Durant had a grievance against Miss Chatterton. He had been induced
to lengthen his visit in order to entertain her, and Miss Chatterton
refused to be entertained. His position at Coton Manor had thus
become a humiliating sinecure. There was no earthly reason why he
should stay any longer, and yet he stayed.
The fact was, that by this time he was really interested in other
things beside the landscape. He had wondered how long Miss
Chatterton would keep it up. He watched her, as one haunted guest
watches another, to know if she too has seen the specter of the
house, observing her manner and her appetite at breakfast, the
expression of her face at bedtime, her voice in saying good-morning
and good-night. On the third day he thought he could detect a slight
flagging; Miss Chatterton was a shade less buoyant, less talkative
than before. By the evening she was positively serious, and he
judged that the iron had entered into her soul. Her manner to her
cousin had changed; it was more tentative, more tender, more
maternal. She had begun to pity Frida, as he had pitied her.
The two were inseparable; they were always putting their heads
together, always exchanging confidences. And it was not only
confidences but characters that they exchanged. It was a positive
fact that as Miss Chatterton flagged Miss Tancred revived, she
seemed to be actually growing young while the young girl grew older.
Not that Miss Tancred grew young without difficulty; the life she
had led was against that. She looked like a woman recovering from a
severe illness, she suffered relapse after relapse, she went about
in a flush and fever of convalescence; it was a struggle for health
under desperate conditions, the agony of a strong constitution still
battling with the atmosphere that poisoned it, recovery simulating
disease, disease counterfeiting recovery.
A wholesome process, no doubt, but decidedly unpleasant to watch.
Durant, however, had very little opportunity for watching it, as he
was now left completely to himself. Miss Tancred's manner intimated
that she had done with him,--put him away in some dark cupboard of
the soul, like a once desired and now dreaded stimulant,--that she
was trusting to other and safer means for building up her strength.
If Durant had ever longed for solitude, he had more than enough of
it now, and he devoted the rest of his time to finishing the studies
and sketches he had begun. He had made none of Miss Tancred.
One morning he had pitched his umbrella and his easel below a ridge
on the far slope of the fir plantation. A thorn bush sheltered him
from the wind and made him invisible from the terrace of grass above
him.
He had emerged from a fit of more than usual absorption when he felt
the stir of footsteps in the grass, and a voice rang out clear from
the terrace.
"If it would only make papa happy. I want him to be happy."
Durant could not help but overhear, his senses being sharpened by
the dread of hearing.
"My poor child" (it was the young girl who spoke), "you don't know
what you want; but you want something more than that."
Durant rattled his color-box in desperation, but the women were too
much absorbed to heed his warning, and Frida even raised her voice
in answering:
"Yes, I'm afraid I do want something more. I know what you're
thinking, Georgie. When women of my age go on like this it generally
means that they're in love, or that they want to be married, or
both."
Durant was considering the propriety of bursting out on them noisily
from the cover of his umbrella, but before he could decide the point
Miss Tancred had continued:
"I am not in love."
She spoke in the tone of one stating an extremely uninteresting
fact.
"You _are_ in love, Frida. You're in love with life, and life won't
have anything to do with you; it's thrown you over, and a beastly
shame, too! You're simply dying for love of it, my sweetheart."
Frida did not deny the accusation. They passed on, and in the
silence Durant could hear their skirts as they brushed the thorn
bush. He could only pray now that he might remain invisible.
He felt rather than saw that they turned their heads in passing.
"Do you think he heard?"
This time it was Miss Chatterton who raised her voice.
"It doesn't matter if he did. He's not a fool, whatever else he is."
Durant overlooked that flattering tribute to himself in his
admiration of Miss Chatterton's masterly analysis and comprehension.
She had, so to speak, taken Frida Tancred to pieces and put her
together again in a phrase--"Dying for love of life." Beside her
luminous intuition his own more logical method seemed clumsy and
roundabout, a constructive process riddled by dangerous fallacies
and undermined by monstrous assumptions. At the same time he
persisted in returning to one of these, the most monstrous, perhaps,
of all. In spite, perhaps because, of her flat denial, he pictured
Frida not only as mysteriously in love with existence, but with a
certain humble spectator of existence. According to the view he had
once expounded to her the two passions were inseparable.
Before very long he received a new light on the subject. It was his
last day, the two cousins were together somewhere, the Colonel was
in bed with a bilious attack, and Durant was alone in the
drawing-room.
He had not been alone long before Miss Chatterton appeared. She came
into the room with an air of determination and sat down beside him.
She went straight to her point, a very prickly one; there was no
beating about the thorn bush with Miss Chatterton.
"Mr. Durant," said she, "I want to talk to you--for once. When you
first came here what did you think of Miss Tancred?"
"I'm afraid I didn't think anything of Miss Tancred."
"Did you dislike her?"
"N-no. I only found her a little difficult to talk to."
"Oh. Well, that's not what I came to consult you about. I want you
to help me. I am going to elope----"
"You don't mean to say so----"
"To elope with Miss Tancred--run away with her--take her out of
this. It's the only way."
"The only way to what?"
"To save her. But I shall do nothing rash, nothing that would cause
a scandal in the county. I shall simply take her up to town with me
when I go back on Monday. My week isn't up; but--well--my temper is.
So far it's all open and aboveboard----"
"Yes--yes. And where do I come in?"
"Oh, _you_--if you wouldn't mind staying where you are and keeping
the Colonel in play till we've got safe across the Channel----"
"The Channel?"
"The Channel, my friend. Where else should we be safe?"
"That means that I've got to stick here till----"
"Till Wednesday."
"Good heavens! Another week! Not if I know it."
"Yes; it's awful, I know; but not as bad as it might have been. You
won't have to talk to Miss Tancred. By the way, she says you are the
only man who ever tried to talk to her--to understand her. What a
dreadful light on her past! Think what her life must have been."
"Not very amusing, I imagine."
"Amusing! _Think_ of it. Thirty years in this hole, where you can't
breathe, and without a soul to speak to except the Colonel. Not that
the Colonel is a soul--he's much too dense."
"To be anything but a body?"
"And all the time she has loathed it--loathed it. You see, she's got
cosmopolitan blood in her veins. Her mother--you know about her
mother?"
"I know nothing about her except that she did a great many bad
things--I mean pictures--for which I hope Heaven may forgive her."
"Don't be brutal. She's dead now and can't do any more. When she was
alive she was a Russian or a Pole or something funny, and mad on
traveling, always going from one place to another--a regular rolling
stone; till one day she rolled up to the Colonel's feet, and
then----"
"Well?"
"He picked her up and put her in his pocket, and she never rolled
any further. He packed her off to England and made her sit in this
dreadful old family seat of his till she died of it. That's the sort
of woman Miss Tancred's mother was, and Miss Tancred takes after her
mother. She's a cosmopolitan, too."
"Rubbish! No woman can be a cosmopolitan." He said it in the same
tone in which he had told Frida that no woman could have a pure
passion for Nature. "And Miss Tancred, though nice, strikes me as
peculiarly provincial. I shouldn't have thought----"
"There are things in her you'd never have thought of. It's wonderful
how she comes out when you know her."
"She certainly has come out wonderfully since you came on the
scene." (The words he used had a familiar ring. It was exactly what
Mrs. Fazakerly had said to him.)
"I? I've not had anything to do with it. It was you; she told me. It
wasn't just that you understood her; you made her understand
herself; you made her feel; you stirred up all the passion in her."
"I don't understand you," he said coldly.
"Well, I think if you can understand Miss Tancred you might
understand _me_. Compared with Frida I'm simplicity itself."
"When did I do these things?"
"Why, when you told her to let herself go. When you showed her your
sketches and talked to her about the places, and the sea, all the
things you had seen; the things she had dreamed of and never seen."
The young girl spoke as if she was indignant with him for reveling
in opportunities that were Frida's by right.
"But she shall see them. She shall go away from this, and be herself
and nobody else in the world."
"It's too late--it's not as if she were young."
"Young? She's a good deal younger than I am, though she's thirty and
I'm twenty-four--twenty-five next September. Frida's young because
she's got the body of a woman, the mind of a man, and the soul of a
baby. She'll begin where other women end, will Frida. Wait till
she's been abroad with me, and you'll see how her soul will come on,
in a more congenial climate."
"Where are you going?"
"We're going everywhere. Venice--Rome--Florence--the
Mediterranean--the regular thing. And to all sorts of queer
outlandish places besides--Scandinavia, the Hebrides, and Iceland;
everywhere that you can go to by sea. The sea----That's you again."
"The deuce it is! I doubt if I've done the kind thing, then. I seem
to have roused passions which will never be satisfied. When she
comes back----"