“I must thank you, Mr. Vair,” said the dark girl, when they parted that
afternoon, “for having given me very much to think about.”
And from her manner, Aubrey Vair perceived clearly he had not wasted his
time.
It would require a subtler pen than mine to tell how from that day a
passion for Miss Smith grew like Jonah’s gourd in the heart of Aubrey
Vair. He became pensive, and in the prolonged absence of Miss Smith,
irritable. Mrs. Aubrey Vair felt the change in him, and put it down to a
vitriolic Saturday Reviewer. Indisputably the “Saturday” does at times
go a little far. He re-read “Elective Affinities,” and lent it to Miss
Smith. Incredible as it may appear to members of the Areopagus Club,
where we know Aubrey Vair, he did also beyond all question inspire a
sort of passion in that sombre-eyed, rather clever, and really very
beautiful girl.
He talked to her a lot about love and destiny, and all that bric-à-brac
of the minor poet. And they talked together about his genius. He
elaborately, though discreetly, sought her society, and presented and
read to her the milder of his unpublished sonnets. We consider his
Byronic features pasty, but the feminine mind has its own laws. I
suppose, also, where a girl is not a fool, a literary man has an
enormous advantage over any one but a preacher, in the show he can make
of his heart’s wares.
At last a day in that summer came when he met her alone, possibly by
chance, in a quiet lane towards Horley. There were ample hedges on
either side, rich with honeysuckle, vetch, and mullein.
They conversed intimately of his poetic ambitions, and then he read her
those verses of his subsequently published in “Hobson’s Magazine:”
“Tenderly ever, since I have met thee.” He had written these the day
before; and though I think the sentiment is uncommonly trite, there is a
redeeming note of sincerity about the lines not conspicuous in all
Aubrey Vair’s poetry.
He read rather well, and a swell of genuine emotion crept into his voice
as he read, with one white hand thrown out to point the rhythm of the
lines. “Ever, my sweet, for thee,” he concluded, looking up into her
face.
Before he looked up, he had been thinking chiefly of his poem and its
effect. Straightway he forgot it. Her arms hung limply before her, and
her hands were clasped together. Her eyes were very tender.
“Your verses go to the heart,” she said softly.
Her mobile features were capable of wonderful shades of expression. He
suddenly forgot his wife and his position as a minor poet as he looked
at her. It is possible that his classical features may themselves have
undergone a certain transfiguration. For one brief moment—and it was
always to linger in his memory—destiny lifted him out of his vain little
self to a nobler level of simplicity. The copy of “Tenderly ever”
fluttered from his hand. Considerations vanished. Only one thing seemed
of importance.
“I love you,” he said abruptly.
An expression of fear came into her eyes. The grip of her hands upon one
another tightened convulsively. She became very pale.
Then she moved her lips as if to speak, bringing her face slightly
nearer to his. There was nothing in the world at that moment for either
of them but one another. They were both trembling exceedingly. In a
whisper she said, “You love me?”
Aubrey Vair stood quivering and speechless, looking into her eyes. He
had never seen such a light as he saw there before. He was in a wild
tumult of emotion. He was dreadfully scared at what he had done. He
could not say another word. He nodded.
“And this has come to me?” she said presently, in the same awe-stricken
whisper, and then, “Oh, my love, my love!”
And thereupon Aubrey Vair had her clasped to himself, her cheek upon his
shoulder and his lips to hers.
Thus it was that Aubrey Vair came by the cardinal memory of his life. To
this day it recurs in his works.
A little boy clambering in the hedge some way down the lane saw this
group with surprise, and then with scorn and contempt. Recking nothing
of his destiny, he turned away, feeling that he at least could never
come to the unspeakable unmanliness of hugging girls. Unhappily for
Reigate scandal, his shame for his sex was altogether too deep for
words.
An hour after, Aubrey Vair returned home in a hushed mood. There were
muffins after his own heart for his tea—Mrs. Aubrey Vair had had hers.
And there were chrysanthemums, chiefly white ones,—flowers he loved,—set
out in the china bowl he was wont to praise. And his wife came behind
him to kiss him as he sat eating.
“De lill Jummuns,” she remarked, kissing him under the ear.
Then it came into the mind of Aubrey Vair with startling clearness,
while his ear was being kissed, and with his mouth full of muffin, that
life is a singularly complex thing.
The summer passed at last into the harvest-time, and the leaves began
falling. It was evening, the warm sunset light still touched the Downs,
but up the valley a blue haze was creeping. One or two lamps in Reigate
were already alight.
About half-way up the slanting road that scales the Downs, there is a
wooden seat where one may obtain a fine view of the red villas scattered
below, and of the succession of blue hills beyond. Here the girl with
the shadowy face was sitting.
She had a book on her knees, but it lay neglected. She was leaning
forward, her chin resting upon her hand. She was looking across the
valley into the darkening sky, with troubled eyes.
Aubrey Vair appeared through the hazel-bushes, and sat down beside her.
He held half a dozen dead leaves in his hand.
She did not alter her attitude. “Well?” she said.
“Is it to be flight?” he asked.
Aubrey Vair was rather pale. He had been having bad nights latterly,
with dreams of the Continental Express Mrs. Aubrey Vair possibly even in
pursuit,—he always fancied her making the tragedy ridiculous by
tearfully bringing additional pairs of socks, and any such trifles he
had forgotten, with her,—all Reigate and Redhill in commotion. He had
never eloped before, and he had visions of difficulties with hotel
proprietors. Mrs. Aubrey Vair might telegraph ahead. Even he had had a
prophetic vision of a headline in a halfpenny evening newspaper: “Young
Lady abducts a Minor Poet.” So there was a quaver in his voice as he
asked, “Is it to be flight?”
“As you will,” she answered, still not looking at him.
“I want you to consider particularly how this will affect you. A man,”
said Aubrey Vair, slowly, and staring hard at the leaves in his hand,
“even gains a certain éclat in these affairs. But to a woman it is
ruin—social, moral.”
“This is not love,” said the girl in white.
“Ah, my dearest! Think of yourself.”
“Stupid!” she said, under her breath.
“You spoke?”
“Nothing.”
“But cannot we go on, meeting one another, loving one another, without
any great scandal or misery? Could we not—”
“That,” interrupted Miss Smith, “would be unspeakably horrible.”
“This is a dreadful conversation to me. Life is so intricate, such a web
of subtle strands binds us this way and that. I cannot tell what is
right. You must consider—”
“A man would break such strands.”
“There is no manliness,” said Aubrey Vair, with a sudden glow of moral
exaltation, “in doing wrong. My love—”
“We could at least die together, dearest,” she said discontentedly.
“Good Lord!” said Aubrey Vair. “I mean—consider my wife.”
“You have not considered her hitherto.”
“There is a flavour—of cowardice, of desertion, about suicide,” said
Aubrey Vair. “Frankly, I have the English prejudice, and do not like any
kind of running away.”
Miss Smith smiled very faintly. “I see clearly now what I did not see.
My love and yours are very different things.”
“Possibly it is a sexual difference,” said Aubrey Vair; and then,
feeling the remark inadequate, he relapsed into silence.
They sat for some time without a word. The two lights in Reigate below
multiplied to a score of bright points, and, above, one star had become
visible. She began laughing, an almost noiseless, hysterical laugh that
jarred unaccountably upon Aubrey Vair.
Presently she stood up. “They will wonder where I am,” she said. “I
think I must be going.”
He followed her to the road. “Then this is the end?” he said, with a
curious mixture of relief and poignant regret.
“Yes, this is the end,” she answered, and turned away.
There straightway dropped into the soul of Aubrey Vair a sense of
infinite loss. It was an altogether new sensation. She was perhaps
twenty yards away, when he groaned aloud with the weight of it, and
suddenly began running after her with his arms extended.
“Annie,” he cried,—“Annie! I have been talking _rot_. Annie, now I know
I love you! I cannot spare you. This must not be. I did not understand.”
The weight was horrible.
“Oh, stop, Annie!” he cried, with a breaking voice, and there were tears
on his face.
She turned upon him suddenly, with a look of annoyance, and his arms
fell by his side. His expression changed at the sight of her pale face.
“You do not understand,” she said. “I have said good-bye.”
She looked at him; he was evidently greatly distressed, a little out of
breath, and he had just stopped blubbering. His contemptible quality
reached the pathetic. She came up close to him, and, taking his damp
Byronic visage between her hands, she kissed him again and again.
“Good-bye, little man that I loved,” she said; “and good-bye to this
folly of love.”
Then, with something that may have been a laugh or a sob,—she herself,
when she came to write it all in her novel, did not know which,—she
turned and hurried away again, and went out of the path that Aubrey Vair
must pursue, at the cross-roads.
Aubrey Vair stood, where she had kissed him, with a mind as inactive as
his body, until her white dress had disappeared. Then he gave an
involuntary sigh, a large, exhaustive expiration, and so awoke himself,
and began walking, pensively dragging his feet through the dead leaves,
home. Emotions are terrible things.
“Do you like the potatoes, dear?” asked Mrs. Aubrey Vair at dinner. “I
cooked them myself.”
Aubrey Vair descended slowly from cloudy, impalpable meditations to the
level of fried potatoes. “These potatoes—” he remarked, after a pause
during which he was struggling with recollection. “Yes. These potatoes
have exactly the tints of the dead leaves of the hazel.”
“What a fanciful poet it is!” said Mrs. Aubrey Vair. “Taste them. They
are very nice potatoes indeed.”