"We sometimes think we might have loved more in kinder
circumstances, if some one had not died, or if some one else had
not turned away from us. Vain self-deception! The love we _have_
given is all we had to give. If we had had more in us it would have
come out. The circumstances of life always give scope for love if
they give scope for nothing else. There is no stony desert in which
it will not grow, no climate however bleak in which its marvellous
flowers will not open to perfection."--M. N.
Two days later, when Janey was pacing in the lime walk of the Hulver
gardens, Mr. Stirling joined her. She had known him slightly ever since
he had become her mother's tenant and their neighbour at Noyes, but her
acquaintance with him had never gone beyond the thinnest conventional
civility. The possibility that Mr. Stirling might have been an
acquisition in a preposterously dull neighbourhood had not occurred to
Janey and Roger. They did not find Riff dull, and they were vaguely
afraid of him as "clever." The result had been that they seldom met, and
he was quickly aware of Janey's surprise at seeing him.
He explained that he had been to call on her at the Dower House, and the
servant said she had gone up to the gardens, and finding the gate
unlocked he had ventured to follow her. She saw that he had come for
some grave reason, and they sat down on the green wooden seat which
followed the semicircle in the yew hedge. Far off at the other end of
the lime walk was another semicircular seat. There had been wind in the
night, and the rough grass, that had once been a smooth-shaven lawn, and
the long paved walk were strewn with curled amber leaves as if it were
autumn already.
Mr. Stirling looked with compassion at Janey's strained face and
sleepless eyes.
"I have come to see you," he said, "because I know you are a friend of
Miss Georges."
He saw her wince.
"I am not sure I am," she said hoarsely, involuntarily.
"I am quite sure," he said.
There was a moment's silence.
"I came to tell you that my nephew has started for Japan, and that he
has promised me upon his oath that he will never speak again of what he
gabbled so foolishly. He meant no harm. But stupid people generally
manage to do a good deal. The worst of Geoff's stupidity was that it was
the truth which he blurted out."
"I knew it," said Janey below her breath. "I was sure of it."
"So was I," said Mr. Stirling sadly. "One can't tell why one believes
certain things and disbelieves others. But Geoff's voice had that
mysterious thing the ring of truth in it. I knew at once you recognized
that. That is why I am here."
Janey looked straight in front of her.
"Of course I hoped, you and I both hoped," he continued, "that Geoff
might have been mistaken. But he was not. He was so determined to prove
to me that he was not that he unpacked one of his boxes already packed
to start for Japan, and got out his last year's notebooks. I kept one of
them. He did not like it, but I thought it was safer with me than with
him."
Mr. Stirling produced out of a much-battered pocket a small sketch-book
with an elastic band round it, and turned the leaves. Each page was
crowded with pencil studies of architecture, figures, dogs, children,
nursemaids; small elaborate drawings of door-knockers and leaden
pipe-heads; vague scratches of officials and soldiers, the individuality
of each caught in a few strokes. He turned the pages with a certain
respectful admiration.
"He has the root of the matter in him," he said. "He will arrive."
Janey was not impressed. She thought the sketches very unfinished.
Then he stopped at a certain page. Neither of them could help smiling.
The head waiter, as seen from behind, napkin on arm, dish on spread
hand, superb, debonair, stout but fleet.
_Alphonse_ was scribbled under it, _Fontainebleau, Sept. the tenth_, and
the year.
Mr. Stirling turned the leaf, turned three or four leaves, all with
_Mariette_ scrawled on them. Mariette had evidently been the French
chamber-maid, and equally evidently had detained Geoff's vagrant eye.
Another page. A man leaning back in his chair laughing. _Dick Le Geyt_
was written under it.
"Is it like him?" asked Mr. Stirling.
"It's _him_," said Janey.
Yet another page. They both looked in silence at the half-dozen masterly
strokes with _Mrs. Le Geyt_ written under them.
"It is unmistakable," Mr. Stirling said. "It is not only she, but it is
no one else."
His eyes met Janey's. She nodded.
He closed the little book, put its elastic band round it, and squeezed
it into his pocket.
"Why did you bring that to show me?" she said harshly. It seemed as if
he had come to tempt her.
"I knew," he said, "that for the last two days you must have been on the
rack, torn with doubt as to the truth of what my miserable nephew had
affirmed. You look as if you had not slept since. Anything is better
than suspense. Well, now you know it is true."
"Yes, it _is_ true," said Janey slowly, and she became very pale. Then
she added, with difficulty, "I knew--we all knew--that Dick had had some
one--a woman--with him at Fontainebleau when he was taken ill. His
valet told my aunt he had not gone--alone. And the hotel-keeper told her
the same. She ran away when Aunt Jane arrived. Aunt Jane never saw her.
We never knew who she was."
"Till now," said Mr. Stirling softly.
Two long-winged baby-swallows were sitting on their breasts on the sunny
flagged path, resting, turning their sleek heads to right and left. Mr.
Stirling watched them intently.
"Why should anyone but you and I ever know?" he said, with a sigh, after
they had flown. He had waited, hoping Janey would say those words, but
he had had to say them himself instead.
She did not answer. She could not. A pulse in her throat was choking
her. This, then, was what he had come for, to persuade her to be silent,
to hush it up. All men were the same about a pretty woman. A great
tumult clamoured within her, but she made no movement.
"I may as well mention that I am interested in Miss Georges," he went on
quietly. "Don't you find that rather ridiculous, Miss Manvers? An
elderly man of fifty, old enough to be her father. It is quite absurd,
and very undignified, isn't it? You are much too courteous to agree with
me. But I can see you think it is so, whether you agree or not. Wise
women often justly accuse us silly susceptible men of being caught by a
pretty face. I have been caught by a sweet face. I never exchanged a
word with Miss Georges till yesterday, so I have not had the chance of
being attracted by her mind. And it is not her mind that draws me, it is
her face. I have known her by sight for some time. I go to church in
order to see her. I called on her two aunts solely in order to make her
acquaintance. The elder one, the portentous authoress, is the kind of
person whom I should creep down a sewer to avoid; even the saintly
invalid does not call out my higher nature."
Mr. Stirling became aware that Janey was lost in amazement. Irony is
singularly unsuited to a narrow outlook.
He waited a moment, and then went on, choosing his words carefully, as
if he were speaking to some one very young--
"It is quite a different thing to be attracted, and to have any hope of
marriage, isn't it? I have, and had, no thought of marrying Miss
Georges. I am aware that I could not achieve it. Men of my age do not
exist for women of her age. But that does not prevent my having a deep
desire to serve her. And service is the greater part of love, isn't it?
I am sure _you_ know that, whose life is made up of service of others."
"I am not sure I do," she said stiffly. She was steeling herself against
him.
If he found her difficult, he gave no sign of it. He went on
tranquilly--
"As one grows old one sees, oh! how clearly one sees that the only
people whom one can be any real use to are those whom one loves--with
one's whole heart. Liking is no real use. Pity and duty are not much
either. They are better than nothing, but that is all. Love is the one
weapon, the one tool, the one talisman. Now we can't make ourselves love
people. Love is the great gift. I don't, of course, mean the gift of a
woman's love to a man, or of a man's to a woman. I mean the power to
love anyone devotedly, be they who they may, is God's greatest gift to
_us_ His children. And He does not give it us very often. To some He
never gives it. Many people go through life loved and cherished who seem
to be denied His supreme blessing--that of being able to love, of seeing
that wonderful light rest upon a fellow-creature. And as we poor elders
look back, we see that there were one or two people who crossed our path
earlier in life whom we loved, or could have loved, and whom we have
somehow lost: perhaps by their indifference, perhaps by our own
temperament, but whom nevertheless we have lost. When the first spark is
lit in our hearts of that mysterious flame which it sometimes takes us
years to quench, one does not realize it at the time. I did not.
Twenty-five years ago, Miss Manvers, before you were born, I fell in
love. I was at that time a complete egoist, a very perfect specimen,
with the superficial hardness of all crustaceans who live on the
defensive, and wear their bones outside like a kind of armour. She was a
year or two younger than I was, just about Miss Georges' age. Miss
Georges reminds me of her. She is taller and more beautiful, but she
reminds me of her all the same. I was not sure whether she cared for me.
And I had a great friend. And he fell in love with her too. And I
renounced her, and withdrew in his favour. I went away without speaking.
I thought I was acting nobly. He said there was no one like me. Thoreau
had done the same, and I worshipped Thoreau in my youth, and had been to
see him in his log hut. I was sustained in my heartache by feeling I was
doing a heroic action. It never struck me I was doing it at her expense.
I went abroad, and after a time she married my friend. Some years later,
I heard he was dying of a terrible disease in the throat, and I went to
see him. She nursed him with absolute devotion, but she would not allow
me to be much with him. I put it down to a kind of jealousy. And after
his death I tried to see her, but again she put difficulties in the way.
At last I asked her to marry me, and she refused me."
"Because you had deserted her to start with," said Janey.
"No; she was not like that. Because she was dying of the same disease as
her husband. She had contracted it from him. That was why she had never
let me be much with him, or afterwards with her. When I knew, I was
willing to risk it, but she was not. She had her rules, and from them
she never departed. She let me sit with her in the garden, and to the
last she was carried out to her long chair so that I might be with her.
She told me it was the happiest time of her life. I found that from the
first she had loved me, and she loved me to the last. She never
reproached me for leaving her. She was a simple person. I told her I had
done it on account of my friend, and she thought it very noble of me,
and said it was just what she should have expected of me. There was no
irony in her. And she slipped quietly out of life, keeping her ideal of
me to the last."
"I think it was noble too," said Janey stolidly.
"Was it? I never considered her for a moment. I had had the desire to
serve her, but I never served her. Instead, I caused her long, long
unhappiness--for my friend had a difficult temperament--and suffering
and early death. I never realized that she was alive, vulnerable,
sensitive. I should have done better to have married her and devoted
myself to her. I have never wanted to devote myself to any woman since.
We should have been happy together. And she might have been with me
still, and we might have had a son who would just have been the right
age to marry Miss Georges."
"You would not have wanted him to marry her now," said Janey hoarsely.
"You would not want her to marry anyone you were fond of."
Among a confusion of tangled threads Mr. Stirling saw a clue--at last.
A dragon-fly alighted on the stone at his feet, its long orange body and
its gauze wings gleaming in the vivid sunshine. It stood motionless save
for its golden eyes. Even at that moment, his mind, intent on another
object, unconsciously noted and registered the transparent shadow on the
stone of its transparent wings.
"I think," he said, "if I had had a son who was trying to marry her, I
should have come to you just as I have come now, and I should have said,
'Why should anyone but you and I ever know?'"
"No. No, you wouldn't," said Janey, as if desperately defending some
position which he was attacking. "You would want to save him at all
costs."
"From what? From the woman he loves? I have not found it such great
happiness to be saved from the woman I loved."
Janey hesitated, and then said--
"From some one unworthy of him."
Mr. Stirling watched an amber leaf sail to the ground. Then he said
slowly--
"How do I know that Annette is unworthy of him? She may have done wrong
and still be worthy of him. Do you not see that if I decided she was
unworthy and hurried my son away, I should be acting on the same
principle as I did in my own youth, the old weary principle which has
pressed so hard on women, that you can treat a fellow-creature like a
picture or a lily, or a sum of money? I handed over my love just as if
she had been a lily. How often I had likened her to one! But she was
alive, poor soul, all the time, and I only found it out when she was
dying, years and years afterwards. Only then did my colossal selfishness
confront me. She was a fellow-creature like you and me. What was it
Shylock said? 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' Now, for aught we know
to the contrary, Annette _may be_ alive."
His grave eyes met hers, with a light in them, gentle, inexorable.
"Unless we are careful we may make her bleed. We have the knife ready to
our hands. If you were in her place, and had a grievous incident in your
past, would anything wound you more deeply than if she, she your friend,
living in the same village, raked up that ugly past, and made it public
for no reason?"
"But there is a reason," said Janey passionately,--"not a reason that
everyone should know, God forbid, but that one person should be told,
who may marry her in ignorance, and who would never marry her if he knew
what you and I know--never, never, never!"
"And what would you do in her place, in such a predicament?"
"I should not be in it, because when he asked me to marry him I should
tell him everything."
"Perhaps that is just what she will do. Knowing her intimately as you
do, can you think that she would act meanly and deceitfully? I can't."
Janey avoided his searching glance, and made no answer.
"You can't either," he said tranquilly. "And do you think she would lie
about it?"
"No," said Janey slowly, against her will.
"Then let us, at any rate, give her her chance of telling him herself."
He got up slowly, and Janey did the same. He saw that her stubbornness
though shaken was not vanquished, and that he should obtain no assurance
from her that she would be silent.
"And let us give this man, whoever he may be, his chance too," he said,
taking her hand and holding it. He felt it tremble, and his heart ached
for her. He had guessed. "The chance of being loyal, the chance of being
tender, generous, understanding. Do not let us wreck it by interference.
This is a matter which lies between her and him, and between her and him
only. It may be the making of him. It would have been the making of me
if I could but have taken it--my great chance--if I had not preferred to
sacrifice her, in order to be a sham hero."