"Ferlie," said Cyprian, one morning, pushing back his chair from the
breakfast-table, "are you feeling all right?"
"Feeling all--what do you mean?"
"You're not, then?"
Her smile was uncertain.
"Don't be silly! Why should I be feeling wrong?"
"That's just what I have been asking myself for more than a week.
The Hot Weather is not nearly upon us yet."
"I'm quite well," she insisted listlessly.
"Then, what is the matter?"
"Nothing."
"Oh!"
"Cyprian, don't tease," and her unnerved vexation contained, he
imagined, a hint of alarm; "there is nothing the matter. Though I
see you are determined to believe that a lie."
"It is one," he replied, opening the newspaper.
She resorted to a stormy exit.
What else could she do when he was right? It seemed sometimes a
great deal too high, the price she was paying to preserve their
flawless peace. At least, it had been flawless until Digby Maur
returned from Rangoon, but not to fall easily into his niche as a
casual acquaintance.
She wondered, when she sat staring at him on the river-bank below the
garden with its wild, concealing foliage, why she had never before
thought of comparing his eyes to a snake's.
He painted on, grimly speechless, but when they travelled over her,
devoid of expression, coldly alive, she could have fled in panic.
And she had got to see the thing out or everyone would learn that
Cyprian had brought her here under false colours and that, somewhere
in England, dwelt her husband, complacently aware of their flight.
The scandal would force Cyprian to resign, to whom public criticism
of his private affairs, even in simple matters, was real torture.
For him, through her, to be obliged to retire on an inadequate
pension in a tempest of slander was unthinkable.
Why had she been such a fool as to shrink from confiding, by letter,
in Peter?
It had seemed immaterial whether she did so or not, considering that,
in Rangoon, one could safely assume nobody had heard of her
existence, and he and the Colonel were not contemplating a long stay
anywhere.
Peter at present, she knew, made a remorselessly logical Catholic
with no time for visions unsanctioned by the Pope. Order and
discipline everywhere, if you please, for Peter, once as thoroughly
lawless as he now showed himself law-ridden. But Peter was an
extremist in everything. He had really little use for the
non-fanatic who hesitates to sacrifice, at any rate, his neighbour's
Life and Limb, for his opinions. But, while he had made his
submission to Rome in calm, wholehearted conviction, which might or
might not, in another ten years, be followed by as calm and
wholehearted a recantation, annulled in its turn by a general
clear-up of his whole life and a death-bed repentance--"for, though
it may be a darned uncomfortable religion to live in, it's the only
tidy one to die in," had ever, like Charles Stuart, maintained
Peter--Ferlie had crept through the gate as a battered ship creeps
gratefully into an unexpectedly discovered harbour, anchorless, after
the storm.
She had found there warmth and healing and a kind of companionship
among the angels that only very sensitive worshippers of abstract
holiness know. The Unseen Hosts were to her lone spirit so really
present at the altar steps that she could no longer consider the most
deserted church empty. Doctrinally, she was unsound. Authority had
recognized the bewildered pulsing of a heart too bruised for
searching examination, and admitted her with far less circumspection
than they accorded Peter of the minutely inquiring habit of mind.
The Peters are well known later to deny; not so the Ferlies.
By reason of that very loyal complex in her was Ferlie passively
chained to the Force from which she had once drawn strength, since
there could be no severing of her fetters without a severance also
from those who had comforted her in affliction. How mean to accept
the sweets and deny the obligations incurred! To question only the
rules which affected her personal desires!
That Force had stood by her in her darkness: therefore she must stand
by it now that she walked in sunshine.
Yet, Cyprian was wondering whether she would outthrow superstition
when happiness set in, and she was sure that, if so, he would soon
persuade himself, for her sake, that, though divorce in itself might
be an evil thing, in their case it became a necessary good. Clifford
could be trusted to make things easy; he to whom all women were
merely, Woman.
The doors would swing wide on very little pressure (... _Et ne nos
inducas in tentationem_).
Since, white-faced and petrified, she had undertaken to deceive
Cyprian, and steal by secret ways and unworthy evasions into Digby
Maur's garden, yielding him the triumph of another picture in return
for his promised silence, she had conversed with him only in
monosyllables and, since he earnestly desired to complete the
commission which might set him on the road to future recognition, he
had borne her self-absorbed misery without making any attempt to
counteract it or effect a reconcilation. His feelings towards her at
that time were an irreconcilable mixture of angry desire and aching
remorse.
The picture completed, it was his intention to make a final effort to
re-arouse her forfeited pity. If she should throw up the sponge
before he were ready he determined to stick at nothing which should
force her and that canting Sterne to eat the dust of the same
humiliation they had publicly heaped upon him.
He was incapable of believing that they were not lovers in the term's
worst accepted sense. And what man has done man can do, and the
woman who takes one step in that direction will take another, he
promised himself.
Ferlie, nervous of Cyprian's penetration in the matter, attacked
Digby one afternoon, when the work was about half finished.
"I don't think you quite understand," she said, "the strain this
deception is putting upon me. Cyprian is inventing reasons in his
own mind for my looking so ill. But I simply can't sleep."
"Tell him then."
"Do you really imagine that he would allow you to finish this, if I
did?"
"In that case I should distinctly advise you not to tell him."
"Oh, you are a cad!" she burst out. "What man, worthy of the name,
would take advantage of a private confidence inadvertently yielded,
to further his own ends?"
"You forget," he said, "your Cyprian never, from the beginning, would
admit that I was worthy of the name. Do you happen to know the terms
in which he forbade me your company?"
"Whatever he said he was right."
"Why not, therefore, resign yourself to the worst where my actions
are under discussion?"
"We had an agreement before T consented to this course," she reminded
him. "I suppose you will not forget it."
"I denied any intention of employing tactics which had already failed
to make you see my side." There was a sneer in his voice. "I have,
nevertheless, abided by the word of a--no, I'll spare you. You
started this conversation, not I."
She relapsed into hopeless silence.
"Do you think I have not suffered too?" he asked, more humanely.
"Once, you would have noticed that I am hardly looking as if my own
nights were undisturbed."
Then, as she answered nothing, "You had better ask Sterne where he
intends to bring up his son that no stigma shall attach to his name
in future as he seems persuaded it does to mine."
"You could save yours if you wished," she said, in tired tones. "It
is what we are that matters, not what other people think we are."
"You may not be the hypocrite you seem. But as for your reputed
brother ..."
"I think, if I were you, I'd leave it at that," Ferlie told him, so
significantly that he paused and passed the rest of the sentence off
with an unpleasant laugh.
"I don't understand exactly what you remind me of," was his next
opening. "Have you, in England, any legends referring to the spirits
of trees? We, in Burma, people our mountains and rivers and trees
with 'nats,' which are powerfully angelic or demoniac spirits, but
the tree-nats are the most popular, I think. I might have painted
you as my conception of a Gul Mohur Nat, but, then, you would have
had to stand nude among the shadows--hardly visible, but still nude,
with the dull golden reflections of the flowers upon your pale skin."
Ferlie looked back steadily into the hard brightness of his eyes.
The attitude of purely English Club members might be, in part,
responsible for the character-development here of weak expansiveness
into bitter withdrawal, and natural animal passion to the impotent
rage of unnatural excesses which lent him a spurious sense of power.
The real power on this occasion lay in her own self-control, and she
knew it.
She spoke impersonally. "There is a story of the first Old Master to
paint from the nude. It is not a story that appeals to me, somehow.
The model and the artist regarded the occasion so sacred as to
warrant their joint attendance at Mass first. Myself, I feel that
they should never have realized the suggestion of lust, in anything
so aloof as Art, enough to anticipate its interference."
She astonished and disconcerted him where he had hoped to disconcert
her.
"You would, therefore, have raised no objection?" rather lamely.
"I should assuredly have refused--you. There is a form of Art, which
only artists of a higher evolution than you are fit to practise. My
objection would not have been founded on any idea that the human body
must be concealed to all for the sake of those who misread its
allegorical beauty."
He unscrewed a fresh tube with savagely nervous fingers, and
descended to cheap reviling.
"Sterne, I gather, is one of the fortunately evolved specimens who do
not misread the allegory and are, hence, privileged without the
artist's excuse."
"Your thoughts just bore me," said Ferlie flatly. "I can see them
passing across your face and they are ugly enough to mar any work you
attempt. And, underneath all my angry disgust, I am sorry for you.
If you came across a wounded snake what would you do?"
The palette crashed to the ground as he took a pace forward,
clenching his stained hands.
"Put it out of its pain," he said.
A faint shadow of that hypnotic power, which Peter had so long
suspected and, finally, developed in himself, supported her.
"If you are, as I believe you to be, a true artist under your skin,"
and she kept very still, "you will practise the restraint which
should enable you to put your picture before your--passions. I have
stood long enough for to-day."
She turned swiftly and retreated through the trees; nor did he
attempt to call her back.
* * * * * *
Towards the end of the week Cyprian, who had left Ferlie at the Club
surrounded by a new batch of English papers, and ridden out, himself,
to an inspection connected with his work at some distance, returned
late in the afternoon, to find her missing.
"Your sister, Mr. Sterne? No. She only stayed at the Club about a
quarter of an hour."
Someone had seen her walking towards the river-path.
"Then I'll go home that way, skirting the hill," said Cyprian. "The
servant met me with a telegram for her, having been to the bungalow
and found her out."
He rode slowly off, flicking at the flies with his crop. Once on the
narrow path above the bank he let the horse pick its own way. The
back compounds of one or two bungalows, set far apart, straggled to
the bushy slope above the water, but the vicinity of the river was
too feverish in the evening to be popular, and it struck Cyprian as
particularly unwise of Ferlie to choose this spot for a walk, in her
present languid state of health.
He made up his mind to tackle her outright when they got home and
insist upon knowing what was worrying her. He had taken refuge in
patience, but she sometimes needed rousing by sharper methods.
There might have arrived a letter from Peter criticizing what Cyprian
felt to be none of that gentleman's business. As an only brother,
and older than Ferlie, it was possible that Peter's scruples had
outweighed his discretion. Cyprian, having overcome his own, was not
prepared for re-discussion of the situation with anybody. To have
and to hold, whatever the future brought to either of them. He would
plough the furrow now to the very end.
As he registered this resolve afresh, he heard voices ahead, but
their owners were hidden behind a natural crescent of thick
undergrowth which somebody had attempted, in the past, to train as a
rude hedge. Above the tumble of scattered bushes appeared the ragged
outline of a garden, flanked by two huge Gul Mohurs.
Cyprian recognized them as those which stood in Digby Maur's
compound, reflecting with satisfaction that the latter had remained
largely invisible since his return from leave.
The ruin of decaying vegetation on the dank path muffled the sound of
his horse's hoofs and he had passed within a few yards of the foliage
concealing the speakers when the identity of one was revealed to him.
"I told you yesterday that you make me pity you, in spite of myself,"
Ferlie was saying excitedly. "I am speaking cold sense when I repeat
that it will be impossible for me to hide much longer from Cyprian
that I am not spending my afternoons at the Club. I actually had to
go there to-day to avoid questions before he went out into the
district."
"Well, it's no use," Digby Maur's huskily uneven tones replied.
"You're great on 'control' and all that, and the means you employ to
get here do not concern me. You will continue to come for as long as
I need you, because you can't help yourself; and I am not nearly
finished with you yet."
Cyprian, on this statement, became entirely primitive man, and did
not wait to consider the metamorphosis. He dismounted, crashed
through the interlacing branches, and found himself standing between
Ferlie and the individual who had made this astounding claim on her
time.
The air was pregnant with the labouring emotions of a drama as old as
the world.
Digby Maur recovered first from the intrusion, for, aware that he now
had his back to the wall he was, also, reliant on the sharpness of
his teeth. Sterne was the kind of man to sell his soul in avoiding a
scandal should such a drastic price be required of him.
"Good evening," he said. "These are my grounds and you will be ready
to admit that even my humble home is my castle?"
For answer, the intruder stepped forward and slashed him across the
face with the riding-crop.
The insolently poised figure reeled backwards as Cyprian spoke to
Ferlie.
"The horse is here. I am going to put you up on it and lead it home.
You don't look fit to walk."
Without a word she went with him down the slope. She would have
refused his help in mounting only that he lifted her bodily and set
her sideways on the saddle, putting the reins between her nerveless
fingers.
The dull thudding progress of the horse was out of time with her
quickening pulses.... Something in the life of Cyprian and herself
was over, and of the new phase which loomed ahead she was afraid.
Arrived at the house she motioned him away and slipped unaided to the
ground. He tossed the reins to a servant and followed her up the
path to his office. She sank into a chair and sat motionless resting
her chin in her palms, dimly aware that he had passed into his
dressing-room. She heard the splutter of a syphon, and immediately
he returned to push a weak mixture towards her. "Drink it up," he
ordered in matter-of-fact tones. "And then, just when you're ready,
Ferlie, you can begin."
So he had not forgotten his promise. Cyprian never made the same
mistake twice. It took a long while for her to tell him, and during
the whole recital he refrained from interruption. When she ended he
drew a deep breath and stretched out a hand through the gathering
dusk to lay it over hers in the old protective way.
"I have this to say," he told her. "We are through with any childish
arguments concerning one another's rights. You have taken no
irrevocable vows to obey me--in fact, I believe the word has lately
been deleted from the orthodox marriage service, has it not?--but our
united brains must be clear upon the point that two cannot walk
together unless they are agreed, and, as it is impossible for two
human souls of widely different impulses to agree identically upon
the treatment of every problem they may be called upon to solve, it
is necessary that in final decisions one should yield precedence to
the other. In visionary matters beyond my ken I am willing to sit at
your feet. Over practical matters and the verdicts that affect our
material welfare, I claim precedence, Ferlie. You gave it to me when
you gave yourself into my keeping at Black Towers. I am responsible
for you; not you for me. Are you satisfied for this to be so?"
It was not in her power to speak, but she bowed her weary puzzled
head over his hand and rested it there. He laid his free one upon
her hair and continued speaking, while he absently smoothed the
ruffled "bob."
"Yes? Well, in the circumstances, you had no shadow of right to take
the law into your own hands and act deliberately against my wishes,
just because my trust in you was too complete for me to conceive the
possibility of such a thing. If that trust between us is to remain
solid, our problems, in the future, will have to be shared. Neither
must spare the other for a mistaken sense of self-sacrifice. You
would not hide your joys from me--why, then, your sorrows? Again, I
ask you: are you satisfied that I am right?"
"You know," said Ferlie's muffled tones. "You know...."
"Do I? Then I am going to extract a promise from you, here and now,
that you will be fair with me, as I have been fair with you. Did I
lie to you after the return of Hla Byu into our joint lives? Did I
leave you and withdraw to fight my battle alone when she drowned
herself? I wonder whether the earthly years make a difference,
Ferlie, after all? I wonder whether you are capable of understanding
what love means to a man who has lived nearly half a century without
it, and who suddenly finds himself face to face with its illimitable
mysteries? Surely, you will admit the fact that, since my probation
has been double yours, I have earned the inevitable right to lead
before I follow?"
Even then she did not stir under the strengthening touch of his
sensitive fingers.
"Lead on," she said....