TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early morning train
for Geneva--homeward bound.
It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration that urgent
business summoned him to London, yet Julia and Alfred, when they chanced
to exchange glances after the announcement, read in each other's eyes
the formless impression that there were other things beside business.
Their uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large and probably
venturesome enterprises; but it did not fit with their conception of his
character that commercial anxieties should possess the power to upset
him. And upset he undeniably was.
They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the morning following
the excursion up to Glion and Caux. He told them then that he had slept
very badly, and that they must “count him out” of their plans for the
day. He continued to be counted out of what remained of their stay
at Territet. He professed not to be ill, but he was restless and
preoccupied. He ate little, but smoked continuously, and drank spirits
a good deal, which they had not seen him do before. Nothing would induce
him to go out either day.
Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's equanimity
synchronized with an apparent change in the attitude of their new
friends on the floor below. This change was, indeed, more apparent
than definable. The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly and
affable as ever, but the sense of comradeship had somehow vanished.
Insensibly, the two parties had ceased to have impulses and tastes in
common. There were no more trips together--no more fortuitous luncheons
or formal dinners as a group.
The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel on this
morning of departure, after they had clambered over the drifts into the
snow-bedecked train, and opened the window of their compartment. They
made sure that they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite,
and that the curtains were drawn aside--but there was no other token
of occupancy discernible. They had said good-bye to the two ladies the
previous evening, of course--it lingered in their minds as a rather
perfunctory ceremony--but this had not prevented their hoping for
another farewell glimpse of their friends. No one came to wave a hand
from the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked somewhat dubiously
at each other as the train moved. Then intuitively they glanced toward
their uncle--and perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and
was staring with a kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite.
“Fortunately, it is a clear day,” said Julia. “We shall see Mont Blanc.”
Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound in her own ears.
Neither her uncle nor her brother answered her.
At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which the young people
had turned their farewell gaze in vain, Miss Madden sipped her coffee
thoughtfully while she read a letter spread upon the table beside her.
“It's as they said,” she observed. “You are not allowed to drive in the
mountains with your own horses and carriage. That seems rather quaint
for a model Republic--doesn't it?”
“I daresay they're quite right,” Lady Cressage replied, listlessly.
“It's in the interest of safety. People who do not know the mountains
would simply go and get killed in avalanches and hurricanes--and all
that. I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent.”
“And you're on the side of the Government,” said the other, with a
twinkle in her brown eyes. “Truly now--you hated the whole idea of
driving over the Simplon.”
Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent as she nodded.
“But do you like this Russian plan any better?” demanded Celia. “I wish
for once you would be absolutely candid and open with me--and let me
know to the uttermost just what you think.” “'For once'?” queried the
other. Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance of
the quotation to be marked.
“Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking,” Miss Madden declared.
She put on a smile to alleviate the force of her remarks. “It is not
you alone--Edith. Don't think that! But it is ingrained in your
country-women. You can't help it. It's in your blood to keep things
back. I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready to believe,
would be incapable of telling an untruth. But I've never met one of whom
I could be sure that she would tell me the whole truth. Don't you see
this case in point,” she pursued, with a little laugh, “I could not drag
it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea, so long as there was
a chance of our going. Immediately we find that we can't go, you admit
that you hated it.”
“But you wanted to go,” objected Lady Cressage, quietly. “That was the
important thing. What I wanted or did not want had nothing to do with
the matter.”
Celia's face clouded momentarily. “Those are not the kind of things I
like to hear you say,” she exclaimed, with a certain vigour. “They put
everything in quite a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you
should be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough. I've said
it a thousand times--and have I ever done anything to disprove it? But
I never can find out what you do want--what really will please you! You
never will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank about the
things I propose. It's only by watching you out of the corner of my eye
that I can ever guess whether anything is altogether to your liking or
not.”
The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. “That
is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago,” said
Lady Cressage, passively--“that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But
originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for
two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak.
I thought it was a very logical opinion then, and, from my own point of
view, I think so now. But if it does not work in practice, at least the
responsibility of defending it is not mine.”
“Delightful!” cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put down her cup again.
“You are the only woman I've ever known who was worth arguing with.
The mere operation makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford--or
passing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows, I would get up
arguments with you every day, for the pure enjoyment of the thing--if
I weren't eternally afraid of saying something that would hurt your
feelings, and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound in
silence in the dark, and I should know that something was wrong, and
have to watch you for weeks to make out what it was--and it would all
be too unhappy. But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. You
don't tell me things!”
Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a wistful reserve.
“It is a constitutional defect--even national, according to you. How
shall I hope to change, at this late day? But what is it you want me to
tell you?--I forget.”
“The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get our passports, and
then to Cracow, and through to Kief, which they say is awfully well
worth while--and next Moscow--and so on to St. Petersburg, in time
to see the ice break up. It is only in winter that you see the
characteristic Russia: that one has always heard. With the furs and the
sledges, and the three horses galloping over the snow--it seems to me it
must be the best thing in Europe--if you can call Russia Europe.
That's the way it presents itself to me--but then I was brought up in
a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort of thing--in its proper
season. It is different with you. In England you don't know what a real
winter is. And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would
like the Russian experiment.”
The other laughed gently. “But if I don't know what a real winter is,
how can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am
perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes--truly--I should like very
much to go.”
Miss Madden sighed briefly. “All right,” she said, but with a notable
absence of conviction in her tone.
A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through another
note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark. She pouted her lips
over the contents of this missive, and raised her eyebrows in token of
surprise, but as she laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her
companion.
“It's from our young friend,” she explained, genially--“the
painter-boy--Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me of a promise he says I
made--that when I came to London he should paint my portrait. I don't
think I promised anything of the kind--but I suppose that is a detail.
It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone by this time--they
were to go very early, weren't they?”
Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. “It was 8:40, I think--fully half an
hour ago,” she answered, with a painstaking effect of indifference.
“Curious conglomeration”--mused the other. “The boy and girl are so
civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are
spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They
ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather
effective--but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame
monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his
fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it
more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves
it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example,
never altered in the slightest degree the habits he formed when he was a
poor workman. To the day of his death, blessed old man, he remained what
he had always been--simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and
thrifty--a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out
of the path he had been bred to walk in. But such nobility of mind and
temper with it all! He never dreamed of suggesting that I should walk
in the same path. From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever
putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible and generous.
I must have been an extremely trying daughter, but he never said so;
he never looked or acted as if he thought so.--But I never stop when I
begin talking of my father.”
“It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him,” Lady Cressage
put in. “One knows so few people who feel that way about their fathers!”
Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon something that
had been left unsaid. The sight of the young artist's note recalled her
earlier subject. “Of course there is a certain difference,” she went
on, carelessly,--“this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant, as the phrase
goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having been educated.”
“Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me,” said the other,
with interest. “And his people were booksellers--somewhere in London--so
that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly
has more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the
nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very
well indeed--in a direct, practical sort of way. I don't quite follow
you about his niece and nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that
they have had a great effect upon him. He sees it himself--and he's very
proud of it. He told me so, quite frankly. But why shouldn't it be a
nice effect?”
“Oh, I don't know,” Celia replied, idly. “It seemed to me that he was
the kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't to be shaved and polished
and taught drawing-room tricks--I feel that merely in the interest
of the fitness of things. Have you looked into his eyes--I mean when
they've got that lack-lustre expression? You can see a hundred thousand
dead men in them.”
“I know the look you mean,” said Lady Cressage, in a low voice.
“Not that I assume he is going to kill anybody,” pursued Miss Madden,
with ostensible indifference, but fixing a glance of aroused attention
upon her companion's face, “or that he has any criminal intentions
whatever. He behaves very civilly indeed, and apparently his niece and
nephew idolize him. He seems to be the soul of kindness to them. It may
be that I'm altogether wrong about him--only I know I had the instinct
of alarm when I caught that sort of dull glaze in his eye. I met an
African explorer a year ago, or so, about whose expeditions dark stories
were told, and he had precisely that kind of eye. Perhaps it was this
that put it into my head--but I have a feeling that this Thorpe is an
exceptional sort of man, who would have the capacity in him for terrible
things, if the necessity arose for them.”
“I see what you mean,” the other repeated. She toyed with the
bread-crumbs about her plate, and reflectively watched their
manipulation into squares and triangles as she went on. “But may that
not be merely the visible sign of an exceptionally strong and masterful
character? And isn't it, after all, the result of circumstances whether
such a character makes, as you put it, a hundred thousand dead men, or
enriches a hundred thousand lives instead? We agree, let us say, that
this Mr. Thorpe impresses us both as a powerful sort of personality. The
question arises, How will he use his power? On that point, we look
for evidence. You see a dull glaze in his eye, and you draw hostile
conclusions from it. I reply that it may mean no more than that he is
sleepy. But, on the other hand, I bring proofs that are actively in
his favour. He is, as you say, idolized by the only two members of his
family that we have seen--persons, moreover, who have been brought up
in ways different to his own, and who would not start, therefore, with
prejudices in his favour. Beyond that, I know of two cases in which
he has behaved, or rather undertaken to behave, with really lavish
generosity--and in neither case was there any claim upon him of a
substantial nature. He seems to me, in fact, quite too much disposed
to share his fortune with Tom, Dick, and Harry--anybody who excites
his sympathy or gets into his affections.” Having said this much, Lady
Cressage swept the crumbs aside and looked up. “So now,” she added, with
a flushed smile, “since you love arguments so much, how do you answer
that?”
Celia smiled back. “Oh, I don't answer it at all,” she said, and her
voice carried a kind of quizzical implication. “Your proofs overwhelm
me. I know nothing of him--and you know so much!”
Lady Cressage regarded her companion with a novel earnestness and
directness of gaze. “I had a long, long talk with him--the afternoon we
came down from Glion.”
Miss Madden rose, and going to the mantel lighted a cigarette. She
did not return to the table, but after a brief pause came and took an
easy-chair beside her friend, who turned to face her. “My dear Edith,”
she said, with gravity, “I think you want to tell me about that
talk--and so I beg you to do so. But if I'm mistaken--why then I beg you
to do nothing of the kind.”
The other threw out her hands with a gesture of wearied impatience, and
then clasped them upon her knee. “I seem not to know what I want! What
is the good of talking about it? What is the good of anything?”
“Now--now!” Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone had reference,
apparently, to something understood between the two, for Lady Cressage
deferred to it, and even summoned the ghost of a smile.
“There is really nothing to tell,”--she faltered, hesitatingly--“that
is, nothing happened. I don't know how to say it--the talk left my mind
in a whirl. I couldn't tell you why. It was no particular thing that was
said--it seemed to be more the things that I thought of while something
else was being talked about--but the whole experience made a most
tremendous impression upon me. I've tried to straighten it out in my own
mind, but I can make nothing of it. That is what disturbs me, Celia. No
man has ever confused me in this silly fashion before. Nothing could be
more idiotic. I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with people
of--well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,--but this man, who
is of hardly any intellectual rank at all, and who rambled on without
any special aim that one could see--he reduced my brain to a sort of
porridge. I said the most extraordinary things to him--babbling rubbish
which a school-girl would be ashamed of. How is that to be accounted
for? I try to reason it out, but I can't. Can you?”
“Nerves,” said Miss Madden, judicially.
“Oh, that is meaningless,” the other declared. “Anybody can say
'nerves.' Of course, all human thought and action is 'nerves.'”
“But yours is a special case of nerves,” Celia pursued, with gentle
imperturbability. “I think I can make my meaning clear to you--though
the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one. The finest thoroughbred
dog in the world, if it is beaten viciously and cowed in its youth, will
always have a latent taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity--call
it what you like. Well, it seems to me there's something like that in
your case, Edith. They hurt you too cruelly, poor girl. I won't say
it broke your nerve--but it made a flaw in it. Just as a soldier's old
wound aches when there's a storm in the air--so your old hurt distracts
and upsets you under certain psychological conditions. It's a rather
clumsy explanation, but I think it does explain.”
“Perhaps--I don't know,” Edith replied, in a tone of melancholy reverie.
“It makes a very poor creature out of me, whatever it is.”
“I rather lose patience, Edith,” her companion admonished her, gravely.
“Nobody has a right to be so deficient in courage as you allow yourself
to be.”
“But I'm not a coward,” the other protested. “I could be as brave as
anybody--as brave as you are--if a chance were given me. But of what use
is bravery against a wall twenty feet high? I can't get over it. I only
wound and cripple myself by trying to tear it down, or break through
it.--Oh yes, I know what you say! You say there is no wall--that it is
all an illusion of mine. But unfortunately I'm unable to take that view.
I've battered myself against it too long--too sorely, Celia!”
Celia shrugged her shoulders in comment. “Oh, we women all have our
walls--our limitations--if it comes to that,” she said, with a kind
of compassionate impatience in her tone. “We are all ridiculous
together--from the point of view of human liberty. The free woman is a
fraud--a myth. She is as empty an abstraction as the 'Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity' that the French put on their public buildings. I used to
have the most wonderful visions of what independence would mean. I
thought that when I was absolutely my own master, with my money and my
courage and my free mind, I would do things to astonish all mankind. But
really the most I achieve is the occasional mild surprise of a
German waiter. Even that palls on one after a time. And if you were
independent, Edith--if you had any amount of money--what difference do
you think it would make to you? What could you do that you don't do, or
couldn't do, now?”
“Ah, now”--said the other, looking up with a thin smile--“now is an
interval--an oasis.”
Miss Madden's large, handsome, clear-hued face, habitually serene in its
expression, lost something in composure as she regarded her companion.
“I don't know why you should say that,” she observed, gently enough, but
with an effect of reproof in her tone. “I have never put limits to the
connection, in my own mind--and it hadn't occurred to me that you were
doing so in yours.”
“But I'm not,” interposed Lady Cressage.
“Then I understand you less than ever. Why do you talk about an
'interval'? What was the other word?--'oasis'--as if this were a brief
halt for refreshments and a breathing-spell, and that presently you must
wander forth into the desert again. That suggestion is none of mine. We
agreed that we would live together--'pool our issues,' as they say in
America. I wanted a companion; so did you. I have never for an instant
regretted the arrangement. Some of my own shortcomings in the matter I
have regretted. You were the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen,
and you were talented, and you seemed to like me--and I promised myself
that I would add cheerfulness and a gay spirit to your other gifts--and
in that I have failed wofully. You're not happy. I see that only too
clearly.”
“I know--I'm a weariness and a bore to you,” broke in the other,
despondingly.
“That is precisely what you're not,” Celia went on. “We mustn't use
words of that sort. They don't describe anything in our life at all. But
I should be better pleased with myself if I could really put my finger
on what it is that is worrying you. Even if we decided to break up our
establishment, I have told you that you should not go back to what you
regard as poverty. Upon that score, I had hoped that your mind was easy.
As I say, I think you attach more importance to money than those who
have tested its powers would agree to--but that's neither here nor
there. You did not get on well on 600 pounds a year--and that is enough.
You shall never have less than twice that amount, whether we keep
together or not--and if it ought to be three times the amount, that
doesn't matter.
“You don't seem to realize, Edith”--she spoke with increased
animation--“that you are my caprice. You are the possession that I am
proudest of and fondest of. There is nothing else that appeals to me a
hundredth part as much as you do. Since I became independent, the one
real satisfaction I have had is in being able to do things for you--to
have you with me, and make you share in the best that the world can
offer. And if with it all you remain unhappy, why then you see I don't
know what to do.”
“Oh, I know--I behave very badly!” Lady Cressage had risen, and with
visible agitation began now to pace the room. “I deserve to be thrown
into the lake--I know it well enough! But Celia--truly--I'm as incapable
of understanding it as you are. It must be that I am possessed by
devils--like the people in the New Testament. Perhaps someone will come
along who can cast them out. I don't seem able to do it myself. I can't
rule myself at all. It needs a strength I haven't got!”
“Ah!” said Celia, thoughtfully. The excited sentences which Edith threw
over her shoulder as she walked appeared, upon examination, to contain a
suggestion.
“My dear child,” she asked abruptly, after a moment's silence, “do you
want to marry?”
Lady Cressage paused at the mantel, and exchanged a long steadfast
glance with her friend. Then she came slowly forward. “Ah, that is what
I don't know,” she answered. Apparently the reply was candid.
Miss Madden pursed her lips, and frowned a little in thought. Then, at
some passing reflection, she smiled in a puzzled fashion. At last she
also rose, and went to the mantel for another cigarette. “Now I am
going to talk plainly,” she said, with decision. “Since the subject is
mentioned, less harm will be done by speaking out than by keeping still.
There is a debate in your mind on the matter, isn't there?”
The other lady, tall, slender, gently ruminative once more, stood at the
window and with bowed head looked down at the lake. “Yes--I suppose it
might be called that,” she replied, in a low voice.
“And you hesitate to tell me about it? You would rather not?” Celia,
after an instant's pause, went on without waiting for an answer. “I beg
that you won't assume my hostility to the idea, Edith. In fact, I'm not
sure I don't think it would be the best thing for you to do. Marriage,
a home, children--these are great things to a woman. We can say that she
pays the price of bondage for them--but to know what that signifies, we
must ask what her freedom has been worth to her.”
“Yes,” interposed the other, from the window. “What have I done with my
freedom that has been worth while?”
“Not much,” murmured Celia, under her breath. She moved forward, and
stood beside Edith, with an arm round her waist. They looked together at
the lake.
“It is Lord Plowden, is it not?” asked the American, as the silence grew
constrained.
Lady Cressage looked up alertly, and then hesitated over her reply.
“No,” she said at last. Upon reflection, and with a dim smile flickering
in her side-long glance at Celia, she added, “He wants to marry you, you
know.”
“Leave that out of consideration,” said Celia, composedly. “He has never
said so. I think it was more his mother's idea than his, if it existed
at all. Of course I am not marrying him, or anybody else. But I saw at
Hadlow that you and he were--what shall I say?--old friends.”
“He must marry money,” the other replied. In an unexpected burst of
candour she went on: “He would have asked me to marry him if I had
had money. There is no harm in telling you that. It was quite
understood--oh, two years ago. And I think I wished I had the
money--then.”
“And you don't wish it now?”
A slight shake of Edith's small, shapely head served for answer. After
a little, she spoke in a musing tone: “He is going to have money of his
own, very soon, but I don't think it would attract me now. I like him
personally, of course, but--there is no career, no ambition, no future.”
“A Viscount has future enough behind him,” observed Celia.
“It doesn't attract me,” the other repeated, vaguely. “He is handsome,
and clever, and kind and all that--but he would never appeal to any of
the great emotions--nor be capable of them himself He is too smooth, too
well-balanced, too much the gentleman. That expresses it badly--but do
you see what I mean?”
Celia turned, and studied the beautiful profile beside her, in a steady,
comprehending look.
“Yes, I think I see what you mean,” she said, with significance in her
tone.
Lady Cressage flushed, and released herself from her companion's arm.
“But I don't know myself what I mean!” she exclaimed, despairingly, as
she moved away. “I don't know!--I don't know!”