face, despite her twenty-five years, was still babyish with its large
blue eyes and rings of soft hair round a childish forehead. She took
her sister-in-law’s hand and smiled, but even then, Anne did not miss
the quick glance that scrutinized her quizzically from head to foot.
From that moment, she knew that for Alice she was merely a dowdily
dressed woman; an old maid, some one to be treated with patronizing
kindliness.
They drove from the station to the cottage, which was almost upon the
seashore.
“Hugh loves the sea. He can’t be happy away from it, can you, darling?”
Alice asked, slipping her hand into his, as they entered the little
parlour where tea was spread.
“Now Anne, tell us all about it!” exclaimed Hugh as they sat down.
“Bless my soul, it’s seventeen or eighteen years since I saw you. What
have you been doing all this time?”
A sudden paralyzing blankness fell upon Anne’s mind.
What had she been doing? For thirteen years after her brother’s last
departure, she had lived in the little house in Tufton Street, managing
the house work, anxiously counting her weekly allowance for fear that
with all her pains, both ends could not be made to meet. She had
nursed a hopeless invalid, and tried to bear his exacting temper with
patience. For the last five of the eighteen years she had read books,
and worked in the garden. There was nothing to tell them.
Instinctively she felt that to these people who belonged to practical
life, who lived and loved, who were in the mainstream of human
activity, her world of books meant nothing.
The colour rushed to her cheeks, and left them white.
“I--I have done nothing at all,” she stammered. “You know I have been
living with Mrs. Burbage for five years? She’s very kind. But she’s
almost an invalid, so we’re--we’re very quiet. Tell me about yourself,
Hugh. Things are always happening to you.”
“Well, _this_ has happened to me,” he returned with a laugh, slipping
his arm round his wife’s shoulder. “The best thing that ever happened
in my life.”
Alice drew close to him with a little nestling movement, and Anne
suddenly felt a sickening pain at her heart.
“Don’t be so silly, Hugh! Any one would think we were lovers,” she
declared, turning to her sister-in-law. “And we’ve been married ages.
Nearly four months.”
“Well, aren’t we lovers?” demanded Hugh, shaking her. “Answer me at
once. Aren’t we?”
She got up laughing, and kissed the top of his head.
“Of course we are. But don’t be silly!” she commanded. She blushed, but
her eyes were bright with happiness.
“Oh never mind Anne!” said Hugh. “She’s one of the family. She doesn’t
count.”
The light, kindly meant words caused Anne another strange pang. She
didn’t count. Of course she didn’t count. Why should she?
“How lovely the sea is!” she exclaimed hastily. “I can’t look at it
enough. You know I’ve only seen it once before.”
“Nonsense! How’s that?” asked Hugh, with the easy forgetfulness of a
man who does not realize the straitened life in which he never had a
part.
“I never went away,” said Anne, simply. “There was no money. Once
when I was a child, Miss Atkins took me for a day to Broadstairs. You
remember Miss Atkins?”
“Old Thomas? She was Anne’s governess, and exactly like a
tortoise-shell cat,” he explained turning to his wife. “Yes, what’s
become of her?”
“Dead,” said Anne. “She died ten years ago.”
“Poor old thing!” returned Hugh perfunctorily. “Darling, won’t you
show Anne her room, and then we can go for a walk before supper. Isn’t
it warm here!” he exclaimed, leaning from the open window. “It’s so
sheltered you see with the cliffs at the back. Make haste, Anne. We’ll
take you on to the downs, and show you the sea to your heart’s content.”
At supper the talk was all about Hugh. His past adventures, his future
prospects. He had worked hard, and was now partner of the promising
sheep farm in New Zealand, to which next month he proposed to return
with his wife.
“I tell Alice it won’t be a very gay existence for her. She doesn’t
look much like a farmers wife, does she?” He threw her an admiring
glance. “But she declares she won’t mind.”
“_You’ll_ be there,” was Alice’s only comment.
“Oh yes! And there are neighbours too. Very jolly people. And Bob
Holmes, that’s my partner, you know, Anne, is an awfully decent fellow.
You’ll like his wife, Alice. She’s such a cheery little woman. Oh! it’s
not so bad. And the climate’s splendid. Lord! how one misses the sun in
this damp misty old country!”
“It will be lovely. I’m longing to go,” Alice exclaimed.
“You see she’s only got an uncle and aunt to leave,” explained Hugh,
turning to his sister. “She’s a very lonely little person.”
“Not now,” said Alice, her voice full of content.
* * * * *
Before she had been with them two days, Anne had found herself filled
with a passionate longing to return to her quiet home. To get back to
the shelter in which she was not reminded twenty times an hour that she
“didn’t count.”
She was amazed at the violence of her own emotions.
Every glance exchanged by the married lovers, every word of love, every
caress, stabbed her afresh.
She had never before known what it was to feel acutely, and the
suffering bewildered her. She was afraid of it. She wanted desperately
to escape from herself, this new self which seemed all torn and
bleeding.
There was a hunted look in her eyes like that of a starving and
desperate animal. She shuddered at them sometimes when they met her
suddenly in the glass. One evening, unable to bear the sight of their
endearments, she had gone early to her room, pleading a headache. She
groped her way to the window, in the dark, and kneeling down beside it,
looked out upon the sea.
Every few minutes, a flash from the lighthouse on the cliffs
momentarily illumined the still water. Far out, lights moved on the
prow of passing ships. She could hear the wash and murmur of the waves,
as they broke lazily on the pebbly shore.
For a long time she knelt there immovable, the sound of the sea
lulling her into a sort of painless trance, till the hum of voices
below gradually filtered to her senses. The evening was so warm that
Hugh and his wife were sitting in the garden. At first, numbed and half
conscious in mind, she scarcely heeded the murmur of talk, but finally
a sentence in a man’s voice reached her consciousness.
“Nonsense, darling! She’s not at all bad looking. Well dressed, she’d
be a fine figure of a woman.”
“Why is she so dowdy then?”
“She lives in the country, you see. I suppose there’s no one to dress
for. And after all what does it matter?”
There was a little laugh. “No. She’s too old now. She’ll never marry.”
Again there was an incoherent murmur. “Yes I know, darling, it’s boring
for you. But she’s had a dreary life, poor girl. I want you to be nice
to her.”
“I _am_ nice,” the answer came in a hurt voice, and was followed
immediately by a rustle.
“I know you are. You’re a darling. You’re the sweetest thing on this
earth!”
There was a sound of a kiss, and Anne drew back from the window with a
quick movement.
“Hush!” The exclamation came swiftly from Hugh.
“Oh! it’s all right. Her light’s out. She’s asleep.”
Anne closed the window noiselessly to shut out the voices to which
she had listened without her will, scarcely conscious of how they had
reached her. She threw herself on her bed in the dark. After all, as
Hugh said, it didn’t matter. But she cried all night as though it did.
In the journal which Miss Page held open on her knee, she saw the date
of her return recorded.
“_Came back to Fairholme Court, March 17th._”
She remembered her old friend’s greeting, as she went to find her in
the morning-room, where she was lying on the sofa.
“Why, Anne! Sea air doesn’t suit you. You’ve got thin, my dear. You
look quite ill. You mustn’t go away again.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I will never go away again.”
She remembered going into the library before she took off her walking
things, looking round at the walls lined with books, and wondering why
they had ever meant anything to her at all.
“Books are no good,” she said to herself, as she went upstairs.
“This also is vanity,” was what the words implied.
* * * * *
Miss Page looked out with a sort of surprise upon the garden steeped in
sunshine. The fountain was still splashing gaily into its marble basin.
In the blue overhead, two pigeons flashed and wheeled. She had been
living over again the life of many years ago, with such intensity of
vision and of feeling, that her present surroundings had the unreality
of a dream.
After a few moments, she turned the next page, knowing well what she
should find, yet curious to see the words in her own handwriting of
twenty years ago.
“_May 15th.--We have had visitors to-day for the first time
almost, since I have lived here. They were all men, too, and
Frenchmen. The parents of one of them, Monsieur René Dampierre,
knew Mrs. Burbage long ago, and he called and brought three
friends with him._”
As Anne slowly turned the pages, isolated paragraphs met her eye.
“_I felt horribly shy at first, but only for a little while.
They were all so nice. I suppose Frenchmen have easier manners
than Englishmen, though I have had no experience of either._”
“_Monsieur Fontenelle is very amusing and clever. I like his
face, though he looks sarcastic, and I’m sure he can say bitter
things. But he never says them to me._”
“_Mrs. Burbage wanted me to describe Monsieur Dampierre in
whom she is chiefly interested, because she knew him when he
was a child. I found it very difficult. When I had said that
he was tall, and broad-shouldered, and very fair and handsome,
it seemed as though I had said nothing. It’s his smile and his
changing face which make up his personality--a very charming
one._”
All through that summer there were short entries concerning the little
colony of Frenchmen that had settled in the village.
Anne glanced at them with a smile. It was a very sweet smile, scarcely
sad, scarcely regretful. It was the smile of content with which a woman
bends over a bowl of dried rose-leaves, and feels again the warmth of
the sun, and sees the glitter and the blueness of the day when the
leaves were red.
IX
It was grey and cheerless in Paris, while Anne sat in the sunshine of
Rome.
Winter had set in early, and in François’s studio the stove piled with
fuel was almost insufficient to warm the great room.
It was as he had suggested, the typical luxurious studio of a rich man.
A broad divan under the window, was piled with cushions, and supported
by them in an attitude suggestive of extreme comfort, François sat and
smoked while he talked to an old friend.
The Vicomte de Montmédy, rich now, through his marriage with an
American heiress, was a lover of the arts, a connoisseur and a buyer of
pictures.
Fontenelle had known him in the days when he was only a struggling and
unsuccessful painter.
His title and his noble birth, had stood him in better stead than his
talent. That this was of an inferior quality to his fine taste in art,
François had early recognized, and his felicitations on the subject of
his prudent marriage had therefore gained an added warmth and fervour
of approval.
The two men had been talking while the daylight waned, and when
François, finding his match-box empty, rose to refill it from a jar
on a side table, he paused to glance with a shiver upon the prospect
outside the window.
The studio looked upon the Luxembourg Gardens. The trees were bare now,
and their branches showed black and stiff against a wintry sky.
The paths underneath them, in summer gay as the flower beds, with
children and their nurses, were now lightly powdered with the first
fall of snow.
“I ought to have gone abroad,” he declared, lighting a cigarette. “If
it were not for these confounded commissions, I should be in Rome at
this moment. There’s no light here. It’s abominable!”
“Why Rome?” asked the Vicomte lazily.
“I love Rome. And then sweet Anne Page is there, and she’s always an
attraction.”
The other man looked up quickly. “By the way, it’s _her_ portrait the
Luxembourg has bought, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” He made a quick movement. “Good heavens man, it’s here, and I’ve
never shown it to you. I forgot you hadn’t seen it. It goes next week.
I kept it to do a little work on the background first.”
“Quick! Show me before the light goes,” urged his friend. “I was always
curious about it.”
François crossed the studio rapidly, and returned with a large canvas.
“The best thing I ever did in my life,” he said deliberately, as he
placed it on an easel in the middle of the room.
The Vicomte had risen, and in a silence that lasted for some time the
men stood before the picture.
“Charming!” he murmured at last. “Adorable! They’ve picked out the
right thing, _mon ami, hein_? The smile! How well one remembers it.
So sweet, and so shy. And that flowered gown. Admirable! It suggests
one of the Botticelli Madonnas. It might be a robe all sown with
stars. And the hair, that delicious soft hair that was no particular
colour--_couleur de miel_, perhaps.”
“Mistress Anne Page? She has brown hair, and speaks small, like a
woman,” quoted François softly.
“What’s that?”
“It’s Shakespeare. And it’s Anne Page,” he answered smiling.
“And the flowers! The great sheaf of flowers she’s carrying. They’re
English, and ‘sweet-Anne’ too.”
Fontenelle looked amused. “You always pronounced it like that,--as one
word!” he said.
“I used to think it _was_ one word. Just a Christian name; a lovely
name.”
He joined in his friend’s laugh.
“When did you do this?” he asked after a moment.
“Just before she went.”
“Was I away then?”
“You were just married. You had gone to America with your wife.”
“Yes. I stayed a year. But when I came back why didn’t you show it to
me?”
“I put it away. She wouldn’t accept it, and I didn’t want to see it,
after she had gone. I never looked at it again till last spring. Paul!
Do you know that picture’s been painted eighteen years, and I’ve never
done anything to touch it since? Encouraging, isn’t it? Something to
congratulate one’s self upon.”
The last words were accompanied by a bitter laugh. His friend was
silent.
“Here comes tea,” said François, with an abrupt change of voice.
His _femme de ménage_ entered with a tray which she placed on one of
the tables. She went out, and re-entered with the spirit lamp and
kettle.
“_Voilà, Monsieur!_”
François began to put the tea into the teapot.
“Antoinette brews it abominably; I always make it myself,” he remarked.
“This tea-habit dates from ‘Sweet Anne’s’ time, doesn’t it?” asked the
Vicomte.
“I believe it does. Do you remember the flat in the Rue Vaugirard? And
Anne pouring out tea on winter afternoons?”
Before the other man could answer, he turned to the picture again.
“I painted that as a sort of memory of the first day I saw her, in an
old English garden. Did I ever tell you how we four, the old four, you
know, first met Anne Page? _You_ only knew her here in Paris, when she
had learnt to dress, when she had learnt to talk, when she had grown
used to us and our ways. We saw her in her garden, when she knew no
one, when from year’s end to year’s end she spoke to no one but the
invalid old woman with whom she lived.”
“What were you four doing in her garden?” inquired the Vicomte, helping
himself to sugar.
“Well, René was in England. He was often there, visiting his
relations--his mother’s people.
“You know he was educated in England? Went to school there, to
Beaumont, and afterwards lived some time in London. René was an
Englishman with at least half his nature. And he loved England because
of his mother. Well, he wrote to me that year--to Thouret, Dacier and
me, to suggest that we should join him for the summer. He told us he’d
found a gorgeous village, where we could all paint and write, and go
on with our beastly art as much as we liked. We thought it wouldn’t be
bad, so we said all right, and packed up our traps and went.
“Have some more tea? Well, another cigarette?
“Dymfield is in Warwickshire, _mon cher_,” he went on, striking a
match, “and Warwickshire is Shakespeare’s county, and Anne Page is one
of Shakespeare’s women. So it was all as right as it could be.
“We put up at the inn. The Falcon it was called. Such a jolly old
place! Sixteenth century. Yawning fireplaces, beams, oak staircases,
walls a yard thick. You know the sort of thing.
“And the village! Thatched roofs all stained with moss. Oh, the colour
of those roofs! Cottage gardens full of hollyhocks and roses. Such a
church! If you’ve ever seen a really beautiful English village, you’ll
know what I’m talking about. Dymfield is one of them.”
“And how did you get to know Anne?”
“Well, René’s mother had been a friend of the rich woman of the place,
an old lady who no more deserved to possess Fairholme Court than she
deserved Anne as her companion.”
“Cantankerous?”
“I don’t know anything about her moral qualities. Her taste was
execrable. Anyhow René made his mother responsible for taking us to see
the place--a wonderful jumble of every style from the fifteenth century
downward. But beautiful! _Mon Dieu_, beautiful as a dream. And Fate was
kind. The old lady was ill in bed, and sweet Anne--I told you she was
her companion, didn’t I?--was forced to do the honours.”
François got up, and began to pace up and down the floor as he talked.
“We were all packed into the drawing-room to wait, the first time
we called, and while René was making absurd remarks about the sofa
cushions, and the bead mats, and the whole chamber of horrors, I
caught sight of Anne coming across the lawn.
“She wore that gown.” He nodded towards the portrait. “An absurd thing
really, but it suited her because it showed her figure.”
“Her figure was superb,” murmured the Vicomte.
“Yes.”
Fontenelle paused a moment. “Even at the time,” he said rather slowly,
“I wondered how she would strike René. Because she wasn’t really
beautiful, you know. Certainly not in those days. Only remarkable
looking, curious, and very sweet.”
“But he was struck too?”
“I remember he looked up suddenly, and said, ‘By Jove, who on earth is
this? It’s some garden goddess or other. Flora. Yes, that’s it,--Flora.
Good Lord, let’s run out and burn incense or something!’
“She had a heap of flowers, branches of lilac and hawthorn and things,
in one arm, supported against her hip, and with the other hand she held
her dress away from her feet. She was moving quickly across the grass.
You know how she walks?
“Then she came into the drawing-room, and we saw her curious face.”
“There it is!” said the Vicomte, with his eyes on the portrait. “You’ve
got it exactly. Something between a Botticelli Madonna and a pagan
goddess--Flora is admirable. But it’s the sort of face that it takes a
painter to admire.”
“She had been considered hideous all her life, of course. She thought
herself desperately plain. Even when we burnt incense,--and René at
once began to send it up in clouds,--she thought we were laughing at
her.” François laughed gently himself.
“You remember Anne? You know how she would take praise. Adorably, like
a little girl who is almost too shy to be pleased. It was absurd, of
course. She was by no means young even then, remember. But somehow that
only made it more piquante. Anne is one of the few women for whom age
is an absurd convention. Quite meaningless, quite beside the point. The
goddesses are immortal.”
“But there was nothing of the goddess about her nature,” objected his
friend.
“Good heavens, no! Except physically. She’s a mortal woman if ever
there was one. She’s just what she always was, sweet Anne Page.”
Twilight was creeping into the studio. The polished floor with its
costly rugs, the pictures on the walls, the outlines of cabinets and
tables, all were growing dim and indistinct. The last light from the
window above the men’s heads fell across the face of the portrait on
the easel. It looked down upon them gently with the wavering uncertain
smile in the eyes, and on the lips, red and soft as the petals of a
rose.
“René saw a great deal of her that summer, I suppose?” asked the
Vicomte, breaking a silence.
“We all did. The gods for their own inscrutable purposes had decided
Anne’s fate. The old lady got weaker and insisted upon having a
hospital nurse. She was in her room all day in bed, and Anne was bidden
to entertain us.
“When we were not in her garden, she was at the old barn which René and
I had rigged up as a studio.
“She amazed us all. Do you know those tightly shut buds on a rose-tree,
that you think will never open? And then the sun shines, and gradually,
very slowly, a little every day, they grow pinker and sweeter, till at
last they are roses?
“I think the sun came out for Anne that year, for the first time in her
life.
“We made her laugh. I don’t believe she had ever laughed before. And
we discovered that she had brains, and taste and understanding, and
_instinct_ for everything that fired our young brains. Instinct is the
word for Anne. It’s a sixth sense with her. The only sense it’s any
good for a woman to possess. The very sense that nowadays with their
education and their emancipation, and their ‘rights,’ women are doing
their best to kill.
“And she’d read, _mon cher_. Good heavens, what she’d read! The
modern English woman with her smattering of Latin and Greek, is an
ill-educated prig beside her. For five years she had been shut up in a
library, and I believe she had read everything worth reading in her own
literature, and much of ours too, for that matter. And I, who like René
am partly English by education at least, know what that means. It’s a
magnificent literature for those who have ears to hear, and a heart to
understand.”
He began to light one of the lamps, stooping over it as he talked.
“She used to read poetry to us sometimes. Thouret and Dacier knew very
little English then, but they could understand the simple things when
she read them. I can hear Thouret now, trying to say after her--
“‘_I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How Roses first came red, and Lilies white._’”
François laughed, as he mimicked the accent of his friend the novelist,
who since the days of which he talked, had attained an almost European
reputation.
“That’s Herrick. You don’t know him? Well, he’s an English
seventeenth-century poet, and he wrote on purpose for a woman as simple
and natural as Anne Page. She used to read him to us in an old walled
garden, where in June that year, the lilies were ‘coming white.’”
“And Dampierre?” asked the Vicomte. “I didn’t know Dampierre in those
days, remember. Tell me something about him.”
He spoke as one speaks of a great man who is dead, whose lightest word
is of importance to the admirers who survive him.
“René was twenty-seven then,” said François, slowly. “He was a year
younger than I. You know how he looked? He was like his mother. Quite
magnificent. Oh sometimes absurdly handsome, when the right mood
affected his face. He used to dress like an Englishman in those days,
in white flannels. When he and Anne walked together they were worth
looking at, I can tell you.”
“But she was, what was it? Seven--ten years older?”
“Yes. She remembered that,” returned François.
His companion glanced quickly in his direction. He had never heard
the whole story, and his curiosity was roused; but something in his
friend’s voice assured him that it would not be gratified.
He made a tentative effort, however, by a suggestion half seriously
offered.
“_Mon ami_, you were in love with her yourself.”
François echoed his light laugh. “No,” he declared. “No. My feeling
for her now is what it has always been. I have paid her the compliment
of thinking of her in a different way from every other woman I ever
met. And I’ve never arrived at defining that way to myself. An English
writer--I’m boring you to death with English writers to-day,--comes
nearest to it in his definition of religion. He says ‘_religion is
morality touched by emotion_.’
“Well, I believe what I have always felt for Anne Page is affectionate
morality,” he laughed again, “strict morality mind, touched with
emotion.”
“Have you seen her lately?”
“I saw her last June, for the first time in three or four years.”
“She’s altered, of course?”
“She has. She’s more beautiful. She’s really beautiful now, so that
even the turnip-headed people she lives among see and acknowledge it.”
“That’s rather wonderful.”