It was, I believe, mainly as a compliment to me that Miss Audrey Liston
was asked to Poltons. Miss Liston and I were very good friends, and my
cousin Dora Polton thought, as she informed me, that it would be nice
for me to have someone I could talk to about "books and so on." I did
not complain. Miss Liston was a pleasant young woman of
six-and-twenty; I liked her very much except on paper, and I was aware
that she made it a point of duty to read something at least of what I
wrote. She was in the habit of describing herself as an "authoress in
a small way." If it were pointed out that six three-volume novels in
three years (the term of her literary activity, at the time of which I
write) could hardly be called "a small way," she would smile modestly
and say that it was not really much; and if she were told that the
English language embraced no such word as "authoress," she would smile
again and say that it ought to; a position toward the bugbear of
correctness with which, I confess, I sympathize in some degree. She
was very diligent; she worked from ten to one every day while she was
at Poltons; how much she wrote is between her and her conscience.
There was another impeachment which Miss Liston was hardly at the
trouble to deny. "Take my characters from life?" she would exclaim.
"Surely every artist" (Miss Liston often referred to herself as an
artist) "must?" And she would proceed to maintain--what is perhaps
true sometimes--that people rather liked being put into books, just as
they like being photographed, for all that they grumble and pretend to
be afflicted when either process is levied against them. In discussing
this matter with Miss Liston I felt myself on delicate ground, for it
was notorious that I figured in her first book in the guise of a
misogynistic genius; the fact that she lengthened (and thickened) my
hair, converted it from an indeterminate brown to a dusky black, gave
me a drooping mustache, and invested my very ordinary workaday eyes
with a strange magnetic attraction, availed nothing; I was at once
recognized; and, I may remark in passing, an uncommonly disagreeable
fellow she made me. Thus I had passed through the fire. I felt
tolerably sure that I presented no other aspect of interest, real or
supposed, and I was quite content that Miss Liston should serve all the
rest of her acquaintance as she had served me. I reckoned they would
last her, at the present rate of production, about five years.
Fate was kind to Miss Liston, and provided her with most suitable
patterns for her next piece of work at Poltons itself. There were a
young man and a young woman staying in the house--Sir Gilbert
Chillington and Miss Pamela Myles. The moment Miss Liston was apprized
of a possible romance, she began the study of the protagonists. She
was looking out, she told me, for some new types (if it were any
consolation--and there is a sort of dignity about it--to be called a
type, Miss Liston's victims were always welcome to so much), and she
had found them in Chillington and Pamela. The former appeared to my
dull eye to offer no salient novelty; he was tall, broad, handsome, and
he possessed a manner of enviable placidity. Pamela, I allowed, was
exactly the heroine Miss Liston loved--haughty, capricious, difficile,
but sound and true at heart (I was mentally skimming Volume I). Miss
Liston agreed with me in my conception of Pamela, but declared that I
did not do justice to the artistic possibilities latent in Chillington;
he had a curious attraction which it would tax her skill (so she
gravely informed me) to the utmost to reproduce. She proposed that I
also should make a study of him, and attributed my hurried refusal to a
shrinking from the difficulties of the task.
"Of course," she observed, looking at our young friends, who were
talking nonsense at the other side of the lawn, "they must have a
misunderstanding."
"Why, of course," said I, lighting my pipe. "What should you say to
another man?"
"Or another woman?" said Miss Liston.
"It comes to the same thing," said I. (About a volume and a half I
meant.)
"But it's more interesting. Do you think she'd better be a married
woman?" And Miss Liston looked at me inquiringly.
"The age prefers them married," I remarked.
This conversation happened on the second day of Miss Liston's visit,
and she lost no time in beginning to study her subjects. Pamela, she
said, she found pretty plain sailing, but Chillington continued to
puzzle her. Again, she could not make up her mind whether to have a
happy or a tragic ending. In the interests of a tenderhearted public,
I pleaded for marriage bells.
"Yes, I think so," said Miss Liston, but she sighed, and I think she
had an idea or two for a heart-broken separation, followed by mutual,
lifelong, hopeless devotion.
The complexity of young Sir Gilbert did not, in Miss Liston's opinion,
appear less on further acquaintance; and indeed, I must admit that she
was not altogether wrong in considering him worthy of attention. As I
came to know him better, I discerned in him a smothered
self-appreciation, which came to light in response to the least tribute
of interest or admiration, but was yet far remote from the
aggressiveness of a commonplace vanity. In a moment of indiscretion I
had chaffed him--he was very good-natured--on the risks he ran at Miss
Liston's hands; he was not disgusted, but neither did he plume himself
or spread his feathers. He received the suggestion without surprise,
and without any attempt at disclaiming fitness for the purpose; but he
received it as a matter which entailed a responsibility on him. I
detected the conviction that, if the portrait was to be painted, it was
due to the world that it should be well painted; the subject must give
the artist full opportunities.
"What does she know about me?" he asked, in meditative tones.
"She's very quick; she'll soon pick up as much as she wants," I assured
him.
"She'll probably go all wrong," he said somberly; and of course I could
not tell him that it was of no consequence if she did. He would not
have believed me, and would have done precisely what he proceeded to
do, and that was to afford Miss Liston every chance of appraising his
character and plumbing the depths of his soul. I may say at once that I
did not regret this course of action; for the effect of it was to allow
me a chance of talking to Pamela Myles, and Pamela was exactly the sort
of girl to beguile the long, pleasant morning hours of a holiday in the
country. No one had told Pamela that she was going to be put in a
book, and I don't think it would have made any difference had she been
told. Pamela's attitude toward books was one of healthy scorn,
confidently based on admitted ignorance. So we never spoke of them,
and my cousin Dora condoled with me more than once on the way in which
Miss Liston, false to the implied terms of her invitation, deserted me
in favor of Sir Gilbert, and left me to the mercies of a frivolous
girl. Pamela appeared to be as little aggrieved as I was. I imagined
that she supposed that Chillington would ask her to marry him some day,
before very long, and I was sure she would accept him; but it was quite
plain that, if Miss Liston persisted in making Pamela her heroine, she
would have to supply from her own resources a large supplement of
passion. Pamela was far too deficient in the commodity to be made
anything of without such re-enforcement, even by an art more adept at
making much out of nothing than Miss Liston's straightforward method
could claim to be.
A week passed, and then, one Friday morning, a new light burst on me.
Miss Liston came into the garden at eleven o'clock and sat down by me
on the lawn. Chillington and Pamela had gone riding with the squire,
Dora was visiting the poor. We were alone. The appearance of Miss
Liston at this hour (usually sacred to the use of the pen), no less
than her puzzled look, told me that an obstruction had occurred in the
novel. Presently she let me know what it was.
"I'm thinking of altering the scheme of my story, Mr. Wynne," said she.
"Have you ever noticed how sometimes a man thinks he's in love when he
isn't really?"
"Such a case sometimes occurs," I acknowledged.
"Yes, and he doesn't find out his mistake----"
"Till they're married?"
"Sometimes, yes," she said, rather as though she were making an
unwilling admission. "But sometimes he sees it before--when he meets
somebody else."
"Very true," said I, with a grave nod.
"The false can't stand against the real," pursued Miss Liston; and then
she fell into meditative silence. I stole a glance at her face; she
was smiling. Was it in the pleasure of literary creation--an artistic
ecstasy? I should have liked to answer yes, but I doubted it very
much. Without pretending to Miss Liston's powers, I have the little
subtlety that is needful to show me that more than one kind of smile
may be seen on the human face, and that there is one very different
from others; and, finally, that that one is not evoked, as a rule,
merely by the evolution of the troublesome encumbrance in pretty
writing vulgarly called a "plot."
"If," pursued Miss Liston, "someone comes who can appreciate him and
draw out what is best in him----"
"That's all very well," said I, "but what of the first girl?"
"Oh, she's--she can be made shallow, you know; and I can put in a man
for her. People needn't be much interested in her."
"Yes, you could manage it that way," said I, thinking how Pamela--I
took the liberty of using her name for the shallow girl--would like
such treatment.
"She will really be valuable mainly as a foil," observed Miss Liston;
and she added generously, "I shall make her nice, you know, but
shallow--not worthy of him."
"And what are you going to make the other girl like?" I asked.
Miss Liston started slightly; also she colored very slightly, and she
answered, looking away from me across the lawn:
"I haven't quite made up my mind yet, Mr. Wynne."
With the suspicion which this conversation aroused fresh in my mind, it
was curious to hear Pamela laugh, as she said to me on the afternoon of
the same day:
"Aren't Sir Gilbert and Audrey Liston funny? I tell you what, Mr.
Wynne, I believe they're writing a novel together."
"Perhaps Chillington's giving her the materials for one," I suggested.
"I shouldn't think," observed Pamela in her dispassionate way, "that
anything very interesting had ever happened to him."
"I thought you liked him," I remarked humbly.
"So I do. What's that got to do with it?" asked Pamela.
It was beyond question that Chillington enjoyed Miss Liston's society;
the interest she showed in him was incense to his nostrils. I used to
overhear fragments of his ideas about himself which he was revealing in
answer to her tactful inquiries. But neither was it doubtful that he
had by no means lost his relish for Pamela's lighter talk; in fact, he
seemed to turn to her with some relief--perhaps it is refreshing to
escape from self-analysis, even when the process is conducted in the
pleasantest possible manner--and the hours which Miss Liston gave to
work were devoted by Chillington to maintaining his cordial relations
with the lady whose comfortable and not over-tragical disposal was
taxing Miss Liston's skill. For she had definitely decided all her
plot--she told me so a few days later.
It was all planned out; nay, the scene in which the truth as to his own
feelings bursts on Sir Gilbert (I forget at the moment what name the
novel gave him) was, I understood, actually written; the shallow girl
was to experience nothing worse than a wound to her vanity, and was to
turn, with as much alacrity as decency allowed, to the substitute whom
Miss Liston had now provided. All this was poured into my sympathetic
ear, and I say sympathetic in all sincerity; for, although I may
occasionally treat Miss Liston's literary efforts with less than proper
respect, she herself was my friend, and the conviction under which she
was now living would, I knew, unless it were justified, bring her into
much of that unhappiness in which one generally found her heroine
plunged about the end of Volume II. The heroine generally got out all
right, and the knowledge that she would enabled the reader to preserve
cheerfulness. But would poor little Miss Liston get out? I was none
too sure of it.
Suddenly a change came in the state of affairs. Pamela produced it.
It must have struck her that the increasing intimacy of Miss Liston and
Chillington might become something other than "funny."
To put it briefly and metaphorically, she whistled her dog back to her
heels. I am not skilled in understanding or describing the artifices
of ladies; but even I saw the transformation in Pamela. She put forth
her strength and put on her prettiest gowns; she refused to take her
place in the sea-saw of society which Chillington had recently
established for his pleasure. If he spent an hour with Miss Liston,
Pamela would have nothing of him for a day; she met his attentions with
scorn unless they were undivided. Chillington seemed at first puzzled;
I believe that he never regarded his talks with Miss Liston in other
than a business point of view, but directly he understood that Pamela
claimed him, and that she was prepared, in case he did not obey her
call, to establish a grievance against him, he lost no time in
manifesting his obedience. A whole day passed in which, to my certain
knowledge, he was not alone a moment with Miss Liston, and did not,
save at the family meals, exchange a word with her. As he walked off
with Pamela, Miss Liston's eyes followed him in wistful longing; she
stole away upstairs and did not come down till five o'clock. Then,
finding me strolling about with a cigarette, she joined me.
"Well, how goes the book?" I asked.
"I haven't done much to it just lately," she answered, in a low voice.
"I--it's--I don't quite know what to do with it."
"I thought you'd settled?"
"So I had, but--oh, don't let's talk about it, Mr. Wynne!"
But a moment later she went on talking about it.
"I don't know why I should make it end happily," she said. "I'm sure
life isn't always happy, is it?"
"Certainly not," I answered. "You mean your man might stick to the
shallow girl after all?"
"Yes," I just heard her whisper.
"And be miserable afterward?" I pursued.
"I don't know," said Miss Liston. "Perhaps he wouldn't."
"Then you must make him shallow himself."
"I can't do that," she said quickly. "Oh, how difficult it is!"
She may have meant merely the art of writing--when I cordially agree
with--but I think she meant also the way of the world--which does not
make me withdraw my assent. I left her walking up and down in front of
the drawing-room windows, a rather forlorn little figure, thrown into
distinctness by the cold rays of the setting sun.
All was not over yet. That evening Chillington broke away. Led by
vanity, or interest, or friendliness, I know not which--tired may be of
paying court (the attitude in which Pamela kept him), and thinking it
would be pleasant to play the other part for a while--after dinner he
went straight to Miss Liston, talked to her while we had coffee on the
terrace, and then walked about with her. Pamela sat by me; she was
very silent; she did not appear to be angry, but her handsome mouth
wore a resolute expression. Chillington and Miss Liston wandered on
into the shrubbery, and did not come into sight again for nearly half
an hour.
"I think it's cold," said Pamela, in her cool, quiet tones. "And it's
also, Mr. Wynne, rather slow. I shall go to bed."
I thought it a little impertinent of Pamela to attribute the "slowness"
(which had undoubtedly existed) to me, so I took my revenge by saying
with an assumption of innocence purposely and obviously unreal:
"Oh, but won't you wait and bid Miss Liston and Chillington goodnight?"
Pamela looked at me for a moment. I made bold to smile.
Pamela's face broke slowly into an answering smile.
"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Wynne," said she.
"No?" said I.
"No," said Pamela, and she turned away. But before she went she looked
over her shoulder, and still smiling, said, "Wish Miss Liston
good-night for me, Mr. Wynne. Anything I have to say to Sir Gilbert
will wait very well till to-morrow."
She had hardly gone in when the wanderers came out of the shrubbery and
rejoined me. Chillington wore his usual passive look, but Miss
Liston's face was happy and radiant. Chillington passed on into the
drawing room. Miss Liston lingered a moment by me.
"Why, you look," said I, "as if you'd invented the finest scene ever
written."
She did not answer me directly, but stood looking up at the stars.
Then she said, in a dreamy tone:
"I think I shall stick to my old idea in the book."
As she spoke, Chillington came out. Even in the dim light I saw a
frown on his face.
"I say, Wynne," said he, "where's Miss Myles?"
"She's gone to bed," I answered. "She told me to wish you good night
for her, Miss Liston. No message for you, Chillington."
Miss Liston's eyes were on him. He took no notice of her; he stood
frowning for an instant, then, with some muttered ejaculation, he
strode back into the house. We heard his heavy tread across the
drawing room; we heard the door slammed behind him, and I found myself
looking on Miss Liston's altered face.
"What does he want her for, I wonder!" she said, in an agitation that
made my presence, my thoughts, my suspicions, nothing to her. "He said
nothing to me about wanting to speak to her to-night." And she walked
slowly into the house, her eyes on the ground, and all the light gone
from her face, and the joy dead in it. Whereupon I, left alone, began
to rail at the gods that a dear, silly little soul like Miss Liston
should bother her poor, silly little head about a hulking fool; in
which reflections I did, of course, immense injustice not only to an
eminent author, but also to a perfectly honorable, though somewhat
dense and decidedly conceited, gentleman.
The next morning Sir Gilbert Chillington ate dirt--there is no other
way of expressing it--in great quantities and with infinite humility.
My admirable friend Miss Pamela was severe. I saw him walk six yards
behind her for the length of the terrace: not a look nor a turn of her
head gave him leave to join her. Miss Liston had gone upstairs, and I
watched the scene from the window of the smoking room. At last, at the
end of the long walk, just where the laurel-bushes mark the beginning
of the shrubberies--on the threshold of the scene of his crime--Pamela
turned round suddenly and faced the repentant sinner. The most
interesting things in life are those which, perhaps by the inevitable
nature of the case, one does not hear; and I did not hear the scene
which followed. For a while they stood talking--rather, he talked and
she listened. Then she turned again and walked slowly into the
shrubbery. Chillington followed. It was the end of a chapter, and I
laid down the book.
How and from whom Miss Liston heard the news which Chillington himself
told me, without a glimmer of shame or a touch of embarrassment, some
two hours later, I do not know; but hear it she did before luncheon;
for she came down, ready armed with the neatest little speeches for
both the happy lovers.
I did not expect Pamela to show an ounce more feeling than the
strictest canons of propriety demanded, and she fulfilled my
expectations to the letter; but I had hoped, I confess, that
Chillington would have displayed some little consciousness. He did
not; and it is my belief that, throughout the events which I have
recorded, he retained, and that he still retains, the conviction that
Miss Liston's interest in him was purely literary and artistic, and
that she devoted herself to his society simply because he offered an
interesting problem and an inspiring theme.
An ingenious charity may find in that attitude evidence of modesty; to
my thinking, it argues a more subtle and magnificent conceit than if he
had fathomed the truth, as many humbler men in his place would have
done.
On the day after the engagement was accomplished Miss Liston left us to
return to London. She came out in her hat and jacket and sat down by
me; the carriage was to be round in ten minutes. She put on her gloves
slowly and buttoned them carefully. This done, she said:
"By the way, Mr. Wynne, I've adopted your suggestion. The man doesn't
find out."
"Then you've made him a fool?" I asked bluntly.
"No," she answered. "I--I think it might happen though he wasn't a
fool."
She sat with her hands in her lap for a moment or two, then she went
on, in a lower voice:
"I'm going to make him find out afterward."