ought not to grudge it to you. But I must say, Dornington--I see we look
at the thing differently--but I must say, I shouldn't have cared to grab
at such luck myself."
Dornington had thrust his hands into his pockets, and stood looking at
his friend.
"I see," he said slowly. "And her fortune is really so much? I didn't
think it had been so much as that. Yes. Well, Guillemot, it's no good
making a row about it; I don't want to quarrel with my best friend. Go
along to my place, will you? Or stay: come and let me introduce you to
Miss Grant, and you can walk up with her; she'll show you where I live.
I'm going for a bit of a walk."
Five minutes later Stephen, in response to Rosamund's beckoning hand at
the window, was following Miss Grant up the narrow flagged path leading
to the cottage which Rosamund had taken. And ten minutes later Andrew
Dornington was striding along the road to the station with a Gladstone
bag in his hands.
Stephen lunched at the cottage. The girls served the lunch themselves;
they had no hired service in the little cottage. Rosamund exerted
herself to talk gaily.
As the meal ended, a fair-haired child stood in the door that opened
straight from the street into the sitting-room, after the primitive
fashion of Lymchurch.
"'E gave me a letter for you," said the child, and Rosamund took it,
giving in exchange some fruit from the pretty disordered table.
"Excuse me," she said, with the rose in her cheeks because she saw the
hand-writing was the hand-writing she had seen in many pencilled verses.
She read the letter, frowned, read it again. "Constance, you might get
the coffee."
Constance went out. Then the girl turned on her guest.
"This is _your_ doing," she said with a concentrated fury that brought
him to his feet facing her. "Why did you come and meddle! You've told
him I was rich--the very thing I didn't mean him to know till--till he
couldn't help himself. You've spoilt everything! And now he's gone--and
he'll never come back. Oh, I hope you will suffer for this some day.
You will, if there's any justice in the world!"
He looked as though he suffered for it even now, but when he spoke his
voice was equable.
"I am extremely sorry," he said, "but after all, there's very little
harm done. You should have warned me that you meant to play a comedy,
and I would have taken any part you assigned me. However, you've
succeeded. He evidently 'loves you for yourself alone.' Write and tell
him to come back: he'll come."
"How little you know him," she said, "after all these years! Even I know
him better than that. That was why I pretended not to be rich. Directly
I knew about the money I made up my mind to find him and try if I could
make him care. I know it sounds horrid; I don't mind, it's true. And I
had done it; and then you came. Oh, I hope I shall never see you again!
I will never speak to you again! No, I don't mean that----" She hid her
face in her hands.
"Rosamund, try to forgive me. I didn't know, I couldn't know. I will
bring him back to you--I swear it! Only trust me."
"You can't," she said; "it's all over."
"Let me tell you something. If you hadn't had this money--but if you
hadn't had this money I should never have seen you. But I have thought
of nothing but you ever since that day you came to the Temple. I don't
tell you this to annoy you, only to show you that I would do anything in
the world to prevent you from being unhappy. Forgive me, dear! Oh,
forgive me!"
"It's no good," she said; but she gave him her hand. When Constance
Grant came back with the coffee, she found Mr Guillemot alone looking
out of the window at the sunflowers and the hollyhocks.
"What is the matter?" she asked.
"I've made a fool of myself," he said, forgetting, as he looked at her
kind eyes, that three hours ago she was only a name to him.
"Could I do anything?"
"You're her friend," he said. "Miss Grant, I'm going down to the sea, if
you could come down with me and let me talk--but I've no right to bother
you."
"I'll come," said Constance. "I'll come by-and-by when I've cleared
lunch away. It's no bother. As you say, I'm her friend."
III
Rosamund stayed on at the little house behind the sea-wall, and she
wrote letters, long and many, which accumulated on the mantel-piece of
the rooms in the Temple. Andrew found them there when he returned to
town in the middle of October. The room was cheerless, tenantless,
fireless. He lit the gas and looked through his letters. He did not dare
to open those which came from her. There were bills, invitation cards, a
returned manuscript or two, a cheque for a magazine article, and a
letter in Stephen's hand-writing. It was dated a fortnight earlier.
"DEAR OLD CHAP," it ran, "I'm off to my father's. I can't bear
it. I can't face you or any one. I wish to God I'd never told
you anything about Rosamund Rainham's money. There isn't any
money: it was all in the Crystal Oil Co. No one had the least
idea that it wasn't good, but I feel as if I ought to have
known. There's a beggarly hundred or so in consols: that's the
end of her million. It wasn't really my fault, of course. She
doesn't blame me.--Yours,
"STEPHEN GUILLEMOT."
Then he opened her letters--read them all--in the order of the dates on
the postmarks, for even in love Andrew was an orderly man--read them
with eyes that pricked and smarted. There were four or five of them.
First, the frank pleading of affection, then the coldness of hurt pride
and love; then, doubts, wonderings. Was he ill? Was he away? Would he
not at least answer? Passionate longing, tender anxiety breathed in
every word. Then came the last letter of all, written a fortnight ago:
"DEAR ANDREW,--I want you to understand that all is over
between us. I know you wished it, and now I see you are right.
I could never have been anything to you but your loving friend,
"ROSAMUND."
He read it through twice; it was a greater shock to him than Stephen's
letter had been. Then he understood. The Millionairess might stoop to
woo a poor lover whose pride had fought with and conquered his love:
the girl with only a "beggarly hundred in consols" had her pride too.
The early October dusk filled the room. Andrew caught up the bag he had
brought with him, slammed the door, and blundered down the stairs. He
caught a passing hansom in Fleet Street and the last train to Lymchurch.
A furious south-wester was waiting for him there. He could hardly stand
against it--it blew and tore and buffeted him, almost prevailing against
him as he staggered down the road from the station. The night was inky
black, but he knew his Lymchurch every inch, and he fought it manfully,
though every now and then he was fain to cling to a gateway or a post,
and hold on till the gust had passed. Thus, breathless and dishevelled,
his tie under his left ear, his hat battered in, his hair in crisp
disorder, he reached at last the haven of the little porch of the house
under the sea-wall.
Rosamund herself opened the door; her eyes showed him two things--her
love and her pride. Which would be the stronger? He remembered how the
question had been answered in his own case, and he shivered as she took
his hand and led him into the warm, lamp-lighted room. The curtains
were drawn; the hearth swept; a tabby cat purred on the rug; a book lay
open on the table: all breathed of the sober comfort of home. She sat
down on the other side of the hearth and looked at him. Neither spoke.
It was an awkward moment.
Rosamund broke the silence.
"It is very friendly of you to come and see me," she said. "It is very
lonely for me now. Constance has gone back to London."
"She has gone back to her teaching?"
"Yes; I wanted her to stay, but----"
"I've heard from Stephen. He is very wretched; he seems to think it is
his fault."
"Poor, dear boy!" She spoke musingly. "Of course it wasn't his fault. It
all seems like a dream, to have been so rich for a little while, and to
have done nothing with it except," she added with a laugh and a glance
at her fur-trimmed dress, "to buy a most extravagant number of white
dresses. How awfully tired you look, Andrew! Go and have a wash--the
spare room's the first door at the top of the stairs--and I'll get you
some supper."
When he came down again, she had laid a cloth on the table and was
setting out silver and glass.
"Another relic of my brief prosperity," she said, touching the forks and
spoons. "I'm glad I don't have to eat with nickel-plated things."
She talked gaily as they ate. The home atmosphere of the room touched
Dornington. Rosamund herself, in her white gown, had never appeared so
fair and desirable. And but for his own mad pride he might have been
here now, sharing her pretty little home life with her--not as her
guest, but as her husband. He flushed crimson. Blushing was an old trick
of his--one of those that had earned him his feminine nickname of Dora,
and in the confusion his blushing brought him, he spoke.
"Rosamund, can you ever forgive me?"
"I forgive you from my heart," she said, "if I have anything to
forgive."
But in her tone was the resentment of a woman who does not forgive. Yet
he had been right. He had sacrificed himself; and if he had chosen to
suffer? But what about the blue lines under her dear eyes, the hollows
in her dear face?
"You have been unhappy," he said.
"Well," she laughed, "I wasn't exactly pleased to lose my fortune."
"Dear," he said desperately, "won't you try to forgive me? It seemed
right. How could I sacrifice you to a penniless----"
"I'd enough for both--or thought I had," she said obstinately.
"Ah, but don't you see----"
"I see that you cared more for not being thought mercenary by Stephen
than----"
"Forgive me!" he pleaded; "take me back."
"Oh no"--she tossed her bright head--"Stephen might think me mercenary;
I couldn't bear _that_. You see you are richer than I am now. How much
did you tell me you made a year by your writing? How can I sacrifice you
to a penniless----"
"Rosamund, do you mean it?"
"I do mean it. And, besides----"
"What?"
"I don't love you any more." The bright head drooped and turned away.
"I have killed your love. I don't wonder. Forgive me for bothering you.
Good-bye!"
"What are you going to do?" she asked suddenly.
"Oh, don't be afraid, nothing desperate. Only work hard and try to
forgive you."
"Forgive _me_? You have nothing to forgive."
"No, nothing--if you had left off loving me? Have you? Is it true?"
"Good-bye!" she said. "You are staying at the 'Ship'?"
"Yes."
"Don't let's part in anger. I shall be on the sea-wall in the morning.
Let's part friends, then."
In the morning Andrew went into the fresh air. The trees, still gold in
calmer homes, stood almost leafless in wild, windy Lymchurch. He stood
in the sunlight, and in spite of himself some sort of gladness came to
him through the crisp October air. Then the _ping_ of a bicycle bell
sounded close behind him, and there was Stephen.
They shook hands, and Stephen's eyebrows went up.
"Is it all right?" he asked. "I knew you'd come here when I came home
last night and found you'd had my letter."
"No; it's not all right. She won't have me."
"Why?"
"Pride or revenge, or something. Don't let's talk about it."
"All right. I want some breakfast; we left town by the 7.20. I'm
starving."
"Who are 'we'?"
"Miss Grant and I. I thought Rosamund would be wanting a _chaperon_ or a
bridesmaid, or something, so I brought her and her bicycle."
"Always thoughtful," said Andrew, with something like a laugh.
Presently, strolling along the sea-wall they met the two girls. Rosamund
looked radiant. Where was the pale, hollow-eyed darling of last night?
The wind that ruffled her brown hair had blown roses into her cheeks.
"Do you forgive me?" whispered Stephen when they met.
"That depends," she answered.
They all walked on together, and presently Stephen and Constance fell
behind.
Then Rosamund spoke.
"You really think I ought to crush my pride, and--and----"
Hope laughed in Andrew's face--laughed and fled--for he looked in the
face of Miss Rainham, and there was no sign of yielding in it.
"Yes," he said almost sullenly.
"That is as much as to say that you were wrong."
"I--perhaps I was wrong. What does it matter?"
"It matters greatly. Suppose I had my money now would you run away from
me?"
"I--I suppose I should act as I did before."
"Then you don't care for me any more than you did?"
"I love you a thousand times more," he cried, turning angry, haggard
eyes to her. "Yes, I believe I was wrong. Nothing would send me from you
now but yourself----"
She clapped her hands.
"Then stay," she said, "for it's a farce, and my money is as safe as
houses."
He scowled at her.
"It's all a trick? You've played with me? Good-bye, and God forgive
you!"
He turned to go, but Constance, coming up from behind them, caught his
arm.
"Don't be such an idiot," she said. "_She_ had nothing to do with it.
She thought her money was gone. You don't suppose _she_ would have
played such a trick even to win _your_ valuable affections. You don't
deserve your luck, Mr Dornington."
Rosamund was looking at him with wet eyes, and her lips trembled.
"Constance only told me this morning," she said. "She and Stephen
planned it, to get you--to make me--to--to----"
"And then she nearly spoilt it all by being as silly as you were.
Whatever does it matter which of you has the money?"
"Nothing," said Rosamund valiantly; "I see that plainly. Don't you,
Andrew?"
"I see nothing but you, Rosamund," he said, and they turned and walked
along the sea-wall, hand in hand, like two children.
"That's all right," said Stephen; "but, by Jove, I've had enough of
playing Providence and managing other people's affairs."
"She was very sweet about it," said Constance, walking on.
"Well she may be; she has her heart's desire. But it was not easy. What
a blessing she is so unbusiness-like! I couldn't have done it but for
you."
"I am very glad to have been of some service," said Constance demurely.
"I couldn't have got on without you. I can't get on without you ever
again."
"But that's nonsense," said Miss Grant.
"You won't make me, Constance? There's no confounded money to come
between _us_."
He caught at the hand that swung by her side.
"But you said you loved _her_, and that was why----"
"Ah, but that was a thousand years ago. And it was nonsense, even then,
Constance."
And so two others went along the sea-wall in the October sunshine,
happily, like children, hand in hand.
VI
THE HERMIT OF "THE YEWS"
Maurice Brent knew a great deal about the Greek anthology, and very
little about women. No one but himself had any idea how much he knew of
the one, and no one had less idea than himself how little he knew of the
other. So that when, a stranger and a pilgrim hopelessly astray amid a
smart house-party, he began to fall in love with Camilla, it seemed to
be no one's business to tell him, what everybody else knew, that Camilla
had contracted the habit of becoming engaged at least once a year. Of
course this always happened in the country, because it was there that
Camilla was most bored. No other eligible young man happened to be free
at the moment: Camilla never engaged herself to ineligibles. The habit
of years is not easily broken: Camilla became engaged to Maurice, and,
for the six months of the engagement, he lived in Paradise. A fool's
Paradise, if you like, but Paradise all the same.
About Easter time Camilla told him, very nicely and kindly, that she had
mistaken her own heart--she hoped he would not let it make him very
unhappy. She would always wish him the best of good fortune, and
doubtless he would find it in the affection of some other girl much
nicer and more worthy of him than his sincere friend Camilla. Camilla
was right--no one could have been less worthy of him than she: but after
all it was Camilla he thought that he loved, Camilla he felt that he
wanted, not any other girl at all, no matter how nice or how worthy.
He took it very quietly: sent her a note so cold and unconcerned that
Camilla was quite upset, and cried most of the evening, and got up next
day with swollen eyelids and a very bad temper. She was not so sure of
her power as she had been--and the loss of such a certainty is never
pleasant.
He, meanwhile, advertised for a furnished house, and found one--by
letter, which seemed to be the very thing he wanted. "Handsomely and
conveniently furnished five miles from a railway station--a well-built
house standing in its own grounds of five acres--garden, orchard
pasture, magnificent view." Being as unversed in the ways of house
agents as in those of women, he took it on trust, paid a quarter's rent,
and went down to take possession. He had instructed the local house
agent to find a woman who would come in for a few hours daily to "do for
him."
"I'll have no silly women living in the house," said he.
It was on an inclement June evening that the station fly set him down in
front of his new house. The drive had been long and dreary, and seemed
to Maurice more like seventy miles than seven. Now he let down the
carriage window and thrust his head into the rain to see his new house.
It was a stucco villa, with iron railings in the worst possible taste.
It had an air at once new and worn out; no one seemed ever to have lived
in it, and yet everything about it was broken and shabby. The door stuck
a little at first with the damp, and when at last it opened and Maurice
went over his house, he found it furnished mainly with oil-cloth and
three-legged tables, and photographs in Oxford frames--like a seaside
lodging-house. The house was clean, however, and the woman in
attendance was clean, but the atmosphere of the place was that of a
vault. He looked out through the streaming panes at the magnificent view
so dwelt upon in the house agents' letters. The house stood almost at
the edge of a disused chalk quarry; far below stretched a flat plain,
dotted here and there with limekilns and smoky, tall chimneys. The five
acres looked very bare and thistly, and the rain was dripping heavily
from a shivering, half-dead cypress on to a draggled, long-haired grass
plot. Mr Brent shivered too, and ordered a fire.
When the woman had gone, he sat long by the fire in one of those cane
and wood chairs that fold up--who wants a chair to fold up?--so common
in lodging-houses. Unless you sit quite straight in these chairs you
tumble out of them. He gazed at the fire, and thought, and dreamed. His
dreams were, naturally, of Camilla; his thoughts were of his work.
"I've taken the house for three years," said he. "Well, one place is as
good as another to be wretched in. But one room I must furnish--for you
can't work on oil-cloth."
So next day he walked to Rochester and bought some old bureaux, and
chairs, and book-cases, a few Persian rugs and some brass things,
unpacked his books and settled down to the hermit's life to which he had
vowed himself. The woman came every morning from her cottage a mile
away, and left at noon. He got his meals himself--always chops, or
steaks, or eggs--and presently began to grow accustomed to the place.
When the sun shone it was not so bad. He could make no way against the
thorns and thistles on his five acres, and they quickly grew into a very
wilderness. But a wilderness is pleasant to wander in; and a few flowers
had survived long neglect, and here and there put out red, or white, or
yellow buds. And he worked away at his book about Greek poetry.
He almost believed that he was contented; he had never cared for people
so much as for books, and now he saw no people, and his books began to
crowd his shelves. No one passed by "The Yews"--so called, he imagined,
in extravagant compliment to the decaying cypress--for it stood by a
grass-grown by-way that had once connected two main roads, each a couple
of miles distant. These were now joined by a better road down in the
valley, and no one came past Maurice's window save the milk, the bread,
the butcher, and the postman.
Summer turned brown and dry and became autumn, autumn turned wet and
chilly and grew into winter, and all the winds of heaven blew cold and
damp through the cracks of the ill-built house.
Maurice was glad when the spring came; he had taken the house for three
years, and he was a careful man, and also, in his way, a determined. Yet
it was good to look out once more on something green, and to see
sunshine and a warm sky; it was near Easter now. In all these ten months
nothing whatever had happened to him. He had never been beyond his five
acres--and no one had been to see him. He had no relations, and friends
soon forget; besides, after all, friends, unlike relations, cannot go
where they are not invited.
It was on the Saturday before Easter that the quarryside fell in.
Maurice was working in his study when he heard a sudden crack and a
slow, splitting sound, and then a long, loud, rumbling noise, like
thunder, that echoed and re-echoed from the hills on each side. And,
looking from his window, he saw the cloud of white dust rise high above
the edge of the old quarry, and seem to drift off to join the
cotton-wool clouds in the blue sky.
"I suppose it's all safe enough here," he said, and went back to his
manuscripts. But he could not work. At last something had happened; he
found himself shaken and excited. He laid down the pen. "I wonder if any
one was hurt?" he said; "the road runs just below, of course. I wonder
whether there'll be any more of it--I wonder?" A wire jerked, the
cracked bell sounded harshly through the silence of the house. He sprang
to his feet. "Who on earth----" he said. "The house isn't safe after
all, perhaps, and they've come to tell me."
As he went along the worn oil-cloth of the hall he saw through the
comfortless white-spotted glass of his front door the outline of a
woman's hat.
He opened the door--it stuck as usual--but he got it open. There stood a
girl holding a bicycle.
"Oh!" she said, without looking at him, "I'm so sorry to trouble you--my
bicycle's run down--and I'm afraid it's a puncture, and could you let me
have some water, to find the hole--and if I might sit down a minute."
Her voice grew lower and lower.
He opened the door wide and put out his hand for the bicycle. She took
two steps past him, rather unsteadily, and sat down on the stairs--there
were no chairs: the furniture of the hall was all oil-cloth and hat
pegs.
He saw now that she was very pale; her face looked greenish behind her
veil's white meshes.
He propped the machine against the door, as she leaned her head back
against the ugly marbled paper of the staircase wall.
"I'm afraid you're ill," he said gently. But the girl made no answer.
Her head slipped along the varnished wall and rested on the stair two
steps above where she sat. Her hat was crooked and twisted; even a
student of Greek could see that she had fainted.
"Oh Lord!" said he.
He got her hat and veil off--he never knew how, and he wondered
afterwards at his own cleverness, for there were many pins, long and
short; he fetched the cushion from his armchair and put it under her
head; he took off her gloves and rubbed her hands and her forehead with
vinegar, but her complexion remained green, and she lay, all in a heap,
at the foot of his staircase.
Then he remembered that fainting people should be laid flat and not
allowed to lie about in heaps at the foot of stairs, so he very gently
and gingerly picked the girl up in his arms and carried her into his
sitting-room. Here he laid her on the ground--he had no sofa--and sat
beside her on the floor, patiently fanning her with a copy of the
_Athenaeum_, and watching the pinched, pallid face for some sign of
returning life. It came at last, in a flutter of the eyelids, a
long-drawn, gasping breath. The Greek scholar rushed for whisky--brandy
he esteemed as a mere adjunct of channel boats--lifted her head and held
the glass to her lips. The blood had come back to her face in a rush of
carnation; she drank--choked--drank--he laid her head down and her eyes
opened. They were large, clear grey eyes--very bewildered-looking just
now--but they and the clear red tint in cheeks and lips transformed the
face.
"Good gracious," said he, "she's pretty! Pretty? she's beautiful!"
She was. That such beauty should so easily have hidden itself behind a
green-tinted mask, with sunken eyelid, seemed a miracle to the
ingenuous bookworm.
"You're better now," said he with feverish banality. "Give me your
hands--so--now can--yes, that's right--here, this chair is the only
comfortable one----"