AMANDUS, -A, -UM
"Mine is a long and a sad tale," said the Mouse, sighing.
The Bellevue, when Gardiner first set eyes on it, was a cross between
a hostelry and a farm, tumbled round three sides of a quadrangle where
black-and-white pigs rooted and grunted, among middens and mangy grass,
under the windows of the dining-room. The Ardennes hotel of those days
had no drains, no baths, no basins bigger than soup-plates and not
many towels, no easy-chairs, no salons; in fact, none of the comforts
of a refined home. There would be middens outside and the odor of the
cow-stable within. On the other hand, the rooms would be clean, the
beds comfortable, the food abundant, if peculiar; and the friendly
welcome which met the traveler made up for many discomforts.
In all his former ventures Gardiner had been a tenant; the Bellevue was
his own. He had bought the freehold with an opportune legacy, and was
spending on it his savings of ten years. According to his usual plan,
he went to work first to make the outside attractive. The quadrangle
where the pigs had fed was now a lawn, laid out with flower-beds. Of
the dilapidated out-buildings, some had been pulled down, others built
up and turned into additional bedrooms. Round the three sides of the
court ran a piazza with easy-chairs, and tables, and ever more flowers,
sure attraction to an English eye. Inside, his alterations had been
more costly. He had put in baths; he had laid on electric light; he
had partially refurnished the house--not, however, with conventional
"suites" from Liège. They would not have suited the heterogeneous old
mansion, on whose lintel was carved the date 1548, and which had been
successively convent, country house, farm, and inn. For those who had
eyes to see, there was in those days a good deal of fine old furniture,
carved presses, beds, and so forth, to be picked up in the farms and
the villages. It had been a labor of love for Gardiner to go round
bargaining for these things, and bringing them home in triumph to his
picturesque old rooms. He made a play of his work, and a pet of his
home; he grudged no labor spent in beautifying it; he enjoyed dressing
it up, as a child dresses up a doll. In the end, what with polished
floors, casement curtains, and Noah's Ark plants in pots, the place
looked like a garden-city house, as Lettice unkindly remarked. There
was nothing like it in the Ardennes.
His next step was to advertise, a branch of their business on
which hotel-keepers in general do not seem to spend their brains.
Gardiner did not want a mixed clientèle, he was out to attract the
poorer gentry, parsons, doctors, schoolmasters, retired colonels and
commanders, literary men--the class which he had found pleasantest
to deal with. Therefore he put his discreet little paragraphs into
such papers as _The Guardian_, _The Church Times_, _The Author_,
_The Journal of Education_, _The Spectator_, and various ladies'
periodicals. Each advertisement was worded differently, to suit its
audience, but all wound up with the formula: "Inclusive terms, 4s. 6d.
per day. Fifteen-day excursions, Dover--Rochehaut, second class, £1.
8s. 3d. Exact directions as to journey given." And to meet the demand
which arose, he had leaflets printed, giving alternative routes by
day or night, plans of stations, prices in detail, travel hints, the
minute advice of an old traveler who knows every trick of the journey;
leaflets which enabled the greenest novice to face the _douane_, and
change at the right places, and catch the right trains. This branch
of his work alone kept him busy, for he was his own secretary. But it
gained him what he wanted, and filled his house. Satan had not much
chance of finding Gardiner's hands at his disposal. Nevertheless, in
those summer days he found time to get into mischief.
Lettice was enjoying herself very much in her own fashion, though to
more adventurous souls her daily round might have seemed dull. She
came down to breakfast at nine, and then crawled out half-a-mile to a
certain brushwood pile in the forest, commanding the view over Frahan.
There she sat down, the faggots providing a comfortable seat with a
back. She took a work-bag and a Latin grammar, and spent her morning
alternately in setting slow stitches in a green tablecloth and in
learning Latin verbs from the volume open on her knee. After lunch
she retired to her room in company with a sheaf of foolscap. If she
wrung out one whole line in a day, she considered herself to have done
brilliantly. After tea came a solemn constitutional with Denis, which,
as her chronic tiredness wore off, extended from two miles to six, or
even ten. Then followed dinner; and after dinner, bed at nine o'clock.
One morning about three weeks after her arrival she was starting on her
customary crawl to the wood pile, when Dorothea jumped up from her seat
on the _terrasse_.
"Are you going for a walk? May I come too?"
"I'm not going far," Lettice warned her in a discouraging hurry.
"I know; you go into the woods and sit down, don't you? I'll bring my
book."
"That will be very nice," declared Lettice. Any one who knew the A B
C of her expressions must have seen that she was, to put it prettily,
as cross as two sticks. Dorothea was not blind; nevertheless, she
persisted. They walked in silence, Dorothea now a little ahead, now
checking herself back to her companion's unalterable crawl. Arrived
at the wood pile, Lettice sat down on the identical bundle of sticks
which she had picked out for herself seventeen days before. She was
conservative as a cat in all her ways.
The morning was hazy. Round them the woods had been cleared of forest
trees; there was a carpet of reddish leathery leaves, across which
the great silver boles lay forlorn, amid the white chips of their
slaughter. Low bushes were green, and there were leaves overhead, a
thin tracery; but elsewhere only russet tones and gray, gray-stemmed
saplings and grayish mists. Gray too was Frahan in the valley, softly
molded in haze, white the river circling its utterly improbable
peninsula, gray the far mountains, pearl-gray and silver, losing
themselves in silvery sky. Between her participles and her stitches
Lettice would often lift up her eyes to the hills; she dearly loved a
distant view. But to-day she was watching her companion.
Dorothea had plumped down among the withered leaves and sat there,
hugging her knees and staring gloomily into the forest. To the feminine
eye it was plain that she wore no stays; she bent about like a willow
wand, and her attitudes were unstudied as a child's. Youth is often
tragic; but there was real bitter experience written on those soft
childish contours, and it was the contradiction which interested
Lettice. Turning her head suddenly, Dorothea caught her with her needle
suspended, staring, and broke into her charming smile.
"I want to tell you something about myself; may I?"
Lettice instantly became all attention. Nature had designed her as a
casket for confidences, and they were often poured into her patient
ear. Dorothea uncurled herself and lay prone, snuggling close, propping
her chin in her hands, and looking now on the ground, now up at Lettice
with her big soft eyes.
"It's a long tale, but it's really quite funny," she said. "It all
began about money. There was a family place, and my father, when he
died, left it to me, with his brother as my guardian; but the brother,
my uncle, thought it ought to have been left to him direct, do you
see?--not to a scrap of a girl. So he was very angry and always bore me
a grudge, and I do think he had a sort of grievance, only he needn't
have been so horrid about it. He wouldn't have been so bad but for his
wife. She was a clever woman, and he was a big soft handsome booby
who always believed what she told him; so when she said I was sly and
wicked, of course he was sure I was. Well, I lived with them, and they
had the use of my money. But they were always most desperately afraid
I should get married and take it away. So they wouldn't let me go
anywhere. I never went to a dance, I never played tennis, I wasn't even
let go out to tea or have any girl friends, not after I was fourteen.
Clara (that's what I had to call her) used to go up to town, and shop
in Bond Street, and do the round of the theaters, on _my_ money, while
I was left at home to dust the drawing-room and wash the stockings. It
was funny! Just like Cinderella!"
"Why didn't you run away?"
"I hadn't any money except threepence a week, or any one to run to.
Besides--" She hesitated. "You don't know how helpless a girl can be in
the hands of a grown-up man," she said, with resurgent bitterness. "He
used to tell me I was the sort of girl who makes a man want to thrash
her. He did hit me once or twice. Oh! I could have killed him!"
She stabbed the dead leaves viciously with Lettice's scissors.
"But, but--but didn't people talk?" Lettice asked.
"Yes, they did, and some of them even quarreled with my uncle about me;
but you see he told every one what a bad girl I was, and in a way it
wasn't a lie, and he could make people believe it, because he believed
it himself. He did really believe that I'd made father leave the money
to me, though I was only five when he died. Why, sometimes I even got
muddled myself, and used to feel I must be all the dreadful things he
said. Oh! I was miserable. You can be very, very miserable when you're
seventeen, and it doesn't seem a bit funny then. I remember once I
saved up my pennies and retrimmed my summer hat--I always hated the
things she got for me--and made it look quite pretty. I was so pleased
with it; and then when I came down she said it was unsuitable, and she
made me take it off, and go to church in the horrid old brown felt I'd
worn all the winter, though it was a broiling June day! I cried--I
cried all the service. So to punish me, when we came out, she asked
the vicar, me standing by, to change our pew, because she said she
couldn't trust me so near the choir! (That was one of the things they
always said, that I ran after men.) However, she was done that time,
for the vicar played up like a trump. He said he'd speak to the choir,
and see they didn't annoy me again; and then he turned to me and paid
the dearest old-fashioned compliment about my sweet face being enough
to turn any young man's head--and me in that frightful old hat and my
nose swelled purple with crying!" She burst out laughing.
"But you did get away at last?"
"Yes, I did. I found a friend to help me ... but I can't talk about
that." Visibly, under Lettice's eyes, her face clouded over and
changed. It was a significant change: not a mere shadow falling from
without, but a revolution within. The under side of her nature, black
with premature grief and premature passions, slowly turned its ugliness
into view.
"Did you ever hate any one?" she asked, her voice sinking and her eyes
glowing as she relived the feelings she described. "Did you ever know
what it was to turn sick and cold with loathing, to have the world
go black, _black_, when a certain person comes near? Did you? No, I
know you never did, you're far too good a Christian. But I'm not a
Christian. I don't believe in any religion of love. There's little
enough love here, and what there is goes to the wall. And there's no
love over us; just a cruel, cruel, grinding power, which delights in
breaking to bits whatever it sees that's beautiful and happy. Oh, it's
an ugly, cruel, hateful world!"
"I think it's a very nice world," said Lettice, her words falling like
drops of soft water on white-hot steel. They did not very accurately
reflect her thoughts, but Lettice's words seldom did that. Dorothea
laughed them to scorn.
"You wouldn't if you were in my shoes," she said derisively. She sat
up. "Listen, and I'll tell you if you like. You've just heard what
sort of life I had when I was a girl; I can laugh over it now, but it
wasn't very gay at the time. Well, I got away, as I said; and for a
little I was happy--oh, I _was_--for just a little, little while. And
then, in a moment--everything gone. Everything. All I'd cared for, and
the hopes I had--oh, I had, I had such heavenly hopes--all gone, all
broken, dead, dead, dead." She beat her palm on the ground. "I dare
say if I'd been older I might have taken it better," she said, turning
her eyes on Lettice with an appeal which nothing in earth or heaven
could satisfy; for it was an appeal to the Moving Finger to go back, to
reverse what had been written. "I might have been gentle and forgiving
and resigned then. But I wasn't old enough. I'm only twenty-one now.
And I'm tired--I'm tired."
The mournful vibrations of her voice died away.
"It is very tiring to hate anybody," said Lettice, deftly plucking the
core of meaning out of these wild speeches. Dorothea did not seem to
hear. Her eyes, transparent windows of her soul, were miserably sad.
Presently with a quick sigh she roused herself, turned the key on
memory and drew down the blind.
"There, that's enough about me. I didn't mean to tell you all this, but
never mind, I'm glad you know. Now let's talk about something cheerful.
Tell me about that handsome cousin of yours. What's he like?"
Lettice, who could not bear to see a book mishandled, had picked up
Dorothea's, and was smoothing its rumpled pages. She accommodated
herself with patience to this violent change of subject. "Denis?" she
said. "He is very nice." Convenient word! In Lettice's vocabulary it
covered a multitude of meanings.
"I like his face. He looks as if he were in the army. Is he in the
army? What does he do?"
"He--he's a sort of engineer."
"An engineer? A civil engineer? That's not bad; they do do things worth
doing--they and an explorer here and there, and the flying men--I like
them best. I like courage, physical courage, it's far more interesting
than moral. I shouldn't think your cousin would ever know what it was
to feel afraid. And wouldn't he never tell a lie?"
"Never," said Lettice, her eyes straying to her Latin grammar.
"Not even to save a friend? He'd do anything else, take any risk
himself, but just not that? So that if he was pushed into a corner
he'd have to tell the truth? That's just what I should have expected.
Of course there are a few things I have against him," Dorothea ran
on, seemingly at random, though her downcast eyes were glowing. "He
shouldn't like cats, nasty treacherous things, they're not a man's
animal. And he shouldn't sing the hymns on Sunday out of that big book
with tunes. Going to church is all right, and suits him, but I can't
bear that book. It's like the W.S.P.A." Presumably Miss O'Connor meant
the Y.M.C.A. "Mr. Gardiner's his very greatest friend, isn't he? Would
he tell lies, do you think?"
"I don't know," said Lettice, far down the passive voice of _amo_.
"What do you think of him?"
"I think he's very nice."
Out shot Dorothea's arm, and Lettice, amazed, aggrieved, found herself
being vigorously shaken.
"Do _not_ talk like that! I never in my life knew any one so--so
perfectly systematically untruthful as you are! I don't believe you've
once this morning said one single thing you really mean!" (But she was
wrong, for Lettice had done so--once.) "Tell me what you think of Mr.
Gardiner. _Tell_ me. I want to know."
Lettice, chafing her arm, mutely reproachful, indicated the creases
which Dorothea's grip had left on her pale blue linen sleeve. "You,
you, you--you are so _violent_," she complained in her _pianissimo_
drawl, which held always a hint of make-believe. "I don't know what
you mean. I do think Mr. Gardiner is very nice." Then for the second
time she let out a little piece of truth. "I shouldn't think he'd take
failure well."
"Oh."
Abrupt silence. Dorothea sprang up and wandered off into the forest,
slashing at the brambles with her stick, jumping over logs that came
in her way, just as a boy might have done. Indeed she looked like a
boy in her rough tweeds and Norfolk coat, with her brown face and
well-scratched hands. She had worn neither hat nor gloves since she
came.
Lettice looked at her with shrewd and wideawake curiosity. She and
Denis, pooling their observations, had been following the hidden course
of Gardiner's love affair. So circumspectly had the pair behaved
that not a soul in the hotel, except the two allies, had any inkling
of the romance in progress. Yet it was serious enough, at any rate
for Gardiner. He was in it up to the neck; no doubt about him. And
Dorothea? Denis was of opinion that she meant business. Hadn't Lettice
seen the expression (love-light was the word in his mind, but he didn't
like to use it) in her eyes?
Lettice had always had her doubts as to that love-light, though she
kept them to herself. This morning they had become certainty. Dorothea
did not love Harry Gardiner--it was not love which had looked out of
those too-clear eyes of hers when she asked that imperious question.
No! Lettice had been illuminated by the certainty that he was the man
whom, on her own showing, she had singled out to hate. Dorothea could
hate, no doubt of that. The plain black and white of her emotions, love
and hate, rapture and agony, they were somewhat startling in a world of
neutral grays.
But at this point Lettice found herself up against a blank wall. What
was Gardiner's offense, and how did it happen that he did not know it
himself? For he did not know; and Dorothea was planning her attack
against a man who had thrown away his armor for love of her. This was
not sporting. Lettice always instinctively took sides with the weak
against the strong, with the victim against the avenger. Besides,
she liked Gardiner. She liked Dorothea too--with reservations; but
her character was simpler, more homogeneous, easier to follow. She,
in fact, was interesting historically, but not analytically. Now the
uncertain balance of strength and weakness in Gardiner made him an
engrossing study. He was transparent to Lettice, while she was opaque
to him. "That inoffensive but very ordinary little person"--so he had
called her: what a pity he could not look into her mind!
Thus Lettice abandoned the study of the passive of _amo_ for its active
voice. In the midst of her cogitations she was surprised to see Denis
come in view, striding through the bracken. He sometimes called for her
on his way back from the river, but now he was approaching from the
direction of the hotel. Moreover, gloom sat upon his brow.
"I say, Lettice," he called out, the Irish accent unusually strong,
"isn't it a nawful nuisance? Wandesforde's had a smash-up in his car,
and he wants me back at once!"
Lettice gazed at him, slowly and thoughtfully rubbing her nose.
"I got the wire just as I was startin' for the river. No, he's not
bad, only a broken arm. But the nuisance of it is that he's entered
for a race on Friday week, and he wants me to take it on instead. I
hate racing on a Friday--I hate racing at all, for that matter, mixin'
oneself up with newspaper men and that sort of raffle; but I'll have to
do it."
"A race? What fun! What for?" asked Dorothea, coming up in time to hear
the last words. She dropped down on a bundle of faggots, and extended
under Lettice's nose a brown and purple palm full of blackberries.
Lettice shook her head, slowly, twice. Dorothea, with a glint of fun,
reached out to offer them to Denis. He screwed his eyeglass into place,
gazed at them absently, and said: "No, thank you." Dorothea continued
to wave them under his nose, in the manner of the importunate sidesman
offering the plate to the stingy parishioner. Denis, yielding, still
absently, chose a berry and swallowed it whole like a pill. Dorothea
with a broad smile emptied the rest of her handful into her mouth, and
hugged her knees again with her crimson hands. The whole had taken but
a moment. "I didn't know you went in for racing. What did you say it
was for?" she repeated.
"Silver trophy offered by the _Birmingham Courier_. Cross-country, with
compulsory halts at Redditch, Coventry, Polesworth, and Walsall. He'd
scratch, if it weren't that we're both rather keen on testin' our new
little bus. She's done one hundred and twenty and over on her trial
flights--"
"Flights? It's an aeroplane race? You fly? You told me he was an
engineer!" cried Dorothea, rounding on Lettice in hot reproach. "Why,
I've been longing to meet a flying man for years! Go on, go on, tell
me all about it. Do you fly much? How _idiotic_ of me not to recognize
your name!"
Here was the enthusiastic young lady, Denis's pet aversion; but,
strange to say, he did not seem to mind her.
"Well, I build aeroplanes," he said, smiling. "It's my partner does the
ornamental work. You may know his name--Wandesforde."
"Wandesforde? Sydney Wandesforde? Why, I should just think I do! He
was the man who came in first in the London-Berlin race, and was
disqualified for passing inside one of the controls in a fog. And then
he had that marvelous escape, when his machine turned over in the air,
and spilt him in a heap on the top plane, and he managed to regain
control, and brought her down safely after all! Why, he's magnificent!
I'd give--I'd give a thousand pounds to go up with him!"
"You can do it for less than that," said Denis, amused.
"Ah, but I mean in a race. A big flying race--it's about the one thrill
worth having left in the world!"
"You should fly your own machine. That's better fun than bein' a
passenger. Any one of the big schools would take you on, for a matter
of seventy pounds or so. It's quite simple."
"Would they? Will you build me an aeroplane, if they do?"
"With pleasure, if you give me the commission."
"I shall come and see you about it directly I get back to England."
"Do."
Lettice gazed from one to the other. Dorothea was like a rose, her
eyes were sparkling; Denis was amused and interested. True that at
present he saw only the enthusiast, not the woman, but it was not to be
supposed that he lacked the common instincts of human nature. Was this
sudden friendship to be encouraged? Lettice answered that question by
uprooting herself from her seat.
"It is one o'clock," she announced. "I am going home."
Denis, as her escort, rose too. Dorothea sat still, looking decidedly
sulky.
"Aren't you coming, Miss O'Connor?"
"No. She doesn't want me to."
Lettice, who had already started on her homeward journey, obviously
was not given to hear. Denis glanced, irresolute, from that expressive
back to Dorothea, but ended by raising his cap and hastening after his
cousin.
"I'm sorry we bored you," he said, taking possession of her coat and
bag and book.
"Don't _mention_ it," returned Lettice with polite _empressement_.