In the last week of the holidays, if only Mrs. Payne had been more
acute, she might have surprised his secret. Walking the lowest of
their meadows on the side of Bredon Hill, they came suddenly upon a
southern slope already powdered with the flowers of cowslips. This
cloth of gold was the chief glory of their spring, blooming mile on
mile of meadowland, and drenching the air with a faint perfume. Mrs.
Payne stooped to pick some, for the scent provoked so many memories,
and to her it was one of the sensations that returned year by year with
amazing freshness--that and the spice of pinks in early summer or the
green odour of phlox. "Smell them, they smell like wine," she said,
giving her bunch to Arthur.
"Mrs. Considine told me that there are no cowslips in their part of
Devon," he said. And then, after a moment of hesitation, he went down
on his knees and began to pick the flowers. The hue of their smooth
stalks was pale as the first apple-leaves, springing straight and
slender each above its leafy mat.
"Why are you picking so many? They're more beautiful as they are."
"If they haven't any I'd like to send her some?"
He went on picking cowslips till the light faded from the fields. Next
morning he packed them carefully, and posted them, with a letter, to
Lapton. She thought it very charming and thoughtful of him to send
Mrs. Considine the flowers. It merely struck her as typical of his new
nature, and she thought it rather shabby of Gabrielle, when, after
three days of waiting, she had not acknowledged the gift. Altogether
she felt that Mrs. Considine had been rather a broken reed as far as
Arthur was concerned. In the beginning she had taken to her, and
expected quite a lot of her. Arthur, too, seemed disturbed that she
did not reply. Day after day he waited for a letter from Lapton with
eagerness. There was no reason why he shouldn't have been anxious to
know that his present had not gone astray. She had not seen the note
that Arthur posted with his flowers.
With no more than the vaguest mistrust--for she still felt that in some
way she had fallen short of full possession, Mrs. Payne saw him return
to Lapton for the summer term. During the early weeks Arthur scarcely
ever wrote to her, and when she protested mildly, his reply seemed to
her evasive. It was a dutiful reply, and though she couldn't help
admitting that in Arthur the recognition of any duty was a new thing,
the suspicion that for some obscure reason she was losing him,
persisted. She was not in the ordinary way a woman of acute
intuitions, but her whole mind had been so wrapped up in that son of
hers that she was sensitive to the smallest changes of tone, and she
knew that while he was writing her letters his head had been full of
other things. At the same time she had sense enough to see that with
his recovery Arthur's life had become crowded with so many new
interests that she couldn't reasonably expect the old degree of
absorption in herself. This was the price of his recovery, and she
determined to pay it without grudging.
She settled down into this state of patience and resignation. She even
prepared to deny herself her usual privilege of a visit to Lapton in
term-time, feeling that it would be unfair of her to interrupt the
progress of Considine's remarkable system. In the meantime she kept in
touch with Arthur through her jealous care of the things that he had
left behind, in the arrangement of his books, in the mending of his
clothes, and in the preparation of an upstairs room that he had begun
to turn into a study for his holiday reading. On these inanimate
traces of him she lavished a peculiar tenderness, for their presence
had the effect of making her feel less lonely.
One day she took up to his new study a number of note-books that he had
used during the Easter holidays. When he had sat out under the cedar
in the evenings she had often noticed him writing with a pencil though
she had never thought to enquire what he was doing. Now, with a chance
curiosity, she happened to open one of these books and examine what he
had written. She saw at once that they were verses, and laughed at the
idea. But when she had read one or two of his poems she laughed no
longer. She realised at once that they were love-poems, feeble and
amateurish in their expression, but daringly sensual and passionate in
their content. They made the good woman blush--her husband had never
been so direct in his days of courtship--but to her blushes succeeded a
moment of fierce maternal alarm. It was impossible, she thought, that
anyone innocent of a violent sexual passion could have conceived the
ideas that the verses contained. They were fully as physical, and
nearly as direct, as the love-songs of Herrick. She was not only
shocked, but frightened, for her long years of widowhood had isolated
her from all feelings of the kind that Arthur expressed so glibly. She
read the poems over again and again. She could not sleep at night for
thinking of them. In the end she became convinced that the thing which
she had feared most had come to pass; that even if the coming of
manhood had brought to Arthur the birth of a moral sense in matters of
ordinary social intercourse, the gain had been neutralised by the
release of a new instinct that was powerful enough to wreck the rest.
The boy was obviously and violently in love--not with any shadowy
dreamed ideal, but actually with a woman of definite physical
attributes. It was almost possible to reconstruct a picture from the
poems. A skin of ivory, grey eyes, hair that was like night, red lips,
pale hands, all rather commonplace, but, none the less, damningly
definite.
It is curious that the image of Gabrielle never suggested itself to
her. Perhaps it was the fact that Arthur, for some unaccountable
reason, probably because he usually saw them in a half-light, had made
her violet eyes--an unmistakable feature--grey. As the matter stood
Mrs. Payne was convinced that he had become entangled, and intimately
entangled, with some dangerous and designing woman. It was her plain
duty to save him. The only thing that restrained her from immediate
action was the fear that any big emotional disturbance might undo the
work that Considine had already accomplished. She didn't in the least
connect the passion with the reformation, and yet she wondered if
interference with the one might somehow prejudice the other. It was a
harrowing dilemma.
In the end, with her accustomed courage, she decided to face the risk.
At any rate no harm need be done by her taking Considine into her
confidence. She encouraged herself with a pathetic trust in his
stability and wisdom in all matters that affected Arthur. Without even
the warning of a telegram she made her decision, ordered the carriage
for the station and set off for Lapton.
She arrived there late on a Saturday night to the astonishment of the
Considines, who had disposed of the boys for the evening, and were
sitting together in the library. Considine, who prided himself on
never being surprised by an emergency, welcomed her as if there were
nothing unusual in her visit, and Gabrielle, a little nervous, went off
to see the housekeeper, and arrange about a room for the visitor. At
the door Mrs. Payne stopped her. "If you don't mind," she said, "I
should be glad if you wouldn't let Arthur know that I'm here."