Lady Mary Denbigh achieved a signal triumph; she persuaded the poet to
accompany her to church. Fig Tree Church, romantically poised on the
side of the mountain, was this year the favoured place of worship with
the guests of Bath House; and where this select extract of London led
all the world of Nevis followed. And not merely the wives and
daughters of the English creole planters, but the coloured population,
high and low, who could make themselves smart enough. It was long
since Warner had entered a church, and the brilliant scene contributed
to the humour of his mood. The church looked as gay as an afternoon
rout in London at the height of the season, and the aristocracy of
Nevis were quite as fine as the guests of Bath House. Their costumes
were of delicate fabrics radiant of hue, and they were beflounced and
beruffled, and fringed and ribboned. There were floating scarves and
sashes of lace and silk; bonnets were covered with plumes and
flowers, the little bunch of curls on either side of nearly every
face, half-concealed by a mass of blonde or tulle. Behind the elect
sat the respectable coloured creoles, often dignified and noble of
aspect, for the West Indian African had been torn from a superior
race; their dress differing little from that of their betters. But who
shall describe the mass of coloured folk massed at the back of the
church, a caricature of the gentry, in their Sunday abandon to the
mightiest of their passions. Their colours were primal, their
crinolines and bonnets enormous--the latter perched far back; their
plumes, if cheaper, were even longer; where flowers and ribbons took
the place of feathers heads looked like window boxes; their sleeves
were so tight that they could not hold their prayer books at the
correct angle, and more than one had stumbled over her train as she
dropped her skirts and tripped into the church. They were still
further bedecked with a profusion of false jewellery, cotton lace and
fringe, ribbons streaming from every curve and angle, and shoes as
gaudy as the flowers on their bonnets. Their men, in imitation of the
aristocrats, wore, of the best quality they could muster, smart
coats, flowered waistcoats, ruffled neck-cloths, tight white trousers,
and pointed boots a size too small. They were the tradespeople of the
village; in some cases the servants of the estates, although by far
the greater number of the young women of humbler Nevis had received a
smattering of education and were now too good to work. Their parents
might get a living as best they could, huckstering or on the
plantations, while the improved offspring, content to herd in one room
on the scantiest fare, dreamed of gala days and a scrap of new finery.
Nevertheless, many of them were handsomer than the white fragile
looking aristocrats, with their olive or cream coloured skins, liquid
black eyes, and superb undulating figures.
Warner had more than once written of the tragedy of these people, his
poet's imagination tracing the descent of the finer specimens from
ancient kings whose dust was mixed with the sands of the desert; and
his had been one of the most impassioned voices lifted in the cause of
emancipation. For these reasons he was much beloved by the coloured
folk of Nevis of all ranks, and some one of them had never failed
to come forward, when he lay ill and neglected, or the bailiffs
threatened to sell his house over his head. All obligations were
faithfully discharged, for he received handsome sums from his
publishers, but his patrimony was long since squandered; nothing
remained to him but his home and a bit of land high on the mountain,
which he had clung to because he loved its wild beauty and solitude.
Lady Mary Denbigh, with her languishing airs, her "Book of Beauty"
style, bored him more than anyone in Bath House, and he had begun to
suspect that her attentions were due not more to vanity than to a
desire to find favour with Lord Hunsdon. But she was seldom far from
Anne Percy, whose propinquity he could enjoy even if debarred
communion. And Lady Mary frequently made Anne the theme of her
remarks, in entertaining the poet; whose covert admiration she too
detected and encouraged, although not without resentment. Miss Percy
was undeniably handsome and high-born, but alas, quite lacking in
fashion, in style, in _ton_. Not that Lady Mary despaired of her. If
she could be persuaded to pass three seasons in London, divorced from
that stranded corner of England where she had spent twenty-two long
years, all her new friends felt quite hopeful that she would yet do
them credit and become a young lady of the highest fashion. Her figure
was really good, if somewhat Amazonian, and her face, if not quite
regular--with those black eyebrows as wide as one's finger, and that
square chin, when all the beauties had oval contours and delicate
arches above limpid eyes--was, as she had before maintained,
singularly striking and handsome, and if perhaps too warmly coloured,
this was not held to be a fault by some.
Warner recalled the bitter-sweet of her babble as he heard her sigh
gently beside him, her long golden ringlets shading her bent face. His
eyes wandered, after their habit, to Anne Percy, who sat across the
church, distinguished in that gay throng by bonnet and gloves and gown
of immaculate white. He worshipped every irregular line in that noble,
impulsive, passionate face and wondered that he had ever thought
another woman beautiful; condemned his imagination that it had lacked
the wit to conceive a like combination. Her eyes, commonly full of
laughter, he had seen darken with anger and melt with tenderness.
There were moments when she looked so strong as momentarily to isolate
herself from normal womanhood, and suggest unlimited if unsuspected
powers of good or evil; but those were fleeting impressions; as a rule
she looked the most completely human woman he had ever known.
He sighed and looked away. A wave of superlative bitterness shook him,
but he was too just to curse life, or anyone but himself. He did not
even curse the worthless woman who had struck the curb from his
inherited weakness and made him a slave instead of a rigid and
insolent master. She had been no worse, hardly more captivating, than
a thousand other women, but she had appealed powerfully to his
poetical imagination, and he had elevated her into the sovereignship
of his destiny, endowed her with all the graces of soul, the grandeur
of character and passion, that he had hitherto shaped from the rich
components in his brain. When he was faced with the naked truth his
mental disquiet was as great as his anguish. If this woman, one of the
most finished works of the most civilised country on the globe, had
revealed herself to be but common clay, where should he find another
worth loving? Surely the woman was not yet evolved who could fasten
herself permanently to his soul and his senses. This may have been a
rash conclusion for a man of his years, but a poet is as old in brain
at six-and-twenty as he is green in soul at sixty. With all the ardour
of his youth and temperament he had longed for his mate, dreamed of a
life of exalted companionship on the most poetic of isles; and one
woman, cleverer than many he had met, had read his dreams, simulated
his ideal, and amused herself until the game ceased to amuse her; and
the richest nabob of the moment returned from India with a brown skull
like a mummy had offered his rupees in exchange for the social state
that only the daughter of a great lord could give him. She had laughed
good naturedly as Warner flung himself at her feet in an agony of
incredulous despair, and told him that no mood had become him so well,
for hitherto he had never expressed himself fully save in verse. And
Anne, neither classic nor modish, still vaguely resembled her! It was
this suggestion of the woman whom at least he must always remember as
the perfection of female beauty, that had tempted him to lurk in the
darkness of the terrace and watch Anne through the windows of Bath
House. In a day when girls cultivated the sylph, minced in their
speech, had numberless affectations, his early choice had possessed a
noble, large figure and a lofty dignity. She was not ashamed to walk,
was to be seen on her horse in the Row every morning, and cultivated
her excellent brain.
But the resemblance, Warner had divined at once, was superficial, and
the first interview had justified his instinct. Anne was a child in
many ways; the other, although younger in years, had been cool,
shrewd, calculating, making no false moves in any game she chose to
play. Warner knew that if he had discovered a gold mine in Nevis and
won her, he should have hated her long since.
But Anne Percy! He could not make the same mistake twice. And had he
met her when he had a decent home and an honoured name to offer her he
believed that he could have found happiness in her till the end of
his life. Nor, had she loved him, would she have been influenced by
worldly considerations. He had seen little of women of the great
normal middle class. Conditions had thrown him with the very high or
the very low, and experience taught him that the former when unmarried
were all angling for husbands, and the latter for patrons. Therefore
had he created a world of ideal women--one secret of his popularity,
for every woman that read his poems looked into the poet's magic
mirror and saw herself; and he had found happiness in creating, as
poets must. Even since his ostracism there had been many hours of
sustained happiness and moments of rapture when he had quite forgotten
his position among men. And Anne Percy, in her radiant presence, drove
his ideals into the shadows and covered them with cobwebs! And he
could never claim her! Even were he not a poor broken creature, with
little alive in him but that still flickering soul dwelling in his
faded unspeakable body, he would not even offer the commonest
attentions to this uncommon girl who was worthy of the best of men.
Nor did he wish to suffer any more deeply than he did at present. To
know her better would be to love her more. When she left the island
he hoped to relegate her to the plane upon which he dwelt in dreams,
and forget that she had not been a created ideal.
But he was sometimes surprised at the strength of his suffering and
his longing. He was so unutterably tired, had been for years, so weary
in mind and body through excess and misery and remorse, so bitterly
old, that he was amazed there should be moments when he experienced
the fleeting hopes and deep despair of any other lover of his years.
He left his bed at night and went out and walked about the island, or
rowed until he was lost under the stars; he dreamed miserably of her
over his books, or hid in the cane fields to watch her swing by in the
early morning, divested of that hideous hoop-skirt, and unconsciously
mimicking the undulating gait of the coloured women she passed. He had
replenished his wardrobe and was becoming as dandified as any blood in
Bath House, having borrowed from Hunsdon against his next remittance.
And as he was eating regularly for the first time in years--less and
less of the concoctions of his own worthless servants--and drinking
not at all, there was no doubt that he was improving in appearance as
well as in health, in vitality. The last word rose in his brain to-day
for the first time. Could it be that this mortal lassitude might leave
him, neck and heel? That red blood would run in his veins once more?
To what end? He was none the less disgraced, none the less unfit to
aspire to the hand of Anne Percy. Not only would the world denounce
her if she yielded, but his own self-contempt was too deep to permit
him to take so much innocent loveliness to himself. But the thought
often maddened him, and to-day, as he looked up and caught her eyes
fixed upon him, suddenly to be withdrawn with a deep blush, he had to
control himself from abruptly leaving the church. More than once he
had suspected an interest, which in happier conditions might have
developed very rapidly. There was no doubt that his work meant more to
her than to any woman he had ever met, and he was convinced that she
avoided him both from a natural shrinking and because her strong
common sense compelled her to see him as he was, forbade her
imagination to transmute his battered husk into the semblance of what
was left of his better self. But she could love him. That was the
thought that sent the blood to his head and drove him from his pillow.
But it did not drive him to brandy. He had felt no temptation to drink
since he met her. It was true that before his final downfall he had
only felt the actual necessity of stimulant coincidently with the
awakening of his wondrous but strangely heavy muse; but during the
past five years he had burnt out tormenting thoughts and remorse with
alcohol, drinking but the more deeply when his familiar throbbed dully
and demanded release.
He could not look ahead. He had not the least idea what would be the
immediate result of the departure of Anne Percy, his return to the
loneliness of his home. With a reinvigorated body, and some renewal of
his faith in woman, he might resist temptation if he thought it worth
while. But the next poem? What then? He had never written a line of
serious work except under the influence of brandy. He knew that he
never should. And with nothing else to live for, to forswear the muse
to whom he was indebted for all the happiness he had ever known was
too much for God or man to ask of him.
He had been sitting tensely, and he suddenly leaned back and
endeavoured to invoke into his soul the peace that pervaded the house
of worship. The good clergyman was droning, fans and silken skirts
were rustling, eyes challenging. But outside the light wind was
singing in the palm trees, the warm air entered through the window
beside him laden with the sweet perfumes of the tropics. The sky was
as blue as heaven. He reflected gratefully that at least he had never
grown insensible to the beauty of his island, never even contemplated
deserting her for either the superior advantages or the superior
dissipations of the great world. To live his life on Nevis and with
Anne Percy! Oh God! He almost groaned aloud, and then came to himself
as Lady Mary rose and extended the half of her hymn book.