you see they don’t understand. Mother says I can take lessons from Miss
Rowe at Dorminster. _Miss Rowe!_” She laughed derisively. “And father
says if I sing well enough to please them at home, and to lead in the
choir, what more do I want? They expect me to trot round with mother
on her district calls, when I’m really only in the way. Mother _likes_
doing it. She wouldn’t give up her work to me even if I wished it.
And I’m supposed to do needlework for the children, when poor Mrs.
Jones down the village would be glad of it, and ought to have it. And
they think I’m awful and ungrateful not to be quite happy with tennis
parties and flower shows for my amusement! Oh Miss Page, don’t you
think to be a daughter at home, with no money, at the mercy of your
parents, unable to get away, is just like being a slave?”
She poured out the words passionately. Her hands were shaking, her eyes
full of tears.
Anne looked at her, and a wave of comprehension and pity passed over
her heart.
The girl’s incoherent words were echoes; they touched painful memories
of years for her, long past.
She recognized the despairing cry of youth, articulate in these modern
times, no longer stifled as in the days of her own girlhood.
Youth, fettered, struggling with passionate clamour to be free.
She recognized the revolt of a temperament unsuited to its environment,
bound by a tyranny no less stifling because it was unconscious and even
loving.
She rose, and began to walk about the room, conscious of the modern
spirit, accepting it as inevitable, and in spite of all the misery it
involved, right in its essence, a necessary step towards the just claim
for individual liberty.
Sylvia watched her hungrily, like a prisoner who has staked his
existence on the goodwill and clemency of a ruler.
“I will do what I can, Sylvia,” she said at last. “I will speak to your
father. I think you ought to go.”
The girl’s face grew radiant. “Oh, you’re an _angel_!” she cried. “What
should I do without you? Speak to him soon, Miss Page!” she implored.
“I can’t bear it any longer. I really can’t. I get on so badly with
father now, and with mother too. I can’t help it. I know I’ve got an
awful temper, but they irritate me so, and----”
Anne sat down beside her on the sofa. “I will speak to your father,”
she repeated. “But, my dear, I know it’s a hard, perhaps almost an
impossible thing to ask you, but try to see your parents’ point of view
as well as your own. They _have_ one, you know,” she added, smiling.
“One that belongs to their age and the traditions of their education.
To them, though you don’t believe it, their standpoint is as important
as yours to you.”
“But you think mine is right?” demanded Sylvia, breathlessly.
Miss Page laughed. “For you, yes. But I’m sorry for your people.”
“I believe you’re sorry for every one,” said Sylvia, after a pause.
“There’s a tendency to get sorrier for most people as one gets older, I
admit. You must bear with me, Sylvia.”
The girl flushed. “Now you’re laughing at me,” she said.
“No. Only remembering how I felt at your age, and being very sorry for
you too.”
“Ought I to see every one’s point of view as you do?”
“You couldn’t. It’s not to be expected of you. And after all, it’s
right that you shouldn’t. It’s the young who make history, and history
is made by seeing one thing at a time to the exclusion of every other
consideration. It’s only in the autumn of life that one has time to be
sorry. But still my dear, you can be kind even without comprehension.
Remember the immortal remark that our parents are fellow-creatures
after all.”
She looked at the girl whimsically, and Sylvia laughed.
“How angry father would be to hear you say that!” she cried. “But you
wouldn’t say it to him, of course,” she added.
“You know it’s only nonsense; and there’s such a thing as tact, my
dear.”
“I know,” sighed Sylvia. “I haven’t got any.”
“That’s another of the things that comes with age.”
“All the nice things come with age, I believe.”
“Well, age should have _some_ compensations,” returned Anne, gaily.
“You have _all_ of them,” Sylvia declared. “All the pretty things that
generally belong to girls, and all the interesting things that ought to
belong to women. It isn’t fair. You know how to talk to every one. I
should _love_ to hear what you say to father. It would be too amusing!
Mrs. Dakin came in this morning, and said you were wonderful with the
Frenchman who dined here last night. And the way you talk to Dr. Dakin
is quite different from the way you talk to father. And of course,
you’re quite different with me again. You always remind me of that
verse in the Bible about being all things to all men!”
“You’re really a terrible young woman!” was Miss Page’s reply. “Go and
sing me something. It’s the only way to stop you from proving me a
monster of duplicity.”
“No, no,” urged Sylvia, eagerly. “You only speak to people as they
can understand. But the wonderful thing is, that you know by instinct
exactly what they _will_ understand, and exactly how to say it.”
“Go and sing,” repeated Anne.
Sylvia went laughing to the piano. “I feel awfully happy. I must think
of something that suits.”
She considered a moment, and then broke into a gay little love-song,
with a charming refrain.
Anne listened, and as she listened, her determination grew. Sylvia was
right. She must go. Her voice was worth cultivating, even at the price
of parental displeasure.
“Thank you dear,” she said as the clear, ringing notes ceased. “I feel
as though a nightingale with brains had been kind enough to fly into my
room.”
“What else would you like?” Sylvia turned her head as she sat at the
piano, playing rippling notes with her left hand. The cloud had left
her face, and her parted red lips were very sweet.
Anne hesitated a moment. “You read music easily, don’t you? I wonder
whether you could sing me a little French song?”
She got up, and opening a cupboard in the wall, began to turn over some
papers.
“Here it is,” she said at last.
Sylvia left her place, and knelt beside her friends chair, taking the
music from her hand.
There were some words upon the cover, but they were in French, and in a
difficult handwriting.
Anne opened the page rather quickly. “You see it’s quite short and
quite simple,” she observed.
“Let me read the words first, and you must correct my pronunciation.”
She began to say the lines a little falteringly, but her quick ear soon
found their lilt, and she read them well.
“How pretty! They’re quite easy words. I can understand them,” she
said, going to the piano again. “Who wrote them?”
Anne did not answer, and Sylvia, engrossed in trying the accompaniment,
forgot her question.
“I see how it goes!” she exclaimed, playing the first bars.
Involuntarily, as she began the first bar, Miss Page put out a quick
hand as though to stop her, but the girl sang on unconsciously, and the
hand dropped at her side.
“It’s lovely!” Sylvia cried, playing the last notes softly over again.
“Thank you, dear,” said Anne, gently. She had crossed the room, and
was trying on her garden hat.
With one hand she gathered up the folds of her long gown.
“The sun is off the roses now, and I’m going to give you some to take
home to your mother. Come out and help me pick them.”
V
Dr. Dakin’s house stood in the village street. It was a plain Georgian
dwelling of a type common to every English country town; a type which
admirably combines comfort with a certain homely dignity.
It was covered with ivy, carefully trimmed where the rows of
square-paned windows broke the front, and its long, narrow door was
surmounted by the conventional classic design of skulls and garlands.
As Miss Page crossed the road towards the post-office one morning late
in September, Mrs. Dakin tapped at the window of the breakfast-room,
and then ran to the door.
Anne smiled as she crossed the threshold. “Why, Madge, what is it? You
look radiant, my dear!”
“I am. I mean I feel radiant. Come in. Do come in. I want to tell you.”
Her voice shook with suppressed excitement, as Anne followed her across
the stone-flagged hall to a room on the right.
“I’m going to Paris for a long visit!” she exclaimed, drawing up a
chair for her friend close to the window. “What do you think of that?”
“I didn’t know you had friends in Paris.”
“Oh yes. Didn’t I ever tell you about Helen Didier? She was one of my
school-fellows at the convent near Tours, where I went for a year. She
married a Frenchman.”
“And she lives in Paris?”
“Yes. I haven’t seen her for ages--scarcely once since we both married.
But I took it into my head to write to her a week or two ago, and just
fancy! You’ll be awfully interested. She knows Monsieur Fontenelle
quite well. Her husband is a friend of his.”
Anne looked up rather quickly. “Really?”
“Yes. Isn’t it strange? I happened to mention him when I wrote to her,
and she knew all about him. She would, naturally, as he’s such a great
man; but it’s awfully exciting that he should be a friend, isn’t it?”
“What does Harry say?” asked Anne.
“Oh, he doesn’t mind. He says it will do me good to have a change.”
“He will miss you horribly, my dear.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “He’s so busy, you know. And when he’s at
home, he’s always buried in his books. Besides, he knows I must have a
change. My nerves get worse and worse, and I’m always having neuralgia.
I sleep badly, too.”
“You mustn’t look so brilliant, then,” returned Anne, laughing. “You’ll
be considered a fraud.”
“It’s nothing but joy,” Madge declared. “You know I’ve never been to
Paris. And just think of getting out of this hole for two or three
months, perhaps. I could scream with excitement at the bare idea!”
“When do you go?”
“Next month. I shall be awfully interested to meet Monsieur Fontenelle
again,” she added. “He’s so clever, isn’t he? I’m rather afraid of him.
I envy you for getting on with him so well.”
Anne smiled.
“Why has he never been to see you before?”
“He’s not often in England now, though he travels a great deal, and is
very cosmopolitan.”
“How on earth has he learnt to speak English so perfectly?”
“He has English relations--Lady Farringchurch is one of them. And as a
young man he studied over here with a friend. But in any case he’s a
wonderful linguist naturally.”
“What interesting people you must have met!” exclaimed Madge, looking
rather curiously at her visitor. “I suppose you met him during all
those years you were travelling? I often wonder how you stand this
miserable little dead-and-alive place. You must have had such an
exciting life.”
Anne did not reply for a moment.
“My dear,” she said at last quietly, “when you come to my age, your
garden, your books, and your friends make a very pleasant haven before
you set sail.”
“And your memories, I suppose?” Madge glanced again swiftly at her
friend.
“And your memories--yes,” Anne repeated.
“I shall have none,” declared Madge, restlessly. “None that count.”
Miss Page was silent. “Oh! I know you think me an ungrateful wretch!”
she broke out, leaning back in her chair and tapping her foot
impatiently. “Harry’s very good and all that. But I’m so _bored_.
I’m bored from morning till night. When I get up every morning I
think--‘Here’s another dull day, what on earth shall I do with it?’ And
sometimes it doesn’t seem worth while to get up and go on.”
Anne watched her as she stared moodily into the narrow trim garden,
discontent and listlessness plainly expressed by her eyes and drooping
mouth.
She was a woman loved faithfully and with infinite tenderness. If
she had allowed them expression, Anne’s reflection would have been
translated by a smile and a sigh, both of them utterly unintelligible
to the little woman at her side. Both of them were therefore repressed.
“Well!” she said aloud. “I hope you’ll have a very gay time. I’m very
glad for you, my dear. Go and be happy. Where does your friend live?”
“Over by the Parc Monceau, wherever that is. _Do_ tell me what it’s
like?” she begged, all animation again.
Anne stayed a few minutes longer, talking about Paris, and then rose to
go.
Mrs. Dakin kissed her affectionately. “I wish you were going with me. I
shall miss you horribly!” she declared.
She followed Anne to the door, and stood a moment, waving and smiling
as her friend crossed the street.
All the bored discontent had vanished from her face, and her husband,
who at the moment drove up in his car, thought she had never looked
prettier.
The reflection was accompanied by a curious dull pain at his heart, a
pain to which he was well accustomed.
“I’ll drive you home,” he called to Miss Page, stopping his car at the
opposite pavement.
“So Madge is going to Paris?” she said, as they swept off.
“Yes. I hope it will do her good,” he returned shortly. “She complains
of neuralgia. Perhaps a change will set that right. I hear the little
Carfax girl is going to London to study this autumn?” he added after a
moment. “She’s off her head with delight about it. That’s _your_ doing,
of course.”
“Well, I suggested it to her father,” Anne admitted.
He laughed. “We all know your suggestions. When a witch ‘suggests,’
mere man is instantly hypnotized. Poor old Carfax can do nothing now,
but put his hand in his pocket and produce the necessary fees.”
Anne smiled. “Come in and look at my hollyhocks,” she said, as they
turned into the drive. “They’re really worth seeing.”
The doctor followed her through the house and across the lawn into one
of the walled gardens. “How gorgeous!” he exclaimed, as she opened the
gate.
The enclosure was a blaze of colour. Wine-red, white faintly flushed
with pink, yellow soft as a sunset sky, the flowers stood close
together in stately rows.
Behind them, on either side of the dividing grass path, masses of
phlox, white and rose and crimson, continued the wave of colour till it
was arrested by the enclosing walls.
“Look at the butterflies,” said the doctor, instinctively lowering his
voice as though he feared to disturb them.
They hovered in numbers above the silken cups of the hollyhocks. On the
sulphur-coloured petals of one of them, a Purple Emperor, motionless,
extended his splendid wings. Here and there, dazzling in fairy armour
of peacock-blue and sheen of silver, darted a dragon-fly.
“The colour of the thing is intoxicating,” murmured Dr. Dakin.
“It reminded me this morning of an elaborately arranged ‘sensation’
scheme, planned by that madman in _À Rebours_. Only of course, he would
have despised such a homely natural flower as the hollyhock.”
The doctor smiled. “What a curious anomaly you are here, my dear lady!”
he declared suddenly. “And yet that’s not true either, because you also
suit the place to perfection. Huysmans, and a country practice, and
Carfax--and you! It’s an amazing world. I hope some intelligent Being
doesn’t miss the exquisite humour of many human juxtapositions,” he
added rather drily.
“I’m glad Sylvia’s going to study,” was Miss Page’s somewhat irrelevant
reply. “She has a beautiful voice.”
“Quite remarkable,” he agreed. “She’ll be a difficult young woman
though, if that face of hers means anything. I don’t know that you
haven’t thrown her to the lions.”
“My dear doctor, isn’t it better to meet the lions, and take one’s
chance, than to be preyed upon by restlessness and discontent till the
whole of one’s character is worm-eaten?” asked Anne, quietly.
The doctor stooped to examine the Purple Emperor which still lay
motionless, basking in the sunshine.
When he raised his head Anne saw the trouble in his eyes.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. Then abruptly, after a moment, “I wish
I could give Madge the life that would suit her!” he exclaimed, jerking
out the words awkwardly.
Miss Page waited a moment. “What do you think _would_ suit her?” she
asked gently.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “She wants to live in London, you
know. She wants a gayer life. But I should be no use in town. I
shouldn’t make a living even. I haven’t the manner. It’s as much as I
can do to hold my own here.”
“Every one who knows you, ends by being thankful to find a splendid
friend as well as an excellent doctor,” returned Anne.
The bitterness in his face softened. “If all the world were like you,”
he began with a little laugh, and paused. “I’m glad they’re not,
though. There must only be one Miss Page. But that’s it,” he went on,
“I must know people well--better than one could ever know them in the
rush of a London practice, where the polished manner I don’t possess is
absolutely necessary.”
There was a silence, while they walked the length of the grass path
together.
“I ought never to have married Madge,” he broke out at last, in a low
voice. “She’s too pretty, and too gay by nature, for a slow coach like
me. This village life is too dull for her. She wants her dances, her
theatres”--he made a vague gesture--“all that sort of thing. I can’t
make her happy.”
There was a note of sad discouragement in his voice which went to his
listener’s heart.
“I think you could,” she said.
He turned his head sharply. “How?” The involuntary hope died. He shook
his head. “She’s bored with me.”
“Partly I think, because she imagines you are bored with her.”
He started. “_I?_ Bored with Madge?” He stopped, as though suddenly
arrested, and stood staring down at the grass. “I--I don’t think you
understand how much I--care for Madge. She’s the only woman I ever
wanted to marry. I----”
His voice failed. Miss Page saw that his face was working.
“I _do_ know. Better than any one, perhaps. But I don’t think you
understand her.”
He looked at her mutely, waiting for her next words.
“You think of her as a butterfly, don’t you? A woman with no brains,
perhaps? Oh! I know,” she interrupted, as he made a gesture of protest.
“I know that would make no difference.” She smiled a little. “A man
doesn’t want the woman he loves to have brains. But they are useful
sometimes. In her case they may be very useful. She would like a life
of gaiety, of course. She’s young and pretty, and it’s only natural.
But she can’t have it. Very well then, if she were nothing but a
butterfly, her lot--and yours, would be hard. But Madge has a mind.
Oh, she’s ignorant, of course! She says so herself. She never reads.
She never thinks. But that’s habit. No one has ever taken any trouble
with her. Did you notice how interested she was the evening we were
really talking--the evening Monsieur Fontenelle dined here? She was
proud of you then. She wished she could take part in the conversation.
Her mind is empty because she has never troubled to fill it. But it’s a
mind of good quality. She has the power to be interested in a thousand
things. You could open a new world to her, if you were careful--and had
a little tact. And we all know that you possess that admirable quality!”
The flattery of her smile was not lost upon the doctor.
Surprise, involuntary hope, gratitude, admiration, all struggled in the
look with which he regarded her.
“You always say the right thing,” he declared simply. “I didn’t know
the child----” He paused, but there was a look of sudden tenderness in
his eyes. “Well! she’s going away now,” he began.
“And that’s such a good thing,” interrupted Miss Page, eagerly. “She
will hear and see so much to interest her. She will come back with new
impressions. You will have something to work on.”
They strolled out of the garden together, and across the lawn without
speaking.
“Good-bye,” said the doctor, starting as though from a deep reverie, as
he found himself opposite his car.
He pressed her hand warmly. “You have made me much happier,” he added
shyly.
“But don’t forget to tell her very often that you love her, and that
she’s the prettiest thing in the world!” Miss Page admonished him, with
a laugh. “There are remarks which never bore a woman, however many
times they are repeated. Those are two of them.”
VI
The midday post had come while Miss Page and the doctor talked in the
garden.
As she passed through the hall after the motor-car had disappeared,
Anne found her letters lying upon the table.
She turned them over, and lighted with satisfaction upon one with a
foreign postmark.
Her correspondence with François Fontenelle--a correspondence of
fifteen years’ duration--had never ceased to be a pleasure to her.
She picked up his letter, and went through the inner hall into the
garden, to the seat under the beech tree.
Several things on the first page made her laugh. François was evidently
in a gay mood when he wrote. He had more work with portraits than he
could get through. He described his sitters with the light raillery
he managed so well, presenting them to his reader with a felicity of
phrase, a touch as skilful and clever as she well knew the portraits
themselves must possess.
It was better to be François Fontenelle’s friend than his enemy, Miss
Page reflected, and smiled to remember the rash women who now crowded
to his studio, anxious to be painted by the popular if distinguished
artist.
She guessed how many of them winced in secret at the result, and
marvelled that fashion, as well as religion, should exact its willing
martyrs.
“_I hear_,” he said towards the end of the letter, “_that I’m likely
to renew my acquaintance with your little friend, Mrs. Dakin. By a
strange chance, the wife of a friend of mine, Louis Didier, knew her
as a school-girl--went to school with her, I think; and she has been
asked to visit them. Louis Didier is a good fellow--an architect. No.
You never met him. I have known him myself only two or three years.
He belongs to the younger generation. C’est un bon garçon, though his
work is mediocre enough. I don’t like his wife. I suspect her of being
what you in England call a cat, though to me she is amiable enough. I
may possibly have struck terror into her feline heart. When you are in
Rome I want you to go again to the Farnesina Palace, and look at the
Correggio. You know the one I mean?_” The letter ended with talk about
pictures.
Anne read it to the last word, and then sat with it still unfolded
in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the drooping branches of the beech
under which she sat.
Its leaves were already yellow, and it rose like a fountain of gold
towards the quiet September sky. All round the eaves of the house
the swallows were skimming and crying, in the unrest of an imminent
parting, and the hazy sunshine wrapped the garden in a dream of peace.
Anne too, sat dreaming. Ever since the visit of her friend, earlier in
the summer, her thoughts had developed a tendency to wander back over
the years before their meeting.
To-day it was of her first five years at Fairholme Court that she was
thinking.
She remembered driving up to the house that was now her home.
She remembered walking through the hall into the drawing-room,
distressfully conscious, even through her shyness, of the desecrated
stateliness of a dwelling meant for beauty.
True, she would not in those days have known with what to replace the
gaudy Axminster carpet in the hall, nor the arsenic green curtains at
the drawing-room windows. But little as she had seen, little as she
then knew of material loveliness, the right instinct she possessed for
form and colour was outraged at every turn by the indications at once
trivial and ponderous of Mid-Victorian taste.
As she entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Burbage rose from the sofa on
which she had been lying, a woollen rug of rainbow hues thrown across
her feet.
She was a little old woman with grey, corkscrew curls hanging in
bunches over her ears, keen eyes, and a mouth which combined shrewdness
and suspicion.
She looked Anne up and down with a penetrating glance.
“I didn’t think you would have grown so tall,” she remarked. “You were
a little creature when I last saw you. Ring for tea, my dear, and then
I dare say you would like to go to your room. Parker will show you.
Make yourself at home, and amuse yourself in your own way, if you can
find anything to do in this dull place. I don’t want you to think you
need trouble about running after me, unless I ask for you. I hate fuss.
There will be time enough for that when I get worse.”
The words struck the keynote of the future relationship between the two
women.
Even at that time Anne’s benefactress was a semi-invalid who did not
rise till noon, and usually spent the rest of the day on the sofa,
knitting interminably. Her illness, not at first severe, made any
but the slightest attention unnecessary. She was a woman a little
eccentric, often difficult in temper, but never exacting in trifles.
Her great abhorrence was what she called “fuss” of any sort, and as she
frequently preferred to be alone, she left Anne for the most part free.
Her duties gradually became those of general supervision of the
household, which composed as it was of elderly well-trained servants,
proved no arduous task.
Few callers came to the house. There was never anything in the nature
of entertainment at Fairholme Court. The days went on. Monotonously,
peacefully, spring glided into summer, summer to autumn; the winters
came and went.