Читать книгу: «Arundel», страница 17

Here was a prospect that had long daunted Elizabeth to look forward to, yet of necessity it must sometime come close to her. She had not so much as seen Edward since he handed her the telegram last August in Mrs. Hancock's drawing-room; he and she, tacitly contriving together in sundered co-operation had averted that. Her heart leaped and sank and leaped again; she shrank from seeing him, and had not known till now, when in the natural course of events she must see him, how much she longed to. On her side there was no reasonable excuse to urge against the plan, and had there been she hardly knew whether she would have urged it. On his side, he might escape the meeting, say that he had arranged to take Edith away for the Sunday, but she felt sure that if he understood that she had consented to go down to her aunt's he would not absent himself. He waited, so she instinctively knew, for a sign that she was willing to meet him. Otherwise he would long ago have been to see her. She quite understood his absence and his silence.

Any sign of emotion that might have escaped her was certainly not seen by her stepmother, who was full of the wonders of this afternoon. But Elizabeth felt that something beyond this invitation to Heathmoor had occurred to send Mrs. Fanshawe's mental barometer up to such exhilarated serenity of fair weather, and she waited for it to be told her. It did not come at once; she mentioned first the other objects on which some ray had beamed which gilded and transfigured them.

"Such a long and dear talk I had with her," she went on, "and she begged, if it did not hurt me too much, to bring down all the memoirs that I have written to read to her quietly. After she had gone I bought the soap and the other little things I wanted, which were even cheaper than I had anticipated, and you never would guess, dear, how I came back here. Perhaps you will scarcely believe it when I tell you, for I got on the top of a 'bus, with my great box of soap and my other parcels, and came all the way right to the Chelsea Town Hall for threepence, not counting the sixpence with which I tipped the conductor, who was most obliging and helped me with my things. Really very polite! In spite of my packages, he of course saw I was not just a common woman like the rest of the passengers, and I hesitated whether I ought to have given him a shilling. But I have never enjoyed making a little economy and denying myself comforts more than I did when I got up on that 'bus."

No, it was not the 'bus ride, so thought Elizabeth, that had produced this exhilaration and pleasure. She waited.

"But before I got up on to my 'bus I gave myself just a little treat," Mrs. Fanshawe proceeded, "and went into one of those electric palaces, as they call them, where you see the cinematograph. I was not quite sure whether it was the sort of thing that is thought respectable, and so I looked pretty closely at the programme before I entered. But I need not have been afraid; I never saw anything more refined, and you and I will go together one of these days, dear. So cheap, too; only a shilling. Why, you could go every day for a week and not spend more than in one evening in the dress-circle at the theatre."

Mrs. Fanshawe looked up at Elizabeth with that glance of soft, shy helplessness which many men found so provocatively feminine and pleading, and called forth the instinct of protection in their somewhat unobservant minds. For, on the whole, nobody was less in need of protection than she; she was almost aggressively able to take care of herself.

"And I didn't have to carry my parcels after all," she said, "from where the 'bus stopped, for whom should I see just coming out of the chemist's there but that dear Sir Henry Meyrick, who was Commander-in-Chief in India. Do you remember? He came home only a couple of days ago on leave, and will be here till January. He stayed with us once at Peshawar, darling, in those happy, happy days!"

Mrs. Fanshawe took out her handkerchief and dabbed the corners of her eyes. This was a piece of ritual that had lost its practical significance (for there was not the semblance of moisture there), and was merely the outward and visible sign of an inward grief.

"I stayed with him afterwards at Simla," she said, "and got, oh, so fond of him! It was while I was staying there, you know, that the news came that caused my poor heart to break. My dear, he was like a woman for tenderness to me, and yet he had the strength of a man; and I can never, never forget what I owe dear Sir Henry. If it had not been for him I am convinced I should quite have broken down, or even made away with myself."

Elizabeth felt sure that she had here the origin of the wonderful rise in her stepmother's spirits. And an idea, horrible to contemplate, came close to her and stared her in the face. She resolutely turned away from it.

"Yes, I remember him quite well," she said. "I thought you found him rather foolish and ridiculous."

"Foolish and ridiculous!" said Mrs. Fanshawe, with great energy. "I cannot imagine what you mean, Elizabeth. You must be confusing him with some one else."

"Perhaps I am," said the girl. "It is stupid of me. How was he looking?"

Mrs. Fanshawe calmed down at once and became softly pathetic again.

"Oh, so different to what he was when you saw him," she said, "when he was so cheery and jolly, and made all the women in Peshawar fall in love with him. At least, I am sure that I did. He looked so anxious and unhappy, Elizabeth, that my heart quite went out to him, and I longed to comfort him. And he brightened up so when he saw me; he looked quite radiant again. And you will never guess what a pretty welcome he gave me, though of course it was very foolish of him. He said, 'My dear little girl – my dear little girl!' twice over, just like that. And he held out both his hands to me, and dropped his umbrella in a puddle and never seemed to notice it. And there was I with my arms full of great heavy parcels. I declare for a moment I was quite ashamed before so true a gentleman as Sir Henry is. And he took all the parcels from me – and oh, my dear, it was so wonderful to me in my loneliness in the crowded streets to be taken care of again like that! – and carried them right up to the door, and gave them to Mary when she opened it. He would not let me touch them again myself."

Again the idea stood close to Elizabeth, holding her, so it seemed, not letting her turn her face away. And the soft, childlike voice went on.

"He asked after you, too," she said, "so nicely and affectionately. He would not come in then, for he had some other appointment; and though he wanted to break it I did not let him. But he is coming to dine here to-night. I shall not think of making any extra preparation for him. He will like it best just to see me in my quiet, modest little house just naturally."

There was a moment's rather awkward pause, for Mrs. Fanshawe had to consider how to reintroduce a topic that had been spoken of that morning between her and Elizabeth in hours of the "horrid little backyard." Elizabeth had wanted to go to the Queen's Hall to attend a concert of the most ravishing character that was to be performed that night, but had given up the idea owing to a marked querulousness on her stepmother's part at the prospect of passing a deserted evening. There had even been pained wonder at the girl caring to go out to an evening of pleasure so soon. But she was not apt to be troubled at her own inconsistencies, and the pause was not long.

"He will be sorry not to see you, I am sure, darling," she said, "but I think you told me you were going to a concert at the Queen's Hall. Very likely you will not be in till nearly eleven, and you may be sure I shall have a nice cosy little supper ready for you when you come back."

To Elizabeth this seemed but to confirm the idea that had forced itself on her; it needed, at any rate, little perspicacity to see that her stepmother, with the prospect of dining alone with Sir Henry, wanted her to keep the engagement which, in deference to her desire, she had abandoned. Nor was she surprised at the tenderness that followed. Mrs. Fanshawe rose in willowy fashion from her chair and stood behind Elizabeth's, gently stroking her hair.

"I want you to enjoy all the pleasures that I can contrive for you, dear," she said. "He whom we both miss so dreadfully, I know would wish us to enjoy – 'richly to enjoy,' does not the Bible say? He would have hated to think that we were going to lose all our gaiety and happiness."

Elizabeth felt physically unable to bear the touch of that insincere, caressing hand. She got up quickly.

"Yes, mamma," she said; "I am sure of that. I have tried not to lose the joy of life."

"So right, darling!" said Mrs. Fanshawe, in a dreadful little cooing voice. "And we have helped each other, I hope, in that. I know you have helped me. I will not let my life be spoiled and broken; it would grieve him so."

She paused a moment with handkerchief-ritual, and with her head a little on one side, spoke with childlike timidity.

"It was lovely being taken care of again," she said, "though only in a little matter like having a parcel carried. Are you going now, dear? Enjoy yourself, my sweetest, and stop till the very end of your concert. I know what a treat music is to you; I would not have you miss a note."

Elizabeth felt the need of air after this interview, and having an hour yet to spare before she need think of going to the concert, went down the broad, quiet street and on to the Thames Embankment at its lower end. She felt stifled by this atmosphere of insincerity from which she had come; she choked at the pitiful nauseating deception that she believed almost deceived her stepmother and caused her to refer to the duty of behaving as her late husband would have had her behave, at all her little subterfuges for facilitating her own arrangements. The falseness of it all was so blatant, so palpable that it would not have deceived a baby, and yet Elizabeth was not wrong in thinking that it largely deceived the very author of it. Her acting might not appear at all life-like to her audience, but it seemed real to herself. For years she had, while diligently pursuing paths of complete selfishness, been employed, so to speak, on modelling a figure of herself, that was winning, child-like, and trustingly devoted to the love of others, and now regarding that, with conscious approval, she had come to believe that it was the very image of herself. And Elizabeth felt sure (and again was not mistaken) that Mrs. Fanshawe was even now getting herself into another graceful pose for the reception of Sir Henry. To say that she was deliberately laying herself out to attract him would have been the coarsely true way of putting it, but things that were coarse and things that were true were almost equally abhorrent to Mrs. Fanshawe's mind. She told herself that she owed a great debt to Sir Henry for his kindness and sympathy at her husband's death, a debt that she would never be able to repay. She was bound to treat him as an old friend, to confide in him her plans for the future; to tell him how she was "oh, so content" to live quietly here, devoting her life to Elizabeth, who was so sweet to her. And she would somehow make it appear that it was her own sweetness, not Elizabeth's, that she was really talking about. She would hint that she was a great deal alone, but that it was by her own wish that Elizabeth spent so many evenings enjoying herself with hearing music. Elizabeth was right, "oh, so right!" to do it. And Elizabeth, thinking over these things, executed a few wild dance steps on a lonely piece of the Embankment, from sheer irritation at the thought. She wondered also whether her stepmother would show Sir Henry the written chapters of the Memoir. She rather thought not.

This little ebullition of temper passed, and she let her mind quiet down again as she leaned her elbows on the stone balustrade and looked out over the beautiful river, which brimmed and swirled just below, for the tide, near to full flood, was pouring up from the sea, still fresh and strong and unwearied by its journey. Barges were drifting up with it in a comfortable, haphazard sort of fashion, and a great company of sea-gulls hovered near, chiding and wheeling together. The hour was a little after sunset, and the whole sky was bright with mackerel-markings of rosy cloud, and the tawny river, reflecting these, was covered with glows and gleams. Opposite, the trees in the park were dim in the mist of fresh green that lay over them, blurring the outlines which all the winter had stood stark and clear-cut under cold, grey skies. And the triumphant tide of springtime which flushed everything with the tingle of new growth, unfolding the bells of the tulips in the patches of riverside garden, and making the sparrows busy with gathering sticks and straws for their nestings, sent a sudden thrill through Elizabeth's heart, and she was conscious again, as she had not been for many weary weeks, of the youth and glory of the world. From the great sea of life came the vivifying wave, covering for the moment the brown seaweed tangle of her trouble that had lain dry and sun-baked so long, flushing and freshening and uplifting it.

Relieved of its irritation, and refreshed by this good moment of spring evening, her mind went back to her stepmother. She felt sure that it was her intention to marry that jolly old warrior, if it could possibly be managed, and that she was going to employ all her art in the shape of her artlessness and simplicity to bring that about. It was but eight months since her husband had died, but, after all, what did that matter? The actual lapse of time had very little to do with the question, and she would be sure to have touching and convincing reasons for such a step. It had seemed horrible at first to Elizabeth, but where, after all, was the horror? Of course, her dead husband would have wished her to be happy. Elizabeth knew her father well enough to know that, and it was only horrible that she should give (as she undoubtedly would) as a reason for her marrying again what she knew his wishes would be on the subject. Whether Sir Henry would be brought up to the point was another matter, and on this Elizabeth had no evidence except her stepmother's account of their meeting. But clearly Mrs. Fanshawe thought that things promised well.

Elizabeth's eyes suddenly filled with tears. Only once had the grass sprung up on that far-distant grave; not yet had the Memoir, so quickly taken in hand, been completed.

"Daddy, daddy!" she said aloud.

She turned from the rosy river, and set out to walk down the Embankment to the next bridge, from where she proposed to take the conveyance that had thrilled her stepmother that afternoon with a sense of incredible adventure. The pavement stretched empty and darkening in front of her, and at the far end the lamplighter had started on his luminous round. Some two hundred yards off a figure was walking quickly towards her, and long before she could distinguish face or feature, Elizabeth, with heart in sudden tumult, saw who it was. Almost at the same moment she saw him pause suddenly in his rapid progress, and halt as if undetermined whether or no to turn and retrace his steps. But he came on again, and soon they stood face to face. All the tumult in her had died down again; she held out her hand with the friendliest, most unembarrassed smile.

"At last, Edward!" she said. "And we shall meet again soon. Aunt Julia has asked mamma and me down for next Sunday."

He looked at her a moment without speaking. She saw that his breath came quickly as if he had been running.

"I know. She told me she was going to write," he said.

"She met mamma this afternoon, and said it instead."

"Must I go away?" he asked. "Of course I will if you wish it. But – but mayn't I see you again?"

At his voice, at the entreaty in his eyes, all but her love for him, unstained and bright-burning, vanished utterly.

"Yes, why not, if you want to?" she said. "But I shall understand so well if you do not."

"I have wanted nothing else every day," he said.

All her heart went out to him.

"Aren't you happy, dear?" she said.

"How can you ask that?"

"I'm sorry," she said simply. "And Edith?"

"I don't know. I don't know anything about her. I try to be kind and nice to her. In fact I am."

A wretched, quivering smile broke out on the girl's face.

"Conceit!" she said. "I'm glad we have met, Edward, for we had to get this over, you know. Well, it's over."

They stood in silence a moment. Then suddenly he broke out —

"Why wouldn't you trust your own heart, Elizabeth, and let me trust mine? What good has come of it all? What has come of it but wretchedness? I don't ask if you are happy. I know you aren't."

"No. But you kept faith. That good has come of it. Don't say those things. It isn't the best of you that says them. And what are you doing here?"

"I often walk this way," he said. "Then I go up Oakley Street. The evenings are getting light now. Do you mind my doing that?"

Then something swelled in her throat forbidding speech.

"I – I must go on," she said at length.

"May I walk with you a little?"

"To the corner. I shall take a 'bus there."

There was but a little way to go, and they stood together, waiting for the 'bus, looking at the darkling river, down which poured the wild west wind.

"Sea-gulls," she said to him, pointing. "Sea-gulls and spring, Edward."

And she mounted quickly up the winding iron stairs, not looking back. But as the 'bus swung round a corner a little distance up the road she could not resist turning round. He was still there at the corner where she had left him, a minute speck on the pavement that glowed in the rose-coloured sunset, so minute, so significant. It seemed to her that all of her essential self, her heart, her power of love, was standing there with him; that he gazed but at an empty wraith of herself who sat on the pounding, swaying 'bus, while she stood by his side as the spring evening darkened and the sea-gulls hovered and wheeled.

CHAPTER XIII
THE GRISLY KITTENS

Elizabeth, as requested by her stepmother, did not leave her concert that night until the very last note of all had died away. But it is doubtful whether that request had very much to do with it: the probability is that she was really incapable of doing so. Just as the hypnotized subject has his will taken possession of by his controller, so that all his wishes, his intentions, his desires are for the time in abeyance and the independence of his own powers completely paralysed, so that night Elizabeth was taken captive by the power of sound. Many times before she had felt that she was penetrating into a new kingdom, a fresh province of thought and feeling, but to-night a more surprising adventure held her bound. She penetrated into no fresh kingdoms, she saw no new peaks upraise themselves or valleys carve themselves at her feet. She was completely in familiar places; only a fresh light, one that for her had never lit sea or land, shone on them, which transfigured them not by fantastic effects and the sensationalism of musical limelights, but with the dawning as of the everlasting day.

She was unconsciously prepared for this, as she had never been before. She, or a hundred others whose souls were steeped with the love of melody, might have heard just what she heard that night, and have had their tastes gratified, their emotions roused, without being gripped in this manner so supreme, so enlightening. New sensations might have flitted through her, new beauties been perceived, new glories been manifested, without this ethical perception being awakened. But with her to-night, all the quiet patience of these past months, of the succession of dark and difficult days, to solve the meaning of which she had applied herself with efforts and strivings after the light, so unremitting, so unnoticed, had rendered her capable of receiving the true illumination. Cell by cell, she had stored honey in the dark; now with the coming of spring, the workers of her soul swarmed out with rush of joyous wings into the light. She was charged to the brim with supersaturated waters; it wanted but the one atom the more to be added that should solidify all that had been put into her, all that by the grace of God she had gathered. Probably the meeting with Edward gave her the last crystal of the salt, took out from her love the grain of bitterness that still lurked there. That made her ready to receive the ultimate gift that music has to bring, namely, the identification of it with all other noble effort, the perception of its truth, which is one with the truth of everything that is beautiful, and is lit by the light that illuminates the whole world, and turns it into the garden of God. Never again in those on whom one gleam of the light has shone can it be wholly quenched. For the future they know from their own selves, from the recollection of the one thing in the world which it is impossible to forget, that whatever storms of adversity, thunder-clouds of trouble lower, there is no such thing any more for them as a darkness quite untransfused, no place so slippery that they can doubt whether their feet are set on a rock and their goings ordered.

The hall was but half-filled, and Elizabeth, seated at the back of the amphitheatre, saw she would be uncumbered with the distraction of near neighbours. The concert opened with the Third Symphony of Brahms, and immediately she was carried into it. Even as one who looks at some superb statue has his mind modelled, as it were, into the image of what he sees, so that his body can, faintly following, unconsciously drop into a pose somewhat like it, so, listening to this, she was made one with it, fused into it, so that, while it sang its message to her, she knew of no existence separate from it. Her mind, her nature became part of it; she, like a sheet of calm waters, burned with the glories of the melodious sky. She became godlike, as she inhaled that ampler ether of glorified intellect through music, which perhaps alone of the arts can make wholly visible to the spiritual eye the wonder and the beauty of pure and abstract thought. No longer did its melodies suggest images to her; her brain strove not after similes to express, as it were, in mere black and white the effect of the rainbow song; it revealed itself, mind.

Then the hall swam into sight again; there was applause. It sounded quite meaningless; you did not clap your hands when daylight came.

There were but three items in the programme, and for the second, the grand piano in front of the stage was opened. The player was familiar enough to her, he with his magical fingers and exuberant youth, but just now he seemed a detached and impersonal figure, as nameless as the viol-holding cherubim in a canvas of Bellini, who make music for the reverie of the saints and angels who stand on either side of the Mother of God. But it was no song of heavenly soul and sexless quires that he was to sing; he was the interpreter of the joy of life and of love and of the myriad emotions that spring like flowers from the fruitful earth. Brahms had revealed what is possible to the wise mind of man, here in the great concerto Tschaikowsky poured out the inspired tale of its emotions; the splendour of their shining, the tenderness of their reveries. Instantly in the presence of this more concrete, more frail and human music the images leaped and danced again in Elizabeth's mind. The noonday shone on the innumerable smile of a blue sea; high above the sultry plain were fixed the spear-heads of Chitral; the dusk fell on the Indian garden with its tangle of Peshawar roses. More personal yet grew the appeal. She walked with her father there; she showed him, as never yet had it been given her to show him, how love had touched her, even as he had said, with its enchantment, how the loyalty of her renunciation of its material fulfilment had not withered its stem, but caused it to blossom with a rarer and more fragrant flowering. She told him how the bitter waters had been sweetened, how the sting had been sheathed, how through darkness love had felt its way up to the day. With tender glance at the pain of it that was passed they dwelt on it; with smiles for her miscomprehension of its growth, for her ignorance of where it led they traced its springing tendrils, on which there were the traces of healed scars where it had bled. But its bleeding was over, and strong grew its shoots over unsightly places. The whole world danced together, not men and women only, not only boys and girls, but sun and sea and sky, and the lions in the desert and the tigers burning bright in the jungle. The peaks and ledges of untrodden snow danced in a whirling magical maze of rhythmic movement. The angels of God joined in it; the devils of hell would have done so had there been such things as devils, or such a place as hell. Again the music grew more personal. All she had ever known of joy, and that was much, was marshalled round her, and through the dancers, this crowd of earthly elements, came he whom every nerve and agent of perception in her body loved. Her human power of emotion leaped to the supremest arc of that rainbow curve, and with him stood there poised. By some divine right he was hers, by a right no less divine he was separated from her. Yet that separation was somehow one with the union.

Then followed a pause of some ten minutes. But no reaction came to her, for it was no mimic show that was now over, no feigned dramatic presentment that she had watched or listened to (she hardly knew which), but something quite real, more real than the rows of dark red stalls, than the shaded scarlet lights, like huge inverted anemones, which hung above the orchestra, more real even than the actual music itself, which was but the husk or at most the temporary embodiment of the truth that underlay and illumined it. She had been shown the vision of mind at its highest, of emotion in its supremest degree. There was something still lacking, which should bind them together, exhibit them, as they truly were, parts of an infinite whole. She knew what was coming, and with the tenseness of an expectation that must be fulfilled, with a suspense that was not the less for the certainty of its coming resolution, she waited.

Half an hour later she came out into the mellow spring night, that teemed with the promise of the south-west wind. Just as the Brahms symphony had summed up for her the glory of mind, and the Tschaikowsky concerto had sung of the depth and sunlit splendours of human emotion, so the Good Friday music had bridged and connected the two, and shown her whence came the light that shone on them. But whereas the concerto had led her through generalities to its culmination of the appeal to her own individual personality, and its needs and longings, in this she was led across the dim threshold of herself, so to speak, into the halls that were full of light, into the house of many mansions. Vivid and ecstatic at first had been the sense of her own intense experience; she was bathed in sun and sea, and then was opened to her a communion of soul with those she loved that transcended all she had ever felt before. And yet, very soon, that faded into nothingness, it passed off the shield of her perception, as a breath is dispersed in frosty air; soon she was no longer the centre of her consciousness, but only an atom of infinite insignificance in it. It was no revelation of herself that was thus manifested, yet inasmuch as she was part of the vital essence of the love that crowned the human understanding, the human passions, inasmuch as she could give thanks for its great glory, that glory was part of her, her love part of it. One and indivisible it stirred in her, even as it moved the sun and all the stars…

It was with no sense of interruptions or of a broken mood that she came out into the jostling of the populous streets, for truth is not a mood, and they with their crowded pavements and whirring roadways were part of it also, and knew her solemn and joyful secret. Without doubt she would not always be able to feel with the same vividness of perception that the eternal peace encompassed her, but, having once realized it, she knew that it would be there always, a sure refuge, that it was the answer to all the riddles and difficulties that life assuredly would continue to ply her with. Again and again, she knew, they would puzzle and perplex her, again and again she would be mist-blinded by them. But she had seen an authentic glimpse, as from Pisgah, of the kingdom to which led the royal roads. They might wind over stony hill-sides, be packed with sand, or clogged with resistant mire, but they led to the promised land, to the kingdom that was within, the gates of which stood open night and day, for all who willed to enter.

It was late, already after eleven, when she dismounted from the 'bus at the corner of Oakley Street, and she half expected to find that her stepmother had gone to bed. It must be allowed that Elizabeth would not have been very sorry if this proved to be the case, for she felt that she could give but a vague attention to the voluble trivialities that would otherwise await her. But not till she had softly closed the street door behind her, did she bring into focus the fact that Mrs. Fanshawe had been dining alone with Sir Henry, or that the voluble trivialities might be supplanted by news not trivial at all.

The idea when first it had occurred to her had repelled her, with the repulsion that a deep love must naturally feel for any self-conscious and shallow affection. There was a sort of heart-breaking jar in the thought that Mrs. Fanshawe, with her pen still dipping for ink to write the Memoir, should be thinking about re-marriage. But now the repulsion had left her; she found herself less jealous for her father's memory, more ready to let the immortality of love look after itself, more capable of sinking her personal feeling. It was not that the idea had lost its sharp edges from her greater familiarity with it; she saw it as distinctly as ever; only the sharp edges now failed to fret her. Besides, how could the shallowness of her stepmother's affections, the insincerity that in itself was of so unreal a nature, affect anything that was real?