I
He had not been near her for two months. It was barely five minutes'
walk from his house in Bedford Square to her rooms in Montagu
Street, and last year he used to go to see her every week. He did
not need the reminder of her letter, for he had been acutely aware,
through the term that separated them, of the date when he had last
seen her. Still, he was not sure how much longer he might have kept
away if it had not been for the note that told him in two lines that
she had been ill, and that she had--at last--something to show him.
He smiled at the childlike secrecy of the announcement. She had
something to show him. Her illness, then, had not impaired her gift,
her charming, inimitable gift.
If she had something to show him he would have to go to her.
He let his eyes rest a moment on her signature as if he saw it for
the first time, as if it renewed for him the pleasing impression of
her personality. After all, she was Freda Farrar, the only woman
with a style and an imagination worth considering; and he--well, he
was Wilton Caldecott.
He would go over and see her now. He had an hour to spare before
dinner. It was her hour, between the lamplight and the clear April
day, when he was always sure of finding her at home.
He found her sitting in her deep chair by the hearth, her long,
slender back bent forward to the fire, her hands glowing like thin
vessels for the flame. Her face was turned toward him as he came in.
Its small childlike oval showed sharp and white under her heavy
wreath of hair--the face of a delicate Virgin of the Annunciation, a
Musa Dolorosa, a terrified dryad of the plane-trees (Freda's face
had always inspired him with fantastic images); a dryad in exile,
banished with her plane-tree to the undelightful town.
She did not conceal from him her joyous certainty that he would
come. She made no comment on his absence. It was one of her many
agreeable qualities that she never made comments, never put forth
even the shyest and most shadowy claim. She took him up where she
had left him, or, rather, where he had left her, and he gathered
that she had filled the interval happily enough with the practice of
her incomparable art.
The first thing she did now was to exhibit her latest acquisitions,
her beautiful new reading-lamp, the two preposterous cushions that
supported and obliterated her; while he saw (preposterous Freda, who
had not a shilling beyond what the gift brought her) that she had on
a new gown.
"I say," he exclaimed, "I say, what next?"
And they looked at each other and laughed. He liked the spirit in
which Freda now launched out into the strange ocean of expenditure.
It showed how he had helped her. He was the only influence which
could have helped a talent so obscure, so uncertain, so shy.
It was the obscurity, the uncertainty, the shyness of it that
charmed him most. It was the shyness, the uncertainty, the obscurity
in her that held him, made it difficult to remove himself when he
sank into that deep chair by her fireside, and she became silent
and turned from him her small brooding face. It was as if she
guarded obstinately her secret, as if he waited, was compelled to
wait, for the illuminating hour.
"It's finished," she said, as if continuing some conversation they
had had yesterday.
"Ah." He found himself returning reluctantly from his quest.
She rose and unlocked the cabinet where her slender sheaves were
garnered. He came and took from her a sheaf more slender than the
rest.
"Am I to read it, here and now?"
"If you will."
He sat down and read there and then. From time to time she let her
eyes light on him, shyly at first, then rest, made quiet by his
abstraction. She liked to look at him when he was not thinking of
her. He was tall and straight and fair; his massive, clean-shaven
face showed a virile ashen shade on lip and chin. He had keen, kind
eyes, and a queer mouth with sweet curves and bitter corners.
He folded the manuscript and turned it in his hands. He looked from
it to her with considering, caressing eyes. What she had written was
a love-poem in the divinest, the simplest prose. Such a poem could
only have been written by his listening virgin, his dreaming dryad.
He was afraid to speak of it, to handle its frail, half-elemental,
half-spiritual form.
"Has it justified my sending for you?"
It had. It justified her completely. It justified them both. It
justified his having come to her, his remaining with her, dining
with her, if indeed they did dine. She had always justified him,
made his coming to see her the natural, inevitable thing.
They sat late over the fire. They had locked the manuscript in its
drawer again, left it with relief.
They talked.
"How many years is it since I first saw you?"
"Three years," she said, "and two months."
"And two months. Do you remember how I found you, up there, under
the roof, in that house in Charlotte Street?"
"Yes," she said, "I remember."
"You were curled up on that funny couch in the corner, with your
back against the wall----"
"I was sitting on my feet to keep them warm."
"I know. And you wore a white shawl----"
"No," she entreated, "not a shawl."
"A white something. It doesn't matter. I don't really remember
anything but your small face, and your terrified eyes looking at me
out of the corner, and your poor little cold hands."
She wondered, did he remember her shabby gown, her fireless room,
the queer couch that was her bed, the hunger and the nakedness of
her surroundings?
"You sat," she said, "on my trunk, the wooden one with the nails on
it. It must have been so uncomfortable."
He said nothing. Even now, when those things were only a
remembrance, the pity of them made him dumb.
"And the next time you came," said she, "you made a fire for me.
Don't you remember?"
He remembered. He felt again that glow of self-congratulation which
warmed him whenever he considered the comfort of her present state;
or came into her room and found her accumulating, piece by piece,
her innocent luxuries. Nobody but he had helped her. It was
disagreeable to him to think that another man should have had a hand
in it.
Yet there would be others. He had already revealed her to two or
three.
"I wonder how you knew," she said.
"How I knew what?"
"That I was worth while."
He gave an inward start. She had made him suddenly aware that in
those days he had not known it. He had had no idea what was in her.
She had had nothing then "to show" him.
It was as if she were asking him, as if he were asking himself, what
it was that had drawn him to her, when, in the beginning, it wasn't
and couldn't have been the gift? Why had he followed her up when he
might so easily have dropped her? He had found her, in the
beginning, only because his old friend, Mrs. Dysart, had written to
him (from a distance that left her personally irresponsible), and
had asked him to look for her, to discover what had become of her,
to see if there was anything that he could do. Mrs. Dysart had
intimated that she hardly thought anything could be done; that there
wasn't, you know, very much in her--very much, that is to say, that
would interest Wilton Caldecott. They had been simply pitiful, the
girl's poor first efforts, the things that, when he had screwed his
courage to the point of asking for them, were all she had to show
him.
"I was too bad for words, you know," said she, tracking his thought.
"You were. You were."
"There wasn't a gleam, a spark----"
"Not one."
They laughed. The reminiscence of her "badness" seemed to inspire
them both with a secret exultation. They drew together, uncovering,
displaying to each other the cherished charm of it. Neither could
say why the thought of it was so pleasing.
"And look at you now," said Caldecott.
"Yes," she cried, "look at me now. What was it, do you think, that
made the difference?"
That he had never really known.
"Oh, well, I suppose you're stronger, you know; and things are
different."
"Things?" she repeated. Her lips parted and closed, as if she had
been about to say something, and recalled it with a sharp indrawing
of her breath.
"And so," she said presently, "you think that was it?"
"It may have been. Anyhow, you mustn't go getting ill."
"I don't think," she said, "there's any need. But don't be
frightened. It won't go away."
"What won't?"
"The gift."
They laughed again. It was their own name for it.
"I wasn't thinking of it. I was thinking of you."
"It's the same thing," said she. "No. It won't go. It can't go. I've
got it fast."
He rose. He looked down on her; he seemed to hesitate, to consider.
"I wonder," he said, "if I might ask my friend, Miss Nethersole, to
call on you? She's Mrs. Dysart's niece."
She consented, and with a terse good night he left her.
She, too, wondered and considered. She knew that she would some day
have to reckon with his life, with the world that knew him, with the
women whom he knew.