been concentrated, and François was already urging that it was time to
go.
They were all in the garden one afternoon, when the subject was first
mentioned.
“This is delicious, charming, adorable!” exclaimed François, suddenly
looking from the lawn across the level meadows, over which the sun was
setting. “It has been a summer snatched out of Paradise. But we must be
getting home to our daily toil.”
Tea was over, but the table, laden with silver and dainty china, had
not yet been removed.
Anne sat near it, in a basket chair, an open book on her knee, from
which at the men’s request she had been reading.
Her white muslin dress with its froth of frills trailed on the grass.
The muslin fichu crossed in front and knotted at the waist, revealed a
glimpse of her long white throat.
Despite himself, François glanced at her curiously.
Her face was unmoved, but he fancied he detected the faintest tremor of
the frills at her breast.
René was lying in a hammock slung beneath the beech tree, and the two
younger men lay on the grass, smoking.
François’ remark was greeted with a torrent of invective from them.
Paris be consigned to everlasting perdition! It was still summer. Why
talk of going?
René was silent. He raised himself in the hammock, and with half-closed
eyes, looked at the evening fields.
“What a beautiful effect,” he said at last. “Look there, where the mist
is rising. I must get that. There’s a picture.”
“You’ve finished your picture, _mon vieux_,” returned François,
speaking in French. “I know the history of another one. You’ll mess
about, and paint out, till the snow is on the ground. There isn’t time.
No! The hour has arrived to pack up.”
“We can’t leave sweet Anne Page!” declared Dacier half seriously. He
turned on his elbow, and glanced up at her, smiling. Without speaking,
Anne returned his smile.
“She looks like an early Italian Madonna disguised as a Reynolds
portrait,” thought François suddenly. “Why on earth has she grown so
ridiculously attractive!” was his next irritable reflection.
“She must come to Paris,” declared Thouret.
“But of course she must come to Paris! When will you come, Mademoiselle
Anne? At once, won’t you? It’s a magnificent idea. We’d take her to the
Elysée Montmartre and to the Nouvelle Athènes. Yes! And to Versailles!
Versailles in the autumn. Magnificent! And the little streets in
Montmartre, and the Place Pigale! Seriously wouldn’t it be splendid to
show our Paris to Anne Page?”
They talked all together, exclaiming and laughing, François joining
them.
Dampierre alone said nothing. He was still gazing over the fields, now
smouldering with faint gold, from which here and there like incense, a
ghostly mist was rising.
“There’s a picture there,” he repeated.
“Hang the picture!” exclaimed Dacier and Thouret together.
“Mademoiselle Anne Page is coming to Paris. Aren’t you, mademoiselle?”
Anne shook her head. “I never go anywhere.” She was still smiling, but
François felt a sudden pang of pity and compunction. To his sensitive
ear, the words were an epitome of Anne’s life.
When it was growing dusk, they rose, and this evening Anne did not ask
them to stay.
Often when it was dull, or too cold to sit in the garden, she took them
into the library, showed them her favourite books, sometimes read to
them. Because as Dacier said, it was good for their English accent, and
she had such a beautiful voice.
To-day she walked with them to the porch, and said good-bye, in a tone
that was as friendly as ever.
“Tell me when you decide to go,” she said. “We must have a picnic or
something for farewell.”
François turned at the gate, and saw her standing in the porch, her
dress startlingly white in the dusk. He shrugged his shoulders, but
involuntarily the troubling sense of having wounded some defenceless
creature, returned to him. He told himself that he was a sentimental
fool, but the illusion did not vanish.
XIII
For the next week, Anne saw little of her friends.
The day after the suggestion for their departure had been made, the old
doctor who attended Mrs. Burbage, asked to see her.
“I’m not satisfied with our patient’s progress,” he said, closing the
library door with much precaution. “I think, Miss Page, I should prefer
to have another opinion, and I propose writing to-night to Dr. Mears of
Harley Street.”
Anne listened with fear at her heart, and the next day, the specialist
arrived from London.
After a lengthy visit, and a subsequent conversation between the
doctors, she was told that the case was serious, and an operation would
probably be necessary.
“Write to her relatives at once,” advised Dr. Mears, taking up his hat.
“I can’t disguise from you that there’s cause for anxiety.”
Anne obeyed, and her letter was answered by a telegram, announcing the
arrival of Mrs. Burbage’s nephew and his wife.
The intimation of their proposed visit was received by the patient with
a grim smile.
“Let them come if they please,” she remarked. “I don’t propose to
endure much of their society. I shall claim the privileges of a sick
woman.”
They arrived the same evening; Mr. Crosby, a weak-looking undecided
man of forty, whose thin fair hair was plastered over a retreating
forehead, and his wife, a stout somewhat vulgar woman, arrogant and
over-bearing.
The visit was not a success.
Mrs. Burbage, who once decided upon a course of action, remained
characteristically obstinate, granted them one interview of ten
minutes, after which her door was resolutely closed.
Mrs. Crosby, pleading solicitude for the relative who had always
repulsed her advances, appealed to Anne, whom she at first treated with
the superciliousness suitable to a dependent who had without doubt
acquired for her own ends, a culpable ascendency over the old lady’s
mind.
Three months previously, Anne would have been helpless in her hands;
too nervous and self-mistrustful to cope with a blustering woman of
the world.
Now, scarcely to her own surprise, so insensibly had the change in her
been wrought, to all Mrs. Crosby’s attempted coercion, she preserved a
self-possessed opposition.
Mrs. Burbage did not wish to see her nephew, or his wife.
That was enough. She did not see them. After two days which exercised
all Anne’s powers of tact and self-restraint, Mrs. Crosby returned to
her Devonshire home, her husband in tow, infuriated and baffled by
the quiet woman whose imperturbable dignity still further roused her
resentment.
“Mark my words Fred, that’s a designing creature!” she exclaimed as
they drove to the station. “She behaves as though she were mistress of
the place. An ugly pale-faced woman like that!”
“My dear, I don’t think her ugly exactly, and her figure is certainly
very good,” murmured Fred, whose folly was proverbial.
“Ridiculous!” panted his wife. “You’re a perfect fool, Fred! I hope
your aunt won’t leave her a farthing. It would serve her right.
Fortunately we know that the place and everything is yours, otherwise I
should leave no stone unturned to get rid of that young person.”
Anne was occupied next day with preparations for the removal of her
friend to the nursing home in London decided upon by the doctors. Only
the nurse accompanied her.
“No, my dear. I refuse to have you with me,” she said authoritatively
to Anne. “What’s the use of dragging you to town when nurse does all I
want? If they don’t kill me between them, you shall come up and see me
afterwards. I shall want a little change from doctors and nurses then.
Just now, you’d only be in the way.”
Anne drove with her to the station, and helped to arrange her
comfortably in the invalid carriage.
“Good-bye, my dear,” she said rather faintly, as Anne bent over her.
She kissed her, and with one of her rare caresses, gently patted her
hand.
“You’re a good girl,” she added. “If I get well, it will only be for
the pleasure of seeing you again. You’ve got quite pretty, Anne. I
always had a weakness for pretty people. Tell the young man, what’s his
name?--René, I’m sorry I didn’t see him.”
“He wanted to come to say good-bye,” murmured Anne, trying to control
her voice.
Mrs. Burbage shook her head, and her eyes closed.
“I can’t talk to young people. I’m past it,” she whispered. “Good-bye,
my dear. God bless you.”
The train moved slowly out of the station, leaving Anne on the
platform, blind with tears.
She tried to remember that the London doctor thought the case by no
means hopeless. In vain. She felt desolate and overwhelmed. She was
alone--and her other friends were going too.
Resolutely Anne turned her mind from this last thought. She would not
tell herself that it was because she dared not face it. They were going
next morning; and in the afternoon they came to say good-bye.
Though late in the month, the day was fine and warm, and for the last
time, tea was laid out of doors. Anne was very quiet and very pale.
Dacier and Thouret commiserated with her on the loss of her friend.
“But she’ll get well. It’s all right,” they assured her cheerfully.
François unobserved, watched her carefully.
René was also very silent, and François was grateful for the high
spirits of the two boys. They insisted before leaving, that Anne should
give them each a flower from her Shakespeare garden.
The flowers of middle summer filled the borders now.
“Here they are, all of them!” said François. “Hot lavender, mints,
savory, marjoram and marigolds.”
“But none of you are middle-aged, so they are not for you,” Anne
returned.
She picked a late rose for each of them, Dacier and Thouret receiving
theirs with extravagant delight.
“It shall be buried with me,” Dacier exclaimed. “But not yet. I’ve got
a few things to do first.”
François groaned. “When I think of the reams of execrable poems I’m
doomed to read before that!” he exclaimed as they strolled under
the yellowing trees. “Look here! We must really go. I’ve got all my
canvases to pack, and so has René.”
“But it’s only au revoir,” declared Thouret. “Sweet Anne Page is coming
to Paris. _C’est déjà une chose tout-à-fait entendue. Nous la menerons
entendre Sara, et Mounet-Sully dans Hernani._”
“We shall have her with us before the winter sets in. And then we shall
come back next year,” added Dacier.
“Good-bye,” returned Anne simply, shaking hands with each of them in
turn.
She walked back into the house when they were gone, noticing minutely,
trivial things such as a little stain on the paint in the hall; a
flower that had fallen out of a jar on the window ledge.
An hour later--when it was nearly dark, René Dampierre found her in the
rose garden.
She stood quite still when she saw him coming, and waited for him to
speak.
“I came back,” he began, stammering a little. “The maid told me you
were in the garden. I forgot this book. You lent it to me.”
He held it out to her as he spoke. It was a little volume of Herrick.
“Keep it,” Anne said. “It’s mine.”
Her voice was steady, but her hands were icy cold, and she was
shivering.
He came close to her.
“May I? Then will you put my name in it, as well as yours? Here’s a
pencil.”
She rested the book on the sundial, and bent low over it, perhaps
because of the fading light.
“It’s too damp for you out here, in that thin dress,” he said in a low
voice. “You’re shivering.” He touched her hand, and she shrank back
against the sundial.
“Anne,” he said, still more softly, and his voice trembled. “Anne,
I can’t say good-bye. Promise that you’ll come to Paris this winter.
Promise! You will, won’t you?”
He took both her cold hands, and suddenly put them to his lips.
It was too dark to see her face, but he heard her catch her breath, and
when she spoke, he scarcely recognized her voice.
“Good-bye, René. I want you to go now. Yes, I mean it. Please go.”
The words, so gently spoken that he knew he had not offended her, were
full of the authority of a woman who expects to be obeyed. He hesitated
a second, then bent his head again, and Anne felt him kiss the sleeve
of her dress.
A moment later, she saw his tall figure pass like a darker shadow,
through the shadows that hung round the gate in the wall. Long after
all the light was gone, she stood where he had left her.
She knew why he had gone. Almost as though she had been present, she
knew all the wisdom his friend François Fontenelle had that day been
pouring into his ears. She pictured François’ cold ironical anger if he
knew, or if he came to know, of this second farewell. Bitterest pang of
all, she knew that he was right.
She stood clasping her hands together.
“It’s all too late--too late,” she kept repeating unconsciously,
shivering from head to foot.
* * * * *
Anne’s prescience was not at fault. Late the same night, after the two
younger men had gone to their rooms, Fontenelle sat in the parlour of
the Falcon Inn, and discussed her with his friend.
“You’ve been a fool, my dear fellow,” he remarked in his dryest tone.
“I warned you not to go back. Why couldn’t you let well alone?”
René sprang restlessly to his feet, and stood with his back to the fire
which he had just lighted.
“You know well enough. Why do you ask absurd questions,” he returned
irritably. “It’s no use talking. I know I’m a fool. But I can’t get her
out of my head.”
François leant forward to tap his pipe against the brickwork of the
fireplace.
“You must,” he said shortly. “It’s madness. This isn’t a case for
fooling. It’s marriage--and suicide. If it were marriage _or_ suicide
you would be a wise man to choose the latter alternative,” he added
grimly.
René moved impatiently. “I know. I know. You needn’t rub it in.
But--she’s adorable. I can’t forget her.”
François regarded him patiently. “My dear fellow,” he said after a
moment, “you may think you’re in love, but do at least try to keep off
arrant nonsense. You know as well as I do that you _will_ forget her.
That two months after you get back, she’ll be an occasional sentimental
memory, and that a year hence, you will never think of her at all.”
René laughed shortly. “You’re a detestable brute!” he exclaimed with
the half wistful half amused smile of a spoilt child, which made part
of his charm.
“And the worst of it is, you’re always right. I don’t want to marry
her. I don’t want to marry any one. I’m not the man to marry. I’ve got
work to do. You’re quite right. I was a fool to go back.”
“And I suppose there was a love scene, and a declaration of sorts?”
François’ voice was ironical, but there was anxiety under the light
words.
“No.” He grew suddenly grave. “She asked me to go--and I went.”
There was a silence which lasted some minutes. The wood fire crackled,
and the lamp illumined the comfortable room with its fifteenth-century
beams overhead, its panelled walls and its red-covered sofa and chairs.
“Anne Page is not a woman to fool with,” said François at last. He
was thinking of what she had once said, sitting in the sunshine of the
garden. “_Then an artist ought to keep out of the way of any woman who
cares. But he wouldn’t if she pleased him._”
The memory of the last words touched him.
“She’s not made for that sort of thing. It’s not decent. It’s not
playing the game. Leave her alone, and she’ll forget.”
Even as he spoke, he wondered whether he spoke truth; but that was a
question to be dismissed with a mental shrug.
“I dare say she’s got nothing to forget,” returned René gloomily. “I’ve
no doubt she thinks I’m just a ridiculous young fool.”
François did not reply.
“Women are strange things,” pursued René presently. “They alter so.
Anne has grown years younger,--and years older since we first saw her.
She manages us now. Have you noticed?” He turned to the other man
with a quick smile. “She couldn’t have done that at first. She was
too shy, and--what’s the word?--diffident. And yet at first, did she
seem a woman to fall in love with? I never thought of it. I believe we
all looked upon her as an interesting creature, and thought ourselves
rather fine fellows for discovering her beauty,--which perhaps doesn’t
exist at all. She was something to paint, something to discuss----”
“Something to teach,” added François slowly.
He glanced at the clock. “Come along! Do you see the time? And we’ve
got to start at seven to-morrow.”
He got up, and put his pipe in his pocket.
“The art of life, my dear young friend,” he remarked with burlesque
sententiousness, as he turned out the lamp, “is to manage one’s
episodes carefully. And to see that they remain episodes.”
René did not reply. He remained seated in the armchair, after the light
was out, staring at the still leaping fire.
XIV
Three days after Mrs. Burbage went away, Anne received a telegram,
summoning her at once to London. The hours spent in travelling, and
reaching the nursing-home, passed like an uneasy nightmare, with a
background of dread to be realized, and by the time she arrived at the
house in Wimpole Street, her friend was unconscious.
She died a few minutes after Anne was admitted to her bedside.
Of the time that followed, Anne had no clear idea. She felt dazed and
uncomprehending, and when by the end of the week, she found herself
back again in the silent house at Dymfield, it was to wonder vaguely
how she had arrived, and in what a solicitor’s letter which awaited
her, could possibly concern her.
The writer, who signed himself William Chaplin, expressed his intention
of calling upon her next day, on business.
Anne received him the following afternoon, standing before the fire in
the library, very slim and tall in her black dress.
Instinctively she had taken refuge in this room, as the one place
unconnected with Mrs. Burbage; the room that held no memories of her.
The grey-haired man who entered, shook hands with her rather
impressively, and sat down, with the remark that she was no doubt
acquainted with the contents of Mrs. Burbage’s will.
“No,” returned Anne, “except that I understood that everything was to
go to Mr. Crosby, her nephew.”
The lawyer glanced at her rather sharply.
“The last will is in your favour,” he replied. “Everything is left to
you unconditionally. This house--all my client’s property--her real and
personal estate. Everything in short.”
Anne turned a shade paler. She did not understand, but she was aware
that the little grey-haired man before her, was making what seemed to
him at least, an important announcement.
At the end of half-an-hour’s conversation, she followed him to the
door, still unable to grasp the significance of his words.
“The will, as I say, is most simple,” he remarked. “Everything is
quite straightforward, and we ought to be able to get the whole thing
through speedily. In the meantime, I congratulate you, Miss Page,”
he added dryly. “Apart from the income, Fairholme Court is a most
delightful residence.” He glanced about him. “Most delightful,” he
added.
Anne shook hands with him, and went slowly back to the library.
Dinner was served as usual by the quiet maids, whose demeanour since
the death of their mistress, had assumed an added shade of decorous
gravity.
They liked Anne, and their manner towards her expressed a kindliness
and sympathy for which she was grateful.
To-night, she scarcely noticed their solicitude, and the dishes they
set before her were taken away almost untasted.
She wandered into the library again after her lonely meal, and began to
pace the floor aimlessly.
From time to time, she took a book from one of the shelves, opened it,
glanced at a page that was meaningless, and unconscious of her action,
replaced the volume.
The dry monotonous voice of the lawyer, re-echoed in her brain. He was
saying words which signified nothing.
“Your income will amount to between four and five thousand a year.”
Out of a mass of detail, it was only this she remembered, and at
present it conveyed nothing to her mind.
She was conscious only of a feeling of loving gratitude that her friend
had cared for her. Of what that care implied, in those first hours she
realized nothing. She could only think of her last words at the station.
“If I get better, it will be for the pleasure of seeing you again.”
Her eyes filled with tears as she remembered them.
Gradually the hours wore on. The servants went to bed, and the house
was silent. Mechanically Anne piled fresh logs on the fire, and at last
conscious of exhaustion from her ceaseless pacing of the room, she sank
into a chair, and held her hands to the blaze.
She was a rich woman now, the lawyer had said so.
What did that mean? With all her strength Anne tried to translate the
statement into comprehensible terms.
First of all, it surely meant freedom from anxiety. No weary
heart-breaking toil for a bare existence. No painful counting of
hard-earned shillings.
Then,--for the first time Anne felt a definite thrill of pleasure,--it
meant the power to help her brother. Hugh should be made happy if money
could compass it.
And afterwards? Well, the realization of some of her day-dreams. She
could travel. The wonderful material world need no longer be a mirage,
a prospect viewed only by the eye of faith and imagination. She might
become the possessor of many beautiful things. Pictures, books,
furniture, dress. She would have the power to help people; to relieve
misery; to do some tangible good. Money was a talisman to unlock some
of the exquisite secrets of the world.
Anne paused. Her thoughts, clear at last, and swiftly moving, were
suddenly arrested.
Her wealth might do all this, but there was one joy it could not buy,
and missing this, all the rest, all the wonders it could work, seemed
dust and ashes. Dead Sea fruit. The time for love was gone, and it had
become the one impossible, unattainable desire of her whole being.
Missing it, she would miss the meaning of existence.
The pageant of the world might be revealed, but it would be seen under
the grey skies of common day; for ever unillumined by the light that
never was on land or sea.
Again in her heart there rose the fierce pain, the sickening hunger she
had experienced when for the first time in her life, she had seen the
eyes of happy lovers.
Swiftly in bitter mockery, her memory placed her once more in the
rose-garden, where a week ago René had kissed her hands, and spoken to
her in the shaken voice she had never heard from a man’s lips before.
If only she had been the girl to whom he ought to have been pleading!
If only she had felt the right to say she loved him too. If only she
had been the girl she longed to be, the wisdom of the wise would
have seemed an idle song. She would have given him her love, freely,
generously, without counting the cost, and the future might have taken
care of itself.
But as it was----
Suddenly Anne rose to her feet. The colour surged up into her face; the
warm blood raced through her body. She put her trembling fingers on the
mantelpiece, to steady herself, and stood looking down into the fire.
As it was--why not?
She felt bewildered, dazed, giddy with the thought that had come to
her, as emerging from a dark passage, one staggers in the glare of a
brilliantly lighted room. Through the dazzling incoherency of her
idea, she clung to one certainty.
If René was not in love with her as she understood love, he was at
least drawn to her as a man is drawn irresistibly to a woman. He had
been in her hands that night. She could have done as she pleased with
him.
Anne knew her power at last, and deliberately, for his sake,
she had not used it. He had gone away. He would forget, of
course--unless----Slowly she sank into her chair, and sat thinking.
She thought through all her life. She thought of the never-ending days
of childhood and youth, unlighted by any happiness, any hope; the
dreary days which had killed at last even her dreams.
She thought of Hugh and his wife in a distant colony, happy, regardless
of her, unmindful, unless she wrote to them, of her very existence.
She thought of the heart of despair which she had brought back to this
very room six months ago, of the dumb certainty that life for her had
been, was, and ever would be, empty of all gifts, of all delight. And
then of the wonderful months that had just passed. Wonderful, because
of all she had learnt of others--and of herself.
She remembered the diffident shrinking creature, who for shyness could
scarcely lift her eyes to the men she regarded with awe, as dwellers in
another world, whether gods or devils she did not know.
She could have smiled as she thought of them now.