Moira’s hope had been that their move to the country would bring Miles
to his senses. With nothing to do but rest and lose himself in the
beauty and peace of outdoors, with not even the responsibility, for
some months at least, to earn any money, she confidently believed he
would drop the habits which had regained their hold upon him of late,
get possession of his impulse to work, and begin to write the things of
which she dreamed he was capable. And in the beginning each day after
they arrived confirmed her hope. He seemed to cast heavy burdens from
his shoulders and his mind, to love spending hours with the children,
romping and making the place merry with their laughter and his. From
time to time he wandered off alone with his pockets stuffed with paper,
boyishly promising great results, or stayed up with the lamp at night.
When they had been there no more than ten days it seemed already a long
time ago that their lives had changed and taken a turn for the better.
She was for that ten days serenely happy.
Then the country began to pall on Miles. He grew restless and evasive;
at breakfast he would hint at various reasons for going to New York.
When their second week end came around he managed a convincing excuse
and disappeared with a small handbag full of over-night clothing.
Moira’s heart sank at this unexpected turn of affairs, and she spent
the days in his absence giving way to more real despair than she
had ever known with him. This time she had done her best, done what
a little while ago she would have thought impossible, and she had
failed....
He seemed to come back passionately eager to see her, and so long as he
did that she could only surrender to him and see in him still her lover
and her first lover, her lover for all time. But these waves of passion
died away; her presence and the children’s began to irk him in a day
or two, sometimes in a few hours, and it soon appeared to her that he
regarded a week as an interminable visit.
She set herself to observing him, to studying his chance remarks, and
for the first time a genuine doubt of his fidelity oppressed her. There
was nothing tangible, except his trips to the city, to justify this
suspicion, and these would have been inadequate despite his evasions.
She could quite naturally think of him as being restless, as wanting
to go away, without dreaming that he would belie her faith in him.
The suspicion of infidelity came before the evidence, but once the
suspicion was lodged in her mind, the evidence, all unconsciously
furnished by Miles, piled up by little and little.
She saw that this warmth of love-making with which he returned to her
did not last an hour. Bitter thoughts assailed her. Evidently he was
not always successful with his hypothetical sweetheart or sweethearts
and was driven back to his wife. She could not keep fantastic
exaggerations out of her head, though in her sober moments she told
herself that the truth, if probably serious, was far less florid than
she imagined.
Nevertheless, there grew upon her an increasing repugnance toward
his advances. She made no issue of it. She did not want conflict.
He was very appealing, very hard on her sympathies, very skilful in
inventions. She could not quickly forget that he had suffered and
struggled while he still loved her. But her inescapable conclusion,
reached in hours of cold reflection, was that they were parting; that
sooner or later an end would come. She determined not to invite it
so long as her pride was not sacrificed; to wait for it sensibly and
coolly.
Another explanation of Miles’ conduct brought a curious sort of
consolation and corrective. This was that he simply wanted to be
free--but did not have the strength. The opportunity had been placed in
his way to leave, and, feeling himself ultimately unequal to marriage
and its burdens and limitations, he believed he ought to take it. His
love still held him tenuously to her and the children, his sentiment
for their past together, his need for a woman’s support--whatever
it was--and he could not find the courage to make the break. He
had probably been strengthened in entertaining this purpose by the
knowledge that somebody had turned up from Thornhill, and she would be
taken care of. Much as that base notion offended her, this last theory
was frankly pleasing. It was better than the thought of betrayal with
another woman.
By the time she had reached this state of enlightenment she was so
skilled in reading poor Miles’ motives that she felt as though she had
acquired supernatural powers of clairvoyance. The summer was more than
half gone.
But she had not thought exclusively of Miles. She had the children to
care for and teach a whole new set of fascinating things, and she had
her painting. The opportunity presented by these untrammelled days was
not to be lost over heart-burnings, and a new power and certainty had
come to her. She wasted less time carrying her attempts to the last
degree of finish. She was trying by experiment after experiment to
get the feel and solidity of the earth and to express her warm daily
contact with it.
She had been very timid toward Osprey where painting was concerned. She
had resolved never to speak to him about it and to keep out of his way
while she was at it. One ought not to expect to rent the cottage of a
famous painter and have advice thrown in. But it was he who sought
her in the orchard one morning and made comments for which she was
grateful, because she understood them and could profit by them, and
also because they were not uncomplimentary.
“Most of us,” he said, “gamble frightfully in choosing art as a career.
That’s why there are so many hopeless artists. We mistake an urge for a
talent, and the devil of it is there is no sure way of knowing whether
we’re on the right road or not. But I think you are. In the first place
you have the steady enthusiasm and not just mere plugging industry.
In the second place you are a self-teacher. Everybody worth a hang is
that.”
They were the first really golden words she had ever heard, and she
was certain afterward that simply hearing them had improved her work
miraculously--made her surer of the knowledge she had gained and helped
her to discard excrescences.
Osprey had few visitors. Perhaps twice a year a gathering of
extraordinary individuals with whom he had consorted at various periods
and in many parts of the world crowded into the house, took possession
of it, kept up a racket until morning and departed, leaving him with a
few more intimate cronies, some to recover from the effects and others
simply to prolong the reunion. These entertainments occurred usually
in the early spring or fall, the seasons of change when people come
together most spontaneously. And they were spontaneous. He had no use
for set affairs.
On rare occasions women drove out to see him, for luncheon or tea; and
he himself went to town about once a month, seldom remaining longer
than over night. He seemed to have cultivated not only the love of
solitude, but the power to enjoy it for long periods.
There was one visitor, however, who arrived often. Moira saw his heavy
blue roadster drawn up beside the lawn three times during the first
month of her stay, and she wondered who the impressive man was, with
short grey curly hair, and the easy bearing of accomplishment. She was
not surprised to learn later that he was somebody--no less a person, in
fact, than Emmet Roget, the producer, a man who was both a power in the
business phase of the theatre and an artistic radical in his own right.
The friendship between these two men appeared to be less extraordinary
now than it had been in past years, but it was still a friendship in
which a certain inequality was apparent. The rôle of Roget toward
Osprey, during three-fourths of their adult lives, had been that of
a detached but watchful guardian. A dozen years ago Osprey had been
something of a riderless horse, a centre of explosions, the victim of
unexpected mishaps and misunderstandings, constantly involved with a
woman, and taking his affairs with desperate seriousness, careless
of his talent and his time. Much of this relationship he skilfully
suggested to her himself, in his humorously philosophic moments.
As he put it, he was born somewhere between his thirty-eighth and his
fortieth year, and began to live his life in a sense backward; for
though he went on having experiences it was always something in his
life before his thirty-eighth year that he seemed to be living over
in these experiences, and relishing where he previously had suffered.
The actual occasion of the change had been a painful separation from
the last of his devastating loves, and more or less complete celibacy
since. The result was a fresh joy in work, a really enormous volume of
production ... peace and contentment and plenty.
The life of Emmet Roget had been exactly the antithesis. He was
penniless in his youth. No sooner had he reached New York--to which
initial step Osprey had assisted him--than he began to have means
for his needs. At twenty-nine he left Europe, after having immersed
himself in as much of French culture as an able young foreigner can
obtain with diligence and enthusiasm, and studied the beginnings of the
German theatre movement. A season was spent directing a Denver “little
theatre,” but the provinces offered too little future and freedom. Once
more in New York, Roget was designing sets and directing productions.
In his late thirties he was instituting new methods into the theatre
which were hailed and copied abroad.
Many regarded Emmet Roget as primarily a “man for the future,” yet to
him the present seemed invariably kind. Unlike his friend, nothing
touched him; but whatever he touched gained from his personality,
took on fascination and beauty. Hard at the core, immovable and
unimpressionable, he was yet acutely sensitive, capable of profound
appreciations, for music, for colour, for a scene, a woman--and
surprisingly human in his contacts. No doubt it was this intuitive
appreciation, coupled with early friendship, which had made him cling
to Osprey through many hopeless seasons and experiments.
The first two or three times that Roget visited him that summer, Osprey
did not refer to his new tenants except casually. Later, however, when
he had had a half dozen talks with Moira, he introduced the subject to
his friend at the dinner table.
“That’s rather a remarkable young woman I’ve got down there in the
orchard,” he said. “Did I tell you that she painted?”
“I believe so--something of the kind,” replied Roget. He had met with
his share of disillusionment among his own protégés, and he was not
given to more than passing interest in the mere fact that a young woman
painted.
“Well,” pursued Osprey, “I’ve got something to show you after dinner.”
When they had finished he led the producer to a picture on the studio
wall and switched on a light he had put up to illuminate it.
“That’s one of hers,” he said. “I think there are extraordinarily good
things in it as well as bad. At all events, I liked it so well I bought
it.”
Roget studied the picture for a moment, but without enthusiasm.
“Yes,” he said. “Obviously you’ve influenced her already, or she’s
known your work for some time.”
“I don’t think it’s so obvious,” protested the other. “There’s personal
insight in that modelling, and it has a back to it. Anyway, she’s
young. Fact is, there’s something really unusual about the girl. I
fancy she had things her own way at one time. The marks are there,
overlaid by experience since.”
“Of course,” laughed Roget quietly, “it makes a difference if you know
the young lady.”
“Hang it, my dear fellow, the girl is poor. Has two children, and a
husband who may be talented and may be a fool. But he’s certainly no
support.”
“Charity and art do not mix, old man.”
“The hell they don’t,” replied Osprey testily. “But as you say,
one must see for oneself. You are going to make Mrs. Harlindew’s
acquaintance, and whatever you think of charity, you will buy a picture
from her as a favour to me. Not too soon, you understand, and not too
obtrusively. She shied at me frightfully when I bought this one. I had
to tell her that I had made quite a collection of the work of promising
beginners for reasons of my own.”
Roget found his friend nearly always transparent. Ten years ago he
would have said there was considerably more than the mere fervour of
the artist in this championship. But he had since become acquainted
with a wholly new side of the man, and it was difficult to believe him
capable of losing his head over a pretty bride who happened to rent his
house.
“You say she is married?” he contented himself with asking, dryly.
A flicker of humorous comprehension passed over the other’s face.
“Yes,” he replied shortly, “but the fellow neglects her.”
Roget’s manner became once more indulgent.
“Well, I shall try to buy this picture. I don’t know what to do with it
after I get it. There are mighty few pictures worth buying. Perhaps not
more than twenty in the world.”
He dismissed the subject and sat down at Osprey’s piano. His study of
the instrument had come late, in young manhood. Lacking any great
musical scholarship or conventional training, he nevertheless played
whatever he had heard that pleased him, with extraordinary tenderness
and effect.