XV

"Well, is it all that you expected? Does the reality come up to the

dream?"

"It does. I never knew a dream that tallied so exactly with the

reality."

Frida was leaning back in a deck-chair, looking at Durant, who sat

beside her on the schooner's rail.

For three days the _Windward_ had sailed up and down the coast of

Cornwall; for three days the little _Torch_, with all sails set,

wheeled round her moorings or followed her flight. Durant had

accepted Miss Tancred's invitation to join them in a week's cruise

in English waters. He spent his mornings in his own yacht, his

afternoons and evenings on board the schooner. The proposal had been

a godsend to him in his state of indecision. After his aimless

wanderings he was exhilarated by this eager challenge and pursuit,

absurdly pitting the speed of his own small craft against the

swiftness and strength of the larger vessel. But he enjoyed still

more sitting on the rail of the _Windward_ and talking to Frida.

There was something infinitely soothing in the society of a woman

who knew nothing and cared nothing about his fame. He was not the

only guest. Besides Miss Chatterton there was Mr. Manby, a little

middle-aged gentleman, who called himself an artist; Miss Manby, a

little middle-aged woman, who seemed to be his sister; and two

little girls with their hair down their backs, his daughters, Eileen

and Ermyntrude Manby. Durant was a good deal alone with Frida, for a

stiff breeze had kept the artist and his sister much below, and

Georgie and the little girls hardly counted.

They were alone now.

Frida had smiled as she spoke, a smile of intelligence and

reminiscence; and he was irresistibly reminded of the first and last

occasion when he had discoursed to her about realities.

"And what are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"With what? With the reality or the dream?"

"With both, with life--now you've got it?"

"Why should I do anything with it? Unless you're talking of moral

obligations, which would be very tiresome of you."

"I'm not thinking of moral obligations."

"What were you thinking of, then?"

"I was thinking--of you."

Frida lay back a little further on her cushion as if she were

withdrawing herself somewhat from his scrutiny. She clasped her

hands behind her head; her face was uptilted to the sky.

His eyes followed her gaze. Over their heads the wind had piled up a

great palace of white clouds; under the rifted floors the blue sky

ran shallow in a faint milky turquoise, while above, between, beyond

those aerial roofs and pinnacles and domes it deepened to _lapis

lazuli_, luminous, transparent, light behind color and color behind

light. The green earth looked greener under the low-lying shafts of

blue and silver; far off, on the sea, the shadows of the clouds lay

like the stain of spilt red wine.

"Who was the great man?" she asked with apparent irrelevance, "who

said that women were incapable of a disinterested passion for

nature?"

He knitted his brows. Frida had proved a little disconcerting at

times. He had had to begin all over again with her, aware that,

though ostensibly renewing their old acquaintance, he was actually

making a new one, to which faint recognitions and perishing

reminiscences gave a bewildering, elusive charm. But Frida

remembered many things that he had forgotten, and a certain

directness and familiarity born of this superior memory of hers

puzzled him and put him out. This time, however, he had a dreamy

recollection.

"Fancy your remembering that!"

"I remember everything. At any rate, I remember quite enough to see

that you're just the same; you haven't changed a little bit. Except

that you don't look as you did the first night I met you."

"And how did I look then?"

She paused, carefully selecting her phrase. "You looked--as if--I'd

given you a shock. You had expected something different. That dream

did _not_ tally with the reality."

"How on earth----"

"How on earth did I know? You may not be aware of it, but you have a

very expressive face."

"I was not aware of it."

Poor Durant. His face was expressive enough now in all conscience.

She held out her hand and laid it on his sleeve, and he remembered

how she used to shrink from his touch.

"My dear Mr. Durant, don't look like that; it makes my heart bleed.

Of course I saw it. I saw everything. I saw your face looking over

the banisters as I was going downstairs, when I've no doubt you

thought you'd caught sight of a very pretty woman; and I saw it with

a very different expression on it when you shook hands and found

that the woman wasn't a bit pretty, after all. Of course it was a

shock to you, and of course I understood. I knew so exactly how you

felt, and I was so sincerely sorry for you."

"Sorry! I have a distinct recollection of being abominably rude to

you that night, and unpleasant afterward. Can you, will you forgive

me?"

"What? Five years after the offense? No. I forgave you at the time;

I'm not going to do it all over again. What does it matter? It's all

so long ago. The funny part of it was that I wasn't a bit annoyed

with you, but I was furious with--whom do you think?"

"I haven't a notion if it wasn't with me."

"It was a she--the other lady, the woman I wasn't, the woman you

thought I was, my ideal self. Needless to say, my feminine jealousy

was such that I could have throttled her. I suppose I did pretty

well do for her as it happened. There can be nothing deader than a

dead idea."

"Don't be too sure. I have known them come to life again."

His gaze, that had fallen, and was resting on the hem of her blue

serge gown, now traveled up the long, slender line of her limbs,

past the dim curves of her body to the wonder of her face. How

marvelously changed she was! She was not only both younger and older

than when he had left her five years ago, she was another woman. The

heaviness had gone from her eyes and forehead, the bitter,

determined, self-restraint from her mouth and chin; instead of

self-restraint she had acquired that rarer virtue, self-possession.

Her lips had softened, had blossomed into the sweet red flower that

was part of Nature's original design. Her face had grown plastic to

her feeling and her thought. She was ripened and freshened by sun

and wind, by salt water and salt air; a certain nameless, intangible

grace that he had caught once, twice, long ago, and seen no more,

was now her abiding charm. The haggard, sallow-faced provincial,

with her inscrutable manners and tumultuous heart, had developed

into the finished cosmopolitan; she had about her the glory and

bloom of the world. For once his artist's instinct had failed him;

he had not discovered the promise of her physical beauty--but that

he should have ignored the finer possibilities of her soul! If she

had really known all that he had thought and felt about her then,

had understood and had yet forgiven him, Frida was unlike any other

woman in the world. He was not sure that this was not the secret of

her charm--the marvelous dexterity of her sympathy, the swiftness

with which she precipitated herself into his point of view. It had

its drawbacks; it meant that she could see another man's and her own

with equal clearness.

The sound of voices from a neighboring cabin, followed by the noise

of unskillful footsteps stumbling up a companion ladder, warned them

that they were not alone. Mr. Manby appeared on deck with great

noise and circumstance, skating, struggling, clutching at impossible

supports, being much hampered by a camp stool and a sketching block

which he carried, and his own legs, which seemed hardly equal to

carrying him. Durant had recognized in the little artist a familiar

type. A small, nervous man, attired in the usual threadbare gray

trousers, the usual seedy velveteen coat and slouch hat, with a

great deal of grizzled hair tumbling in the usual disorder about his

peaked and peevish face. Durant sprang forward and helped this

pitiful figure to find its legs; not with purely benevolent

intentions, he settled it and its belongings in a secure (and

remote) position amidships.

"Glad to see you back again!" Frida sang out.

Mr. Manby screwed up his eyes, put his head very much on one side,

and peered into the wild face of Nature with a pale, propitiatory

smile.

"Yes, yes; I mustn't neglect my opportunities. Every minute of this

weather is invaluable."

"It strikes me," said Frida, as Durant established himself beside

her again, "that it's you artists whose devotion to Nature

is--well--not altogether disinterested."

"Manby's affection seems to be pretty sincere; it stands the test of

seasickness."

"Oh, Mr. Manby doesn't really care very much for nature or for art

either."

"What does he try to paint pictures for, then?"

"He tries to paint them for a living, for himself and the little

girls." And Frida looked tenderly at Mr. Manby as she spoke.

At that moment Durant hated Mr. Manby with a deadly hatred. He had

gone so far as to find a malignant satisfaction in the thought that

Mr. Manby's pictures were bad, when he remembered that Frida had a

weakness for bad pictures. Art did not appeal to Frida. She talked

about Paris and Florence and Rome without a word of the Louvre or

the Uffizi Gallery or the Vatican. She didn't care a rap about

Raphael or Rubens, but she hampered herself with Manbys.

"Is there a Mrs. Manby?" he asked gloomily.

"No. Mrs. Manby died last year."

"H'mph! Poor devil! Lucky for her, though."

Frida ignored the implication. "To go back to the point we were

discussing. If you were honest you'd own that you only care for

nature because you can make pictures out of it. Now I, on the

contrary, have no ulterior motives; I don't want to make anything

out of it."

"I wasn't talking about nature. I want to know what you are going to

make of your life."

"There you are again. Why should I make anything of it? You talk as

if life were so much raw material to be worked into something that

it isn't. To my mind it's beautiful enough as it is. I should spoil

it if I tried to make anything of it."

He looked at her and he understood. He was a man of talent, some

said of genius, but in her there was something greater than that; it

was the genius of temperament, an infinite capacity for taking

pleasures. To her life was more than mere raw material, it came

finished to her hands, because it had lived a long life in her soul.

Her dream had tallied.

Beside that rich creative impulse, that divine imagination of hers,

his own appeared as something imitative and secondhand, and his art

essentially degraded. He was nothing better than a copyist, the

plagiarist of nature.

He looked up to where Mr. Manby sat smiling over his sketching

block, Mr. Manby, surrounded by his admiring family. Mr. Manby did

not see them; he was wrapped in his dream, absorbed in his talent

with all its innocent enormities. He at any rate had no misgivings.

The little girls, Eileen and Ermyntrude, played about him; they

played with blocks and life-buoys and cables, they jumped over coils

of rope, they spun round to leeward till the wind wound their faces

in their long hair, they ran for'ard, shrieking with happy laughter

as they were caught by the showers of spray flung from the yacht's

bows. Frida's eyes followed them, and Durant's eyes followed

Frida's.

"They are seeing the world, too, it seems."

"Yes; they have caught the fever. But they are young, as you see;

they have taken it in time. Some day they'll be tired of wandering,

and they'll settle down in a house of their own, over here in

England, and be dear little wives and mothers."

"Eileen and Ermyntrude--by the way, I never know which is Eileen and

which is Ermyntrude. And you, will you never be tired of wandering?"

She looked at him with the lucid, penetrating gaze he knew so well.

"Never. I took the fever when I was--not young, and it goes harder

with you then. There's no hope for me; I shall never be cured."

She rose and joined the Manbys. The little girls ran to meet her,

they clung to her skirts and danced round her; she put her arm round

Ermyntrude, the younger, and Durant saw her winding her long fingers

in and out of the golden hair, and looking down into the child's

face, Madonna-like, with humid, tender, maternal eyes.

He thought of her as the mother of Manby's children, and he hated

the little girls.

There was a voice at his elbow. "Isn't she splendid?" Miss

Chatterton had seated herself in Frida's chair.

Her presence brought him instantaneous relief. He had been glad to

meet Miss Chatterton again. Not that he would have known her, for

time had not dealt very kindly with the young girl. Her face, from

overmuch play of expression, showed a few little wrinkles already,

her complexion had suffered the fate of sanguine complexions, it had

not gone altogether, but it was going--fast, the color was beginning

to run. But time had not subdued her extravagant spirits or touched

her imperishable mirth. In spite of a lapse of five years she gave

him a pleasant sense of continuity; she took him up exactly where

she had put him down, on the platform of the little wayside station

of Whithorn-in-Arden. Unlike Frida, Miss Chatterton had not

developed. When she began to talk she had the air of merely

continuing their last important conversation.

"Didn't I tell you how she'd come out if she got her chance?"

"You did."

"And wasn't I right?"

"You were."

"But you oughtn't to have needed telling, you ought to have seen it

for yourself."

"Right again. I ought to have seen it for myself."

"He who will not when he may will live to fight another day; isn't

that how it goes on?"

"Yes; I congratulate you on your work."

"It isn't my work, lord bless you! nor yours, either--_there_ I was

wrong."

"What is it, then?"

Miss Chatterton stared out over the sea and into the universal air.

"Why, it's--it's everything! Of course you did something, so did I.

But if it comes to that, the present Mrs. Tancred did more than

either of us. We couldn't have married the Colonel."

"Then you think that was the reason why she----"

"I do, indeed. She could have had no other. You see she was awfully

fond of Frida. And, what's more, she was fond of you."

It was his turn to look out over the sea.

"What do you think? He has never forgiven her for going away, though

it happened to be the very thing he wanted. How's that for

inconsistency?"

"Has she seen the--the Colonel since?"

"She has. A strange, unaccountable longing to see the Colonel comes

over her periodically, like a madness, and she rushes home from the

ends of the earth. That's happened three times. It's the most

erratic and incalculable thing about her. But going home doesn't

answer."

"I should hardly have thought it would."

"Except that she's got the control of more money now. Tell you how

it happened. The last time she went home she found the poor little

Colonel making his little will. He asked her point-blank what she

meant to do with the property when he was in his little grave. He

must have had an inkling. And Frida, who is honesty itself, said she

didn't know, but she rather thought she would sell it and make for

the unexplored. Then he was frightened, and made her make a solemn

vow never to do anything of the kind. Somehow the property seems to

have recovered itself, with all she put into it; anyhow, after that,

it managed to disgorge another thousand a year. So Frida's more

independent than ever."

Durant made an impatient movement that nearly sent him overboard to

the bottom of the sea, where, indeed, he wished that Frida Tancred's

thousands were lying. Georgie noticed the movement, and blushed for

the first time in their acquaintance.

"Just look at those children," said she, "they simply adore Frida.

It's odd, but she's got the most curious power of making people

adore her. I don't know what she does to them, but waiters,

policemen, porters, customhouse officers, they're all the same. The

people in the hotels we stayed in adored her. So did the Arabs up

the Nile and the Soudanese in the desert, so did the Kaffirs on the

veldt and the coolies that carried her up the Himalayas--and she's

no light weight, is Frida."

Georgie paused while her fancy followed Frida in delightful

retrospect. Durant said nothing, he sat waiting for her to go on.

She went on.

"Women, too--I've seen them hanging about drafty corridors for hours

on the off chance of seeing her. There was a dreadful girl we knew

in Paris, who used to grovel on her doormat and weep because she

said Frida wouldn't speak to her. Frida loathed her, but she was

awfully nice to her till one day when she tripped over her on the

mat. Then she wasn't nice to her at all; she hauled her up by the

belt, and told her to get up and go away and never make such a fool

of herself again."

Georgie cast at Durant a look that said, "That's how our Frida deals

with obstructives!"

"And where was all this remarkable fascination five years ago?"

"It was there all right enough, lying dormant, you know. I felt it.

Mrs. Fazakerly felt it--that's why she married the Colonel. You felt

it."

"I didn't."

"Excuse me, you did. That's why you stayed three weeks at Coton

Manor when you needn't have stopped three days. As for Mr. Manby

there, he simply worships the ground she treads on, as they say."

"The devil he does! What's he doing here?"

"As you see, he's painting pictures as hard as ever he can go. He

paints them in order to live; but as he has to live in order to

paint, Frida--well, between you and me, Frida keeps him and Eileen

and Ermyntrude, the whole family, in short. But that's a detail. It

isn't offered as any explanation of the charm. I don't believe that

anybody ever realizes that Frida has money."

He could believe that. He had never realized it himself. Her

enjoyment of life was so finished an art that it kept its machinery

well out of sight.

"Frida," Georgie serenely continued, "has a weakness for landscape

painters. The memory of her mother--no doubt."

"Don't they--don't they bore her?"

"No. It takes a great deal to bore Frida--naturally, after the

Colonel. Besides, she doesn't give them the chance. Nobody ever gets

what you may call a hold on Frida. There's so much more of her than

they can grasp. And there are, at least, three sides of her by which

she's unapproachable. One of them's her liberty. If you or I or the

little Manby man were to take liberties with her liberty Frida

would----"

"What would Frida do?"

"She would drop us down, very gently, at the nearest port, and make

for the Unexplored! And yet, I don't know. That's the lovely and

fascinating thing about Frida--that you never _do_ know."