“I will take you there presently. I’m glad you approve my Shakespeare
garden,” she added, with a touch of the shyness she had almost
forgotten.
“It’s delicious!” declared René. “That old wall as a background, and
the mass of wallflowers--gillyflowers, Shakespeare calls them, doesn’t
he? And the beds of violets! The scent of it all! It smells of England.
And I love England, because it’s my mother’s and Shakespeare’s country.”
“You have some of your own flowers growing here,” he added, stooping
towards a bed of double narcissus, and glancing up at Anne with a smile.
“My own flowers?” she repeated, puzzled.
“Don’t you know the country name for these?” He was still smiling.
“_Sweet Nancies._”
“And in Shakespeare your name is ‘sweet Anne Page,’” added Fontenelle,
“the prettiest English name in the world.”
A faint colour came to Anne’s face. She glanced from one to another
with a look half shy, half pleased, half pitiful.
It gave place to a little movement of dignity.
“I’m glad you like my name,” she said.
In her voice there was a suggestion of fear. The fear that these
strange yet pleasant young men were laughing at her. She took them
across the sunny lawn, where the beech tree’s silken leaves had still
the freshness of spring. A thousand birds were singing and calling. The
scent of the lilac hung in the air, and the hawthorns were drenched in
fragrant snow.
Before the irregular charming front of the house, the men paused, and
breaking into French, poured out ecstasies of praise.
“_Ravissant! Quelle belle ligne! Que c’est délicieux!_”
“This is the library,” said Anne, as the men followed her through the
open window into the dim beautiful room.
It was the one room in the house unspoilt by modern furniture; left
just as it had been in her old friend’s day, with its high-backed
chairs of gilded Spanish leather, its heavy rich curtains at the
window, and the books reaching from floor to ceiling, their bindings
of calf and leather forming the most harmonious of decorations.
Simultaneously, the men uttered exclamations of delight.
Fontenelle rushed to one of the shelves, and became absorbed in the
titles of the books which he read aloud, calling to his companions now
and again, when he had discovered a treasure. René Dampierre stood in
the embrasure of one of the windows, with Anne.
“Do you read these books?” he asked, smiling down at her.
“Yes,” said Anne, simply. “I read them for nearly five years. But I
haven’t read anything lately,” she added, involuntarily.
“No? Why not?”
Again the colour rushed to her cheeks, and her companion, suddenly
curious, wondered what he could have said to destroy her composure.
“I don’t know,” she answered hurriedly. “I have been so busy in the
garden. Shall we have tea out of doors? It’s quite warm enough.”
She left him to give the order, and when the library door closed,
François abandoned the books, and crossed the room to him.
“But she’s charming!” he exclaimed, speaking in English. “Isn’t it an
unusual type? That clear pale face and the soft hair, and the soft
voice? I shall get her to sit for me.”
“She’s accustomed to be thought exceedingly plain,” remarked Dampierre.
Fontenelle made an impatient gesture.
“By the usual idiot perhaps. How do you know?”
“By her manner. She hasn’t any of the airs of a pretty woman. She
thought we were laughing at her just now, in the garden.”
“If we made her think herself pretty, _mon cher_, she’d surprise us
all. There are a thousand possibilities in that face.”
“_Allons!_ I for one am quite ready,” laughed Dampierre. “I believe
you’re right. She could be beautiful, though she’s not young. What do
you think? Thirty-two, thirty-three?--or more?”
François shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. She’s one of the
women for whom age doesn’t count--except as an improvement.”
“An unusual case.”
“Of course. But she’s unusual. I’m going to paint her.”
“Tea’s ready,” said Anne, appearing again at the window. “It was in the
drawing-room, so I just had it carried out.”
She was quite at her ease now, and tea was a delightful meal under the
flickering shade of the beech tree.
The men praised her French, inquired how she had learnt it so well;
laughed and chattered; and finally took their leave, with many
invitations to Anne. She must come to their studio, which was really
only a barn. She must come to tea at the Falcon Inn. It was quite worth
seeing. Above all, they must come back to the most charming garden in
the world.
“_Pour revoir la déesse du jardin_,” added Thouret, lifting his hat
with a flourish, as she stood in the porch, watching their departure.
XII
“So René Dampierre has grown into a handsome man, has he?” said Mrs.
Burbage, when Anne went to her room.
She was sitting up in bed, with a shawl thrown round her shoulders.
Her face was yellow and pinched, but the eyes that looked out from
under the wasted forehead, were sharp and keen as ever.
“Well! so he ought. His mother was a beautiful creature, and his father
was well enough, as men go. Jacques Dampierre was quite a celebrated
man in Paris, thirty years ago, when I used to visit them. A writer;
a novelist, I believe. I never read any of his books. In those days
it wasn’t considered the correct thing for young women to read French
novels. And quite right too. They’re all disgraceful.
“René’s a painter, you say? Well! much good may it do him. He won’t
make money that way, though I suppose he must have come into a decent
income through his father. He’s an only son.”
“His father is dead then?” Anne asked.
“Yes, my dear, dead long ago. He died a year after his wife, and that’s
fourteen years now. She was a Leslie, one of the old stock, and as I
say, a lovely girl. Fair, is he? Like his mother then. Hers was the
only real gold hair I ever saw. And she had brown eyes, like a deer, or
a fawn, or some creature of that sort.”
Anne remembered the brown eyes that ought to have been blue. He had his
mother’s eyes as well as her hair then, evidently.
“Let me see, René must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight by this time,”
the old lady went on. “I haven’t seen him since he was a baby of
five or so. He was a pretty boy, then. They sent him over here to be
educated, at that Catholic place. Beaumont isn’t it? He ought to be
quite an Englishman, and I hope he is.”
“Well, he speaks English perfectly, with only the very slightest
accent. But I don’t think he’s at all like an Englishman,” said Anne.
“In manner, I mean,” she added.
“Humph! More’s the pity. I don’t like foreigners.”
Anne was silent. She thought she did.
“He brought friends, you say? Well, tell them to come whenever they
like, my dear. You’re quite old enough to look after them. Catherine
Leslie--Dampierre, I mean, was a good friend to me. I should like to
show hospitality to her boy.”
She turned over on the pillow, her voice growing weak.
“That will do, Anne. Nurse will see to me. I can’t talk ten minutes now
without this dreadful faintness.”
The nurse came up to the bed, and Anne stepped aside, pausing at the
door, to throw a pitying glance at the sharp profile against the pillow.
The old lady was growing visibly weaker, and Anne sorrowed. She was so
lonely, so desolate at the end of life. Childless, almost friendless,
for brusque and downright in manner, she had never possessed the happy
art of engaging the affection of others, she was going down to the
grave almost unregarded.
Few of her own generation were alive, and with the younger race she
concerned herself but little. Anne knew that she had a nephew, her
sister’s child. She had occasionally spoken of him as her heir,
generally with the dry comment that she grudged him the money.
“He’s a great gaby,” she often declared, “and his vulgar wife will make
ducks and drakes of my fortune.
“But there, my dear, what does it matter? In the place where I go
there’s neither knowledge nor understanding. It will be all the same to
me.”
* * * * *
Anne left the sick-room, and from force of habit, wandered out into the
garden.
“How lonely! How desolate!” she found herself thinking.
“And I shall be just as lonely, just as desolate when it comes to my
turn.”
She turned her face towards the quiet evening sky, in which, despite
one or two trembling stars, the flush of sunset still lingered, and
again despair fell like a cold hand upon her heart.
All the afternoon she had felt so gay. She had been amused, interested,
almost flattered.
Now the words she had just heard, recurred to her. “Tell them to come.
You are quite old enough to look after them.”
A sudden miserable sensation of shame assailed her, to remember how
young she had felt. In welcoming her visitors, she had not thought of
her age at all. She had accepted them as equals and contemporaries.
The blinding tears which made her stumble on the path already dim with
twilight, caused her to bow her head with the instinct of hiding them
even from herself.
“I’m quite old--quite old,” she repeated with something that was partly
a sob, partly a shiver. “They didn’t make me feel it, because they are
kind, and they have charming manners. But they are young, and life is
all before them. It’s all over for me--and I’ve never had it.”
The bats skimmed noiselessly past her, in the dusk. All the birds had
ceased singing. It was nearly dark, but with a horror of returning to
the house, of being shut within four walls, Anne sat at the foot of the
sundial, and in the darkness her tears fell.
* * * * *
Yet next morning, in the sunshine, when René Dampierre came to ask her
to the “studio,” it seemed not only easy, but natural, to smile, and be
well pleased. When she found herself with her new friends, depressing
thoughts fled like magic.
They were so obviously glad to see her. They interested her so much
with their discussions, their enthusiasm, their talk, fresh and new
to her, of methods, and values and style, in painting, in writing, in
music, in the whole world of art to which hitherto she had travelled
alone; speechless, like a ghost amongst ghosts.
From the outset, Anne saw that René Dampierre was regarded with a
certain admiring respect by his companions. Already he was considered a
great man; already they looked up to him as a leader, an authority.
Little by little, emerging from her provincial ignorance, she realized
that a world of art existed in Paris, in which these young men had
already made a place for themselves, and were recognized. From the
first, it was chiefly through François Fontenelle that her imagination
began to work, began to construct the life, the surroundings, the
whole framework of existence, with its modern thought, its ideals, its
ambitions, out of which her friends had for a moment stepped into the
stagnant peacefulness of this English village. It was with François
that she talked most easily. His fluent speech, his gift of picturesque
narration and description, led her to realize a new world; gave sight
to her eyes, gave her understanding.
Thouret and Dacier were delightful boys, younger by three or four years
than the other two friends.
Anne liked them heartily, and was amused by their boyish high spirits,
and nonsense talk, but her real interest was with François Fontenelle,
and René Dampierre.
With René, her shyness lasted longer than with the others, and often
as she searched her mind for the reason, she could never determine it,
except that as she incoherently put it to herself, he was “so absurdly
good-looking.”
His manner to her was charming, more charming perhaps than the manner
of any of the others, though they all treated her with that flattering
air of mingled deference and admiration to which she was growing
accustomed. But despite herself, the little tremor of confusion when
René addressed her, never ceased to trouble and embarrass her. In the
company of François she was at her ease; interested, pleased, serene,
ready to talk or to listen. René alone, though she loved him to talk
to her, longed for it in fact with an intensity for which she often
despised herself, never succeeded in effacing a secret inexplicable
dismay.
The days passed on. May slipped into a radiant June. It was a brilliant
summer, warm and sunny, the first happy summer Anne had ever known.
Early in their acquaintance Fontenelle had asked her to sit to him, and
out of doors, in the garden of Fairholme Court, he made sketch after
sketch.
He was always dissatisfied.
“It isn’t right!” he exclaimed time after time. “You are the most
elusive creature in the world. I don’t think I know you well enough yet
to get down what I want. But some day I will paint you. You are going
to make my fortune!”
“Then you must come again--many times,” Anne said.
Even while she spoke, her smile died.
Next summer, who could tell where she might be? She could not blind
herself to the seriousness of her friend’s illness.
And when she was gone?
Anne refused to look forward. Once long ago, Mrs. Burbage had told her
she need not be anxious about the future.
“I shall see that you don’t starve, my dear,” she had said.
But Anne realized that her life would be very different. It would
probably mean facing the world once more in some sort of struggle
for existence, without the companionship, which quiet unemotional as
it was, meant all she had ever known of a friendly home, and human
affection.
Often as these reflections assailed her, she put them from her. This
was her summer. She would not spoil it by thinking of cold rain and
wintry days.
It was while she was sitting to François that they talked most; and
always sooner or later, the conversation centred upon René Dampierre.
“He has genius,” François assured her with the generous enthusiasm of
an artist for work that is beyond his own powers.
“We are all desperately excited about René’s career. He will be great,
as Corot, as Daubigny are great. He is the coming man. You will see.
In ten years time, he will be a leader, the founder of a new school of
painting; a great power in France. Oh! we’re going to be proud of René!
Unless, of course,” he added with a change of tone, “he plays the fool.
There’s always that to fear with him. He must let women alone. They’re
the very devil for smashing up a man’s work; and that’s René’s weak
side. He’s a fool about women. Just the sort of sentimental fool who’s
capable of marrying one of them. And if he does----” Fontenelle’s shrug
of the shoulders and the gesture of his disengaged hand, completed the
sentence.
“Why?”
Anne was accustomed to frank conversation from François Fontenelle. He
discussed his own love affairs with perfect freedom. He told her of the
adventures of his acquaintances in Paris, and with a Frenchman’s love
of analysis, entered into long discussions on the psychology of love
and passion.
Anne listened calmly. Ignorant as she was, except through her reading,
of the phase of existence he described, she had by this time grown
to form a very fair idea of the emotional life of the men in her
friend’s set in Paris. Much of what François said, she heard with
incomprehension, not of the facts, but of the feelings to which
they corresponded. She was neither shocked nor surprised. François’
conversation never offended her. He talked to her frankly as to a grown
woman of intelligence, and she accepted his confidences as simply as
they were offered.
As yet, Anne knew little about herself. It had never occurred to her to
analyze her own temperament. Throughout her life it never occurred to
her, and in this circumstance lay the secret of a certain simplicity
which to her dying day she preserved.
It never struck her that her character, formed in a seclusion
unaffected by the clash of argument and conflicting ethical opinion,
was wide and generous, and original. Free-thinking in the true sense
of the word, inasmuch as her thoughts were her own, uncoloured by
the prejudices and predilections of any sect or party. Her life had
been forced into a narrow channel, but quite spontaneously, quite
naturally, her nature accepted a wide outlook, and extended sympathy
and tolerance to lives and standpoints of necessity different from her
own.
To many men apparently, love as she had dreamed of it, was an utterly
different conception from that she had formed for herself. She accepted
the fact, merely trying to understand.
“Why?” she repeated. “He might find the right wife.”
François smiled as he looked up from his drawing, and met her blue
eyes, candid as a child’s, but a woman’s eyes nevertheless.
“Sweet Anne Page!” he exclaimed. “Why shouldn’t he find the right wife?
The chances are a million to one against it. Even if she exists. She
would have to be a miracle of self-sacrifice and comprehension, and
tact and wisdom, if she were not to stand in his way. René is an artist
to his finger tips, and if only out of consideration for women, no
great artist should marry. No! René must always love and ride away. And
the women he loves must be those who are accustomed to see the cavalier
depart, without grieving. The women who merely look out for the next.”
Anne was silent. It was a way of love she did not understand. Yet she
could imagine its existence.
“Men must be very different,” she said after a long pause. “That sort
of thing would hurt a woman so much. One sort of woman, I mean. I think
it would kill the best in her, so that if she were doing any work like
painting, for instance, far from helping her, it would _prevent_ her
from doing as well as she might.”
“Men _are_ different. Most men. And if women would only recognize the
fact, there would be fewer tears. Love is your whole existence, as
one of your poets says, I believe. Bryon, is it? For us it’s often an
episode,--more often a series of episodes. Sometimes, rarely, the other
thing. But that for an artist is not a consummation to be desired.
Think! His whole existence! What becomes of his work if it’s merged in
the life of one woman? Why it goes to pot, of course,” he went on with
one of his rapid descents into English slang, which combined with his
foreign accent always made Anne smile.
“No, that’s the price an artist pays--if it’s a heavy price, which I
doubt,” he added with the cynicism of youth. “No absorbing loves for
him. Love is necessary for his imagination, of course. It fires him
with enthusiasm. It gives him delight and gaiety, and bestows on him
the joyous mind to work. But if he’s a wise man, no absorbing passions.
Above all, no ties.”
Anne sighed. “I see what you mean. But it seems that art is very cruel.”
“It is.”
“Then I think if what you say is true, an artist ought to keep out of
the way of any woman who--cares. But he wouldn’t if she pleased him,”
she added softly.
François laughed. “In your wisdom you have divined the natural
selfishness of man,” he said.
As the months passed slowly on, a change, or rather a development
gradual but steady, was taking place in Anne’s nature, a development
that presently made itself manifest in her appearance, in her attitude,
in her demeanour, physical as well as mental.
Slowly but surely, she was waking to the consciousness of her
womanhood, and of her power.
The men whom she had grown to know intimately, regarded her with
obvious admiration.
In their eyes at least, the eyes of artists, it was evident that she
was not as she had hitherto imagined, destitute either of beauty or of
attractive charm.
_Ah! Voilà sweet Anne Page!_ She had grown used to the frequent
exclamation when she appeared in the garden in which at Mrs. Burbage’s
desire they were always free to come and go as they pleased.
It no longer made her feel embarrassed and uncertain as to its
sincerity.
Her friends’ admiration for her had become a sort of cult. She was
a new type, a woman to be praised--discreetly, with deference--yet
praised. They brought to her the incense of a sincere flattery, and to
Anne, starved of affection, unconsciously waiting for love, it was very
sweet.
She accepted it humbly, gratefully, with a surprise as great as her
pleasure. But it could not fail to produce results.
She began to take pains with her dress, and her natural taste made it
easy to adapt the simple gowns she possessed, into becoming garments.
When René Dampierre exclaimed how well something suited her, she went
to the glass and looked at herself with innocent gratification and
astonishment to find that he was right.
Her eyes grew softly bright. There was often a faint colour in her
cheeks.
Even to the unobservant conventional bystander, that summer Anne
was charming. If she scarcely recognized herself when she saw her
reflection in the glass, the change in her mental personality still
further surprised her.
By degrees, so slowly, so insensibly that it seemed a natural process,
she had found herself, and in making that discovery, she had made
others.
These men who had seemed so strange and wonderful at first;--beings
from another planet, whose thoughts she did not understand, whom
she watched with interested amazed eyes, became in one sense very
simple people. People easily swayed and managed by a woman older than
themselves, a woman naturally intuitive, but hitherto deprived of the
opportunity of exercising gifts of which she had only recently become
aware.
Her conversations with François Fontenelle, as well as her previous
wide reading, had removed her ignorance of facts. The rest, now that
she was freed from the shackles of self-mistrust, lay well within her
natural powers.
To François Fontenelle, a quick observer, even then a man of the
world, possessed of the keen and subtle intelligence which in later
years was to stand him in good stead for the promotion of his material
prosperity, the change was early discernible. He viewed it with
secret amusement, and inasmuch as he felt himself to a large extent
responsible, some pride, and finally a touch of uneasiness.
It was as though some gentle creature too inexperienced to know its
strength, had unexpectedly without in any way losing its gentleness,
become dangerous. Dangerous to itself, dangerous perhaps to others. He
often found himself glancing uncertainly at René, and then reassuring
himself by recalling his friend’s natural instinctive manner to women.
René was always a great success with women. His voice altered when he
spoke to them; his attentions were very charming.
François had heard the voice, and witnessed the attentions many times
before, and they had never meant anything more than the sort of thing
which according to him, in the wisdom of his sapient youth, was “all
right.” The love of a few weeks; at most, a few months. Nothing in
short that from his point of view could affect the artist seriously,
or jeopardize his position. Why then should he feel uneasy? Except of
course, that this was a different matter. Anne’s was not the usual
case; he could imagine no one further from the type of woman who with
_sang-froid_ watches the departing cavalier.
The idea was preposterous, ludicrous to entertain side by side with the
idea of Anne Page. If Anne fell in love--heavens! if Anne fell in love!
His brain almost ceased working at the bare notion.
“René would be done for,” he reflected incoherently. “I know his idiocy
where women are concerned. And if a woman like Anne Page falls in love,
there’ll be the devil to pay! He’d have to marry her. A woman years
older than himself. And then exactions, tears, jealousy of him, of his
work. Oh awful! Horrible!”
His rage at the bare possibility of such an event extended at moments
to Anne. “I know these gentle women!” he told himself vindictively.
“They’re worse than any of them, when it comes to a love affair.
Tenacious, determined, implacable----”
And then Anne would enter the drawing-room to welcome him, or come
across the grass. Anne with her sweet gay smile, and her gentle
dignity, and his anger died.
It was all right, of course. What a fool he had been! The idea had
never occurred to either of them, and all he had to do was to keep his
preposterous notions to himself.
Moreover, September had arrived, and the time for the return of the
whole party to Paris was approaching. René certainly seemed in no
hurry to depart. But that was comprehensible.
He was working hard, and as François allowed, never had he worked
better. There was a tenderness and grace in his landscapes which was
new to them, inspired he said by the gracious beauty of Shakespeare’s
county.