"Bah!" he cried again, "It's those confounded eyes of hers. It's those
laughing, searching, haunting, promising eyes."
"Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear."
It was the voice of Adrian, raised in song. And repeating the same
complaisant proffer, to a tune which I suspect was improvised, it drew
near along the outer passage, till, in due process, the door of the
billiard-room was opened, and Adrian stood upon the threshold.
"Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine e-e-ear," he trolled
robustly--and then, espying Anthony, fell silent.
Anthony appeared to be deep engrossed in letter-writing.
"Ahem," said Adrian, having waited a little.
But Anthony did not look up.
"Well, of all unlikely places," said Adrian, wondering.
Anthony's pen flew busily backwards and forwards across his paper.
"Remarkable power of mental concentration," said Adrian, on a key of
philosophic comment.
"Eh? What?" Anthony at last questioned, but absently, from the depths,
without raising his eyes.
"I 've been hunting far and wide for you--ransacking the house, turning
the park topsy-turvy," said Adrian.
"Eh? What?" questioned Anthony, writing on.
But Adrian lost patience.
"Eh? What? I 'll eh-what you," he threatened, shaking his fist. "Come.
Put aside that tiresome letter. 'Do you happen to know where your master
is?' says I to Wickersmith. 'Well, if you 'll pardon my saying so, sir,
I think I see him agoing in the direction of the billiard-room, saving
your presence, sir,' says Wickersmith to me." Adrian pantomimed the
supposed deference of the butler. Then, loftily, "But, 'Shoo' says I.
'An optical delusion, my excellent Wick. A Christian man would be
incapable of such a villainy. The billiard-room, that darksome cavern,
on a heaven-sent day like this? Shucks,' says I. Yet"--his attitude
became exhortative--"see how mighty is truth, see how she prevails, see
how the scoffer is confounded. To the billiard-room I transport myself,
sceptically, on the off-chance, and--here, good-lack, you are."
"It's the weather," Anthony explained, having finally relinquished his
correspondence. "I was in the garden--but I could n't stand the weather."
"The weather?" wondered Adrian. "You could n't stand the weather? My
poor lamb. Ah, what a delicate constitution. He could n't stand the
weather." Eyes uplifted, he wagged a compassionate head.
But suddenly, from the sarcastic note, he passed to the censorious, and
then to a kind of gay rhapsodic.
"The weather? Shame upon your insinuations. I will not hear one
syllable against it. The weather? There never _was_ such weather. The
weather? Oh, for the tongues of men and angels, to chant the glory of
the weather. The weather is made of sugar and spice, of frankincense and
myrrh, of milk and honey, of every conceivable ingredient that's nice.
The sky is an inverted bowl of Sèvres--that priceless bleu-royal; and
there are appetising little clouds of whipped cream sticking to it. The
air is full of gold, like eau-de-vie de Dantzic;--if we only had a
liquefying apparatus, we could recapture the first fine careless nectar
of the gods, the poor dead gods of Greece. The earth is as aromatic as
an orange stuck with cloves; I can't begin to tell you all the wondrous
woody, mossy, racy things it smells of. The sea is a great sheet of
watered-silk, as blue as my blue eyes. And the birds, the robins and the
throstles, the blackbirds and the black-caps, the linnets and the little
Jenny Wrens, knowing the value of silence, are hoarding it like misers;
but like prodigals, they 're squandering sound. The ear of mortal never
heard such a delirious, delicious, such a crystalline, argentine,
ivory-smooth, velvety-soft, such a ravishing, such an enravished tumult
of sweet voices. Showers, cascades, of pearls and rubies, emeralds,
diamonds, sapphires. The weather, says Anthony Rowleigh. He could n't
stand the weather. The weather is as perfect as a perfect work of
art--as perfect as one of my own incomparable madrigals. It is
absolutely perfect."
He tossed his head, in sign of finality.
"It appears so," Anthony discriminated gloomily; "but appearances are
risky things to judge by. It may have charms for a voluptuary like you;
but I"--and he took a tone of high austerity--"I, as an Englishman, have
my suspicions of anything so flagrantly un-English."
"Apropos of things un-English," said Adrian, "I 'm pining for a serious
word with you."
Anthony pulled a wry face.
"Oh, if you 've been attacked by one of your periodic spasms of
seriousness," he sighed.
"It's about calling on Madame Torrebianca," said Adrian.
"Oh," sighed Anthony. With a presence of mind that I can't help thinking
rather remarkable, he feigned a continuity of mood; but something went
_ping_ within him.
"Look here," said Adrian, imperatively. "I 'll thank you to drop that
air of ineffable fatigue of yours, and to sit up and listen. I don't
suppose you wish to be deliberately discourteous, do you? And as those
ladies happen to be new-comers, and your immediate neighbours, not to say
your tenants, I expect you are sufficiently acquainted with the usages of
polite society to know that a failure on your part to call would be
tantamount to a direct affront. Furthermore, as one of them (Miss Sandus
is, unhappily, still in the Götterdämmerung of the Establishment), as
Madame Torrebianca is coming to your house, as your guest, to hear Mass
on Sunday morning, I sincerely hope I need n't tell you that it's simply
_de rigueur_ that you should call before that occasion."
He stood off, and raised his brown-red eyebrows, as who, from an
altitude, speaking _de par le Roi_, should challenge contumacy.
But two could play at the game of eyebrow-raising. Anthony raised his.
"Coming as my guest? Coming as my _guest_? I like that," he exclaimed.
"What have _I_ to do with her coming? If every stranger to whom you
choose to extend the privilege of hearing Mass in the Chapel, is thereby
to be constituted a _guest_,--_my_ guest,--I shall have my hands full
indeed. If she's a guest at all, if she's anybody's guest, she's yours;
You 've created the situation. Don't try to thrust the brunt of it on
me."
Adrian flung back his head, and spoke from a still loftier altitude.
"I believe you are the master of the house?"
"The titular master," Anthony distinguished. "I years ago resigned all
real power into the pink and chubby hands of my mayor of the palace."
And he slightly bowed.
"I disdain to answer your silly quibble over the word _guest_," Adrian
continued, ignoring the rejoinder. "La Nobil Donna Susanna Torrebianca
is a guest. And as master of the house, by your return, you _ex officio_
supersede me in the capacity of host."
"_Ex officio_?" repeated Anthony, considering. "The fashion of adorning
ordinary speech with classical quotations has long since passed from use."
"And therefore,"--Adrian brought his theorem to its conclusion,--"unless
you particularly aspire to seem--and to be--an absolute barbarian, a
bear, a boor, a churl, and a curmudgeon,"--each epithet received an
augmented stress,--"you must call at Craford New Manor with the least
possible delay. As I find myself in rather good form just now, and feel
that I should shine to perhaps exceptional advantage, I suggest that we
call forthwith."
Anthony got up, and sleepily stretched his arms.
"Ah, well," he consented; "since your fond heart is set upon it--there.
It will be an awful fag; but when Dimplechin becomes importunate, I can
deny him nothing."
He stifled a yawn.
Adrian's round face radiated triumph.
"You are a good child, after all," he said, "and you shall have jam with
your tea."
"I think I have fooled that fellow to the top of his bent," was Anthony's
silent self-gratulation.
His pulse beat high, as they walked across the park.
"How could I ever have contemplated waiting till Sunday?" he asked
himself, in a maze.
Sunday, the day after the day after to-morrow, seemed, in his present
eagerness, to belong to the dim distances of futurity.
And all the way, as they passed under the great trees, over the cool,
close turf, with its powdering of daisies and buttercups and poppies,
through alternations of warm sun and deep shadow, where sheep browsed,
and little snow-white awkward lambkins sported, and birds piped, and the
air was magical with the scent of the blossoming may,--all the way, amid
the bright and dark green vistas of lawn and glade, the summer loveliness
mixed with his anticipation of standing face to face with her, and
rendered it more poignant.
"If cats were always kittens,
And rats were always mice,
And elderberries were younger berries,
Now would n't that be nice?"--
Adrian, walking beside him, trilled joyously.
"You seem in high spirits," Anthony remarked.
"I 've been thinking of your suggestion," said Adrian.
Anthony frowned, at a loss.
"My suggestion--?"
"Yes--your suggestion that I should marry her."
Anthony stared.
"What?" he ejaculated.
"Yes," said Adrian, blandly. "I think the suggestion is decidedly a
happy one. I think I shall pay my court to her."
"_You_? Man, you 're bereft of your senses," said Anthony, with force.
"You need n't be so violent," said Adrian. "It's your own idea."
"I was making game of you--I was pulling your leg. Marry her? She would
n't look at you," said Anthony, contumelious.
"Why not, I should like to know?" Adrian haughtily enquired.
"You 're--you 're too young," Anthony reminded him.
"Too young?" mildly demurred Adrian, wide-eyed. "I 'm thirty, if I 'm a
day."
"You 're thirty-nine, if you 're a day," said Anthony. "But you 'll
never be thirty--not even when you 're forty. You breathe perennial
spring."
"I confess," said Adrian, with deliberation, "I freely confess that I am
not an effete and blasé old thing, like--like one who shall be nameless.
There is a variety of fruit (the husbandman's despair), a tough,
cross-grained, sour-hearted variety of fruit, that dries up and shrivels,
and never ripens. There is another variety of fruit that grows rounder
and rosier, tenderer and juicier and sweeter, the longer it hangs on the
tree. Time cannot wither it. The child of the sun and the zephyr, it is
honey-full and fragrant even unto its inmost ripe red core."
He expanded his chest, and significantly thumped it.
"Mark you," he resumed, "I name no names. The soul of delicacy and
discretion, as of modesty and kindness, I name no names. But as for
myself, that I am young I acknowledge. Those whom the gods love are ever
young. Yet I am old enough, at least, to be capable of fresh, impulsive
feelings. I am old enough to have cast the crude, harsh pessimism of
inexperience. I am old enough to have outlived my disillusions. I am
old enough to have learned that the good things of life are good, and to
understand that the rose-buds in the garden are there to be gathered.
And I 'm not such a silly as to forbear to gather them. I think I shall
make Madame Torrebianca the object of my respectful solicitations."
Anthony fixed eyes of derision on him.
"Oh, the fatuity of the man!" he jeered. "If you could see yourself.
You 're sandy-haired--and miles too fat."
"I beg your pardon," said Adrian, with dignity. "My hair is of a very
fashionable shade--tawny, which indicates a passionate heart, with
under-waves of gold, as if the sunshine had got entangled in it. I will
not dwell upon its pretty truant tendency to curl. And as for what you
call _fat_--let me tell you that there are people who admire a rich,
ample figure in a man. I admit, I am not a mere anatomy, I am not a mere
hungry, lean-faced, lantern-jawed, hollow-eyed, sallow-cheeked,
vulture-beaked, over-dressed exiguity, like--well, mark you, I name no
names. I need not allude to my other and higher attributes--my wit, my
sympathy, my charming affectations, my underlying strength of character
(a lion clothed in rose-leaves--what?), my genius for the divinest of the
arts. I think I shall lay myself at the feet of Donna Susanna. The rest
of the sex"--his gesture put them from him--"may coif St. Catherine."
"I have n't the honour of knowing the lady in question," said Anthony,
with detachment. "But if she is anything like the paragon you have led
me to expect, let me, as your sincere well-wisher, let me warn you not to
cherish hopes that are foredoomed to disappointment. If, on the other
hand, she should indeed admire your style of rich, ample figure, I shall
deem it my duty to save you from her--at no matter what cost to myself.
I cannot allow you to link yourself for life to a woman without taste."
And then they rang the bell at the vast, much-bestuccoed portal of the
new house; and Anthony's heart, I think, for the minute stood still
within him. The door was opened, and he could look into the big, ugly,
familiar marble hall;--familiar still, and yet changed and strange, and
even beautified; with new soft hangings, and Persian carpets, and
flowers, and books, and bibelots about; with a new aspect of luxury and
elegance; with a strange new atmosphere of feminine habitation, that went
a little to Anthony's head, that called up clearer than ever the
dark-haired, strenuous-faced woman of the dog-cart, and turned his
imagination to visions and divinings of intimate feminine things. One
thought of chiffons, and faint, elusive perfumes, and the gleam and
rustle of silken garments; one heard soft voices, trills of feminine
laughter, the whispering of feminine secrets; one saw ladies in low
chairs, reading or embroidering by lamp-light.
So, for an instant, Anthony stood at Susanna's threshold, looking into
her antechamber, breathless almost with his sense of her imminence;--and
then the tall flunkey said, in the fastidious accents of flunkeydom, "Net
et _em_, sir;" and all my hero's high-strung emotion must spend itself in
the depositing of a card.
As they turned away, and the summer landscape again met him with its warm
breath and radiant smile, he gloomed at it savagely, from eyes of deep
rebuke, as at a thing that had beguiled him with false promises, wronged
and defrauded him. And he flew out petulantly at poor Adrian--
"Here's a pretty dance you 've led me, for the pleasure of a word with
Mr. Yellowplush."
"Oh?" said Adrian, taken aback. "I expected you 'd be relieved. You did
n't want to see them. And the exigencies of the case are satisfied by
leaving cards."
"I could have sent my card by you," growled Anthony.
"You 've had a lovely walk, with a lovely comrade, in lovely weather,"
said Adrian.
"The weather is simply brazen," Anthony declared.
V
Judged by the standards of a cit, countrymen, I believe, are generally
early risers; but even for a countryman, Anthony, next morning, rose at
an unlikely hour. The tall clock in the hall, accenting with its slow
sardonic tick the silence of the sleeping house, marked a quarter to
five, as he undid the heavy old-fashioned fastenings of the door, the
oaken bar, the iron bolts and chains, and let himself out.
He let himself out; but then he stood still for a minute on the
terrace, arrested by the exquisite shock of the wonderful early air:
the wonderful light, keen air, a fabric woven of elfin filaments, the
breathings of green lives: an aether distilled of secret essences, in
the night, by the earth and the sea,--for there was the sea's tang, as
well as the earth's balm, there was the bitter-sweet of the sea and the
earth at one.
He stood for a minute, stopped by the exquisite shock of it; and then
he set forth for an aimless morning ramble.
The dew clung in big iridescent crystals to the grass, where the sheep
were already wide-awake and eager at their breakfasts; it gleamed like
sprinkled rubies on the scarlet petals of the poppies, and like
fairies' draughts of yellow wine in the enamelled hollows of the
buttercups; on the brown earth of the pathways, where the long shadows
were purple, it lay white like hoar-frost. The shadows were still
long, the sunbeams still almost level; the sun shone gently, as through
an imperceptible thin veil, gilding with pinkish gold the surfaces it
touched--glossy leaves, and the rough bark of tree-trunks, and the
points of the spears of grass. A thicker veil, a gauze of pearl and
silver, dimmed the blue of the sea, and blurred the architecture of the
cliffs. On the sea's edge lay a long grey cloud, a long, low, soft
cloud, flat, like a band of soft grey velvet. The cloud was grey
indeed; but (as if prismatic fires were smouldering there) its grey
held in solution all the colours of the spectrum, so that you could
discern elusive rose-tints, fugitive greens, translucent reflections of
amethyst and amber.
The morning was inexpressibly calm and peaceful--yet it was busy with
sound and with movement. Rooks, those sanctimonious humbugs, circled
overhead, cawing thieves' warnings, that had the twang of sermons, to
other rooks, out of sight in neighbouring seed-fields. Lapwings,
humbugs too, but humbugs in a prettier cause, started from the
shrubberies where their eggs were hidden, and fluttered lamely towards
the open. Sparrows innumerable were holding their noisy, high-spirited
disputations; blackbirds were repeating and repeating that deep
melodious love-call of theirs, which they have repeated from the
beginning of the world, and no ear has ever tired of; finches were
singing, greenfinches, chaffinches; thrushes were singing, singing
ecstatically in the tree-tops, and lower down the imitative little
blackcaps were trying to imitate them. Recurrently, from a distance,
came the soft iterations of a cuckoo. Bees went about their affairs
with a mien of sombre resolution, mumbling to themselves, in stolid
monotone, "It-'s-got-to-be-done-and-it-'s-dogged-that-does-it,
it-'s-got-to-be-done-and-it-'s-dogged-that-does-it," and showing thus
that even the beautiful task of flying from flower to flower and
gathering honey, may, if you are a bee, fail to interest you, and
necessitate an act of will; while butterflies, charmed by the continual
surprises, satisfied by the immediate joys, of the present moment,
flitted irresponsibly, capriciously, whithersoever a bright colour
beckoned, and gave no thought to the moments that had not yet come.
Everywhere there was business, rumour, action; but everywhere, none the
less, there was the ineffable peace of early morning, of the hours when
man--the peace-destroyer?--is still at rest. And everywhere,
everywhere, there was the wonderful pristine air, the virginal air,
that seemed to penetrate beyond the senses, and to reach the
imagination, a voice whispering untranslatable messages, waking mystic
surmises of things unknown but somehow kindred.
Anthony strolled on at random, down the purple-shaded paths, under the
spreading oaks and bending elms, over the sun-tipped greensward,
satisfied, like the butterflies, by the experiences of the passing
moment, enjoying, in leisurely intimacy, the aspects and vicissitudes
of his way; for a melancholy man, curiously cheerful; the tears of
things, the flat and unprofitable uses of the world, forgotten: for a
melancholy man, even curiously elated: elated--oh, more than likely
without recognising it--as one is to whom the house of life has
discovered a new chamber-door, and, therewith, new promises of
adventure. He strolled on at random, swinging his stick nonchalantly,
. . . till, all at once, he saw something that brought him, and the
heart within him, to a simultaneous standstill: something he had been
more or less sub-consciously thinking of the whole time, perhaps?--for
it brought him to a standstill, as if he saw his thought made flesh.
He had just mounted a little knoll, and now, glancing down before him,
he saw, not twenty yards away, under a hawthorn in full blossom,--
"Madame Torrebianca, as I am alive," he gasped.