THE ACCIDENT UPON THE ROAD
Was Etta Romney dead or would the months recreate her?
Evelyn believed that they would. The intolerable _ennui_ of her life
at Melbourne festered the atmosphere in which such dreams as hers were
born and reared. She had that in her blood which no make-believe could
prison. Had the whole truth been told, it would have set her down for
a gypsy of gypsies--a true child of the roadside and the caves. But
the truth was just the one thing her father hid from her.
"I met your mother at Vienna," he had told her once when an illness had
moved him to that affectionate confidence which weakness is apt to
provoke. "She was Dora d'Istran, the most beautiful woman in the city
and one most run after. You are like her sometimes, Evelyn; you have
her eyes and hair, and just such a manner. She understood me as no one
else in the world has ever done, not even my little daughter. I
married her in the face of my family and never regretted the day. She
died when you were eleven months old. I live again through that hour
which took her from me every day of my life."
Here was no weak confession. Throughout his life this man had been
seeking a good woman's love. Knowing in his heart that he had done
things unworthy of it, he sought it yet more ardently for that very
reason. One woman, his wife, had understood him and given him of her
whole soul generously. Her death left him a vagrant once more. In
vain he, a miser to others, lavished generous gifts upon Evelyn, his
child. "She would love me if she could," he told himself, "but there
is a chord in her nature I cannot strike." A keen observer of
intuitive faculty would have said that the man's nature, not the
woman's, in Evelyn Forrester forbade her to respond to his affection.
Of this Evelyn herself remained quite unconscious. Fret as she might
against her father's unjust and inexplicable treatment of her, she
would have resented hotly the suggestion that she had not a daughter's
love for him. Her very obedience, she thought, must be sufficient
witness to that. Though he made a prisoner of her, she rarely uttered
a complaint. His varying moods, now of doting affection, now of
irritation and temper, found her patient and silent. When he did a
mean thing she shuddered, but rarely spoke of it, because she knew that
words would not help her. Her own life had been lived so far apart
from his. She wished with all her heart that it had not been so; but
she could not justly blame herself for circumstances she was in no way
able to control.
This had been her attitude before her great escapade in London; it
remained her attitude upon her return to Derbyshire. She met her
father each morning at the breakfast table; dined with him in solemn
state at night--occasionally received visits from their neighbors, and
was some times the guest of the vicar of the parish, a pleasant old
Cambridge Don, by name Harry Fillimore. But in the main Evelyn lived
alone, in the wild glades of the beautiful park, down by the silent
pool of the river--just as she had lived and dreamed in the old days of
the longing for the world, its glamour and its glories. And now she
had a great secret to take to the green woods with her. Day by day, as
some sylph of the thickets, the true Romany child reacted the thrilling
scenes of the brief weeks of triumph in London. Her hair wild about
her shoulders, her eyes reflecting the dreams, she would crouch by the
river's bank and play Narcissus to the reeds.
"It was I, Etta ... yes, yes ... just the little Etta looking up from
the waters--I went to London--I played at the theatre--they said I was
a success--they offered me money--to Etta Romney, just little Etta
Romney. And now it's all over. Etta is dead, and Evelyn has come
back. I shall never go to London again--I shall die, perhaps, down
there among the reeds in the river. Oh, if some one only would love
me, some one understand me. And it's for ever in this lonely
place--for ever--for ever."
Such regrets were neither hysterical nor unusual. She knew that there
was some great void in her life, some desire ungratified, which must
haunt her to the end; and this knowledge drove her day by day along
those paths of solitude which her father wished her to tread, though
never would he have confessed as much. His lavish gifts to her
scarcely won a word of thanks. When she rode a horse, it was madly,
defying convention, helter-skelter across the grass lands like a
Mexican flying over the prairie. She bathed in the deepest, most
dangerous pools; went shooting but shot little, because her will
revolted from the purposes of slaughter; would picnic in the darkest
thickets and had even set up a tent and slept in it, far from house or
cottage, at the height of the summer glory.
"A little madcap," the bland vicar said when he heard of it, "a regular
brick of a girl, though who'd believe it when he saw her at her
father's dinner table. Why, last night, sir, she sat in the
drawing-room just for all the world a paragon of propriety with ten
generations of grand dames to her name. I didn't dare to take a second
glass of port for fear I should be jocular. And to-day I saw her
flying toward Derby in the new car at thirty miles an hour. Away went
my straw hat just like a cricket ball. Now, what are you to make of a
young lady like that?"
Doctor Philips, the person addressed upon this occasion, confessed that
you might make many things of her.
"She could earn a good living at steeplechasing, and I would pay her
five pounds a week to be my _chauffeur_," he said quite seriously, "and
please don't forget the ball she drives at golf. Why, vicar, she'd
give the pair of us a half. It's no ordinary woman could do that."
They agreed that it could not be, and having discussed the Lady Evelyn
at great length were about to sit down to lunch together, individuals
aware of their own humility in the face of a superior intellect, when
Williams, the groom, came flying over from the Hall and demanded to see
the Doctor instantly.
"There's bin a haccident on the road, sir," he cried breathlessly,
"please come over at once--the gentleman's up at the house and the Earl
away."
The doctor, wasting no words, set out with a sigh and a backward glance
at the inviting table.
The Vicar said:
"Thank God--I thought that _she_ had come to grief."