallia as the recipient of her
confidences.Gallia had no experience in dealing with women of this
class,--indeed, Miles was the first specimen she had come across,--and
although she sometimes succeeded in stemming the torrent of wholly
irrelevant matter, and always succeeded in greatly impressing the
charwoman, she every now and then became inundated and swamped by
fresh streams, and acquired perforce much private information
concerning the inner life of an acquaintance. Putting aside her
annoyance at having learnt certain private facts about a man she knew,
the whole thing had, from many aspects and for many reasons, an effect
on Gallia's mind.The day after her arrival at the Hall, no visitors being yet come,
she went briskly out to the stables to choose which horse she would
ride. She felt the necessity of a long time of thought, and she knew
nothing so conducive to it as hours in the saddle by field and fallow,
by copse and hill.The stables were a great feature at the Hall, and Lord Hamesthwaite
was, distantly and quite ignorantly, very proud of his horses. For
himself, two would have been sufficient; the big white horse he drove
in town, and the solid, fiddle-headed cob he rode in the
country.But with Gallia it was different. Her pair of skewbalds and double
dog-cart were known in every village in the Weald; nothing could beat
her little Norfolk trotter in the dark-green cart; and her particular
pride was a perfectly appointed Devonshire donkey jingle, in which a
very fleet dark jackass flipped along the road on pointed hoofs.This time she rode a half-bred Arab, capable of a ten-mile canter
which bade fair to send its rider to sleep, and took her way by a
bridle-path through a wood of chestnuts.A smiling morning of perfect summer did not reflect smiles on
Gallia's face. She rode along, wrapped up in her own thoughts,
unconscious of flowers and birds; observing the road before her and
her horse in that accurate but mechanical fashion common to all good
riders. Her face was in its severest mask. She was paler than usual,
owing perhaps to fatigue, perhaps merely to mental tension. She was
searching diligently in her brain for the reason of a sensation she
had experienced. She was perplexed because it seemed to her she had
been guilty of a logical inconsistency.The proposition, as she phrased it, was this: she had heard that
Mark Gurdon had a mistress. That was the initial fact. On hearing
this, she had been conscious of strong moral
revulsion. And that was the crux: considering what her own view of the
subject had always been, that put her about.Why should she experience a sense of nausea on hearing as much
about any man? Why particularly about Gurdon, whom she had met less
than a dozen times, and merely liked with a liking the most
ordinary?She reflected upon this without any solution occurring to her, and
her manner of reflection was peculiar. Just as she would have all the
world be fair and honest with all the world, so she was fair and
honest with herself. She regarded herself, very reasonably, as two
people--her reason as one person, her feelings as another. She
imagined in her mind a kind of platform from which first her reason
spoke, and, as it were, stepped down; in the open moment that
followed, her feelings made themselves heard in the same place.At length it struck her, that until she could discover whether the
fact of a man keeping a mistress would disgust her, should she hear it
of any casual acquaintance, no conclusion could be come to."My feeling is so odd and vague in this matter, that I think it
must be a sort of elemental sex impulse
speaking in me, and not personal feeling at all," was the leaf of
wisdom that floated from the big tree and fell at length upon the
surface of her mind. "I must put the question to some other girl."
Miss Janion's personality flashed before her, and she smiled--smiled,
and then laughed aloud, so that Mahmoud turned one ear backward
shiveringly. It would be amusing to have Miss Janion down when Lord
Shillinglee and the others came, for instance; but the question should
be put to Margaret during the first private talk they had
together.She gathered up her reins, and the light pressure of her leg behind
his girth opened Mahmoud like a pair of scissors, and he bounded off
for a gallop."There is a human soil in human thought of which the oak trees,
thank God, know nothing!" Gallia laughed again at the confused feeling
she had attempted to put into words, and Mahmoud, taking that as an
encouragement, thrashed his feet into the deep summer dust of the
road, that stifled the green acorns with white powder.When she had swallowed sufficient of the tonic of a gallop, Gallia
settled her horse to his exquisite Eastern pace. Past a common with
necklaces of young geese upon it; then a halt while a gate was deftly
opened, Mahmoud breasting it at the instant
Gallia's crop loosened the catch; forward again, this time on a wood
road, where squirrels and partridges crossed almost beneath the
horse's nose; past openings that showed sudden cornfields; past hazel
coppices thick with green cobs; past tangles of ripening
bramble-berries; past farms and new ricks of hay, smelling stronger,
and a thousand times more sweetly, than the corner of Bond Street and
Burlington Gardens, till at length, outside the village of Hiddenfold,
Gallia drew rein."Ah, it is too hot for this," she said, casting back her open coat
and wondering why she had let herself get so hot. "I shall positively
have to see if I can get some lemonade somewhere."Mahmoud blew a portentous snuffle, the best sound save a whinny
that can be heard from a horse, when Gallia brought up at the door of
a little thirteenth-century inn.As everyone knew Miss Hamesthwaite by sight, attendance to her
wants was swift. The homely ginger-pop from a stone bottle completely
refreshed her, and she drank it slowly, unabashed by the eyes of two
dusty cyclists, who, with purple faces and necks above their grey club
clothes, were irrigating lime-choked channels by means of a quart pot
of shandy-gaff.Gallia's roving glance penetrated easily to the interior of a tiny
sitting-room on the left of the door, and she was not much astonished
to recognise a friend extended in a long basket chair in the shade of
the window geraniums. At his full length, in cool grey, a grey crush
hat still upon his head, waistcoatless, with a white silk shirt rising
and falling to every breath, lay Dark Essex, sound asleep. The table
was covered with papers and books and other signs of industry, but the
worker, looking amazingly handsome, lay stretched beside his tools,
overcome by the warmth of the day. Though she had heard he was at "a
little pub in Surrey," as he had phrased it to his sister, she had not
known that Hiddenfold, only some dozen miles from the Hall, was the
spot he had chosen. Looking round, she did not wonder at his
choice. It was a delicious village."I rather wish he were not here," Gallia said, as she finished her
drink hastily; "and yet, why not? Why not? On the whole, I am glad. He
is the one person in the world I can talk to."With some caution she put Mahmoud on the turf and crossed the
green, rather than risk waking the sleeper by riding past his
window.CHAPTER XXIVTHE first few days of Margaret's stay were devoted by Gallia to
giving her riding-lessons in the park, and driving her about with her
mother in the afternoons. Once or twice Gallia had mooted an
invitation to Hubert Essex to walk over and lunch, or be driven over
to dine, but always Margaret had gently negatived the plan."He is so hard at work," she said; "if you would like me to be
frank, I will say that he would be angry with me for letting you know
his whereabouts.""That would be very silly of him," observed Gallia, smiling. "And,
you know, it is possible to refuse an invitation.""Of course; but he would think he ought to call, and I don't
suppose he has more than one suit here.""Men's sense of etiquette--which must proceed from vanity--is a
thing I cannot keep pace with," Gallia
remarked, blending a touch of contempt with her indifference."And there is another reason," Margaret said, with reluctance."Of course there is another reason. You are afraid my attractions
might prove too strong for his sensitive nature. Naturally I divined
that."Margaret laughed."Well, you know, it wouldn't be at all odd if he did fall in love
with you, but I should be sorry, because it would only make him
unhappy," she rejoined, with some spirit. Gallia smiled out over the
park. "You may laugh," continued Margaret. "I know you don't believe
in men having feelings like ours.""On the contrary, not like ours, but simply the counterpart of
ours.""Hubert is a curious, silent creature, but that is not to say that
he has no heart.""Very true.""Gallia, you are laughing again! What has made you so hard upon men
generally?""Me hard upon men? What a wild idea! I like men extremely. I'm more
at ease with them than I am with women; I've known far more of them
intimately. I'm not sure that I don't think their make-up much
honester than women's. How can you call me hard upon them?" She argued with the greatest good-humour, for she was
attached to Margaret, and liked Margaret to assault her. "Simply
because I have dared to burst their cocoons; to wind off some of the
strange silky poetry that has been wrapped round them by generations
of women and their fellow-men. I don't believe all this about men's
feelings, because I've never come across any of it; that's why. I
explain such evidences in a totally different way, and I claim that my
way is a great deal more in accordance with the facts. There you have
it.""The long and the short of it is, that you don't believe in love,"
said Margaret simply, and with a small air of offence. "But you will
fall in love yourself some day, and then you will see what it is
like."Gallia's cheek darkened for a second, then her face cleared, and
she leaned far back in the window-seat they were occupying, and passed
her hand up and down the shining cold edge of the old-fashioned
rose-patterned chintz curtain.There fell a long silence between them. Gallia felt no inclination
to make any reply: she did not even realise that the moment was one
eminently suited to confidences; and if she had, it would have made no
difference. She had never experienced, in all
her life, the faintest desire to confide in anybody. This reserved
habit of mind made her, at one and the same time, in some things so
wise, and in many things so ignorant. Margaret saw her flush, and felt
a moment's expectation; then she divined that, though Gallia might be,
or have been, in love, she had no desire to describe her
experiences. She broke silence, therefore, in a half-whispering
voice."I have heard it said," she began curiously, "that every man is a
widower when he proposes.""Ah! Have you indeed?" Gallia was roused from her abstraction and
gleamed with dark humour upon the speaker."And yet," Margaret continued, in a hesitating manner and with a
little lurking hope in her voice,--"And yet one always hopes, if one
did fall in love some day, it would be with a man who had been as
little of a widower as possible!"The humour of this speech threatened to overcome Gallia's gravity;
in spite of Margaret's touching earnestness, she would have given way
to a strong desire to laugh, perhaps, unless she had had a very clear
motive in hearing the girl's views frankly and confidently
expressed."Instinctively, then, you dislike the idea?""Oh, I think it dreadful! Everyone must.""Do you think it dreadful all the time--or only when it is brought
home to you in connection with one of your acquaintances?""Well, of course it's a thing one tries to think of as little as
possible," Margaret said emphatically.Gallia noted this with a certain bird-like alertness of glance."But every time it does come into my head it
horrifies me; of course, more than ever about a man I know."For the moment Gallia could not be quite sure whether this referred
to an experience, or whether Margaret spoke prospectively. She
waited. The speaker continued musingly--"As a rule, I suppose it is just about men whom you know that you
don't hear of it."A caustic smile hovered on Miss Hamesthwaite's lips."I believe it is a canon of decency to conceal such facts; one owes
it to one's women friends, men think. But, Margaret, if you knew and
liked a man,--if he was a friend, you know,--you wouldn't dislike him
if you discovered that he had a mistress, for instance?"Margaret turned a much-startled face from the window."How"--she began, and then suddenly recovered her composure. "I
shouldn't dislike him--as a friend--I suppose.""But--as a lover?""Oh," she cried quickly, "I could not bear him as a lover!""But, my dear girl, men being what they are, is that
reasonable?""Oh, there is a difference between believing a thing to be
generally the case, and knowing it to be the fact. Oh, do say there is.""Oh, surely. And there's a difference to an ostrich who has his
head buried--or hasn't, as time and opportunity have allowed.""Gallia, you are fearfully severe. I suppose there are some
girls--the Gertrude sort of girls, you know--who don't mind at
all. But most girls--of some heart and feeling--most girls do feel it
dreadfully.""If a man were here, he would exclaim piously, 'And God grant there
may always be such girls in the world, or what hope has a man of
keeping straight!'" Gallia laughed delightedly. "Yes, we have proved
there are three sorts of women. The bad ones, to fan the flame of
men's vices--a red flame that, for the sake of the picturesque; the
good girls, to feed the white flame of their virtues; and the
in-between girl, who blows neither fire, and
can warm herself indifferently at both.""But you, Gallia, you? You have never said what you think of
it.""Oh, for me, I would love any man who attracted my mind, who shared
my tastes--I mean my sort of love, you know; but it would be
independent of any idea of marriage. To a certain extent, then, and
with regard to marrying, I think my ideas on other points lead to my
preferring the ordinary man." This she said very thoughtfully, and
with a marked, earnest voice. "There are a lot of passionless men
about now-a-days," she went on in an easier tone, "and it would be
terrible to marry one by mistake. Yes, I have decided. It is quite
reasonable--which is the main thing. I shall make no fuss about it if
my future husband has a past--of a reasonable colour.""I think--if I loved a man"--Margaret's face and voice partook of
an ideally exquisite quality as she spoke--"I think I could forgive
him."Gallia gazed at her in admiration."You are the being biology will never explain. You keep alive the
old tradition about soul, and angels, and saints, and spirits. No
scientist living but would forswear his whole life's labour for you if he saw you at this moment! Wouldn't
he, now?""Nonsense, Gallia! I am nothing of the kind." She laughed
charmingly. "Though, of course, I know"--with a great attempt at
frankness--"that I am pretty.""You beautiful, silly soul! I believe you honestly think that's all
that's the matter with you. Come down, and let us get the letters
which have just trotted across the park on Punch's back."They ran downstairs together, and fell upon the post-bag in the
hall."Ah, more excitement! The great man from Africa arrives in London
to-morrow, and--goodness!--this is from Robbie Leighton. He's in
Paris. He's coming--when? Oh, I'm to expect him when I see him."Margaret made some comment or other, but her pensiveness lasted all
the afternoon. Perhaps she was going to be called upon to forgive
him--a part women have ever loved to play.CHAPTER XXVQUITE the typical country-house party was gathered beside the
cedars one afternoon some few days later. It was the kind of day upon
which no object was quite still before the eye, every tree and flower
seemed to tremble, rather to shiver lightly, in the gold heat, which
was so intense as to appear solid, corporeal, to lie like a weight
upon the earth.While tea went on under the trees, the light oak luggage-cart could
be seen upon the winding drive making its way downhill towards the
high road and the station. Just in front had passed a pretty
pair-horse victoria, and it was quite in keeping with stable etiquette
that the victoria drawn by the two fretting thoroughbreds should start
slowly in advance, and the luggage-cart, which flew easily, behind a
less important equine character, should come after.John Denyer was expected from London, where he had passed a few
days on his arrival, and whither Lord Hamesthwaite had travelled three
times to see him on important business.From one of these visits the Colonial Secretary had returned with a
question to put to his daughter. It had taken her a good deal by
surprise."Ask Mr. Gurdon down here? Oh, surely, if you like. But why am I to
write? You know him, papa, I suppose better than I do?""I have seen him perhaps three times socially. I met him at your
Aunt Celia's one night a little time ago; and I have happened to meet
him twice or three times since"--"And you met him at a dinner at the Reform last year, for I
recollect you told me of it," Gallia put in."Very true, no doubt; but it had escaped me.""And in your own department too!""In my own department I have of course been aware of him, my dear,
but I have not known him.""I suppose he is a mere menial in the department?" said Gallia
wickedly, for she was not above laughing occasionally at her father's
pomposity. For a wonder Lord Hamesthwaite decided to take this
seriously."I greatly wish, Gallia, that you had acquired some of your dear
mother's genius for comprehending important social matters! Mr. Gurdon
is a very remarkable young man. His sagacity,"
Lord Hamesthwaite continued, as though he were referring to a
water-spaniel,--"his sagacity is amazing. Quite amazing. I am not
mistaken when I tell you that Gurdon is a man with a career before
him. He is not yet thirty, and he has been singled out. Besides, he is
most gentlemanly and of charming manners. Denyer took a great liking
to him when they met in Africa.""Oh! So he met Denyer in Africa? I never heard him say so.""You have indicated his greatest talent. He is a young man who does
not feel it necessary to say everything that he knows or that he has
done."Gallia might not have a head for affairs, but she was quite sharp
enough to know that this was very high praise. She had often heard her
Aunt Celia say that Mark should be helped on, and she was able to
perceive that he was in a fair way to have her father's hand reached
down to him."Shall we therefore say Thursday?" Lord Hamesthwaite inquired, with
a smile. He was a great deal too courteous to leave his daughter with
the recollection of something like a reprimand from him in her
mind."Yes, I'll ask him for Thursday, papa."Lord Hamesthwaite turned rather nervously towards her on his way to
the door."You don't dislike Mr. Gurdon, Gallia, I hope?""Tout au contraire," she replied lightly, "I
like him very much."The discussion ended, the note was written, Gurdon was free, and
would be delighted, and consequently arrived in correct form in time
for luncheon on Thursday. The same afternoon, a dishevelled young man
stepped out of a station fly, with a battered brown bag in his hand,
and bade the footman be careful of the foreign-looking packages he was
taking from the hands of the driver."Good gracious!" exclaimed Gallia, who was at that moment issuing
from the hall door, accompanied by Margaret. "It is Robbie." Margaret
could have told her as much, for it was indeed no other.The young man swept a Spanish sombrero from his head with an
insouciance that was native and a flourish that was foreign, and
disclosed the astonishing effect produced by a person having hair much
fairer than his skin.He shook Gallia heartily by the hand, keeping his eyes well upon
her face and his sombrero at his side."Miss Essex I once had the pleasure of
knowing in Paris," he said, with a neat little emphasis, just marked
enough for Margaret to hear, upon the "once.""I have not forgotten you at all," said the exquisite Margaret,
with a tender music in her voice, and upon her face a smile only just
large enough to love."Good Heavens! passionately attached to each other, I declare,"
said Gallia inwardly, and reflected further that a charming scamp like
Mr. Robert Leighton was precisely the kind of being Margaret was
framed to waste herself upon.Robbie's behaviour from the first hour of his arrival left no doubt
of his feeling to Margaret, and Gurdon, for one, observed it with much
peace of mind.He was extravagantly charming to Mrs. Essex--utterly enthralled by
Margaret, of whom he made sketches in a dozen fictitious characters,
and of whom he immediately undertook a serious portrait.This very portrait was under discussion as they sat at tea,
awaiting, on Gallia's part with some excitement, the arrival of John
Denyer."Now look here," Robbie exclaimed, leaping up wildly with a teacup
in his hand. "My idea is to have her here--Miss Essex, do you
mind--just half a minute? Thanks--by this pink
peony tree. In this same pink gown. No hat on. Drenched in
sunlight--you see?""She will have sunstroke to a certainty," cried her mother."Face, hair, hands, all that wonderful gold shade," Robbie went on,
with unabated enthusiasm,--"that grey atmospheric gold; and then the
peonies and the dress--masses of bluish-purple.""But they are pink," suggested someone diffidently."Actually, but not relatively!" cried Robbie with much
fervour. "Actually we know they are
pink. Relatively we see they are
bluish-purple. One paints what one sees."An impressive silence followed this explanation of the method of
art."Then I am of course going to do a head in the old Italian manner,
with a gold background. Gold is Miss Essex's inevitable setting. But
it is among flowers that a large portrait should seize her. Dear Miss
Essex--is it troubling you too much? Just over here. The pink of your
gown is simply inspired! I see a most fascinating scheme, by using
that sheet of poker-red nasturtiums as a background."They strolled off together, amid a chorus of laughter and shrieks
of horror; but the earnest-minded artist and his victim heeded them
not, and it may be stated in Robbie's defence
that he did paint that picture, and that it acted as an extinguisher
to some two hundred and fifty other pictures in the centre of a room
at the Grafton Galleries.Gurdon was a silent member of the party. He had wondered why no one
wanted to paint Gallia, a slim, silvery figure with a dense blue-green
feathered arm of the cedar behind her.Her old plainness of attire was no longer indulged in. Whether she
thought it seemly, as the hostess of a large establishment, or whether
it was the outcome of but another personal whim, Gallia had chosen to
be rather magnificent in her costume of late.From her head, on which she wore one of those French rustic hats,
with cobwebs of lace draped over the brim, so unbecoming to almost
every Englishwoman, to her feet and ankles in their silvery-grey
stockings and grey leather buckled shoes, she was perfect. Sitting
with her legs crossed, the dove-coloured ruffle of her petticoat--pale
ashes of roses tint--was a delight to see, and perhaps it was because
he enjoyed looking at her so much, that Mark found little to say.Mrs. Essex was not a talkative woman, but she was a good listener,
and little Lord Shillinglee, a young man of
enormous wealth and no fixed political opinions, was giving her plenty
to listen to."Ah, you see they haven't got the money, Mrs. Essex; these Radical
fellows 'll promise anything to a man who will back them up a bit with
some money. I'm a bit of a Radical myself, you know, though this lawn
isn't the place to say so, eh? And I really shouldn't mind going in
with them, if it was only to hear the other side curse--I beg your
pardon, Mrs. Essex, but they would, you know." He dissolved in a
malicious little chuckle, and shook furtively within his baggy
clothing.Gallia looked down at him, where he sprawled awkwardly at one side
of her, and then over to Mark sprawling gracefully at the other. Her
mind was busy with the contrast when the carriage came up to the front
door. Lord Hamesthwaite at once went to receive the short, well-built
man who got down from it."Ah, there is Mr. Denyer," said Mrs. Essex, and the eyes of the
party were for the moment directed to the group. A few minutes later
the great man was among them. Mark Gurdon's eye never left Miss
Hamesthwaite when the introduction was being performed. All her whims
of manner,the scorns and ironies and indifferences of youth, dropped from her, and left a picture of the woman
she would be in a few years' time, when her slow development had
progressed.Only the ease and dignity natural to her position, as well as the
graciousness that was her own, appeared in the pleasant words of
welcome that she spoke. A certain glow rose in Gurdon's mind, as he
caught this glimpse of the stately and social Gallia he had seen once
before, with a difference, at Holland House. Entirely without "beauty
manners" at all times, Gallia sometimes lacked something of the
influence the manners of a beautiful young woman give her. It is most
fortunate that the generality of beautiful people behave as though
they were beautiful--for this, not their actual claims of form and
feature, is what the mass of mankind observes and responds to.Denyer had been moving among the groups, but he came and stood
beside Gallia and looked across the park. The figure of Mr. Essex, in
his light-grey clothes, was seen crossing the grass to the house."Ah, Miss Hamesthwaite, can you guess what it is to a man whose
eyes have been accustomed to the far lovelier flowers of our Dark
Continent, to see again a sward, moist and velvety, freckled with
daisies?"Gallia responded intently to the touch of real emotion in the man's
voice. She was interested. Her greeting to Essex was unconsciously
shortened."How exquisite your Surrey is! A garden, a series of parterres. One
of oak forest, one of chestnut plantation, one of meadow grass, one
corn or flowers.""It must seem wonderfully small to you. But it is rich, really very
rich--and would go so much further if the people knew anything about
exploiting it. You, in Africa, can compel settlers to the use of more
scientific means of cultivation; nothing compels them here!" Gallia
spoke with a note of regret and bitterness, then stopped to give
Mr. Denyer a cup of the tea that had just been brought out."Expensive business trying to start new agricultural methods in
this country!" remarked Lord Shillinglee, who had abandoned
agriculture for coal, and saw no reason to regret it."Very, eh, Gallia?" cried Robbie, with the air of acute
mischief. "Let me see, what did your van cost when you were so hot on
agricultural reform?""Miss Hamesthwaite, this is news!" cried Mark, much
interested. "How much truth is there in the accusation of
philanthropy?"Gallia turned to him, smiling. "I'm afraid a good deal," she
replied. "Others enjoy telling that story more than I do--ask papa
about it."Lord Hamesthwaite appeared nothing loth to provide details."Ah, those were the days of our enthusiasm," he said, in a
good-natured, quizzing fashion. "We attended the classes at an
agricultural college throughout a whole session. Then we started a
van, and selected our own teachers.""Then it was partly your scheme?" inquired Mrs. Essex."Not at all! I was severely neutral. This young woman did the whole
thing. Let me see--what did the van teach, Gallia?""Farmyard Economics," said Gallia briefly, suppressing a smile.A low, delighted chuckle from Essex greeted the reply."It wasn't agriculture, it was simply, as I say, Farmyard Economics
we wanted to teach. We weren't in connection with, far less in
opposition to, any of the efforts made by the societies; but I
thought, and for that matter still think, there was room for the
practical enlightened common sense our people talked. My two young men
lectured in turns in the van.""Of course free?" from Gurdon."Oh, certainly, free!""The expense was all upon the other side," said Robbie,
laughing. "It cost a pretty penny to compel them to come in to the
van, didn't it, Gallia?""You will never be happy till I tell you what it did cost," Gallia
said, looking over to him."For how long did you pursue the idea?" Denyer inquired."For a season, commencing in the middle of February and continuing
to the beginning of June.""Well, it cost just a fraction over a thousand pounds," said Gallia
reluctantly. This statement excited much delighted laughter."Farmyard Economics!" murmured Essex in a tone of irresistible
gravity.Gallia swept round upon him."Well, I paid two young men, bought two horses from papa--and he
let me have them very cheap, I remember they were £40
apiece. Then I had to have the van built. It was a beautiful van,
painted in grass-green and corn-colour, with appropriate mottoes--no,
I will not divulge the mottoes round the
top. That van cost over £200, although I designed every bit of
it myself"--There was more laughter, in which Gallia joined frankly."But what industry and application on your part, Miss
Hamesthwaite!" Denyer said, looking admiringly upon the beautiful
face.Gallia coloured."I was just growing up," she said, more seriously, and with a
return to the irony of her ordinary mood. "I had been too well fed, I
suppose, all my life, and I had a good deal of superfluous energy to
work off. Besides, I was just at the age of devotion and anxiety to do
good, and that sort of thing. It didn't last long, and of course I see
the folly of it now."This speech affected various of her hearers very differently.Gurdon's face, in spite of his enjoyment of the details of her
scheme, had been alight with interest and admiration. He had thought
that Gallia affairée would be a more
charming picture--a reality--than any other Gallia. He thought that
eagerness and warmth and interest must have greatly become her dark
beauty, which a touch of too much cynicism made somewhat inhuman.Denyer, experienced man and diplomat, leader, organiser, financier,
and ruler, was interested too, because he was faced by something he
did not understand, and could not account for. To Denyer nothing that
he did not understand was small or unimportant. The mere fact that he did not understand it gave it a certain
importance in his eyes.Essex, with eyes half-shut and blinking at long intervals beneath
his hat brim, scrutinised less her face than her mental attitude. The
mere details of her expression were less noticed by him than a
scarcely perceptible uneven shifting of her figure."In Miss Hamesthwaite's mind philanthropy appears to rank as an
intellectual nettle-rash," he observed critically. "Some people get
nettle-rash at forty."Gallia had fallen into a smiling melancholy."It's usually a youthful disease, all the same," she said. "I have
been so long growing up," she continued, with an air as though she had
just perceived the fact. "You know when you are grown up because you
accept things. I scarcely can yet, I want to fight everything and have
everything new and made new again."Denyer and Gurdon smiled discreetly and politely in admiration of
her lighted face."What an innocent lady!" said Essex sweetly. "Still at the age of
comparatives. Good. Bad. Indifferent."She turned to him."Prophesy, if you like," she cried. "I know you want to! That I
shall come to an even mean, yes? Well, it is quite
possible."CHAPTER XXVITHERE are only two kinds of people in society, and each kind is
admittedly equally tedious. There is the person who thinks one should
"be oneself" at all hazards, and the person who thinks that at no
hazard should one be oneself, but always someone else.At the first blush, the first-named commends himself most to an
honest mind, but before declaring for him it may be well to pause.Change and recreation are the inevitable food of man. Sooner or
later the human being who has decided in favour of "being oneself"
will take a holiday, draw a long breath, and decide, for refreshment's
sake, to be someone else. It is at this juncture that you may meet
him, and how are you to know?Equally inconvenient, and even more common, is the second breed of
human--he whose creed perceives a certain indecency, at any rate an
impoliteness and an inexpediency, in being oneself, and who is
customarily engaged in being someone
else. This person is equally certain to pack his bag, so to say;
expand his chest, and, with defiance in his eye and custom beneath his
heel, decide to "be himself." And if at this point you have fallen in
with him--well, how are you to know?The worst of the business is, that it is usually on the occasion of
a handsome crisis in their lives that people behave in this way. And
if you yourself are mixed up in the crisis--if it is your crisis too?
At any rate, there is comfort in knowing that a crisis is the finest
setting for a mistake. Seldom, if ever, does a mistake have fair play
and become fully recognised unless it is made at a crisis.Fortunately, it usually is, and that is why we hear so much about
mistakes.When Dark Essex kissed and passionately loved Gallia in the
Cloisters of Westminster--was he being himself or someone else? And
was it his moment of change, or his age of custom? Had he prefaced his
abandon with this unspoken flash of thought:
"By Heavens, I'll act like any other man"? Or with this: "For once,
then, a mad once, I'll let myself go"? Gallia had often wondered. So
had Essex. It formed an interesting speculation for his leisure
moments, and to facilitate its study he sought Gallia's society--or
rather her neighbourhood--from time to
time. As a part of this seeking, he decided to accept the invitation
for the day on Hindhead.The advent of Miss Janion to the Hall had decided Gallia on making
this expedition; she entertained a wholesome fear of the
"maiden-up-to-date," if left, for whole consecutive hours, loose about
the house and grounds. Gertrude was a person who liked to "do
something." She came down in the best of clothes, and consequently in
the best of spirits too, prepared to do any number of things, and in
appropriate dresses."Shillinglee?" she cried, as Gallia ran over the names of the house
party. "How amusing! How is it, I wonder, that one never goes to a
country house without meeting the man one last refused? And he always
takes you down to dinner, too.""Well, in point of fact, I had"--Gallia began vaguely."I know! Of course; you had arranged it! My dear, don't alter the
table for me. I've gone through it with others, and I can again."Gallia laughed. "You'll accept him this time," she said."Shall I? I believe I shall. He said so the other day at the
Prince's garden party, I remember. What a gathering! never in all my
life have I seen"--and so the chitter-chatter had run on.While the household was still at breakfast, there was heard the
heavy clopping of under-bred hoofs upon the drive, and when they
looked out, there was Essex, mounted on some strange quadruped he had
hired from his inn at Hiddenfold."Ah, but you haven't felt him trot!" he said, with academic
gravity, as he came into the breakfast hall and shook hands. "You see
he is accustomed to working front horse in a team of three. I call
him, most incorrectly, the Teamster.""Well, I think you had better abandon him and see what we can do,"
Lord Hamesthwaite called from his little table near the fire.Breakfast was agreeably broken up at three little tables, and
Gallia and Margaret were in a square window embrasure, supported by
Gurdon and Lord Shillinglee.Robbie was described as not up yet. Mrs. Essex was described as not
down yet. Gertrude was described as not dressed yet.Everyone admitted that it was a lovely day. Mr. Essex sank into a
chair and tapped his boots.Gallia noted, with a feeling of dislike, when she handed him a
peach with a bit of ice in place of the stone, that his feet were too
small. In the Cloisters, just when he took her hands, she had observed
that his hands were too small. It was a
blemish in so handsome a man; a blemish that gave her a feeling of
discomfort. They were to start in twenty minutes."Now may I order you something that corresponds to one's idea of a
horse--or will you prefer driving?" she said hospitably.For a second the crazed suggestion lightened in Essex's brain that
he would first like to know if she were riding or driving. Then he
reflected, sensibly, that of course he wouldn't have cared to know
anything of the kind.Any woman would have perceived that Gallia's snowy spotted muslin
was never put on to be taken off again in such a hurry.In her hat she had followed Margaret's plan; it arched eave-like
above her hair; but over it, as she was driving, she had carried a
broad wisp of incredibly soft French lisse,
which broke in a foaming bow under her chin.Beside her, Margaret, in the green of young willows, and a hat
trimmed with their garlands, seemed the most delectable of summer
morsels. Gertrude wore a coaching dress from Paris, which had to be
seen to be credited. In time they started. Gallia drove Mr. Denyer
behind her Norfolk trotter. The main party came on the coach, Lord
Shillinglee proudly exercising his only known and proven talent,
handling with beautiful dexterity what Gallia called her scratch
team.The picturesquely English start from the fine old house was greatly
enhanced by the solitary equestrian. Mr. Essex had abandoned the
Teamster to the heaviest oats the brute had ever encountered, and was
mounted on Gallia's black hunter. This exquisite beast had not done a
day's work for many months, and only enough exercise to keep him in
condition. When he came out of the stable, shining like a
looking-glass, and as supple as a Persian cat, Gallia apologised for
his flesh."If you are determined to ride, you shall at least have a good
day," she said, as she looked over his bitting with a careful
eye. "Spain's paces are really divine."Spain proceeded to illustrate this the moment his rider's weight
was in the saddle."You could ride him on a thread of silk," Gallia said proudly, as
she watched the beast playing with his feet, "but you'll soon see what
Spain is made of.""Liquorice and aguardiénte, I should
think," said Robbie.Gurdon looked on, and wished he had been riding also. No man should
miss an opportunity of riding when he wants to make an impression on a
woman, provided he never loses his temper with a horse, and can ride."When you first went to Spain, how did you
make yourself understood in the wild places?" an obvious association
of ideas led Margaret to ask, as they bowled down the avenue."Oh, I learnt some Spanish in Paris; short sentences, you
know. There was a little girl there, daughter of an old model, who put
lots of useful tips in my way. Of course you remember young Lemuel,
Gurdon?" He leaned over and threw this question behind Lord
Hamesthwaite's shoulders to Mark."Oh yes, perfectly," Gurdon answered, wondering what had put the
girl into Robbie's mind. But he was destined to receive no
information, for Robbie was a scatter-brain, and any notions of
sequence in conversation were foreign to his type.Gurdon had excellent reason not to forget the girl; at that moment
he had in his pocket a brief note from her, forwarded from his
club. She was still in Brighton; she was almost strong. "It was so gay
and jolly after town; she hoped he was amusing himself wherever he
was. She had got the cheque all right. The doctor thought another
fortnight would quite set her up; he was such a nice doctor; quite
young; he had sent her tickets for two afternoon concerts." He
mentally conned over all the short, shallow sentences. He was sorry
for the girl, not because of her position, but because of her
nature. She must so certainly go one way. A
man's most pleasing inconsistency is his earnest pity of an
unfortunate. It gives the good people hope of his redemption; it
assures the average, clear-headed people that there is no possible
hope of hers.He was sitting where he could see a stretch of exquisite country on
every side of him; feeling the exhilaration in the light rush of
summer air; within touch of the fluttering laces that came warm from
Margaret's neck and tapped his cheek, and were recovered and
apologised for, made fast and blown loose again,--Margaret, the woman
he had at one time thought he loved. In front of him, a bright speck
upon the road, sometimes basely swallowed by a covetous hedge curve or
a greedy group of trees, was the little cart crowned by the white
figure of Gallia. Sitting there, it struck him that surely no man ever
saw the cobweb threads of his destiny so thickly floating in the air
before him. Now one tickled his face and now another. Now it was
Margaret and her whilom charm that he thought of; now it was Gallia
and the strong fascination she had for him. Then it was the letter in
his pocket. He remembered that other coach-drive in Paris two years
ago, when he had sat beside Mont Voisin and talked horse-breeding in
the latest cuvée of Paris French--when
he had been troubled by those underthoughts
about his career. Then he had not been getting on. Since? Well, since
had come his private secretaryship--not to the man he wanted, but
still, to a very good man. Then Denyer's return home, unexpected, too
good to hope for, as it had seemed. And a few chance words must have
passed between Denyer and Lord Hamesthwaite. The Colonial Secretary
must now know what he had owed, frankly and directly, to the
discretion of one humble underling in the big office; an underling
who, happening to have a little money, had conceived the idea of
spending his two months' rest in Africa, the country whose name was
under his eyes some fifty times a day. Lord Hamesthwaite must know, or
wherefore this sudden patronage? Mark was far too clever to think of
it as anything else. Life seen from this coach-top was somewhat
different, indeed! His alertness had served him very well. So had
money which he had put away carefully when his father died, and there
was more of it left yet.A less acute young Englishman would never have imagined it worth
his while to take the particular journey Mark had taken; to fall into
intercourse with the particular men Mark had thought it well to meet;
to get to know the facts of a case as Mark had got to know them; to
earn the personal commendation of the strong
man on the spot, John Denyer; to ignore the fact of his connection
with the big office at home as Mark had ignored it; to come home and
hold his tongue about the whole business as Mark had held his."Distrait, am I? I beg your pardon!" he said, in answer to a
playful poke from Mrs. Essex. "I was thinking about the last time I
was coaching; it was from Paris to Auteuil and back. I was thinking of
the astonishing difference in the outlook.""Ah, quite so. The races, I suppose? Oh, a very gay scene in
France, of course. I remember, when I paid my daughter a visit, we
were driving, and saw the people coming back from
Longchamps. Different indeed! One could not imagine a sweet Surrey
road holding such a company."They were pulling up the steep winding ascent to Hindhead, the
breath of the pines was about them, the air was full of the hum of
ardent bees constraining the heather to an early bloom. Upon the links
of road visible some mile or two behind was Essex on the slim black
Spain. In front was the green cart, with the brilliant Norfolk bay
throwing himself at his collar, and Gallia's smiling face turned
backward, as it seemed, looking at him. Gurdon's road had changed
indeed.CHAPTER XXVII"YOU see, it's not as though I had a sixpence in the world."
Mr. Leighton raised him-self to a more upright position on the
heather, and made the familiar gesture of pulling his watch from his
pocket. "Look here!" the chain came out neatly, and was found to have
a curious piece of copper money attached to it. "You see what time it
is with me!" he added, with a touch of easy tragedy."Oh, you don't really mean"--He interrupted the soft note of shocked amusement in Margaret's
voice."Indeed I do. Had to, positively, to get down here.""How dreadful for you!""So we should be as poor as possible at first. But not for long. I
have lots of old stuff that would feed the Spring Exhibitions for some
time to come. And I should paint portraits. I should get on at that, I
know. You see, to be a portrait-painter, you only want two
things." Robbie screwed up his face and tried
to look practical. "You want to paint the right people, and you want
to paint 'em in the right way.""Yes," said Margaret, with deep sympathy in her face."Now, as to the right people, I should be in rare case. Grannie
would help me to rope in the right people." She nodded. "And as to the
right way--well, you see my way in that big plein air I'm doing of you.""You mean the grey, gold, and bluish-purple one?" She might well
ask. Robbie had at least five canvases on the way."Yes, that's it. I'm painting people in greyish gold and purple
just now. I mean, that's how I see them, you know. Well, after all, a
man only wants a manner." He put his hand through his yellow hair and
pulled several stray locks down over his cedar-coloured forehead. "So
that we should be perfectly independent, you know; I'm sure you
couldn't bear to feel dependent on anyone, and I know I couldn't. And
Grannie makes a lovely background to a fellow's life."Margaret laughed. She was one of those women with a silver
laugh. They are really the nicest kind."Oh, Robbie," she cried, "don't make yourselfout such a dreadful goose and such a naughty boy as well, or
I don't think I really can"--"Now don't say it, Margaret, or you'll regret it! You do love me,
you must love me, for I have loved you ever since that day in Paris
when I first saw you. You remember? It was your first morning at the
studio, and you didn't know your way about. I shall never forget the
colour in your face when it dawned on you that you were in the wrong
studio. You looked divine! The fellows talked of you all morning.""It was one of the most frightful moments of my life," said
Margaret faintly."By Heavens, what a subject picture that would be! I see the whole
thing; I should treat it as an upright. Your face would be the warmest
note of colour, the prevailing tones would be grey, and the faint
pinks of the model would support your pink blush. I shall do it! I
shall call it 'A Rose in Error.' No, 'An Errant Rose.' You wait.""Robbie, you think of nothing but painting me.""You're wrong. I think much more of loving you. I have thought of
that since ever I've known you.""Hush!" She raised up a white and very pointed forefinger. "Don't
say that. There was one time when you didn't
think of me at all. But we won't talk of it any more." She sighed and
drooped her serious eyes."My darling girl, we must talk of it, if you are to be so madly
mistaken as all that. I swear that I have loved you ever since I have
seen you. I may have been a bit wild. I may not have been all the time
just what you would have wished me to be--and what your love will
always keep me." He took her hand and kissed it, and looked up at her
with deep sincerity in his face. She responded to it by leaning
forward and putting her lips to his forehead. It was the first time
she had volunteered the smallest caress, and for a moment he lost his
head. It was much credit to him that he found it again, and
continued. "But you have kept me straight." This he said, spacing the
words to give them more emphasis. She looked at him rather
wonderingly. "Why, dear, you can't imagine the things I might have
been up to in Paris.""Don't tell me, Robbie! I'd much rather not know.""My dear child, I wasn't going to tell you How can you suppose that
I would?" He put both his arms round her, which brought his head on her shoulder, since she was seated on a
tree-root somewhat above him. "Don't let us talk of it any more now,
dear. There is nothing, Margaret, I swear it to you, nothing that any
good woman would not be able to forgive. You know there are vast
differences in men; I can't explain 'em to you exactly, but there
are. I don't lay claim to many shining virtues, but among men, you
know, and by men, you understand, I should come out pretty well. For
I've never been a bad chap, really."Whether memory suppressed an echo in Margaret's mind cannot be
told; at anyrate, they were very happy after this, so happy that they
forgot everybody but themselves; which is the only trustworthy symptom
of true happiness. Fortunately, most of the party had expected that
this picnic would "bring matters to a head" between Mr. Leighton and
Miss Essex. The dependence of the upper classes in England upon
picnics as an emotional opportunity is positively pathetic. The
excellent meal, which forms the inevitable prelude to that moment at
which one may get away and talk with the only person one desires to
talk to, was over. It had been accompanied by no greater excitement
than a wonder as to what had become of Mr. Essex. He had been at most
a mile and a half behind them when last seen,
and yet he had never appeared.A footman had been despatched to the inn at which he had been
advised to leave Spain, and had returned with the curious intelligence
that the horse was in the stable and that Mr. Essex was in the
inn. Mr. Essex had asked for a room, and some ink, pens, and paper,
and had left orders that he was not to be disturbed."Seized with an inopportune attack of literary creativeness,"
Gurdon had observed, smiling; and nobody found a better explanation to
offer."Such an odd boy he always was!" his mother plaintively added, not
without some pride in his oddity, however.So lunch had passed over without him, and then Margaret and Robbie
had wandered off, taking advantage of irregularities in the rolling
heathland and other bits of cover with a deftness that would have put
a detachment of infantry to the blush.The rest permitted an opposite direction to attract them, and
strolled quietly along, Denyer and Mark Gurdon walking on each side of
Gallia at first. There was nothing particular to do. The object of the
expedition had been the drive, and they were to drive home by
another road, which would give them an extra
five miles and a great deal of delightful scenery.Returning from the walk, Gallia went on in advance to give her
orders about putting in the horses. Leaning up against the coach she
discovered Mr. Essex, with that peculiar air of coolness, paleness,
and dark handsomeness that distinguished him."Really, at the top of that three-mile hill, Spain and I had worked
so hard that we were both unfit to join the party. The landlord deeply
sympathised with my condition, and he and his man put me through a
wonderful twenty minutes. It seems they have a great experience in
towelling the cyclists. After that I lay down; after that, I am
ashamed to say, I went to sleep." These explanations flowed smoothly
from Mr. Essex, and wore an air of such truth that the footman packing
a hamper close by paused in his work and marvelled.Gallia had turned to Mrs. Essex with some laughing allusion to the
cause of her son's disappearance."Do not be any quicker than you can help with the horses," Essex
remarked, catching the groom's eye and bidding adieu to half a
sovereign at the same moment. The man understood him, and passed the
word to his helpers."May I claim the last ten minutes of this delightful hour, Miss
Hamesthwaite?" Essex said, approaching her as she stood in brisk talk
with Mark Gurdon. She looked up at him at once--the curious still
atmosphere of strength and hidden thought about the man always
commanded her attention. "I should like to show you the greatest
curiosity in the neighbourhood, and I think you may have missed it. It
lies over here.""Mr. Essex excites my interest!" she said to Mark. "Well, then,
don't disappear when Brownie is put in, because she will not stand,
and you know I am to drive you home."Whether this remark disturbed Essex or not, he certainly spoke no
word as they walked off together."But you said it was over there?" protested Gallia, pointing with
her parasol, and then opening it suddenly."Truly," he rejoined, altering the direction of his steps. Still
they went on in silence."What were you doing at the inn?" Gallia asked, as they descended a
hill among the pine trees."I was writing to you," answered Essex quietly."To me?"--she looked up in surprise at his face.With a sudden change of his absorbed manner, he met her eyes and
put life into his glance."To you. See this!" he showed her an envelope with her name upon
it. "Shall we sit down here on the edge of this little pool? It looks
deep, doesn't it?"Gallia was conscious that the day had changed, that her frame of
mind must alter to be in keeping with it, that something serious was
coming to her. There was no fascination, no magnetism about Essex's
glance, but there was, now and then, a curious deep, still fondness in
its depths, which lingered for a very little moment, just long enough
to obtain recognition, and then left mockery, of himself as much as
others, in its place."I have changed my mind about my letter: I shall throw it away," he
said."Don't do that! It would spoil the heather." Essex laughed."What a pity I am not a sentimental fellow!" said he; "there is a
beautiful opportunity for bitterness there. No, we will dig a
hole--and bury it. Some little mice will gnaw it up and make nests of
it, and still smaller mice, of a fleshy shade, shall nestle in
it,--good." He began to make a hole just between them as they
sat. Still digging, efficiently enough, with a
long silver cross that hung on his watch-chain but never dangled
publicly upon his waistcoat, he began speaking."Don't be impatient, Gallia: this is the last of me.""What is?""This little talk to-day, and this buried letter.""Don't bury the letter--let me read it first.""And bury it after? No, indeed. Some letters are meant to be
buried. I see that in any case you would wish this one buried, so my
last service shall be to bury it for you.""Your last--and your first service."He looked up."That's not true. I have done, first and last, a great deal for
you, Gallia. First and last, good or bad, I have done a great
deal. For six years I have been a great deal in your life; often I
have involuntarily given the tendency to your thoughts. When we met,
what were you like? Ah! how different you were!""I remember myself perfectly. I could cry now for what I suffered!
How hard I have taken everything! How brackish and bitter every
experience of my first youth tasted! Drowned in sea-water, life has
been for me. I was hot-spirited, raw, impatient; clever, sensitive,
shy, vain, self-conscious; with an abnormally
developed sense of the ridiculous; too shy even to cherish a fine
ideal inside myself. Then you came along, and how much bitterer and
more brackish things seemed to you! What a cynicism I found in you!
What crude brutality you served out to me!" She recapitulated these
things as though they had been long unthought of in her mind, as
though she saw and recognised them clearly now at last for the first
time. Neither looked at the other, they stared out across the
wonderful waves of green Surrey far into the blue of Sussex."Yes, I spoilt you and warped you--unintentionally, of course. I
used to think of you much more than I would ever admit, you
know. Then, when I was tutoring in Greece and trailing cubs about
Asia--those strange letters that you wrote to me. Three of them I
remember, in about two years.""I used to be moved to write them after long spells of a lonely
sort of misery and dissatisfaction. Usually at night.""Once by moonlight--so you said.""Quite true; one does that sort of thing at a certain time in one's
life. And your replies! Good Heavens! 'I perceive in the lower corner
what you would no doubt wish me to consider a tear-drop. Do not, dear
lady, do not impress so honest an object as
the bedroom ewer, to support these figments of the imagination.'"
Gallia laughed with a suspicion of sadness in the voice, sadness for
those old days when such nonsense had made her so miserable. He joined
in even less gleefully. Then they both said the same thing at the same
moment, which often happens, but has, nevertheless, an odd enough
effect.Gallia. "I was so fearfully in love with you, you see!"Essex. "You were so fearfully in love with me, you see!"At this they laughed again."Well, it was that, I suppose," Essex said; and then, looking at
her, added, "The thing has evened itself up since, hasn't it?"She did not answer."Let me see the letter before you put it in.""No; the letter belongs to something that has no further
existence.""And was it not the curiosity you wanted to show me?""No. I was the curiosity--and still am. But not of the same sort. I
have repented me of the evil.""Why?""I didn't know you were going to drive Gurdon home, before. I do
now: that little fact has changed my
life-plan. I can't help feeling you are right to drive Gurdon home and
marry him afterwards. I think he will do very well. He is really quite
a fine fellow, Gurdon, and he will have all the position you care
about. I know you don't care for family."Gallia had not interrupted any of these statements regarding her
future course of action. She contented herself by saying, "My dear
Dark, we haven't any family ourselves. Nice, middle-class people
raised to uncomfortable prominence by a vulgar title.""No doubt," he assented calmly. "Still, that's just why you might
have been expected to stand out for family, you know.""We can do without it. Money I have in plenty. Gurdon will achieve
all the position necessary for a man to have. He has the kind of
talent that is indispensable to a Conservative Government. They can't
get on without the keen talent of business men. Look at papa! They got
in papa, in the face of enormous Cabinet opposition, to morphine the
Colonies after the machinations of a Marquis. Forgive me all those
silly m's. And see how it has worked. The Radicals have had to stoop
and collar labour to keep them going, the Tories have stooped too and
collared the shopkeepers--ourselves--to keep them going.""A facile explanation, Gallia, with as much truth in it as any
woman can arrange artistically in her statements.""I was talking of Gurdon's position as it affects himself, not as
it affects me, for it doesn't affect me. It's as a man that Gurdon
appeals to me.""You are perfectly right," said Essex smoothly, dusting his small,
sallow hands with a handkerchief; "he has all the manly
qualities.""He has. He's got virility, alertness, no vague nebulous tract of
country between the place where his ideas are born and the place where
they are shaped for practice. He is keen and gamey and lifey. Then
he's got iron self-control, a princely obstinacy, an imperial power of
faithfulness." Essex assented with his head several times. "Added to
which, he is a handsome fellow, with all the bone and muscle and blood
and fibre that a man ought to have--not wasted by athletics, nor
injured by slothfulness.""My dearest girl," Essex said, when the list of Gurdon's virtues
was full, "he's the very man for you. Marry him. Marry him by all
means!""I am glad you think it is all right," said Gallia
heartily. "There's nothing in which two heads are more conspicuously
better than one, than in deciding a point of this kind. The successful marriage is when you happen to want
the man that other people would have chosen for you.""Entirely so. People have proved thousands of millions of times
that it's the last move to base upon one opinion only, and that your
own.""Well, you see why I'm going to marry him?""Oh, I do.""And I explained all my views to you before--as to what I expected
to arrive at for myself?""You did indeed.""Dark, you aren't being sympathetic: what's the matter?""Nothing, dear."There was a pause, during which they sat as before, looking over to
blue Sussex. Gallia's face was a little discontented."And now," taking out his match-box, "let us burn the letter. On
second thoughts, I won't let mice nibble it to pieces. Ashes are, I
believe, employed as a fertiliser. Do you think a sprig of white
heather would be so obliging as to spring on the grave of my
hopes?""Your hopes?""That letter was to tell you that--Do you mind putting up your
parasol? I can't get this match to light; thanks!--You see, I didn't
know till now that you had decided.""Yes, I think I have decided.""Do you mind telling me, are you going to love Gurdon at all?""I like the 'am I going to,'" she laughed. "No, Dark. The thing is
not written in that key. I finished loving anyone--you know when.""I know when. When I began to love you.""Was it? Well, that was the nick of time."Her eyes were on the flames of the thin cream-laid note-paper of
the inn."I would not ask to see that letter, though, of course, I would
like to have seen it, just as much as you would like to have shown it
me. I believe I can control the woman in me
sometimes.""My dear," Dark Essex looked up with a naïf illumination of
face and a very delicate playfulness of voice, "that's your one
failing!--Now," rising as she rose, "shall we fly in the face of
custom by not kissing each other?"She smiled her sweetest, her most delicious smile, and walked with
a graceful floating sort of swiftness over the heather. Very soon they
could see the coach--the reins were just being buckled at that
moment. Something had delayed the men."All the same," said Gallia, turning to him and pausing, "I think
one may over-do one's sacrifices, in order to fly in the face of
custom. We run the risk of giving custom too
much importance." Essex made a gesture of despair, and indeed he felt
some in his heart. "If he'd had a pinch more of the common vices of a
man about him," commented Gallia to herself, with the whimsical
network showing on her forehead."I swear I'm so accustomed to acting as if I've no feelings, that I
begin to think I haven't any!" was Essex's reflection.Essex was a distinctly clever fellow, but he lacked a great deal of
valuable common knowledge. For instance, he had never heard that there
is often precious little fighting in the soldier who is too good at
drill.CHAPTER XXVIII"TEN miles--with plenty of hill--in fifty-four minutes."Gurdon took out his watch to make a calculation. They were on the
level just then."Really, it is good! Do you think driving fast can make one hot, or
is it really very warm?""It is warm; but you are at a certain strain to watch the road when
we are going so fast, and the excitement heats you.""She is perfectly sure-footed, and I have never known her to
stumble--but of course one must--Hullo! Aha!"At that instant the horse had stumbled--it was only a small
stumble, but Gallia pulled up immediately."I'll go back and see what it was." Mark got promptly out and
walked along the road; there was an inch deep of powdery sand in the
track, and among it more than one rounded stone. He came back and
reported, and they went on again, but Gallia's
brow was knitted. The next two miles were covered much more slowly,
and conversation was somewhat disjointed."There! I was afraid of it, she's going lame of that near fore!
Never in all the four years that I have had her has she known one
minute's lameness. She must have strained herself in recovering. We
shall come very soon to the Noah's Ark Inn; I will stop there and rest
her for half an hour.""We might have tea, perhaps?"Mark knew much better than to offer to look after the horse; he
went and found the ostler, however, and then he set himself to
ordering tea and strawberries in a quaint little sitting-room looking
out upon a garden choked with flowers.The strain was rather more serious than she had imagined, and
Gallia was about twenty minutes in getting a hot-water bandage on the
leg, after having bathed it as long as the hot water of the "Noah's
Ark"--a tap which had small popularity, apparently, and was little
inquired for--held out. She came in at length and described her
labours."And I am afraid, do you know, that we must go home by
train!""Very well. What a pity for the little horse! You will want to take
him too. Shall I get a man to go to the station, and see if by any
means a horse-box can be had?"She gratefully accepted this suggestion, and Mark went to put it in
force at once."At anyrate," she said to herself, as she arranged her hair at the
oblong glass on the over-mantel,--"At anyrate, he is a person of
resource in little things. So tremendously necessary. He is the kind
of man who would miss the last train, and arrive just the same. And
one has to admire that. Whereas, poor Dark--dear, dear! how much one
could love Dark for being totally without that sort of quality!"Gurdon came in at that moment."It is all right; the man has gone. And I just gave him a telegram
to the stationmaster at Haslemere, asking him to put a horse-box on to
the 6.35 from there; so that, even if there is none at this little
place, you will probably get one all the same.""What a useful person you are!"Gallia looked laughingly at him. This fresh proof of his readiness
in little things amused her."Do you dislike useful people?""How should I? Ah, here is tea!"She helped the dumb, heavily-breathing
country girl to spread the table, then she lifted a pot of musk from
the window and put it in the centre.What a gracious sort of thing to do! thought Mark.They sat down. As is usual in the country, the bread was greyish
and a little sour, the butter was salt and out of a tub, the jam was
somebody or other's whole squashed fruit, and the tea someone else's
best bonded, which recalled the delicious hay of a year ago. They had
no fresh eggs, and they had no cream, and they had no water-cress. But
Gurdon was in love with Gallia Hamesthwaite, so it didn't matter.And Gallia Hamesthwaite was in love with logic, so it didn't
matter."Ah!" he put down his cup with rapture; "friendly Brownie! But the Brownies belong to the
good folks, don't they?""They do. And this time their little doings will be the means of
keeping us away from our friends till eight o'clock, and making papa
very anxious.""He surely won't be so anxious when he reflects that you are with
me?" Gurdon said rather foolishly, with the carelessness of a person
who is wanting to say one particular thing, and bestows the least
possible attention upon any other subject that
may happen to come up.He received a look of cool inquiry from Gallia."He will be anxious about you too. Brownie should have taken care
of both of us, and Brownie didn't.""Brownie has been the means of our being alone here together," said
Gurdon boldly. "I seem never to have found you alone in my life till
now.""Why should you have expected to? The way we all live is calculated
always to bring people together in droves, not alone together.""But how can you get to know anyone whom you persistently meet in
droves?""Somehow or other, even in London, you do find yourself alone with
people who want to know you, and whom you want to know." Gallia spoke
musingly, the long dim cloister at Westminster rising before her
eyes."It has never yet happened to me.""It has happened to you here to-day."Still there was the cloud of elsewhere in her eyes, the tentative
remote tone in her voice. Mark was no psychologist, and it did not
disturb him.
"'And He and She the banquet scene completing,
With dreamy words and very pleasant eating,'" he said contentedly, holding up a really quite presentable
strawberry.She smiled upon him."Something has put me in mind of a poem I once knew, I have thought
of it at intervals all day. I wonder if you know it?""Let me hear it."He said it. He had a good voice; he said it very well. There is no
need to detail the poem. Everybody has had such a poem in his mind on
such an occasion; everybody will remember some of it. It was quite the
usual poem."You have a great feeling for poetry," said Gallia thoughtfully,
when he had finished."For a practical kind of fellow, I believe music and poetry have
far too much meaning for me.""Do you like your life salted with poetry?" she asked, thoughtfully
still."If I could get it," Mark answered, smiling; "if not, I am prepared
to do without it.""An unusual attitude for you, Mr. Gurdon.""Very, I admit--I'm seldom prepared to do without what I want. As
you will have guessed, or someone may have told you, I am a very
ambitious man."She laughed. "I have guessed--and everybody has told me
besides.""Think of the most ambitious design I could entertain--towards you,
for instance."He had courage, but he lowered his voice and he spoke slowly, very
slowly.Gallia looked at him; her face and eyes were not unkind, and there
was a gleam of playfulness in them."I think of it," she said. "And you can put it aside at once."He lifted his shoulders slightly, as though to get a better
breath."I am so in earnest," he said, with a good deal of effort. "Gallia,
I am so in earnest." He clasped his right hand round his left, pressed
them so till the white pattern of each finger was shown above each
knuckle, then, still clasped, he dropped them between his
knees. "Think what I want--I want to make you my wife!""Now, why? " said Gallia, not flippantly but with interest. "That's
only the second most ambitious design I can think of, but tell me
why?"He missed the parenthesis, the answer to that "why" was burning in
him so hotly. He stammered his reply, seemed to reject the first part
of his answer, and said, with great restraint, "Because I admire you
more than any woman I have ever seen. And because I admire you more than I could admire any woman in the world,
seen or not seen."She looked at him critically."You shall tell me more of that later. It is my turn to say
something. You shan't suffer the unfairness of the average proposal
scene if I can help it.""The unfairness?""Yes. A man has to say all the humble, uncomfortable things,--in
the sweat of his brow,--and a girl listens calmly and allows smiles to
dawn at intervals. We won't do that. We'll try and be more honest. So
it is my turn now. I have thought for some little time of marrying
you, and to spare you any further anxiety, I may tell you that I had
decided to if you spoke of it."Mark recognised the tremendous individuality of this speech, and
took both her hands in a grasp of great strength, a grasp that
trembled from his desire not to crush those hands too tightly."Gallia!" It was a cry of great joyfulness; the astonishing
whiteness of his face gave way before a rush of blood. "But you
mustn't accept me yet," he said,--"not like that. I have things to
tell you, things about myself. You must know them before you say
that"--he inhaled sharply, with a musical note in his breath--"that
you will take me.""Of course we shall have to talk about it a very great deal. But if
I tell you a few things, it will save time. And we can do the talking
at greater leisure.""That reminds me"--he seized his watch and then leapt up; "how dare
there be trains?" He took her hand again, even as he looked for and
rang the bell. "We must leave instantly if we are to walk Brownie to
the station."Gallia, without another word, flew out of the room. Mark gave the
girl who came half a sovereign, and followed to the stable-yard. The
harness had already been stowed in the little cart. And Gallia came
out of the stable leading a still limping Brownie by a borrowed
halter. They set off, Mark beside her, she leading her horse.The lane that Mark and Gallia followed seemed to lead into the
heart of a lemon-and-silver evening rather than to any landward
point. They were silent for a little time. Then Mark, after many
inward hesitations, took her free hand and held it. The conversation,
so hurriedly concluded, seemed a little difficult to take up."There are so many things I must tell you, so much to explain, so
much to put you in possession of," Gallia began perplexedly, as they went along, "and this doesn't seem the
occasion. This is not a serious occasion, it is a sentimental
occasion"; she placed a dreadful inflection on the word sentimental,
which made Gurdon apprehensive. "This lane, the scent of those
queen-of-the-meadows, the honeysuckle and roses, that sky over there
above the fir trees, is too much for me; the whole thing is a stage
set, and we are puppets! I can't be serious." He listened very
sympathetically. "And the press of centuries of tradition is weighing
on me and pulling and dragging me." She shook her head and threw it up
as a horse does when unused to harness. "I can't be myself. All the
dead women in the world who have done identical things at such moments
are coercing me, are pushing and constraining me to act as they
did. And if I do, I shan't mean it--it won't be me, it will be
them--all the women who have been loved and who have gone before. What
chatter it is to talk of being free, or of getting free! as if we ever
could! Make her the moment and the man, and every woman takes to
sentiment smiling, as a little yellow fluffy duckling flounders
quacking to a pool. Oh, what chatter--what chatter it has all been,
this talk of freedom! Sometimes there are moments in life when one
actually sees a little further--when emotion
and excitement lift one above the shoulders of the colder crowd. Free?
Individually free? Poor women, if that is what we want! We undo one
knot in order to be 'free' to tie another. Women are like members of
an Alpine party--looped each to one long rope. Even I, who have no
sentiment in me, my hands and arms would know perfectly how to clasp
you."Mark shivered with sudden passion."That would be instinct," he said in a whisper."It would not! It would be heredity! Savage man and woman did not
make love as we do, they had no instinct of that kind. You eat and
hunt and kill and sleep and marry by instinct--but there is no primary
instinct of love-making. It is heredity. A trick of heredity. Hands,
arms, and lips are born with the cunning of it, and whether one feels
like it or not has little enough to do with it."Mark admired her the more for this fire, though it puzzled him."Gallia, can't you see what a lovely thing it is, this sweet
instinct in women--in all good, true women--to respond to, and to love
the man who loves them.""No, Mark, I can't see it--I never could see it. It has been my misery always to see the ugly side of love
and love-making. And I feel caught in a net now, a net of
sentiment. No, you are not the fowler; it isn't your fault. It's the
season and the sky and the flowers, and the whole of nature's clever
'ticing-trap. Mark, pick me some honeysuckle,
get me some
meadowsweet--let me take Queen Nature's shilling if I must."In half a minute he had put a great tower of creamy, powder-headed
meadowsweet into her hand, and hung a scented trail of honeysuckle
about her neck and from her hat. She let him kiss her as he did this,
knowing that it had to be, that the time had come for it, and verily
Mark's soul was in his eyes as he looked at her."How gladly I would unbe everything I have ever been for you now!"
he said, rather strangely, and still held her face lightly with his
hands."I forget--have you said that you loved me?" asked Gallia."I don't know if I've said it. I don't think I am going to say
it. There are things to tell you first. And I think, too"--he raised
his arms above his head and looked up into the air and seemed to
expand himself to the evening--"I think, too, if you will allow me, I
will never say it--I will live it."Words rose to Gallia's lips in reply, but she saw the lemon lines
in the sky, and the masses of silver cloud and the bars of misty blue
that would be indigo in an hour, and she smelt the flowers, and knew
the dead women of the world were having their will of her, were
triumphing in her. She made no answer. They were both silent. Just
before they went into the station, Gurdon said tenderly--"I owe Brownie something!" and he stopped and kissed the beast's
bright neck, just above where Gallia's hand lay on it, then he kissed
her hand too. "My hand!" he said."Oh, dead, dead women who are so strong still!" cried Gallia in her
puzzled heart. "And dead men too, that teach so faithfully!""What will you do with your flowers?" said the man of the world
dubiously, as they went into the station yard."I shall wear them," said Gallia."You look lovely in them," responded the lover, with an ecstatic
modulation.CHAPTER XIXAS they sat down on the little narrow bench at the end of the
horse-box, opposite Brownie's frightened head, Gallia felt the weight
of the situation becoming intolerable. Never in her life had she put
off the awkward moment, the moment of confession, abasement,
explanation--whatever it might have been. The torments of a person
with something on his mind were new to her. She had an almost endless
buoyancy of soul, owing to her habit of immediate honesty. This moment
now burdened her as much as had those others long ago, when it had
been Essex to whom her explanation was owed.She was silent, sometimes looking out at the blue and black
evening, sometimes letting her eyes rest on Brownie's head. Mark had
been silent too, by way of sympathy with her mood. Also, he had a
great deal to think of. Events had hurried him somewhat; instead of
all falling out decently and in order, here was only another example of Nature's or Life's lack of any sense of
propriety. It deeply offended Gurdon's sense of decency to have spoken
to Miss Hamesthwaite while Cara Lemuel still depended upon him for
support. She would never, of course, hear of it, but Gurdon had his
theories; he honoured the woman who was to be his wife; he regarded
this complication as a tacit offence to her, and he, on his own part,
resented it. He was the victim of it as much as she was. This made him
silent too. His heart beat high at his fine fortune, but--he too had
his ideal, and for the sake of an opportunity he had not acted up to
it.He chose an outside subject to break in upon their constraint."Imagine your coming in this box and insisting on travelling with
the horse!" he said, with a kind touch in his voice."I would not have excused a servant for getting into a carriage and
leaving a nervous horse alone," Gallia answered simply."But then it would have been the servant's business.""It is the business of anybody who happens to be with a horse to
look after him, isn't it? Besides, wouldn't you rather be in a
carriage with a dear horse whom you know than in a carriage with tiresome people whom you instinctively
hate?"He laughed."Oh, far rather," he said. "It is said that women who are fond of
animals to the extent that you are, don't care for children.""If children are as nice as nice animals, I like them
extremely. But why should one be expected to adore other people's
children, out of hand? It's absurd. Fortunately it's dying out. Now,
do you like children?"He did not answer at once; as a matter of fact, he could not
command his voice. He had never had anything like this emotion to
quell before--he had not believed himself capable of it--now it choked
him. If he had at that moment recalled his love for Margaret,--which
had been a mere drawing-room feeling, with as little substance about
it as a cretonne,--if he had recollected some other feelings of his in
another relation, he would have shouted in their repudiation. This,
this now, was his first moment of feeling; he was indeed hoisted above
the shoulders of the colder crowd; he was scarce able to breathe for
the tumult in his breast. Her question had been put quite lightly; she
had had no arrière pensée; but
the instant she felt him take her hand in the spell of the silence that had fallen, and heard him breathing,
she knew a moment had come."I shall love my own children," he said, very low and gravely, "if
God--and you--give me any."Mark, the worldly-minded; Mark, the agnostic; Mark, the erect man
of now-a-days, whose knee had never bent at any shrine! And till then
he had never known any thought that went so deeply with him; he had
never cared or meant a hundredth part as seriously.Could Gallia reply? It was her time; she was strangely moved; it
must have been a sob, half of exaltation, half of regret, that he
heard in her voice. If it had been Essex who was beside her, whose
hand was in hers! If he had said those last words! Just in a flashing
second she wondered if it would have come natural to her to reply. She
looked searchingly round the box--but a little light came in at the
square window, a mere fading beam, and there was no lamp. Oh, if it
had been Essex! She could have told him true. She thought of her duty,
she thought of her free choice, she thought of her ideals. She was
strong enough then for the ordeal by fire. She belonged now to the man
beside her, she had chosen to belong to him; and he was hers, she had
selected him to be hers."I will love our child," she said. He said nothing, he was more
than happy.Some priest wrapped in mystic adoration, kneeling in the chequered
light of the Virgin's chapel, praying for the atonement of man's sins
to woman, who has felt his heart reel to that most sacred depth of
humility which is the first step upon the gold stairway of pardon,
might sympathise with Gurdon's feeling then.Presently he awoke to be a man again."Will you not say once, now, that you love me?" he asked."Need we say our alphabet?" asked Gallia, with a swift change of
humour, and he was sure he had made a mistake. "Ah, yes," she went on,
"I must tell you. I am not marrying you because I love you.""Then forgive me my vanity--if I took that for granted, it is
because I knew of no other possible reason for your marrying me. Why,
then--why are you willing to be my wife?""Frankly, I am not allured by the prospect of being anybody's
wife," she said, taking up her adherence to her older feelings. "But I
want to marry; and I want you to be my husband--or rather, the father
of my child."He was puzzled and he was piqued,--he did not in the least follow
her."I do not love you--I may no doubt come to have a strong affection
for you."--He recovered a little--he was ready, as every man is ready,
to undertake to teach her to love him; he was going to tell her so in
a minute. "But I admire you; you fill out my idea of what a man should
be, not only in looks, but in qualities. Perhaps it seems strange to
you, but I have never had much love in me, and that little I used up
some time ago, on someone who did not care for me, and whom, if I had
married, I should have been disappointed with now. I have only yearned
to be a mother--I can't explain and say more about it than that, even
to you; I have wanted the father of my child to be a fine, strong,
manly man, full of health and strength. A man who is a man, whose
faults are manly; who has never been better than a mere man in all his
life."He marvelled greatly, then he said, "But--do you know enough of my
life to feel satisfied? For, Gallia, I love you. So much that you
shall take me on your own terms. I shall be yours, and you shall be
your own ! When I cannot understand, I shall still love you. I do not
quite follow you now, but with you I know that there is no single
feeling but what is noble and honourable and honest. Now--you must
hear about my life--I must be as honest as you
would have me--as, indeed, I wish to be.""Thank you, Mark; as I said before, the discomfort shall not be all
yours. It would have been strange if, with my views, I had agreed to
marry you being ignorant of your life. An odd series of little
circumstances placed me in possession of certain facts"--"You know that I loved Margaret Essex?""Well, I did not. But I could not forgive any man who had not loved
Margaret Essex. She is the ideal woman. She is a thousand women--not
one woman. All men ought to worship her."He laughed, picked up her hand and kissed it. "Looking back on it,
it seems very curious," he said; "she touched none of the chords you
touch in me. Every fibre in me loves you!" His voice was warm and
joyous again. "So what did you know?" He had no suspicion of what was
coming."Well, I believe I was already dreaming of marrying you--possibly,
and if you would have me--when the knowledge of the illness of your
mistress came to my ears."If a cannon had gone off close to his head, Mark would have been
less amazed."You will believe that I was not prying into your life," said Gallia judicially, not as one asking a
question, but as one giving an order. He was too astounded to
speak. Could Essex, who just possibly might know something of it,
have--but never, never, never--that was wholly impossible.She recapitulated the chain of events that had put her in
possession of these facts, and still Mark's silence held good."I went down into the country to think things over, to review my
life, and be quite sure of what I wanted to do with it. At first just
at first, Mark--I did not like it; it somehow--did not please me. I
will not go into the reasons, though I think I know them all
now. Then--I saw that I must reform my thoughts; I saw that the
logical sequence of my views about the kind of man I wanted to marry
read equally as my approval"--"Don't, Gallia! For God's sake, don't, don't, don't!" Without
knowing why, Mark knew that he could not bear this. He could bear the
rest, but this he simply could not bear. It was
the agony of knives to him.There was a pause; in Gallia's brain an explanation of his feeling
made itself heard. Throughout the ages, a man's wife is expected to
disapprove of his mistress while she forgives
him for having one; all this is tacit. It is impossible for a man to
listen to his adored wife talking--in no matter what fashion--of his
previously cherished mistress. That this is as incomprehensible as the
number of physical elements, matters nothing. It is so."Would you rather have me angry with you about it?" asked
Gallia."Infinitely rather," said Gurdon; "it would be more natural.""If I loved you, I might be jealous of her," thought she, but
wisely said nothing."Well, you cannot get over the fact that it was owing to my hearing
of her at the time and in the way that I did, that decided me to marry
you."Gallia clasped her hands round her knees and looked disconsolately
before her.Gurdon groaned. The longest pause of all occurred.Gallia abandoned Gurdon, his head in his hands, and occupied
herself with Brownie.In the meantime the train drew into the station. They roused
themselves, and the horse was got out and a man found to take it to
the Hall."I find they can have a fly from the inn in a few minutes.""Very well. I am going to walk. I should prefer it."This sounded as though Mark was to have the privilege of driving
alone in the fly; he could not believe that she meant it."If you wish to walk, I am very willing; but are you not
tired?""Not the least. I'm made of better stuff. I want to walk because I
want to think. You had better think too. I see I have frightened
you. You had never seen the real me till now, and you don't like
her. Very well. Let her go--there is no harm done.""Hush! hush! Life is not a child's game, Gallia.""No," she murmured, with a wry smile; "it is too dull for
that."They had been walking down the ash-path, now Gallia led the way to
a short cut through the wood which cut off the hill. He put his arm
round her and they walked silently on. After all, he thought, there
isn't another woman alive who could regard such affairs as calmly, or
with so complete an absence of hysteria. And he was going to teach her
to love him. Things seemed to point very naturally to his asking her
to forgive him. This is not at all an unusual way for things to point,
in the early stages of a love episode,--later,
the woman has to ask forgiveness."It is to be as you please--you shall take me for whatever you
please, no matter in what capacity, for better or for worse. I--I am
proud that you want me."It was really rather fine in Mark."Perhaps you will learn to have some little feeling for me--some
day."This rather astonished Gallia, who was, as a rule, occupied singly
with her own life and her own future, feeling these to be as much as
she could manage."It would disappoint me very greatly in myself," she said, very
naïvely, "if I came to love you."Mark laughed. Somehow this intoxicated him. He took her in his arms
and crushed her till he frightened her. Being only a simple young
woman after all, this had a great effect upon her. If only Essex had
had the grit to go as far--to laugh and go as far.CHAPTER XXXTHERE were signs of commotion in the house when Gallia and Gurdon
walked into the hall about nine o'clock,--commotion of a regulated and
decently-constrained nature, as became a large and well-managed house,
but nevertheless commotion.Gallia's eye fell on a copy of the Figaro of
that day's date on one of the hall tables, and, with a confused idea
in her mind, she left Gurdon and ran along the flagged terrace upon
which the windows of the drawing-rooms opened.Upon so hot an evening as it was, none were closed."Aunt Celia!" she exclaimed, in great
excitement,--"well?"--bursting into the room. "When I saw the Figaro--Yes, papa, perfectly sound and unhurt!
Brownie fell lame, so we came home by train. Forgive my not welcoming
you except by an Indian warwhoop. I am so glad to see you, Aunt Celia,
for, of course, it means you are better." She came over to the
arm-chair in which Mrs. Leighton, still in her bonnet and slowly peeling off outer wisps of wholly unprotective
laces, had evidently not long sat down."I was well enough to escape, dear, and I have come here to
recover, if you will let me, from the severities of the cure. They
have tried me inexpressibly." She shut her eyes, raised her eyebrows,
and, with a slight trembling of the delicate ivory and lavender-veined
lids, inhaled whiffs of strong ammonia from a bottle.Gallia had the good taste not to exclaim upon her improved
appearance, for nothing would have offended the old lady more than any
remark of the kind, but she was, in point of fact, looking wonderfully
better.Just as Gallia finished a somewhat fuller explanation of the
accident, Gurdon, who had changed his clothes, came into the room. A
servant had apprised him of Mrs. Leighton's arrival, and Gallia could
not withhold her admiration of his greeting of her. The homage of her
favourite young man threw a great sparkle into the old lady's face,
and even to the orange ribbon in her charming bonnet, she seemed to
brighten."Your rooms, dear Aunt Celia"--"Thank you, child, I will go upstairs after I have had my bouillon;
oh, here it comes! Of course I have brought my own sheets;--I have given up camel's hair and am sleeping in pine
wool now. No sheet can be fit to use unless it has been aired for
forty-eight hours consecutively." Mrs. Leighton spoke with authority;
she was in the habit of changing the material of her sheets in a
sweeping fashion about every three months, and invariably carried the
latest fad to her friends' houses when she visited."Thank you, Gerald," as Lord Hamesthwaite's arm came to her
assistance in leaving the room. "You will tell me your fortunes
to-morrow?" This to Mark, who was opening the door."I am coming up with you to see that you have everything," said
Gallia, whose cheek was flushing faintly, even as was Mark's.But there were no confidences of any sort that night, and, greatly
wearied by her own affairs, and the perplexity that these had brought
her, Gallia sent messages downstairs to her guests, and shut herself
into her own rooms for the night.A night's rest is supposed to have a chemical effect on most
situations; in the morning light difficulties are said to appear more
surmountable. Gallia, however, was not conscious of having
difficulties exactly; to act in accordance with a plan is not
necessarily to make things easier for the people with whom you act,
but for the actor it greatly lightens the task of living.Gallia, all her life long, had acted in accordance with sets of
preconceived ideas; with her growth these had either strengthened or
modified, but in some form or other they were always there.Instinct, as will have been seen, had no place in deciding her
actions; nor, in a certain sense, could intuition have had much force
with her. Some people, whose minds have been trained in religion, will
do what they think God would have them do--that is, what they believe
to be right. Gallia, who had no religious ideas, and had never at any
moment in her life felt the want of any, was only anxious to do what
was honest and honourable.If a given movement were fair and just to others, then it was the
one that she would take; and upon such points she examined herself
rigorously from time to time, and raised her standard always a little
bit higher.Before breakfast next morning she had an interview with her father,
of a quite satisfactory kind; to him she naturally wished to confide
her feelings towards Gurdon at once, and take his advice about
announcing her engagement. Lord Hamesthwaite had nothing but what was
favourable to say. He was not an ambitious man, but even if he were,
he felt he might have had reason to be satisfied with Mark.In Brownie's loose-box she found Gurdon, whom she sent straightway
to her father's room.Margaret and Robbie she found upon the terrace."I absolutely repudiate the idea that that picnic in any way
assisted me," Robbie was saying, in answer to some badinage from
Gertrude. "I have been engaged to Margaret for about two years.""How one does dread proposals!" Miss Janion said fervently. "They
are so samey and they are so dull. There is
something frightful in sitting beside a man and knowing he is trying to lead up to a proposal. And
when he has led up to it! I can sit and say
with my lips every succeeding sentence--you know, as one does some of
the prayers in church. There's a system, and he never departs from
it. He always has to go into his past. Have you noticed what a passion
men have for telling girls about their pasts? They are so proud of
their blundering, unimaginative records,--and, of course, every girl
must think how far better she could have done it. Men are like
children who have come home from the seashore." She fixed a bright
magnetic eye upon Lord Shillinglee, who appeared in the distance, and
drew him to the spot. "They have to tell about how they paddled, and
just how deep they went in, and all about the
queer things they fished out, and about the crabs that caught hold of
their toes." Everybody had to laugh at this bit of Gertrude's
description, though Margaret was blushing like a nectarine. "And all
the time you see how awfully frightened at the crabs they have
been. 'But our little shoes were hanging round our necks, Nursey
dear,'"--here she imitated the small, high voice of the
self-consciously good child,--"they say, as they put them on
again. "'And see how clean we've kept our overalls!'"Robbie dissolved in a perfect paroxysm of laughter."It will require enormous nerve to put a man off this confession,
they so love to be forgiven; it will be depriving him of a sacred
moment; but the man I marry will have to be generous and make the
sacrifice. I have heard the detailed pasts of so many men, it will be
quite refreshing to know nothing of my husband's."While the young people babbled and laughed together,
Mrs. Leighton's maid had been busily erecting a large square umbrella
of cream-coloured muslin, bordered with engaging frills, and lined
with pink; beneath this had been placed a comfortable chair. To this
bower Mark now escorted the old lady, and they fell into earnest conversation. Mark could not detail his fortune
without Gallia's permission, but the skilful diplomatist, who had
liked and encouraged him from the first, put certain astute questions,
and drew her own conclusions from the guarded replies. Fortunately,
the state of affairs which she suspected pleased her greatly. Robbie's
engagement to Margaret had put her in a good temper, and she soon
dispelled a slight sense of regret that Gallia was not to marry a man
of old family--old family being a thing that she had always declared
her dislike of, publicly.She would have been angry if it had been Essex, and she was always
rather frightened that it might be Essex. Yet there was Essex, his
clothes having been fetched for the night from Hiddenfold--there was
Essex looking vaguely out over the park. When Gurdon joined Gallia,
Mrs. Leighton summoned Hubert. She put a number of quite barefaced
questions to him, about his career and prospects and intentions. With
people whom she believed to be unimportant, she could behave in a
mildly unscrupulous manner that was surprising. Finesse, she argued,
should never be thrown away."Marriage?" said Dark speculatively, when he had been led to the
block. "A man with pronounced heart-disease ought not to marry. Nothing is more inevitably hereditary. No,"
smiling at her faintly, "I never contemplated marriage.""Funny!" the old lady was left murmuring; "everybody has insisted
on Gallia being consistent, and makes no allowance for a possible
reversion to the type; she has acted in accordance with her absurd
opinions, because her heart has never awakened to scatter her
reason. She will fall in love with that attractive manifestation of
heart-disease yet. But she will be married, so it will not
signify."Mrs. Leighton was not very far out here, and would not have been so
far out, had she had more leisure to observe Gallia and Essex
together, and know that her prophecy had come true already. The wind
grew a little too strong, and she sauntered indoors for more
shelter."Essex, I want a word with you." Gurdon came up and put a hand on
Dark's arm; "shall we go into the smoking-room? there is no one
there."Not especially wondering what Mark could have to say to him, Essex
followed into the smoking-room with a leisurely step. When he came out
three-quarters of an hour later, his face moved unconsciously; his old
well-accustomed smile struggled to play over it."You see, with Denyer on the spot, and things at their present juncture, I cannot possibly leave here,"
Gurdon was saying as they walked out together.Essex nodded once or twice, and went on up the stairs alone to
Gallia's study."I am just leaving," he said, "and heard that you were here.""You are going away now?""Yes; the atmosphere is becoming somewhat overcharged with
sentiment; besides, I ought to be going back to work.""Do you know," she said, observing him very closely, "you look
ill.""Do I?""Pale. You do really! A curious pallor. Is your heart all right,
Dark?""Bust up in my rowing days, I believe, but it will last my
time.""Why did you never tell me?" she asked, with a sense of having been
shut out from his confidence."Had I not enough disadvantages in your eyes, without that?"Gallia coloured very deeply and painfully."I should only have mentioned it to you in one event.""And that?""Well, we needn't mind that now. Heart disease, you know, is
hereditary."A curious light came into Gallia's eyes--she understood him."Good-bye. We shan't meet again for some little time, I think. When
does your marriage take place?""Oh, no date has been spoken of yet.""Ah, well, I shall see you then.""I don't think I want you to come.""Really? Just as you wish. I would like to have seen you looking
dreadfully beautiful. But you won't banish me afterwards
altogether?""Oh no. Besides, Mark looks upon you as a friend."Essex rose and held out his hand, and his smiling eyes met
hers."He has some little reason to," he said quietly, and was gone.In a quarter of an hour he was walking to the station."I shall get to the junction in time for the 2.15 to Brighton," he
said, "and then I can do my last service to Gallia. The first, she
said, was burying the letter. The second will be Gurdon's commission
to Miss Lemuel. Fate has at anyrate a redeeming sense of
humour."MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH. Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia" Advert included in back of Dowie's "Gallia"