There is a little village in North Devon, sheltered from the sea by a
low range of sand-hills that stretches for miles on each side of it. The
coast turns westward here, and no cliff breaks that line of billowy
sand; northward and southward it goes, with the rhythmic monotony of the
sea. The sand-hills are dotted with tufts of the long star-grass, where
the rabbits sit; inland they are covered with fine blades bitten short
by the sheep. Seaward lies the hard ribbed sand, glistening with salt,
and fringed with the white surf of the Atlantic.
On the coast, about a mile from the village, there is a long one-storyed
bungalow, built on the sand-hills. The sand is in the garden, where no
flowers grow but sea-pinks and the wild horn-poppy; it lies in drifts
about the verandah, and is whirled by the Atlantic storms on to the low
thatched roof. The house stands alone but for a few fishermen's huts
beside it, huddled close together for neighbourhood.
Here, because it was the most man-forsaken spot she knew, Audrey had
come, exchanging the roar of London for the roar of the Atlantic. She
thought she would find consolation in the presence of Nature. London had
become intolerable to her. Everywhere she turned she was reminded of the
hateful Laura. Laura stood open in the window of every book-shop; Laura
lay on every drawing-room table; there was no getting away from her. And
yet Audrey's notoriety had won her more friends than she had ever had
before. Everywhere people were kind to her; they made much of her; they
said it was "hard lines," it was "a shame," "execrable," "unpardonable,"
and they assured her that nobody thought a bit the worse of her for all
that. Some even went so far as to declare that they saw not the remotest
resemblance between her and the popular heroine. But it was no use.
Nothing could raise her in her own esteem. She fled. She longed to be
alone with Nature. She took the bungalow for the winter; and once there,
she wished she had never come.
She arrived in a storm that lasted some days. She thought she would have
gone mad simply with hearing the mad wind and sea. It was the same
whether she sat indoors listening to them, or she walked out, battling
with the wreaths of whirling sand. After the storm came the dull, grey,
heaving calm,--always the rolling clouds, the rolling sand-hills, and
the rolling sea. That was infinitely worse. And to add to her
depression, Audrey had never been so rigidly confined to the society of
her chaperon; there was nobody else to see or hear, and the boundaries
of the poor lady's intellect were conspicuous in the melancholy waste.
There was no escape from her except into the cold monotony without.
Then February set in warm though grey. One morning Audrey was able to
sit out in a sunny hollow of the sand-hills, where the rabbits had
flattened a nest for her. Then she could think.
She was in the presence of Nature. Art was nothing to this. Art,
in the time of her brief acquaintance with it, had baffled her, and
given her a hint of her own feebleness; but Nature was the great
Incomprehensible--and she was alone with it. Alone, in a lonely land,
peopled mostly by the wild creatures of sea and shore, by peasants and
fishermen, men and women who looked at her with strange eyes and spoke a
strange language; whose ways were dark to her, and their thoughts
unfathomable. She was face to face not only with primitive human beings,
but with the primeval forces of the world--the stern, implacable will of
the wind and sea. Not that she could feel these things thus, for they
lay beyond the range of her emotions; but at the same time they tortured
her. At first it was only by a dull sense of their presence,
annihilating her own. Then, because they were things too great for her
to grasp, they cruelly flung her back upon herself. They had no
revelation for her. But left to herself, bit by bit her own character
was revealed to her,--not as it had appeared to her before--not even as
Wyndham had revealed it to her--but in the nothingness that was its
being. It was stripped bare of all that had clothed it, and ruled it,
and made it seem beautiful in her eyes. Left to herself, all the
influences that had lent colour and consistency to this blank, unstable
nature, had passed out of her life. The men whose destiny she had tried
to mould, who had ended by moulding hers, twisting it now into one
shape, now into another, had done with it at last; they had flung it
from them unshapen as before. There was no permanence even in destiny.
Vincent, whose will had dominated her own; Ted, whose boyish passion had
touched her heart and made her feel; Langley, whose intellect had
kindled hers, and made her able to think,--they were all gone, and she
was alone. That was Langley's doing--Langley, whom alone of the three
she had really loved--ah, she hated him for it now. And hating him, she
remembered the many virtues of the two whom she had not loved well.
Vincent--that was a revelation of love--why had she shut her eyes to it?
Ted too, poor boy, he might have been hers still if she had chosen. She
might have been moulding his destiny at this moment--instead of which,
his destiny was doubtless moulding itself admirably without her.
Then her mood changed. She revolted against the cruelty of her lot. Her
sex was the original, the unpardonable injustice. If she had only been a
man, she could have taken her life into her own hands, and shaped it
according to her will. But woman, even modern woman, is the slave of
circumstances and the fool of fate.
"Audrey, Audrey, my dear!" called a wind-blown voice across the
sand-hills. Solitude had frightened Miss Craven out of the bungalow, and
she was picking her way in and out among the rabbit holes.
North Devon was hateful to cousin Bella. She hated the wastes of sand
and sea, the discomforts of the bungalow, the slow hours uncertainly
measured by meal-times that seemed as if they would never come. Her
brain was wild with unsatisfied curiosity. Yet she had tact in the
presence of real suffering. She had forborne to question Audrey about
the past, and their present life was not fruitful in topics. She did
nothing but wonder. "I wonder when it will be tea-time? I wonder if
there was anything between Audrey and her cousin? I wonder which of
those three gentlemen it was? I wonder when it will be tea-time?" That
was the monotonous rondo of her thoughts to which the sea kept time.
"Audrey, my dear, come in! I think it must be lunch-time," she wailed.
But no answer came from the hollow. She meekly turned, and picked her
way back again across the sand-hills.
Audrey lay hidden till the forlorn little figure was out of sight; then
she got up and looked around her. She shuddered. Her life was as bleak
as the bleak landscape smitten by the salt wind--cold and grey and
formless as the winter sea.
What was that black silhouette on the sands? She strained her eyes to
see. Another figure was making its way towards her from the bungalow.
When it came near she recognised the unofficial rustic who brought
telegrams from the nearest post-town. She waited. The man approached her
with an inane smile on his face.
"Teleegram vur yue, Mizz," he drawled.
She tore open the cover, and read: "Come at once. Vincent dying. Wire
what train you come by.--Katherine."
She crumpled the paper in her clenched hand. The landscape was blotted
out; she saw nothing but the envelope lying at her feet, a dull orange
patch against the greyish sand.
"Any awnzur, Mizz?"
"No." She shut her eyes and tried to realise it. "Yes--yes, there is!
Wait--I must look out my trains first."
She made out that by driving to Barnstaple, and catching the two-o'clock
train, she would reach Waterloo about eight. She sent the man back with
a telegram saying that she would be in Devon Street by nine that evening
at the latest.
It was past one then, and she had yet to pack. It was hopeless--she
could never catch that train. It did not matter; there was another to
Paddington an hour later: it was a slow train, but she would be with
Vincent by eleven.
But she was faint, and had to have some luncheon before she could do
anything; and there was so much to do. She flew hither and thither,
trying to collect her clothes and her thoughts. Her grey cloak and her
bearskins--she would want them, it would be cold in the train. And her
best hat--where was her best hat? Cousin Bella had hidden her best hat.
Ah! she _must_ think, or everything would go wrong. What was it all
about? Vincent dying--dying? Audrey knew little about dying, except that
it was a habit people had of plunging you suddenly into mourning when
you had just ordered a new dress. Death was another of those things she
could not understand.
By the time she had had luncheon, and decided what clothes she would
take, and packed them; by the time the one old fly in the village had
been ordered, and had made its way at a funereal pace to
Barnstaple,--Audrey was just in time to see the three-o'clock train
steaming out of the station. By taking the next train and travelling all
night, she would only reach Paddington at four in the morning.
As she was at last borne on towards London, lying back on the cushions
and trying to sleep, the facts became more clear to her. Vincent was
dying; and he had sent for her. She was exalted once more in her own
eyes.
It seemed to her then that her love for Vincent had been the one stable
and enduring thing in her nature, the link that bound her to a
transfigured past, that gave coherence to a life of episodes.