between the old woman and her companion, who moved so gently, whose
voice was so soothing, who was always at hand when she happened to be
wanted--never in the way when her presence was not required.
Anne practically led her own isolated life. Too shy to make any
advances, the people of her own grade in the village, from the outset,
ignored the companion of a woman who had never been popular. She was
just a quiet, harmless creature, lady-like certainly, but very dull,
whom they occasionally pitied for being shut up with “that disagreeable
Mrs. Burbage.”
Anne found the bedroom she had loved as a child, now her own, almost
unchanged. The rosebuds on the wall were faded certainly, but the
dimity valance at the window, the white curtains to the bed were fresh
and spotless, and the “spindly” furniture remained. The white roses had
grown much taller. They clambered round the window now, and far above
her head, looked down at her as she opened it in the morning.
The library was also unaltered, and in this room, and in the garden,
Anne found all the joy of her life.
She was permitted to do what she liked with the garden, and, under the
direction of the old gardener, who rejoiced to find some one who loved
the work, and, delighted in its results, Anne planned and planted and
laid the foundation for the beauty that now surrounded her. The hours
in the open air restored her health. Insensibly, she grew strong and
straight. Her always graceful figure developed, and though it was
marred by the ill-cut gowns of the village dressmaker, she carried it
superbly.
Through the long winter days, the library was her solace and delight.
At first, imperfectly educated as she was, unused to reading, owing
to lack of time and lack of opportunity, she was bewildered by the
numberless books through which she was free to range.
But gradually she found her way; made a path for herself, and followed
it to find it leading her to distant prospects. Mr. Burbage, a gentle
and scholarly recluse with a catholic taste in literature, had left a
fine and widely representative library behind him, containing not only
the masterpieces of French as well as English prose and poetry, but
many curious and rare volumes dealing with the less frequented roads of
mental travel.
Anne found history, biography, philosophy, in sufficient quantities to
last her for a lifetime.
She found curious memoirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
as well as books on magic, on alchemy, on all the strange and recondite
studies which at various periods have exercised human thought.
French literature was well represented, and impelled by interest
and curiosity, Anne began to recall the little of the language she
had learnt with her governess as a child. In this endeavour she
unexpectedly found a ready teacher in Mrs. Burbage, who, educated in
a French convent up to the time of her marriage, spoke the language
fluently, and liked to speak it. Naturally gifted as a linguist, Anne
learnt quickly, and often from choice, as time went on, the two women
spoke French together, rather than English.
But it was to the English poets that Anne most often returned.
Poetry suited her nature. It was the form of art which to her, most
fully expressed the heights and depths, the beauty and the terror,
the haunting melancholy, the fear, the inexpressible longings, the
regrets, the sadness, the innocent delights of life, which, in all its
complexity, she had begun to recognize through the world of books.
In life, men went down to the sea in ships, and did business in
great waters. In life, there had been beautiful cities, in which a
many-coloured crowd of citizens and soldiers, of artists and thinkers,
had jostled and fought, and painted their thoughts in churches,
and on palace walls; built them into soaring towers, and mighty
cathedrals; woven them into immortal books, and lived them in schemes
for the regeneration of the world. In life, as Anne had come to
know it through her reading, there had been, and still were, fierce
passions of love and hate, swaying men and women as the trees of a
forest are swayed by a rushing wind. Passions which had given birth
to the great stories of the world--the stories of Helen of Troy, of
Abelard and Heloise, of Launcelot and Guinevere, of Romeo and Juliet.
In life, running like a dark mysterious stream, among the simpler
sensations, the more elemental passions of humanity, there had been
strange terrors, haunting curiosities, insatiable longings for the
unattainable, the unknowable, the unrealized--the desire of the moth
for the star.
In life too, there had always existed the fresh unspoiled delight in
Nature’s loveliness; in the charming natural embroidery of earth’s
garment. Delight in the simple things out of which, as her favourite
Herrick told her, he rejoiced to make his songs.
“_I sing of Books, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers;
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers----_”
In poetry, as in a mirror, Anne found the result of all her reading
reflected and transfigured.
It summed up for her all that she had learnt from other books, of love
and life, and hope of immortality.
She began with Chaucer, and found him sweet and fresh and hardy as the
hawthorn blossom with which he powders his English meadows. She found
in him all the simple and tender emotions which have existed in the
heart of man since he became human. The love of Custance for her child
delighted her.
“Pees litel sone, I wol do thee no harm:
With that hire couverchief of hire hed she braid,
And over his litel eyen she it laid.
* * * * *
O litel child, alas! what is thy gilt
That never wroughtest sinne as yet parde?”
The gentle, natural words, written five hundred years ago, went to
her heart. She loved the gaiety, the bustle, the gossip, the sense of
colour and vitality in that long procession which wound from the Tabard
Inn, along the white roads full of sunshine, which led to Canterbury.
She read the ballads which like vivid lightning flashes illumine the
darkness of the Middle Ages, and show the mainsprings of human action
to be ever the old mainsprings of love and hate.
She came to the Elizabethan poets--to the period when England had
become “a nest of singing birds.” She found Spenser’s glorious
love-song, and the wonderful cry in which Marlowe’s Faust links one
great love-story to another.
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss----”
She learnt to know so well that they haunted her thoughts like music,
the sonnets of Shakespeare, and the lyrics of all the “singing birds,”
Lodge and Peele and Nash, Ben Jonson and Campion, who, a musician in
every sense of the word, framed his “Ayres for one voyce with the Lute
or Violl,” so as “to couple words and notes lovingly together.” She
came to Milton, and the lighter poets of the Restoration, of whom her
love was given chiefly to Herrick. The poets of comparatively modern
times followed, and led her in due time to Keats and Shelley, who
revealed to her the modern note of unrest, and the troubling effect
on the human spirit, of beauty, whether revealed as to Keats in the
material world, or as to Shelley in the intangible world of ideas. With
these two poets, the library, formed in her old friend’s youth, paused
abruptly in its representations of English poetry.
Anne found no volume of Browning, nor of Tennyson, on the shelves.
In her friend’s day they were young, untried men, as in a still
greater degree, were Swinburne, Morris, and Meredith.
But without them, Anne, like Keats, had travelled in the realms of
gold, and the new planet that swam into her ken was the very world in
which for thirty years she had lived blind and a prisoner, ignorant of
its beauty, deaf to its calling voices.
It was of her five years of solitary reading that Anne was thinking as
she sat in the September sunshine with François’s letter open on her
lap.
She had read, she had thought. Imaginatively, she had entered into the
life of the great world outside her country home.
But of actual individual experience of one personal heart-beat, known
to thousands of men and women past and present, she was as ignorant at
thirty-five as she had been all through her quiet existence.
Like the Lady of Shalott, she sat weaving her tapestry of dreams before
a magic mirror in which the pageant of the world was nothing but a
reflection; a shadow-dance of figures, loving, hating, struggling;
pursuing brave adventures, triumphing or defeated, hopeful or
despairing.
Miss Page folded her letter, and replaced it slowly in its envelope.
It was the day for her class of village children, whom she taught to
sew, and to whom, while they wrestled with long seams, she read fairy
tales.
There was tea in the garden afterwards, and she had forgotten to tell
Burks to put out the strawberry jam.
She rose, and went into the house to repair the omission.
VII
“We shall have a very dull winter,” complained Mrs. Carfax, “with so
many of you away. Sylvia and Mrs. Dakin have gone already, and now you
are going to desert us. We shall feel quite lost.”
It was a damp afternoon in mid-October, and the wood-fire in Miss
Page’s drawing-room glowed cheerfully.
The tea-table was drawn up near its blaze, and Mrs. Carfax leant back
comfortably in the corner of the sofa, sipping her tea and eating hot
cakes appreciatively.
“So you’re going to Rome?” she continued. “We hoped as you didn’t go
away last year you had become reconciled to an English winter.”
“I didn’t mean to go,” confessed Anne. “I was very happy here last
year. But somehow this autumn I have begun to long for more sunshine. I
know we’ve had a lovely summer, and I ought to be content, but the rain
of the last fortnight has decided me.”
She glanced with a little shiver towards the drenched garden. The rain
had been too persistent to make much sweeping of leaves practicable,
and the grass was strewn with them, yellow, battered and rotting.
“Tell me about Sylvia!” she inquired. “I heard from her the other day,
but I dare say you have later news. She seems very happy.”
“Oh, she writes in excellent spirits, as of course she would, now she’s
got her own way.”
Mrs. Carfax’s expression was one of rather irritable displeasure,
and Anne’s inward reflections turned on that deplorable yet possibly
comprehensible antagonism which so frequently exists between children
and parents; the tie of blood so binding, yet so provocative of mutual
adverse criticism, involuntary irritation and impatience.
“Do you like the boarding-house?” she asked.
“Oh yes. Very nice. Her father and I took her there last week, you
know. I couldn’t be easy till I’d seen what sort of place she was in.
And men are no good at that sort of thing.” She helped herself to
another tea-cake.
“Oh yes,” she repeated, “it’s a very comfortable house; on the
Embankment, I think you call it. At any rate, it’s quite close to the
school where she takes her lessons. Sylvia shares a sitting-room with
Susie Villiers, one of her school-fellows who is studying at the Slade,
is it? I always forget the names of these places. It’s a house built on
purpose for students, I understand. _Most_ comfortable. Hot and cold
water on every floor, and bathrooms, and a beautiful dining-room. To my
mind it’s all _too_ luxurious. Everything is done nowadays, it seems to
me, to tempt young people from their homes.”
Mrs. Carfax gave an exasperated sigh.
“But Sylvia has a great gift, dear Mrs. Carfax,” pleaded Anne. “It
isn’t as though she leaves home to do nothing.”
“That’s what her father says now. He never used to. He always upheld
me in maintaining that the place of the eldest daughter is at home.
I don’t know what you could have said to change him so, Miss Page,
but ever since he talked to you about Sylvia, his cry is that it’s
sinful not to use the gifts with which God has endowed us. Men are so
inconsistent; and if they’re clergymen they always seem able to quote
some text to annoy you. I don’t mean to be profane, but sometimes I
have found the Bible most trying.”
Mrs. Carfax sighed again.
“She has a lovely voice. You will be proud of her one day,” declared
Miss Page, with her disarming smile.
“But what is she going to do with it? I would never consent to a child
of mine singing in public, with her name in newspapers, and on placards
and all that! It would break my heart.”
“Still you needn’t think of the future yet, need you? She has years of
training before her.”
“But if she’s not going to do anything with it, what a waste of money!”
exclaimed Mrs. Carfax, tragically. “I think it’s much better for girls
not to have gifts,” she added.
Miss Page was rather disposed to consider that her guest had uttered a
great truth.
Her reply however, was non-committal.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But if they _do_ possess them don’t you agree
with Mr. Carfax that it’s right to cultivate them? A gift of any sort
is such a worrying thing,” she added persuasively. “And if it’s allowed
to rust, it chiefly worries its possessor. Now that she’s doing what
she was born to do, Sylvia will be contented. I _don’t_ think it’s just
because she’s getting her own way that she’s happy. It’s deeper than
that. She’s satisfied because she’s fulfilling a need of her nature for
which she’s no more responsible than she is for the colour of her very
pretty eyes.”
Anne’s voice was so gentle, her smile so irresistible, that Mrs. Carfax
was visibly softened.
“At any rate I’m glad it’s not art she’s got a taste for,” she conceded.
To Mrs. Carfax, painting, to the exclusion of all the other activities
of the Muses, was art, as Miss Page understood.
“You wouldn’t like her to paint?”
“Oh landscapes and flowers, and that sort of thing is all right. A very
nice amusement. I’ve got lots of water-colour sketches I did as a girl,
and hand-painted screens, and sofa cushions too. But nowadays art is
such a shocking thing, isn’t it? I hear that Susie Villiers draws from
the nude, as they call it. To me, it’s a perfectly disgusting idea.
And they draw _men_, as well as women. Imagine a young girl having the
boldness to draw a man without his clothes!”
“Do have some of this toast before it gets cold,” urged Anne. “Oh!
while I think of it I wish you would tell me how to make that delicious
shortbread I tasted the last time I came to you.”
Mrs. Carfax, adroitly switched off the topic of art as she understood
it, was on firm ground now that culinary operations held the
conversational field.
She gave minute directions to which her friend listened with flattering
attention.
“I must write that down before I forget it,” said Anne, opening a
bureau to take from it her book of recipes.
“How beautifully orderly you are!” exclaimed her guest, glancing with
admiration at the packets of papers tied with ribbon, the piles of
little books which filled the pigeonholes. “What a pity you never
married. You would have made _such_ a good wife. The wives of to-day
are shocking housekeepers. Look at that flighty little Mrs. Dakin! The
doctor, poor man, must suffer a good deal. I doubt whether he ever gets
a decent meal. Don’t you think it’s very extraordinary of him to let
her go away for such a long visit as she proposes to make? I think that
kind of thing is a mistake, you know.”
Launched upon the stream of gossip for which she possessed a
considerable weakness, Mrs. Carfax shook her head portentously.
“He thinks it will be good for her health. She’s not very strong, is
she? And this place doesn’t suit her in the winter.”
“Oh! I don’t think there’s much the matter with her health,” answered
Mrs. Carfax with a touch of scorn. “She hasn’t anything else to think
of. She hasn’t enough to do, that’s what’s the matter with her. One or
two children would soon make her forget her ailments. Poor Dr. Dakin! I
_don’t_ think she’s very nice to him, do you? I often pity him.”
“But I’m quite sure they’re devoted to one another,” began Miss Page,
hailing with relief the entrance of the Vicar, who had called to fetch
his wife, and to bid their hostess farewell.
“Well, dear lady!” he exclaimed in his hearty voice. “So you’re off to
the land of perpetual sunshine to-morrow. Lucky woman! And Rome too, a
city which I have always had a great desire to visit. Most interesting.
Most interesting. But you leave us desolate.”
“How kind of you to come and say good-bye! My farewells this week have
made me quite sad,” declared Anne. “I hate last days.”
“We shall all miss you terribly. You leave a heart-broken community
behind you,” said the Vicar. “Poor Dakin is already bemoaning his fate,
bereft of his wife and of you. It’s a good thing Sylvia isn’t here, or
we should have had nothing but lamentations till the spring.”
“You all spoil me,” Anne said in a moved voice. “We have been talking
about Sylvia,” she went on rather hurriedly. “I’m so glad she’s happy.”
“Best thing for her. Quite the right thing!” declared the Vicar
emphatically. “I’m always telling my wife that gifts are ours as a
sacred trust. Moreover, when the girl comes back for the holidays and
so on, she will appreciate her home, and we shall all get on much
better in consequence. Girls as well as boys must find their own paths,
and make their own lives. To thwart them only leads to unnecessary
friction, and is after all unjust. Every girl should have her chance.”
If Miss Page smiled in secret to find the ideas she had implanted in
the Vicar’s mind so well assimilated that they re-appeared in the form
of original conviction, no trace of her amusement was visible.
“I’m sure Mrs. Carfax will find that you’re right,” was her remark, as
she smiled at the lady in question.
Mrs. Carfax kissed her affectionately. “Good-bye. I’m sure we’re
preventing you from looking after your packing,” she said.
“Good-bye,” echoed her husband, enclosing Anne’s frail hand in his
vigorous clasp. “Don’t let Sylvia bother you with too many letters. I
am convinced that I’ve done the right thing by the child in sticking to
my own ideas.”
He smiled the manly smile of self-confidence and wisdom denied to
women, and Miss Page, following her visitors to the hall-door, waved to
them as they went down the drive together.
* * * * *
The amusement that she need no longer repress, was in her eyes, as she
went upstairs to her room; the gentle tolerant amusement of a woman old
enough to look at life with kindly sympathy for its absurdities, and
that charity without which the spectacle has a tendency to move to a
mirth as bitter and more cruel than anger.
She found Burks on her knees before a trunk, still engaged in packing.
“That will do, Burks. I’ll finish it myself,” she said. “You go down
and get your tea.”
After the maid had left, Anne opened the door which led from her
bedroom into her sitting-room, and examined the shelves with the idea
of choosing one or two favourite books to take with her on her journey.
The books in this room were chiefly modern, supplementing the library
downstairs.
She chose one or two French novels, and a little volume of Herrick,
which had found its way to the shelves mostly devoted to French
literature. Then she returned to the bedroom, which was already bright
with lamp and firelight.
She hesitated a moment, then went to the bureau, from which several
months before she had taken her old journal.
This time she sought for, and found another book. After adjusting the
spring, and locking the writing part of the piece of furniture, she
thrust this volume, without looking at it, deep into her nearly filled
trunk.
VIII
Anne always returned with pleasure to Rome, a city which she knew well,
and to which she was bound by many memories. She settled down happily
with her maid in the little hotel in the heart of the city, at which
she frequently stayed.
It had been chosen chiefly on account of the garden which her rooms
overlooked--one of those charming Roman gardens, full of orange-trees
in tubs, of oleanders, and of clambering vines.
A fountain splashed in the midst, and the sound of its falling water
was music in her ears.
The deep blue sky, the dazzling sunshine never ceased to fill her
with a sense of buoyancy and youth, and all her wanderings to distant
churches, to ruined temples; amongst pictures, and statues, were a
delight.
One morning, when she had tired herself by a long ramble through
the halls and corridors of the Vatican, she returned with the
determination to do nothing for the rest of the day, but read and be
lazy.
She went to her room after lunch, her mind filled with the beauty of
the Borgia rooms in which she had just lingered.
The ribbed ceilings, rich with the gorgeous colour of the emblems and
coats-of-arms of the princely house, the marble pavements, the lofty
windows, formed the empty frame into which her fancy painted pictures
of the scenes those rooms had beheld. She heard the rustle of dresses
stiff with gold and gems; she caught the backward glance of many a
face; the face of Isabella d’Este, of Beatrice, of Lucrezia, framed in
the golden hair she washed so frequently, and tended with such care.
“_What’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?_”
Browning’s words had come to Anne’s mind as she stood for a moment
alone in one of the ante-chambers, and glanced about her as though
expecting it to be full of ghosts.
She wondered how many of these golden-haired women had loved the
painted walls upon which her eyes now rested. Those wonderful frescoes
of Pinturicchio with their background of valley and mountain, and their
flower-starred meadows; their animals and birds, their fantastic
towers, their dainty figures, fanciful and charming as a fairy tale.
She hoped they had loved them, and praised the painter with their
sweetest smiles.
Outside in the garden, the fountain splashed in the sunshine, and
suddenly its melody was the melody of her own fountain in her own
English garden at home.
She thought of it lovingly, and planned a new hedge of briar-roses in
the sunny corner where the dovecote stood.
Gradually the memory of the garden filled her mind, and blotted out the
stately visions of palaces and princes.
It grew peopled with well-known figures, with men who twenty years ago
had walked with her across its green lawn, had sat with her under its
trees, laughing, talking, reading, sometimes, but rarely silent.
Presently she rose, and took from a locked drawer the book she had
brought from home, and till this moment, forgotten.
Sitting in the sunshine, with the splash of the fountain sounding in
her ears, Anne opened it.
“_March 3._ Hugh came home last November to marry Alice,” were
the first words that met her eyes.
“They have taken a little furnished cottage by the sea, at St.
Margaret’s Bay near Dover, and they want me to stay with them
before they sail for New Zealand. Mrs. Burbage says of course I
must go, and I start to-morrow to be with them for a fortnight.
I long to see Hugh again, but I’m shy at the thought of meeting
his wife. I have never seen her.”
Except for the mention of her return to Fairholme Court, there was
nothing written in the book from that date, till May of the same year,
and the painful colour crept into Anne’s face as she noticed this.
There was no need for written record. Clearly, as though she had
recently lived through the experience, she remembered that fortnight’s
visit.
She remembered getting out of the train at the wayside station, the
nearest station touched by the railroad, for St. Margaret’s Bay. Her
heart was beating rather fast. It was eighteen years since she had seen
Hugh. Should she recognize him? He would not know her. When he last
came home she was a girl of seventeen. The thought of her present age
struck her with a shock of dismay.
There were only two people on the platform. A big burly man, tall and
bearded, and beside him a girl in a white serge dress.
Hugh and his wife!
“I am Anne,” she stammered, going up to them.
Hugh put his arms round her with his old impulsive roughness, and then
held her away from him.
“Why, you’ve grown, Anne!” he cried gaily. “You were such a little
thing! So slight, I mean. Darling, this is Anne. Isn’t she a damned
fine woman?”
His old laugh rang out boyishly, as Anne turned shyly to his wife.