Scandal was mistaken. Miss Audrey Craven was not in search of a
religion, but she had passed all her life looking for a revelation. She
had no idea of the precise form it was to take, but had never wavered in
her belief that it was there, waiting for her, as it were, round a dark
corner. Hitherto the ideal had shown a provoking reticence; the
perfectly unique sensation had failed to turn up at the critical moment.
Audrey had reached the ripe age of ten before the death of her father
and mother, and this event could not be expected to provide her with a
wholly new emotion. She had been familiarised with sorrow through fine
gradations of funereal tragedy, having witnessed the passing of her
canary, her dormouse, and her rabbit. The end of these engaging
creatures had been peculiarly distressing, hastened as it was by
starvation, under most insanitary conditions.
The age of ten is the age of disenchantment--for those of us who can
take a hint. For Audrey disenchantment never wholly came. She went on
making the same extravagant demands, without a suspicion of the limited
resources of life. It was the way of the Cravens. Up to the last her
father never lost his blind confidence in a world which had provided him
with a great deal of irregular amusement. But the late Mr. Craven could
be wise for others, though not for himself, and he had taken a singular
precaution with regard to his daughter. Not counting the wife whom he
had too soon ceased to care for, he had a low opinion of all women, and
he distrusted Audrey's temperament, judging it probably by his own and
that of his more intimate acquaintance. By a special clause in his will,
she had to wait for her majority four years longer than the term by law
appointed. Further, until she reached her majority she was to spend six
months of the year at Oxford, near her guardian, for the forming and
informing of her mind--always supposing that she had a mind to form. And
now, at the age of five-and-twenty, being the mistress of her own
person, her own income, and her own house in Chelsea, she was still
looking out for a revelation.
Her cousin, Mr. Vincent Hardy, believed that he had been providentially
invented to supply it. But in the nature of things a cousin whom you
have known familiarly from childhood cannot strike you as a revelation.
He is really little better than a more or less animated platitude.
Vincent Hardy would have been unaffectedly surprised if you had told him
so. To himself he seemed the very incarnation of distinguished paradox.
This simply meant that he was one of those who innocently imagine that
they can defy the minor conventions with a rarer grace than other men.
Certainly his was not exactly the sort of figure that convention expects
to find in its drawing-rooms at nine o'clock in the evening. It was in
Audrey's house in Chelsea, the little brown house with discreet white
storm-shutters, that stands back from the Embankment, screened by the
narrow strip of railed plantation known as Chelsea Gardens. Here or
hereabouts Hardy was to be met with at any hour of the day; and late one
July evening he had settled himself, as usual, near a certain "cosy
corner" in the big drawing-room. His face, and especially his nose, was
bronzed with recent exercise in sun and wind, his hair was limp with the
steam of his own speed, and on his forehead his hat had left its mark in
a deep red cincture. His loose shooting jacket, worn open, displayed a
flannel shirt, white, but not too white. This much of Hardy was raised
and supported on his elbow; the rest of him, encased in knickerbockers,
stockings, and exceedingly muddy boots, sprawled with a naive
abandonment at the feet of the owner of the drawing-room. Lying in this
easy attitude, he delivered himself of the following address--
"Life in London is a life for lunatics. And life in England generally is
a glorious life for clergymen and counter-hoppers, but it's not the life
for a man. It was all very well in the last century, you know, when
Englishmen were men first, and lunatics, if they chose, or clergymen or
counter-hoppers, afterwards. Ah! if that wasn't exactly our golden age,
it was the age of our maturity, of our manhood. If you doubt it, read
the literature of the eighteenth century. Take Fielding--no, don't take
Fielding. Anyhow, since then we have added nothing to the fabric of
life. To pile it on above, we've simply been digging away like mad from
below, and at last our top-heavy civilisation is nodding to its fall;
and its fall will sweep us all back into barbarism again. Then, when we
are forced back into natural conditions, the new race will be born. No
more of your big-headed, spindle-shanked manikins: we shall have a
chance then of seeing a _man_--that is, a perfect animal. You may turn
up your nose, my superfine lady: let me tell you that this glorious
animalism means sanity, and sanity means strength, and strength means
virtue. _Vis--vir--virtus_, ma'am."
Hardy sat up and caressed the calves of his legs with thoughtful
emotion, as if he recognised them as the sources of the moral law within
him. His cousin had not followed his precipitate logic. With woman's
well-known aversion from the abstract, she was concentrating her
attention on the concrete case, the glorious animal before her. Now it
would be very wrong to suppose that Hardy was in the least tainted with
socialism, anarchism, or any such pestilent heresies, or that he had
read "Emile" and "Walden." He had never heard of either of these works,
and had no desire whatever for the restoration of society on a primitive
basis of animalism, modified by light literature, clothing, and the
moral law. For all modern theories he had a withering contempt, his own
simple creed being that in the beginning God made man a Tory squire. His
quarrel with the social order was a purely private and particular one.
In our modern mythology, Custom, Circumstance, and Heredity are the
three Fates that weave the web of human life. Hardy did not wholly
sympathise with this belief. He had too profound a respect for his own
pedigree to lay his sins at his great-grandfather's door. As the nephew
of a Tory squire, he was but two degrees removed from original
righteousness. In spite of this consideration, he was wont to describe
himself with engaging candour as a "bad hat." In doing so he recognised
that he was a dependent part of a vast and complicated system. If he,
Vincent Hardy, was a bad hat, who was to blame for it? Obviously,
civilisation for providing him with temptation, and society for
supplying encouragement. As a consequence he owed both civilisation and
society a grudge.
"Therefore I say that a return to barbarism will be our salvation. You
and I mayn't live to see the day, but----"
Here the impassioned orator, who had been making charges at his boots
with the point of his walking-stick, succeeded in detaching a large
cake of mud, which he immediately ground to powder on the carpet.
Civilisation personified in Audrey Craven gazed at him in polite
reproach.
"My new carpet will certainly not live to see it. It may be part of the
detestable social order, but it is not responsible for it, any more than
I am."
"Never mind, Audrey. It's honest Hertfordshire mud--clean from the
country as God made it, if I hadn't had to cross your filthy London in
order to get here."
Audrey smiled, though she knew that brown streaks of the honest
Hertfordshire mud marked the hero's passage from the doorway to her
feet. She was naturally long-suffering, and seldom repulsed any one,
save a few of the more impertinent of her own sex. She lay back in her
cosy corner, outwardly contemplating the unusual length of muscular
humanity extended before her, inwardly admiring her own smile, a smile
of indulgent lips and arch eyebrows, in which the eyes preserved a
languid neutrality.
Being thus pleasantly preoccupied, she may be supposed ignorant of her
cousin's broad gaze of unreflecting admiration, and totally unprepared
for his rapid change of theme.
"Audrey," he began, with alarming suddenness, "some people would lead up
to the subject cautiously. That would only waste time, and time's
everything now. Is Miss Craven at home?"
"Miss Craven is always at home when I am. Would you like to see her?"
"See her? Good heavens, no! Do you know positively where she is
secreting herself, or must I lock the door?"
"That is unnecessary. She will not come in--she never does."
A suspicious look darted from the corners of Hardy's eyes.
"Except when I ask her," added Audrey, sweetly.
"Well, then, if you can ensure me against the sort of interruption that
annoyed me before, we will return to the question we were discussing
when----"
"Please don't go over any old ground. That would bore me."
"It would bore _me_. I will begin where we left off. The problem, if you
remember, was this--to put it baldly--do you care for me, or do you
not?"
"Didn't we get any farther than that?"
"No, we didn't."
"Do I--or--do I not? Really I cannot tell you, Vincent, for I don't know
myself."
"Nonsense! there's no logical dilemma. You can't go on for ever treating
it as an open question."
"Well--you draw such absurdly hard-and-fast lines."
"Audrey, do you honestly suppose that I've walked here thirty miles,
parboiled between sun and rain, in order to be made a fool of?" (in his
excitement Hardy forgot that twenty miles was the precise distance, and
that he had much better have taken the train). "How much longer are you
going to keep up this fiendish cat-and-mouse sort of game?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that ten years is a devil of a time to keep a man waiting for
his answer."
"Ten years?--ten days, you mean."
"Excuse me, I broached this subject for the first time ten years ago."
"Oh, I daresay, when we were both children."
"We are neither of us children now, Audrey."
"Speak for yourself. I was an infant in the eyes of the law till the
other day."
"You are--let me see--five-and-twenty. If you have any mind at all, you
must have made it up by this time."
"The case would be much easier if you were not such a mass of
inconsistency yourself."
"I've been consistent enough in one respect. Do you remember the first
time you stayed with us at Woodford, when you weren't much higher than
that table, and how you and I set off together for Wanstead Woods?"
"Yes--before breakfast. I have never forgotten it."
"Nor I. You did rile me that day, Audrey. You waited till we came within
a stone's-throw of the woods, and then you sat down in a turnip field
and cried because you couldn't go any farther."
"After running at your heels for two miles, like a dog."
"Yes--and, with the irresponsibility of the inferior animal, eating up
the whole of the cake I provided for us both."
"It was perfectly fair; you dragged me out against my will."
"So you argued at the time, but I couldn't follow your reasoning.
Perhaps you have forgotten how I carried you on my back to Woodford, and
then gave the milkman sixpence to drive us the rest of the way home. And
you were such a contemptible little snob that you cried again because
you had to sit next the milkman."
"I remember perfectly. You only carried me as far as Red Bridge, in a
position the most comfortable for yourself and the most undignified for
me. You borrowed that sixpence from me and never paid me again; and we
were _both_ punished with dry bread for breakfast, because we were seen
in the milk-cart."
"The abominable injustice of my parents was of a piece with the whole
system I complain of. You will observe that we were punished, not for
disobedience, but for riding in a milk-cart, and not so much for being
in it as for being seen in it."
"Exactly, otherwise the reminiscence would be slightly irrelevant."
"Not at all. It illustrates my thorough-going consistency. I loved you
then, in spite of your detestable conduct in the matter of that cake,
and I have loved you ever since in spite of your other faults."
"Thank you."
"I suppose you would prefer some hypocrite who told you that you had
none?"
"On the contrary, I enjoy being told of my faults."
This was true. If it came to the point, Audrey would boldly offer her
own character for dissection rather than suffer conversation to be
diverted to a less interesting topic. Hardy had rather neglected these
opportunities for psychological study, and herein lay the secret of his
failure. He continued, adopting a more practical line of argument
suggested by the episode of the sixpence--
"It's not as if you were a millionaire and I a grovelling pauper. I
shall have Lavernac and two thousand a-year when my uncle, Sir
Theophilus Parker, dies." Hardy rolled out the title with a certain
proprietary unction; his cousin had no share in this enviable
relationship. "I give the old bird five years at the very worst, and
it's a moral impossibility that he should leave me in the lurch. But I
don't count on that. My own property has kept me idle all my life; but
I've sold it at last, and, as I said just now, I am going out to Canada
to farm."
Audrey blushed, and punished her blush with a frown. If she had been
playing the amusing game that Hardy suggested, it was one thing to give
the mouse a little run in order to renew the pleasures of the chase,
another thing to let him escape altogether from her paws. Hardy saw his
advantage and followed it up.
"When I told you that I had done with civilisation, I suppose you
thought it was a joke?"
"I did. Only I couldn't see the point."
"The point is this, that I'm going down to Liverpool to-morrow, and
shall sail for Canada this day week. I can't stand it any longer. I
can't breathe here. Town or country, it's all the same--the air chokes
me, it's teeming with moral bacilli. You never thought I was so
particular? No more did I----". He paused, knitting his brows. "I admit
frankly that I'm a bad hat. This place has been my ruin, as it has of
many a better man than me. Perhaps, if it hadn't been for you,
Audrey--but I won't press that point; it wouldn't be generous, however
just. Anyhow, whatever my past has been, my future lies in your hands. I
would say your love was life or death to me, but that wouldn't be
anywhere near the truth. It's not so much a question of death as a
question of damnation."
Hardy was desperately in earnest, but not so much so as to be careless
of rhetorical effect. In his desire to represent himself as a fallen
angel he had done himself no little injustice, as well as grossly
exaggerated the power of Audrey's regenerative influence.
She was evidently moved. She took no pains to restrain the trembling of
her lips, more than was necessary to preserve their delicate outline.
Hardy had paid homage to her as the superior being.
It marked an epoch in the history of his passion.
He rose to his feet and looked down on her as from a height. A fallen
angel is not without his epic sublimity.
The lady hesitated. She pulled out the tremolo stop, and then spoke.
"You say that if it hadn't been for me--I don't quite understand you,
but you are mistaken if you think I never cared for you--never cared, I
mean to say, for your good." She also rose, with an air of having made a
statement as final as it was clear and convincing. He laid his hand on
her shoulder and looked steadily in her face. There was no evasion in
her eyes, but her eyelids quivered.
"It's all right, Audrey; you never have denied that you love me, and you
can't for the life of you deny it now."
She did not attempt to; for the entrance of the footman with coffee made
denial indecent at the moment, if not impossible. That _deus ex machina_
from below the stage retired, unconscious of the imminent catastrophe he
had averted. But he had brought into the little drama a certain prosaic
element. Coffee and romantic passion do not go hand in hand.
Then it seemed to Audrey that the welcome interval of commonplace lapsed
into a dream, in which Hardy's voice went sounding on in interminable
monologue.
"I shall hear the wind, Audrey, rushing over prairies infinite as the
sea; I shall see the great wall of the Rockies rising sky-high. And
England will seem like a little piece of patchwork, with a pattern of
mole-hills for mountains, and brooks for rivers. And when I've set our
Canadian farm going, I shall hunt big game. And when I've exterminated
the last bison off the face of the boundless prairie, I shall devote
myself to literature."
"Literature?" she echoed faintly. It was all so grotesquely strange that
even this announcement brought only a dreamlike surprise.
"Yes, literature. Do you think literature is only produced by the
miserable noodles who sit in their studies at home, till their muscles
wither and their hearts get flabby? _My_ book will be a man's book, with
a man's blood and a man's brains in it. It will be a book that will make
posterity sit up. And when you have enjoyed the fame of it a little,
we'll go out again together. In Canada we shall find a new heaven and a
new earth."
She sat silent and passive. The situation had a charm which she was
powerless to break. It seemed as if the mere brute force through which
Hardy had dominated her intellect hitherto, had become refined by some
extraordinary process, and was exerting a moral influence over her. In
order to assert herself against the intolerable fascination she rose
hastily and crossed the room to where her piano stood open in the
corner.
She played loud and long,--wild Polish music, alive with the beating
pulses of love and frenzy and despair. It would have roused another man
to sublime enthusiasm or delirious rapture.
It sent Hardy to sleep.
Stretched on the hearthrug, with slackened jaw, and great chest heaving
with regular rise and fall, he slept like a tired dog. She played on,
and as she played he dreamed that he stood with her in the midst of the
burning prairie, they two on a little ring of charred black earth, an
island in a roaring sea of fire. The ring grew smaller and smaller, till
they could only find standing-room by clinging close together. As he
turned to her she thrust him from her into the sea of fire, crying,
"It's perfectly fair, Vincent, for you dragged me here against my will!"
He woke with a snort as the music suddenly ceased. It was midnight. He
had to start from home early next morning, and if he delayed longer he
would lose the last train out.
He parted from Audrey as only the traveller outward bound parts from his
betrothed. In fact, as she remarked afterwards, "For the fuss he made
about it he might have been going to the North Pole with his life in his
hands. So like Vincent!" As for Hardy, he felt already the wind of the
new heaven and the sweetness of the new earth.
Audrey was staring abstractedly into the looking-glass, when she heard
the front-door shut with a violent bang, and the sound of his quick
footsteps on the pavement below. She came to herself with a cold shiver.
What had she done? Surely she had not gone and engaged herself to
Vincent? bound herself in the first year of her liberty to a man she had
known all her life, and her own cousin too?
It was impossible; for, you see, it would have argued great weakness of
mind and a total want of originality.