_MARGARET LELAND._
I.
Sherman and his mother rented a small house on the north side of St.
Peter’s Square, Hammersmith. The front windows looked out on to the
old rank and green square, the windows behind on to a little patch
of garden round which the houses gathered and pressed as though they
already longed to trample it out. In this garden was a single tall
pear-tree that never bore fruit.
Three years passed by without any notable event. Sherman went every day
to his office in Tower Hill Street, abused his work a great deal, and
was not unhappy perhaps. He was probably a bad clerk, but then nobody
was very exacting with the nephew of the head of the firm.
The firm of Sherman and Saunders, ship brokers, was a long-established,
old-fashioned house. Saunders had been dead some years and old Michael
Sherman ruled alone—an old bachelor full of family pride and pride
in his wealth. He lived, for all that, in a very simple fashion. His
mahogany furniture was a little solider than other people’s perhaps.
He did not understand display. Display finds its excuse in some taste
good or bad, and in a long industrious life Michael Sherman had never
found leisure to form one. He seemed to live only from habit. Year by
year he grew more silent, gradually ceasing to regard anything but his
family and his ships. His family were represented by his nephew and his
nephew’s mother. He did not feel much affection for them. He believed
in his family—that was all. To remind him of the other goal of his
thoughts hung round his private office pictures with such inscriptions
as “S.S. _Indus_ at the Cape of Good Hope,” “The barque _Mary_ in the
Mozambique Channel,” “The barque _Livingstone_ at Port Said,” and
many more. Every rope was drawn accurately with a ruler, and here and
there were added distant vessels sailing proudly by with all that
indifference to perspective peculiar to the drawings of sailors. On
every ship was the flag of the firm spread out to show the letters.
No man cared for old Michael Sherman. Every one liked John. Both were
silent, but the young man had sometimes a talkative fit. The old man
lived for his ledger, the young man for his dreams.
In spite of all these differences, the uncle was on the whole pleased
with the nephew. He noticed a certain stolidity that was of the family.
It sometimes irritated others. It pleased him. He saw a hundred
indications besides that made him say, “He is a true Sherman. We
Shermans begin that way and give up frivolity as we grow old. We are
all the same in the end.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Sherman and her son had but a small round of acquaintances—a few
rich people, clients of the house of Sherman and Saunders for the most
part. Among these was a Miss Margaret Leland who lived with her mother,
the widow of the late Henry Leland, ship-broker, on the eastern side
of St. Peter’s Square. Their house was larger than the Shermans, and
noticeable among its fellows by the newly-painted hall door. Within
on every side were bronzes and china vases and heavy curtains. In
all were displayed the curious and vagrant taste of Margaret Leland.
The rich Italian and mediæval draperies of the pre-Raphaelites
jostling the brightest and vulgarest products of more native and Saxon
schools. Vases of the most artistic shape and colour side by side
with artificial flowers and stuffed birds. This house belonged to the
Lelands. They had bought it in less prosperous days, and having altered
it according to their taste and the need of their growing welfare could
not decide to leave it.
Sherman was an occasional caller at the Lelands, and had certainly a
liking, though not a very deep one, for Margaret. As yet he knew little
more about her than that she wore the most fascinating hats, that the
late Lord Lytton was her favourite author, and that she hated frogs. It
is clear that she did not know that a French writer on magic says the
luxurious and extravagant hate frogs because they are cold, solitary,
and dreary. Had she done so, she would have been more circumspect about
revealing her tastes.
For the rest John Sherman was forgetting the town of Ballah. He
corresponded indeed with Mary Carton, but his laborious letter writing
made his letters fewer and fewer. Sometimes, too, he heard from Howard,
who had a curacy in Glasgow and was on indifferent terms with his
parishioners. They objected to his way of conducting the services.
His letters were full of it. He would not give in, he said, whatever
happened. His conscience was involved.
II.
One afternoon Mrs. Leland called on Mrs. Sherman. She very often
called—this fat, sentimental woman, moving in the midst of a cloud
of scent. The day was warm, and she carried her too elaborate and
heavy dress as a large caddis-fly drags its case with much labour
and patience. She sat down on the sofa with obvious relief, leaning
so heavily among the cushions that a clothes-moth in an antimacassar
thought the end of the world had come and fluttered out only to be
knocked down and crushed by Mrs. Sherman, who was very quick in her
movements.
As soon as she found her breath, Mrs. Leland began a long history of
her sorrows. Her daughter Margaret, had been jilted and was in despair,
had taken to her bed with every resolution to die, and was growing
paler and paler. The hard-hearted man, though she knew he had heard,
did not relent. She knew he had heard because her daughter had told his
sister all about it, and his sister had no heart, because she said it
was temper that ailed Margaret, and she was a little vixen, and that if
she had not flirted with everybody the engagement would never have been
broken off. But Mr. Sims had no heart clearly, as Miss Marriot and Mrs.
Eliza Taylor, her daughter’s friends, said, when they heard, and Lock,
the butler, said the same too, and Mary Young, the housemaid, said so
too—and she knew all about it, for Margaret used to read his letters
to her often when having her hair brushed.
“She must have been very fond of him,” said Mrs. Sherman.
“She is so romantic, my dear,” answered Mrs. Leland, with a sigh. “I
am afraid she takes after an uncle on her father’s side, who wrote
poetry and wore a velvet jacket and ran away with an Italian countess
who used to get drunk. When I married Mr. Leland people said he was not
worthy of me, and that I was throwing myself away—and he in business,
too! But Margaret is so romantic. There was Mr. Walters, the gentleman
farmer, and Simpson who had a jeweller’s shop—I never approved of
him!—and Mr. Samuelson, and the Hon. William Scott. She tired of them
all except the Hon. William Scott, who tired of her because some one
told him she put belladonna in her eyes—and it is not true; and now
there is Mr. Sims!” She then cried a little, and allowed herself to be
consoled by Mrs. Sherman.
“You talk so intelligently and are so well informed,” she said at
parting. “I have made a very pleasant call,” and the caddis-worm toiled
upon its way, arriving in due course at other cups of tea.
III.
The day after Mrs. Leland’s call upon his mother, John Sherman,
returning home after his not very lengthy day in the office, saw
Margaret coming towards him. She had a lawn tennis racket under her
arm, and was walking slowly on the shady side of the road. She was a
pretty girl with quite irregular features, who though really not more
than pretty, had so much manner, so much of an air, that every one
called her a beauty: a trefoil with the fragrance of a rose.
“Mr. Sherman,” she cried, coming smiling to meet him, “I have been
ill, but could not stand the house any longer. I am going to the Square
to play tennis. Will you come with me?”
“I am a bad player,” he said.
“Of course you are,” she answered; “but you are the only person under a
hundred to be found this afternoon. How dull life is!” she continued,
with a sigh. “You heard how ill I have been? What do you do all day?”
“I sit at a desk, sometimes writing, and sometimes, when I get lazy,
looking up at the flies. There are fourteen on the plaster of the
ceiling over my head. They died two winters ago. I sometimes think to
have them brushed off, but they have been there so long now I hardly
like to.”
“Ah! you like them,” she said, “because you are accustomed to them. In
most cases there is not much more to be said for our family affections,
I think.”
“In a room close at hand,” he went on, “there is, you know, Uncle
Michael, who never speaks.”
“Precisely. You have an uncle who never speaks; I have a mother who
never is silent. She went to see Mrs. Sherman the other day. What did
she say to her?”
“Nothing.”
“Really. What a dull thing existence is!”—this with a great sigh.
“When the Fates are weaving our web of life some mischievous goblin
always runs off with the dye-pot. Everything is dull and grey. Am I
looking a little pale? I have been so very ill.”
“A little bit pale, perhaps,” he said, doubtfully.
The Square gate brought them to a stop. It was locked, but she had the
key. The lock was stiff, but turned easily for John Sherman.
“How strong you are,” she said.
It was an iridescent evening of spring. The leaves of the bushes had
still their faint green. As Margaret darted about at the tennis, a red
feather in her cap seemed to rejoice with its wearer. Everything was at
once gay and tranquil. The whole world had that unreal air it assumes
at beautiful moments, as though it might vanish at a touch like an
iridescent soap-bubble.
After a little Margaret said she was tired, and, sitting on a garden
seat among the bushes, began telling him the plots of novels lately
read by her. Suddenly she cried—
“The novel-writers were all serious people like you. They are so hard
on people like me. They always make us come to a bad end. They _say_ we
are always acting, acting, acting; and what else do you serious people
do? You act before the world. I think, do you know, _we_ act before
ourselves. All the old foolish kings and queens in history were like
us. They laughed and beckoned and went to the block for no very good
purpose. I dare say the headsmen were like you.”
“We would never cut off so pretty a head.”
“Oh, yes, you would—you would cut off mine to-morrow.” All this she
said vehemently, piercing him with her bright eyes. “You would cut off
my head to-morrow,” she repeated, almost fiercely; “I tell you you
would.”
Her departure was always unexpected, her moods changed with so much
rapidity. “Look!” she said, pointing where the clock on St. Peter’s
church showed above the bushes. “Five minutes to five. In five minutes
my mother’s tea-hour. It is like growing old. I go to gossip. Good-bye.”
The red feather shone for a moment among the bushes and was gone.
IV.
The next day and the day after, Sherman was followed by those bright
eyes. When he opened a letter at his desk they seemed to gaze at him
from the open paper, and to watch him from the flies upon the ceiling.
He was even a worse clerk than usual.
One evening he said to his mother, “Miss Leland has beautiful eyes.”
“My dear, she puts belladonna in them.”
“What a thing to say!”
“I know she does, though her mother denies it.”
“Well, she is certainly beautiful,” he answered.
“My dear, if she has an attraction for you, I don’t want to discourage
it. She is rich as girls go nowadays; and one woman has one fault,
another another: one’s untidy, one fights with her servants, one fights
with her friends, another has a crabbed tongue when she talks of them.”
Sherman became again silent, finding no fragment of romance in such
discourse.
In the next week or two he saw much of Miss Leland. He met her almost
every evening on his return from the office, walking slowly, her racket
under her arm. They played tennis much and talked more. Sherman began
to play tennis in his dreams. Miss Leland told him all about herself,
her friends, her inmost feelings; and yet every day he knew less about
her. It was not merely that saying everything she said nothing, but
that continually there came through her wild words the sound of the
mysterious flutes and viols of that unconscious nature which dwells
so much nearer to woman than to man. How often do we not endow the
beautiful and candid with depth and mystery not their own? We do not
know that we but hear in their voices those flutes and viols playing to
us of the alluring secret of the world.
Sherman had never known in early life what is called first love, and
now, when he had passed thirty, it came to him that love more of the
imagination than of either the senses or affections: it was mainly the
eyes that followed him.
It is not to be denied that as this love grew serious it grew
mercenary. Now active, now latent, the notion had long been in
Sherman’s mind, as we know, that he should marry money. A born
lounger, riches tempted him greatly. When those eyes haunted him from
the fourteen flies on the ceiling, he would say, “I should be rich;
I should have a house in the country; I should hunt and shoot, and
have a garden and three gardeners; I should leave this abominable
office.” Then the eyes became even more beautiful. It was a new kind of
belladonna.
He shrank a little, however, from choosing even this pleasant pathway.
He had planned many futures for himself and learnt to love them all. It
was this that had made him linger on at Ballah for so long, and it was
this that now kept him undecided. He would have to give up the universe
for a garden and three gardeners. How sad it was to make substantial
even the best of his dreams. How hard it was to submit to that
decree which compels every step we take in life to be a death in the
imagination. How difficult it was to be so enwrapped in this one new
hope as not to hear the lamentations that were going on in dim corners
of his mind.
One day he resolved to propose. He examined himself in the glass in
the morning; and for the first time in his life smiled to see how
good-looking he was. In the evening before leaving the office he
peered at himself in the mirror over the mantlepiece in the room where
customers were received. The sun was blazing through the window full on
his face. He did not look so well. Immediately all courage left him.
That evening he went out after his mother had gone to bed and walked
far along the towing-path of the Thames. A faint mist half covered
away the houses and factory chimneys on the further side; beside him
a band of osiers swayed softly, the deserted and full river lapping
their stems. He looked on all these things with foreign eyes. He had no
sense of possession. Indeed it seemed to him that everything in London
was owned by too many to be owned by any one. Another river that he
did seem to possess flowed through his memory with all its familiar
sights—boys riding in the stream to the saddle-girths, fish leaping,
water-flies raising their small ripples, a swan asleep, the wallflowers
growing on the red brick of the margin. He grew very sad. Suddenly
a shooting star, fiery and vagabond, leaped from the darkness. It
brought his mind again in a moment to Margaret Leland. To marry her, he
thought, was to separate himself from the old life he loved so well.
Crossing the river at Putney, he hurried homewards among the market
gardens. Nearing home, the streets were deserted, the shops closed.
Where King Street joins the Broadway, entirely alone with itself, in
the very centre of the road a little black cat was leaping after its
shadow.
“Ah!” he thought, “it would be a good thing to be a little black cat.
To leap about in the moonlight and sleep in the sunlight, and catch
flies, to have no hard tasks to do or hard decisions to come to, to be
simple and full of animal spirits.”
At the corner of Bridge Road was a coffee-stall, the only sign of human
life. He bought some cold meat and flung it to the little black cat.
V.
Some more days went by. At last, one day, arriving at the Square
somewhat earlier than usual, and sitting down to wait for Margaret on
the seat among the bushes, he noticed the pieces of a torn-up letter
lying about. Beside him on the seat was a pencil, as though some one
had been writing there and left it behind them. The pencil-lead was
worn very short. The letter had been torn up, perhaps, in a fit of
impatience.
In a half-mechanical way he glanced over the scraps. On one of them he
read: “MY DEAR ELIZA,—What an incurable gossip my mother is.
You heard of my misfortune. I nearly died——” Here he had to search
among the scraps; at last he found one that seemed to follow. “Perhaps
you will hear news from me soon. There is a handsome young man who pays
me attention, and——” Here another piece had to be found. “I would
take him though he had a face like the man in the moon, and limped like
the devil at the theatre. Perhaps I am a little in love. Oh! friend of
my heart——” Here it broke off again. He was interested, and searched
the grass and the bushes for fragments. Some had been blown to quite
a distance. He got together several sentences now. “I will not spend
another winter with my mother for anything. All this is, of course, a
secret. I had to tell somebody; secrets are bad for my health. Perhaps
it will all come to nothing.” Then the letter went off into dress, the
last novel the writer had read, and so forth. A Miss Sims, too, was
mentioned, who had said some unkind thing of the writer.
Sherman was greatly amused. It did not seem to him wrong to read—we do
not mind spying on one of the crowd, any more than on the personages of
literature. It never occurred to him that he, or any friend of his, was
concerned in these pencil scribblings.
Suddenly he saw this sentence: “Heigho! your poor Margaret is falling
in love again; condole with her, my dear.”
He started. The name “Margaret,” the mention of Miss Sims, the style
of the whole letter, all made plain the authorship. Very desperately
ashamed of himself, he got up and tore each scrap of paper into still
smaller fragments and scattered them far apart.
That evening he proposed, and was accepted.
VI.
For several days there was a new heaven and a new earth. Miss Leland
seemed suddenly impressed with the seriousness of life. She was
gentleness itself; and as Sherman sat on Sunday mornings in his
pocket-handkerchief of a garden under the one tree, with its smoky
stem, watching the little circles of sunlight falling from the leaves
like a shower of new sovereigns, he gazed at them with a longer and
keener joy than heretofore—a new heaven and a new earth, surely!
Sherman planted and dug and raked this pocket-handkerchief of a garden
most diligently, rooting out the docks and dandelions and mouse-ear
and the patches of untimely grass. It was the point of contact between
his new life and the old. It was far too small and unfertile and shaded
in to satisfy his love of gardener’s experiments and early vegetables.
Perforce this husbandry was too little complex for his affections to
gather much round plant and bed. His garden in Ballah used to touch him
like the growth of a young family.
Now he was content to satisfy his barbaric sense of colour; right
round were planted alternate holyhock and sunflower, and behind them
scarlet-runners showed their inch-high cloven shoots.
One Sunday it occurred to him to write to his friends on the matter
of his engagement. He numbered them over. Howard, one or two less
intimate, and Mary Carton. At that name he paused; he would not write
just yet.
VII.
One Saturday there was a tennis party. Miss Leland devoted herself all
day to a young Foreign Office clerk. She played tennis with him, talked
with him, drank lemonade with him, had neither thoughts nor words for
any one else. John Sherman was quite happy. Tennis was always a bore,
and now he was not called upon to play. It had not struck him there was
occasion for jealousy.
As the guests were dispersing, his betrothed came to him. Her manner
seemed strange.
“Does anything ail you, Margaret?” he asked, as they left the Square.
“Everything,” she answered, looking about her with ostentatious
secrecy. “You are a most annoying person. You have no feeling; you
have no temperament; you are quite the most stupid creature I was ever
engaged to.”
“What is wrong with you?” he asked, in bewilderment.
“Don’t you see,” she replied, with a broken voice, “I flirted all day
with that young clerk? You should have nearly killed me with jealousy.
You do not love me a bit! There is no knowing what I might do!”
“Well, you know,” he said, “it was not right of you. People might say,
‘Look at John Sherman; how furious he must be!’ To be sure I wouldn’t
be furious a bit; but then they’d go about saying I was. It would not
matter, of course; but you know it is not right of you.”
“It is no use pretending you have feeling. It is all that miserable
little town you come from, with its sleepy old shops and its sleepy
old society. I would give up loving you this minute,” she added, with
a caressing look, “if you had not that beautiful bronzed face. I will
improve you. To-morrow evening you must come to the opera.” Suddenly
she changed the subject. “Do you see that little fat man coming out of
the Square and staring at me? I was engaged to him once. Look at the
four old ladies behind him, shaking their bonnets at me. Each has some
story about me, and it will be all the same in a hundred years.”
After this he had hardly a moment’s peace. She kept him continually
going to theatres, operas, parties. These last were an especial
trouble; for it was her wont to gather about her an admiring circle to
listen to her extravagancies, and he was no longer at the age when we
enjoy audacity for its own sake.
VIII.
Gradually those bright eyes of his imagination, watching him from
letters and from among the fourteen flies on the ceiling, had ceased to
be centres of peace. They seemed like two whirlpools, wherein the order
and quiet of his life were absorbed hourly and daily.
He still thought sometimes of the country house of his dreams and of
the garden and the three gardeners, but somehow they had lost half
their charm.
He had written to Howard and some others, and commenced, at last, a
letter to Mary Carton. It lay unfinished on his desk; a thin coating of
dust was gathering upon it.
Mrs. Leland called continually on Mrs. Sherman. She sentimentalized
over the lovers, and even wept over them; each visit supplied the
household with conversation for a week.
Every Sunday morning—his letter-writing time—Sherman looked at his
uncompleted letter. Gradually it became plain to him he could not
finish it. It had never seemed to him he had more than friendship
for Mary Carton, yet somehow it was not possible to tell her of this
love-affair.
The more his betrothed troubled him the more he thought about the
unfinished letter. He was a man standing at the cross-roads.
Whenever the wind blew from the south he remembered his friend, for
that is the wind that fills the heart with memory.
One Sunday he removed the dust from the face of the letter almost
reverently, as though it were the dust from the wheels of destiny. But
the letter remained unfinished.
IX.
One Wednesday in June Sherman arrived home an hour earlier than usual
from his office, as his wont was the first Wednesday in every month,
on which day his mother was at home to her friends. They had not many
callers. To-day there was no one as yet but a badly-dressed old lady
his mother had picked up he knew not where. She had been looking at his
photograph album, and recalling names and dates from her own prosperous
times. As she went out Miss Leland came in. She gave the old lady in
passing a critical look that made the poor creature very conscious of
a threadbare mantle, and went over to Mrs. Sherman, holding out both
hands. Sherman, who knew all his mother’s peculiarities, noticed on
her side a slight coldness; perhaps she did not altogether like this
beautiful dragon-fly.
“I have come,” said Miss Leland, “to tell John that he must learn to
paint. Music and society are not enough. There is nothing like art to
give refinement.” Then turning to John Sherman—“My dear, I will make
you quite different. You are a dreadful barbarian, you know.”
“What ails me, Margaret?”
“Just look at that necktie! Nothing shows a man’s cultivation like
his necktie. Then your reading! You never read anything but old books
nobody wants to talk about. I will lend you three every one has read
this month. You really must acquire small talk and change your necktie.”
Presently she noticed the photograph-book lying open on a chair.
“Oh!” she cried, “I must have another look at John’s beauties.”
It was a habit of his to gather all manner of pretty faces. It came
from incipient old bachelorhood, perhaps.
Margaret criticized each photo in turn with, “Ah! she looks as if she
had some life in her!” or, “I do not like your sleepy eyelids,” or some
such phrase. The mere relations were passed by without a word. One face
occurred several times—a quiet face. As Margaret came on this one
for the third time, Mrs. Sherman, who seemed a little resentful about
something, said—
“That is his friend, Mary Carton.”
“He told me about her. He has a book she gave him. So that is she? How
interesting! I pity these poor country people. It must be hard to keep
from getting stupid.”
“My friend is not at all stupid,” said Sherman.
“Does she speak with a brogue? I remember you told me she was very
good. It must be difficult to keep from talking platitudes when one is
very good.”
“You are quite wrong about her. You would like her very much,” he
replied.
“She is one of those people, I suppose, who can only talk about their
relatives, or their families, or about their friends’ children: how
this one has got the hooping-cough, and this one is getting well of the
measles!” She kept swaying one of the leaves between her finger and
thumb impatiently. “What a strange way she does her hair; and what an
ugly dress!”
“You must not talk that way about her—she is my great friend.”
“Friend! friend!” she burst out. “He thinks I will believe in
friendship between a man and a woman.”
She got up, and said, turning round with an air of changing the
subject, “Have you written to your friends about our engagement? You
had not done so when I asked you lately.”
“I have.”
“All?”
“Well, not all.”
“Your great friend, Miss——what do you call her?”
“Miss Carton. I have not written to her.”
She tapped impatiently with her foot.
“They were really old companions—that is all,” said Mrs. Sherman,
wishing to mend matters. “They were both readers; that brought them
together. I never much fancied her. Yet she was well enough as a
friend, and helped, maybe, with reading, and the gardening, and
his good bringing-up, to keep him from the idle young men of the
neighbourhood.”
“You must make him write and tell her at once—you must, you must!”
almost sobbed out Miss Leland.
“I promise,” he answered.
Immediately returning to herself, she cried, “If I were in her place
I know what I would like to do when I got the letter. I know who I
would like to kill!”—this with a laugh as she went over, and looked at
herself in the mirror over the mantlepiece.