IT was high time, I felt, to reconsider my position in regard to Eric and
Marion. At present the former knew nothing of my residence in the
neighbourhood, or of the acquaintance I had formed with his cousin. His
letters, always few and intermittent, had for some time ceased
altogether. He was no doubt constantly on the move from one place of
interest to another; so I had been unable to write to him the news of my
appointment to Fleetwater, and, in the light of my recent discovery, I
regarded his ignorance of my whereabouts as adding a fresh complication.
If what the Rector had told me was true, and Riverdale was really
inclined towards Marion, then my own position was about as difficult a
one as could well be imagined. Even a man more conceited (I hope) than
myself might well have paused in the presence of such a rival. The very
points in his personality that had won him my devotion—his beauty and
charm and careless indifference—might well prove equally attractive to
his cousin. Add to which, there was his future and assured position,
both likely to tell with her father, if not with herself, to say nothing
of the chance that he might one day win fame and distinction as a
painter.
And against all these advantages, what had I to offer in competition?
Nothing, I assured myself repeatedly, nothing, _nothing_. Only a poor
curacy and a moderate competence, while, of personal attraction, in
comparison with Eric, again nothing, _nothing_. But this was the least
of all my difficulties—far worse was the being brought into competition
with my best and earliest friend; in particular, the self-consciousness
that I was a gainer by his absence. When she began to talk of him, as
assuredly she would do, so soon as she knew of our friendship, how was I
to answer her? My own warm love and admiration for his merits would
second and stimulate her own. The temptation, I am thankful to say, was
gone before it was realised. Never, not for one moment, did my heart
fail in its duty to my friend. Never did the thought even enter my mind
of depreciating or disparaging his merits that I might better my own
position. To have entertained the thought as possible would have seemed
to me an act of incomparable baseness.
However, the thought and self-examination induced by the difficulty ended
by dissipating it. The position, I saw, was for the time being
irremediable, and I ended where I might have begun—by recognising that my
own part must be that of a simple and unprejudiced onlooker, till Fate
should have taken the guidance in her hand, and shown me in which
direction she intended to turn the scales.
And if my praises of him should help his chances of success—so let it be.
Love is not always given to the most attractive and deserving, while if
he succeeded, better he, I said to myself, than any other. For him, if
for anyone, I could be content, I thought, to stand aside and efface
myself, almost without regret.
Meantime my own love, I determined, must be a silent and unsuspected one.
And so, when I met her the day after, I told her frankly of all my love
for Riverdale; how he and I had grown up together with every thought in
common, how he had befriended me at school, and stood by me at College,
and how the first great grief of my life had been our necessity of
parting.
She was pleased, I could see, with all my praise of him; pleased too, I
thought, that we had discovered this new bond of sympathy between us, and
could discuss his career with a mutual interest in his success.
“I wonder what it was,” she said one day, “that brought you and Eric so
closely together,”—thereby reproducing the very difficulty that had often
puzzled me. “Your natures are about as far removed as the Antipodes.
Unless I’m much mistaken, yours is a strong and uncommonly decided
character, with the most practical ideas of what life’s work should be.
While he is a dear old indolent dreamer, with all the fascination of
modern Alcibiades, but with none of the energy or ambition that
characterised the splendid young Athenian.”
“Ah, there you are wrong, believe me, and will have to admit it before
the world has grown much older. He has in him all the fire of the true
artist,—latent it may be for a while. But sooner or later it’s bound to
come to the fore. Even now he’s seeing things on the continent that will
stimulate it into activity, and then he’ll show what’s in him and
surprise us all.”
I had hardly entered upon this policy of masterly inactivity before I was
tempted to abandon it. On a hot afternoon towards the end of June I was
lazily whipping the Rectory stream on the chance of a trout, when Marion
came down to me from the terrace, clad—or so it seemed to my uneducated
gaze—in a diaphanous cloud of palest lavender, and holding in her hand an
open letter. Then and there I became faithless to my conscience, for
never had she appeared to me in prettier guise. Her dress—and I always
like those confections of cloud-like tulle or gauze under whatever name
they are scientifically known—was in perfect harmony with the cool green
tints of the Rectory garden, while excitement, and she was excited now,
always showed her at her best. It called up the tawny light that slept
in her hazel eyes, and flushed the paleness of her cheeks, while the
faintest breath of a summer wind saw its opportunity and played with the
tangles of her ruddy hair.
Surely, I thought, I’m hypersensitive, even in respect for a love that
has such claims on me as Eric’s. And after all, a man owes a duty to
himself no less than to his friend.
“Good news!” she cried, as she floated to me down the steps. “I’m off to
the archery fête, and am late already. But I couldn’t go without telling
you that I’d heard at last from Eric, and, what’s more, we shall see him
soon. He’s been through all the great galleries—Paris, Dresden,
Florence, and Madrid. Since then he has been studying hard at Rome in
one of the best studios. He says his master thinks a lot of him, and
will dismiss him soon as needing only practice and hard work, which he
can manage just as well in England as in Rome. Meantime, he’s having a
really good time of it, making excursions between whiles to all the old
towns, and especially to Aquila and the Abruzzi, where every step an
artist takes gives him a fresh subject.
“But I must be off now,” she ran on. “Goodbye; I wish you were coming to
the fête. But perhaps you are well out of it—(I thought the reverse)—for
I know you don’t like archery. It’s too statuesque and Apollo-like for
you—would suit Eric better, wouldn’t it? You would like something a
little more real and murderous. By the way, I wonder you didn’t make a
soldier of yourself.”
She left me almost bewildered by her beauty. And, like a true lover, I
abandoned the Rectory trout to their own devices, while I mused and
dreamed over my lady’s perfections. “Of course,” I said to myself,
“Shakespeare is right, as he always is. Fancy _is_ engendered in the
eye; at least it was in my case; born before I had seen any reasons for
its birth, in fact, in spite of many reasons to the contrary, as I
recalled the well-remembered shock of Reggie’s love-scene. And it may
either die in its cradle, or else turn to love, as mine did. Then how is
it that the unattractive women find their husbands? I suppose there must
be men to whom plainness, and even ugliness, can appear perfection. The
answer is not forthcoming, and I give it up. At any rate, love’s a phase
of feeling and an emotion (often untrue and misleading, by the way), not
a deduction or an inference.”
And then a trout took my fly, and I left off dreaming dreams and landed
it.
But her news had left me in a happier frame of mind, and I was already
beginning to look forward to Eric’s arrival with a wistful eagerness, as
certain to determine, in one direction or the other, this wearing period
of anxiety and doubt. As a matter of fact, the issue was nearer than I
anticipated, and events that followed rapidly had practically settled the
decision before he came.