goddess and oracle. Giving to charities with both hands, petitioned
for advice and counsel, loved by every one, high and low. That’s not
surprising. Nor is it more surprising, I suppose, that she’s happy.
Her nature is essentially simple and maternal. She ought to have had
children and children’s children by now.”
He got up and switched on all the lights, revealing the spacious room,
and the beautiful things it contained; revealing also once more the
portrait on the easel.
The Vicomte again examined it. “The Luxembourg has made a good choice,”
he repeated. “It’s a beautiful thing, _mon cher_. Gracious, dignified,
sweet--but sad. In spite of the smile, because of it, I suppose,
profoundedly sad. But why? She was not, she is not a sad woman.”
François was moving about the room, rearranging the canvases against
the wall.
“She was sad then.”
The Vicomte waited, but François said no more, and the conversation
turned upon other matters.
As he rose to go, he stooped to examine a little sketch propped up on
the top of a cabinet, against the wall.
“That’s rather nice,” he remarked critically. “It’s the little woman I
met here the other day, isn’t it? Dark. Pretty. English. Who is she?”
“A Mrs. Dakin. By the way, she’s one of Anne Page’s friends. One of the
people in her village. She’s staying here with Madame Didier.”
“Louis Didier’s wife? Did they know her then?” asked his friend quickly.
“Who? Anne? No. It was all ages before their time. Louis has only been
in Paris five or six years.”
“So much the better. That woman’s a cat, _mon cher_. Sleek fur, claws
and all.”
“Madame Didier? I agree,” returned François with a laugh. “The typical
English devotee of Mrs. Grundy. Louis goes in mortal fear of her.”
“_Tant pis!_” exclaimed the Vicomte, with an accent of commiseration.
X
Towards the middle of December, Mrs. Carfax became possessed with the
idea of going to London.
Various circumstances had combined to render her projected visit
pleasurably fraught with interest.
There was shopping to be done, of course. There was also Sylvia to
embrace;--Sylvia whose holidays were so short that she herself had
suggested the advisability of staying in town for Christmas, in order
not to interrupt her work.
Naturally Mrs. Carfax was anxious to see her child. Naturally also she
looked forward to staying with the Lovells, who were old friends, and
had a comfortable house in Bayswater.
Then too, she had been deeply interested to hear that the niece who was
visiting Mrs. Lovell, was none other than the Madame Didier who had
invited Mrs. Dakin to Paris.
Mrs. Dakin had not yet returned to Dymfield, and it was natural and
neighbourly of Mrs. Carfax to feel as much interest in her protracted
absence, as that which palpitated in every Dymfield breast. In a few
days she would be in the position of knowing all that Madame Didier
knew about her late guest. And then there was Sylvia of course, and the
shopping, and the delight of meeting her dear friends the Lovells. Mrs.
Carfax was quite determined to go.
“I shall take the three o’clock train this afternoon,” she announced
to the Vicar at breakfast time, “and send a telegram to Laura. She is
quite ready for me, and urges me to come at once.”
“Very well, my dear,” agreed the Vicar. “Please yourself of course,
though I scarcely think it necessary. You were in town only three
months ago.”
“You don’t think it necessary to see Sylvia, who is not coming home
for Christmas?” demanded his wife. “Well, I do. I have the feelings of
a mother after all, and I think it’s cruel to leave the poor child up
there, with never the sight of a home face.”
“Please yourself, my dear, as I have already said. There seems to be a
spirit of great unrest working amongst us,” he went on, stirring his
second cup of coffee irritably. “There’s Miss Page abroad, and Sylvia
away, and Mrs. Dakin not yet returned. And now you----”
“Children, go upstairs if you’ve finished your breakfast,” interrupted
their mother. “Johnny, say grace. Now all of you go and get your
lessons ready for Miss Hope. She’ll be here in a minute.”
There was a stampede to the door, and when it closed on the last child,
Mrs. Carfax turned to her husband.
“It’s most extraordinary about Mrs. Dakin, isn’t it?” she exclaimed.
“And such a strange thing that this Madame Didier should be Major
Lovell’s niece. I heard something once about a niece of his having
married a Frenchman, but I never knew her name. I shall probably hear
all about Mrs. Dakin from her.”
“Then my dear Mary, if you do, I hope you will be discreet.”
“Discreet, George? What do you mean? Am I not always discreet?”
The Vicar prudently disregarded the question.
“What I wish to point out, is this,” he returned. “The duty of taking
broad and charitable views. There is a reasonable explanation of Mrs.
Dakin’s absence. I met Dakin yesterday, and he told me it was a
question of his wife’s health. She’s seeing some doctor in Paris, and
going through a course of treatment.”
Mrs. Carfax sniffed. “With her own husband a doctor!”
“My dear, you know as well as I do that doctors seldom attend their
wives.”
“You annoy me, George. You speak as though I should be glad to hear
that there was any other reason. I’m sure I hope with all my heart it’s
the true one. But everybody is talking about it, and I must say I think
the poor man looks very unhappy.”
“Broad views,” returned the Vicar, clearing his throat, “are those
which in Christian charity we should always endeavour to assume with
regard to our fellows. Let us remember also, that we have neither part
nor lot in this matter.”
“Why don’t you tell me straight out to mind my own business?” asked
Mrs. Carfax angrily. “It’s what you mean. And we’re not in church, so
you needn’t beat about the bush. You only take ‘broad views’ as you
call them, when you want to be annoying and put me in the wrong. You
know as well as I do that it’s not right for a wife to stay months away
from her husband. Dr. Dakin must be a fool to allow it. At the same
time, you know how delighted I should be if it _is_ all right. And yet
you pretend to think that in a spirit of vulgar curiosity I’m going up
to town on purpose to gossip and try to find out things which don’t
concern me! My object in going, as you know, is to see Sylvia----”
“And to do some shopping. Yes, my dear. Yes. You’ve said so many
times,” interrupted her husband, rising. “You’d better tell Mark to
bring the trap round at half-past two.”
The Vicar closed the breakfast-room door with a slightly firm touch.
“Is mamma going to London to-day?” shouted Johnny, who regardless of
lesson books, was sliding down the banisters outside.
“I believe so. I trust it may do her good,” answered his father
piously. “Go upstairs, at once, and get ready for Miss Hope.”
He entered his study, and with some disinclination, sat down to
the sermon for which a more deferential hearing might possibly be
anticipated than that accorded in the home circle.
* * * * *
Mrs. Carfax arrived at Rushworth Terrace just in time to dress for
dinner. Madame Didier, to whom she was presented in the drawing-room
just before the gong sounded, was a tall young woman of twenty-seven
or twenty-eight, with a sharp face and a thin pointed nose. Her fair
hair was arranged neatly over her forehead, and her dress, though
fashionable, was undistinguished.
“Helen doesn’t look a bit French, does she?” asked her aunt.
Mrs. Lovell was a fat comfortable woman with no figure, and less
intelligence.
“I’m glad she’s kept so English. One would have thought that living in
Paris so long would have made a Frenchwoman of her.”
“We should quarrel if it had!” declared the Major in a loud voice. “I
don’t like foreigners. Can’t stand ’em. Beg your pardon, my dear. I
forgot your husband!”
He laughed heartily. “But you must excuse me. I’ve never seen him, and
I dare say you’ve made an Englishman of him. Hope so, I’m sure.”
“Oh, nothing would make an Englishman of Louis, I’m sorry to say,”
answered Madame Didier. “He can’t bear England. We’re always fighting
about it.”
“Well, come along! Dinner. Dinner. I’m famished,” declared the Major.
“Come along, Mrs. Carfax. How’s your husband? And the children? All
well, eh? That’s right.”
“I’m so interested to hear that you know a neighbour of ours,” began
Mrs. Carfax during the first favourable opportunity at dinner-time.
“Oh! Madge Dakin? Yes. Aunt Laura has been telling me that you are
neighbours. She has been staying with us in Paris, as of course you
know.”
“Yes. I’m so sorry to hear she is ill.”
Mrs. Carfax helped herself to bread sauce, and waited in suspense.
“Madge is never quite so ill as she thinks she is,” replied Madame
Didier in her decisive voice. “It’s all a question of nerves with her.
However, I suggested she should go to a doctor who did me a great deal
of good some time ago. I’m a _real_ sufferer from nerves. And as I
couldn’t keep her any longer--I had visits to pay and so on,--she is
boarding with some people in Paris to go on with the treatment.”
The explanation, delivered in Madame Didier’s high thin voice,
seemed sufficiently reasonable. Yet Mrs. Carfax was conscious of an
under-current.
Her hostess was silent, but the Major, always garrulous, broke in with
one of his pet grievances which lasted till the end of the meal, and
ended by proving anew, through many ramifications, that the country was
going to the dogs.
In the drawing-room, when coffee was served after dinner, and her host
had gone to the smoking-room, circumstances for Mrs. Carfax were more
propitious.
Madame Didier took out her embroidery, and Mrs. Lovell lay back in an
easy-chair, and warmed her feet at the fire.
“Helen has been telling me a good deal about this Mrs. Dakin,” she
began.
Her tone suggested that further confidences might be expected from Mrs.
Dakin’s friend, and Mrs. Carfax sat upright in her chair, and leant
forward a little.
“Oh, but if Mrs. Carfax is a friend----” objected Madame Didier.
“Well, dear, so are you,” put in Mrs. Lovell, who, as Mrs. Carfax
suddenly decided, was really quite stupid.
Madame Didier’s offended expression might portend anything--even
silence.
Innocent of psychology, Mrs. Carfax could not be expected to know that
on this score, at least, she need have no apprehension.
“Of course I am Madge’s friend,” said Madame Didier, stitching very
fast, “and that’s why I am so distressed at her foolish behaviour.”
“What has she----?” Mrs. Carfax paused. It was perhaps safer not to
interrupt.
“Oh only that she rather annoyed me by flirting outrageously with a
man who sometimes comes to our house. A man I don’t like. But he’s
a friend of Louis’s, and so I have to put up with him. A Monsieur
Fontenelle.”
“Why, I met him last spring, at a dinner-party!” interrupted Mrs.
Carfax in surprise.
“So I heard.”
The brief words were enigmatic in tone, and Mrs. Carfax gave an
uncomprehending gasp.
“He’s a celebrated man, as of course you know. He was made President of
the International Art Congress this summer, here in London. And he’s
naturally a splendid painter. But he’s not a nice man. Few Frenchmen
are.”
Madame Didier shut her thin lips, and bent over her embroidery.
“You mean----?” began Mrs. Carfax timidly.
“If he were an Englishman, he would have a very bad reputation. But
in Paris--well!” Madame Didier shrugged her shoulders. “There’s no
such thing as morality. I need not tell you that _I_ have never grown
accustomed to it. I still keep my English ideas as to right and wrong.”
“I’m thankful you do, dear Helen,” murmured her aunt.
“I warned Madge,” pursued her friend. “I told her all I had heard about
him. Louis was angry with me, but I thought it my duty.”
“But she hasn’t----? I mean there isn’t any danger of--of a divorce, or
anything of that kind?”
Mrs. Carfax involuntarily lowered her voice to a horrified whisper.
“Oh no! no! Let us hope it won’t come to that. Mind, I’m not accusing
Madge of anything but foolish flirting. She made a dead set at him, I
must say that. I don’t believe that otherwise he would have taken any
notice of her. But Madge is so vain. And then she has an idea she isn’t
happy with her husband. Well! a wife must make the best of the man she
marries. I make a point of getting on with Louis.”
“I’m sure you do, dear,” interrupted her aunt. “You’re so wise.”
“But you think she’s really staying on to----?”
“I fear that the excuse of her illness is only half true. She’s staying
on I believe to--well, to go on with the flirtation, let us say.”
Madame Didier laughed a little, and took a fresh thread of silk.
“Madge is a nice little thing, of course, but she’s very flighty. I
can’t help thinking that she must have fallen under some bad influence
lately. She comes from _such_ a good home. I used to stay with her
at her father’s house just outside York, when we were schoolgirls.
The Etheridges are county people, you know. Not very rich, but well
connected, and in the _nicest_ set. No fastness or anything horrid of
that sort. The right sort of quiet county people. You know what I mean.
We rather thought she might have done better than a country doctor.”
“Dr. Dakin is _extremely_ well connected,” put in Mrs. Carfax a little
stiffly. He was a neighbour after all, and she felt that the slighting
reflection might easily extend from the faculty, to the Church, of
which her husband was so distinguished an ornament.
“Oh yes, I’m sure of it,” Madame Didier hastened to reply. “And a
clever man, I hear.”
“Extremely clever. And devoted to his wife. This will be a terrible
blow.”
Mrs. Carfax leant back in her chair, and wondered whether she should
write to George, or wait till her return. She decided to wait. A verbal
recitation would be more effective.
“Oh! let us hope she will recover her senses and return to her home.
I feel terribly distressed about it, as it was in my house she met
Monsieur Fontenelle.”
“No! She met him first at Miss Page’s,” corrected Mrs. Carfax. “I
_thought_ he seemed very attentive that evening. He was talking to her
a long time after dinner.”
Madame Didier looked up sharply from her work.
“Who _is_ this Miss Page?” she asked. “How does she come to know
Monsieur Fontenelle?”
“She’s a most charming woman. We are very proud of her at Dymfield. I
suppose she met Monsieur Fontenelle abroad. She has travelled a great
deal.”
“Ah!” Madame Didier took another thread of silk, and matched it
carefully.
“I only wondered,” she went on, “because Madge was so reticent about
her. Naturally, when I saw her becoming so very intimate with Monsieur
Fontenelle, I inquired about the woman who was responsible for the
first introduction. But I could gather nothing from Madge except that
Miss Page was a beautiful woman, and apparently a paragon of all the
virtues.”
Madame Didier sniffed slightly, and began to fold up her work.
“She’s certainly a striking looking woman, and most generous and
charitable,” returned Mrs. Carfax. “My husband would not know what to
do without her financial and other help, in the parish. Certainly we
know very little about her life before she settled at Dymfield ten
years ago,” she added rather uncertainly.
“Good works are the modern equivalent for the convent, aren’t they?”
suggested Madame Didier.
“She’s a charming woman,” repeated Mrs. Carfax in a slightly dazed
voice.
“No doubt. Yet I know one woman who doesn’t describe her in those
terms. Did you ever meet a Mrs. Crosby? No? Well, she is firmly
convinced that Miss Page robbed her of her inheritance.”
“If the doctor is at all wise, he will go and look after his wife,”
suggested Aunt Laura, her remark making a timely but unconscious
diversion.
“I’ll see what I can do,” observed Mrs. Carfax with significance.
Madame Didier looked a little alarmed. “Please don’t mention my name!”
she begged. “Remember I have said nothing, and that, only in Madge’s
interest.”
“Discretion is my strong point,” returned Mrs. Carfax with dignity. “I
am no gossip, and the last thing in the world I should wish to do, is
to make mischief.”
“You are always so wise, dear Mary,” murmured Mrs. Lovell.
The ladies talked till a late hour, and Mrs. Carfax went to bed full
of an excitement which she was shocked to recognize as distinctly
pleasurable.
XI
Tiring a little of hotel life, Anne had taken an apartment on the
heights close to the Church of the Trinità dei Monti.
In her sunny room overlooking the city, in the intervals between her
rambles, or the interchange of visits, she spent quiet happy hours.
In Rome, as in no other Italian city, time slipped back, and the life
of twenty years ago seemed often more real, more tangible, than her
existence of to-day.
Over and over again, in Rome, she was startled to find herself living
not in the present, but in the memory of an unforgetable past.
One morning, in walking through the Farnesina Palace, she stopped
before a window to look down upon a narrow walled garden. The paths
were mossy and weed-grown; the whole place pervaded by that air of
neglect and decay, common to Italian gardens. But at the end of the
enclosed oblong space, there was a beautiful old gate of marble. Orange
trees in rows, ran the length of the right-hand wall, and between the
glossy leaves, the fruit shone golden. In the centre grass plot, amidst
the long unkempt grass, there were rose bushes with pale pink monthly
roses upon them; and overhead a roof of sky blue as the heart of a
gentian.
Miss Page turned her head quickly, a half smile upon her lips, as
though to speak to some one at her side.
It was twenty years since she had looked down upon that quiet garden,
but the illusion of a bygone day was so strong, that she expected to
meet a responsive smile.
* * * * *
The summer of which François Fontenelle had spoken to his friend, as he
sat beneath Anne’s portrait, was the summer which followed her visit to
her brother and his wife.
Anne had returned with her inner life wrecked and shattered. Her
peace of mind was gone. She spent no more quiet days in the library
with her books. A feverish restlessness drove her out of doors, where
while daylight lasted, she worked among her plants, digging, weeding,
planting with such energy that from sheer physical fatigue, she forced
herself to sleep dreamlessly till morning renewed her toil. She was
uninterrupted. No one disturbed her. She had nothing else to do.
In spite of her protestations, Mrs. Burbage who had been growing
steadily feebler through the winter, sent for a hospital nurse, and
finally kept her bed.
“I will be looked after by the right people,” she declared with
characteristic determination. “Trained nurses are the right people to
tend the sick. I can afford to pay for them, and I will have them. You
have had enough waiting upon invalids, my dear.”
Freed from nearly all her customary duties, therefore, Anne had the
long spring days before her, and with the instinct of her healthy
nature, she strove by hard physical work, to fill them, and at the same
time to crush out the mental malady which tore at her heart.
“It’s a disease, but work will kill it,” she told herself.
And she set her teeth, and worked.
She worked; but she was burdened with a great fear and a great regret.
Immersed in books, as for the last five years she had become, she had
not hitherto noticed the isolation, the narrowness of her life.
Not only had she failed to miss the intercourse of her fellow
creatures, she had actually dreaded their approach.
Filled with a nervous mistrust of her own power to please, she had
shunned humanity as represented by any living soul outside the gates of
Fairholme Court.
“I know nothing about any one,” was the dreary burden of her thoughts.
“I don’t understand anything about real men and women. My own life is
empty, and so for me, the lives of others are empty too. I have nothing
to say to them, no help to give them, I’m useless in a world of which I
know nothing except at second hand. And as I grow older my heart will
dry up and wither more and more, till I’m an old maid--the conventional
old maid.”
She planted her sad thoughts with the beds of lilies; she dug them into
the ground round the rose-bushes; and serenely, mockingly, the garden
flourished and broke gradually into a flood of bloom.
It had never looked so beautiful as on the day when Mrs. Burbage’s
maid came to her while she was watering the new rose hedge round the
sundial, to say that visitors had called, and her mistress wished Miss
Page to receive them.
The lilac bushes were cascades of amethyst bloom; the hawthorn trees
were dazzling white, or rosy to their utmost branch. Anne had broken
off great sprays of blossom which lay at the foot of the sundial, ready
to be taken into the house.
She picked them up, and full of consternation and trembling shyness,
made her way across the lawn, and entered the drawing-room by one of
the long French windows.
It seemed to her that the room was full of men, and she put out her
hand blindly to the tallest of them, murmuring incoherent words.
“I am René Dampierre,” he said. “I’m so sorry Mrs. Burbage is ill. She
knew my mother, and me too when I was a child. I should like to have
seen her.”
The words, spoken with the faintest foreign accent, were quite fluent,
and the voice was beautiful, the gentlest man’s voice Anne had ever
heard. She ventured to look at him, and involuntarily she smiled, her
confidence restored.
He was very tall, she noticed, and big, and bronzed to the roots of his
thick straw-coloured hair. His eyes were brown. Even at the moment,
Anne was conscious of surprise. She had expected them to be blue. But
they were eyes which drove away her shyness, and she was able to shake
hands calmly with his friends as he introduced them.
“This is François Fontenelle, a painter like myself. And this is
Thouret, who writes very bad verse and worse novels, and this is
Dacier who does everything--also very badly. All my friends. And
you--Mademoiselle?”
“I am Anne Page,” she said, and to her own amazement, she laughed.
They all looked so friendly, and they were not at all alarming.
“Anne Page? That is a Shakespeare name!” exclaimed the young man whom
Dampierre had first introduced.
“Shakespeare?” repeated Dacier. “_Ah! Si je pouvais seulement parler
Anglais, mademoiselle!_”
“I can speak a little French,” said Anne timidly. “But you mustn’t
laugh at my accent.”
They surrounded her then, talking a babel of mixed French and English,
and Anne found herself laughing with them, as she tried to reply to
their questions.
“May we see the garden?” asked René Dampierre presently. “Oh no! don’t
put down the flowers! I would offer to take them, but if they are not
in your way, do carry them. They are just right.”
“Oh yes! the goddess of the garden must keep her flowers,” insisted
Dacier.
Anne kept them uncomprehendingly, since her compliance seemed to please
her guests.
She was mystified. But they were all friendly and kind, and easy to
entertain. She had spoken to few men in her life, and she did not know
there were any like these. It was a new sensation to be addressed with
deference, and regarded with attention.
Never before had Anne felt flattered, and the sensation was agreeable.
She took them to her rose garden, and showed them the quaint old
sundial, which, at her instigation, the gardener had brought from an
outhouse in which she had discovered it, and set up in a space enclosed
by clipped yews.
She showed them her borders of snowy pinks, with the lavender bushes
behind them, and the garden she was making, a fancy of her own, (new
then,) in which only Shakespeare’s flowers should grow.
“There are a great many, you see,” she told them. “And such nice
old-fashioned plants. Rue and marjoram, and lavender, and marigolds. I
love marigolds, don’t you? They won’t come yet, though.”
“No. They are ‘flowers of middle summer,’” quoted Monsieur Fontenelle.
“You see I know your Shakespeare,” as Anne turned to him with a smile
of pleased surprise.
“And the ‘_daffodils that come before the swallow dares_’ are nearly
over,” said Dampierre. “But you still have some pale primroses and
the violets.... Now don’t try to show off, François, because _I_ want
to!... ‘_Violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes or
Cytherea’s breath._’”
“You are wonderful!” laughed Anne. “You are Frenchmen, but you know
_The Winter’s Tale_!”
“I ought to. I have been brought up chiefly in England,” returned
Dampierre. “But Fontenelle is a disgusting genius. He knows the
literature of all languages by instinct. He was born knowing them. In
his nurse’s arms he terrified his relations by babbling in English,
Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic.”