“No, don’t undo it, Addie. Oh, I do believe you’re going to! Do let’s
go home,” the child pleaded pettishly. “And Mary must be tired and
cold, waiting in the car all this time.”
“Oh, damn Mary!” said Adelaide. “Who cares for Mary?”
“But I’m tired and cold too.”
“You are? Come along then, my precious--at once.”
She turned and faced Wald Ensor. The long last look with which she had
enveloped the splendid, sullen, restless animal had not left her humid
eyes.
Quickly she recognized him, and righted herself. She put up to her
eyes, with a reminiscence of her town manner, a pince-nez that hung
round her neck by a chain of antique workmanship, and said in a hard
voice--
“Is that you?”
Then a marked hesitation seemed to overcome her. She raised her arm
that hung languidly down at her side, as if to ward off a blow. A
little collection of parcels she was holding together by a string fell
to the ground. The child very properly bent to pick them up. Ensor
properly, too, was about to forestall her, but a gesture from Adelaide
seemed to him to be intended to prevent and forbid him doing so. There
was an awkward pause.…
Then Adelaide, indicating with her pince-nez the stooping figure of
the beautiful young girl, and looking carefully away, pronounced
quickly--
“Wald, my daughter, Phillis.”
“How do you do?” said Wald Ensor, formally, when, her cheeks reddened
with stooping, the child resumed her upright position. She was
concerned because one of the parcels was missing. Perhaps it had
rolled under the feet of the bull?…
“Never mind,” said her mother fondly. There was a loving pride in her
voice. None of the lowing cows, untethered, but morally fast anchored
to the posts where their calves were firmly bounden, their mother-love
taken into strict consideration by the cunning drover, who relied on
it more surely than on any rope that was ever spun of hemp, could
boast a tenderer, more maternal solicitude. Ensor was touched. So the
restless, theoretic Adelaide was happy and settled at last, her hopes
fulfilled, her theories carried out.
Phillis, in her bucolic completeness and obvious sterling health, was
a maternal production to be proud of. She had golden hair, blue eyes
and a complexion of roses and again roses. There were hardly any
lilies, and although she was lovely at fifteen, the chances were that
she would be raddled at fifty. Ensor noticed that the bare hand that
clutched the wooden rail was, unlike her mother’s, large and heavy.
She probably had feet to correspond. The dark, bushy eyebrows, which
struck a note of savagery in the simple, placidly sensuous
countenance, suggested one coarse progenitor; Adelaide’s was an
excessively refined type. He surmised that she had in effect succeeded
in capturing something in the nature of a prize-fighter for a mate.
Such, she had declared, was her ambition to do in the old days at any
rate, something rustic, fair and Saxon.…
Adelaide released her underlip, which she had drawn in and had bitten
till it bled, and spoke quickly, with a graceless, oppressive
cordiality that reminded Ensor, at that moment, of the first time she
had invited him to dinner in Portland Place. In her access of nervous
excitement, as of one constantly expecting to be refused, she was
exactly the same, uncertain, deprecating, but peremptory.
“Where are you staying, Wald? At the Antelope? Here on business? Well,
you can do it from High Walls. We’ll motor you in every day. Let us go
and get your things out of the Antelope. The car’s there--waiting for
us----”
“Thank you-- I hardly think I----” so Ensor was saying at intervals,
and continued to say. He felt annoyed, hustled, overborne by all the
methods of an aggressive, overweening personality. Adelaide’s love of
domineering had once been modified by youthful languor; now her
masterfulness was reinforced by physical fitness. She had grown out of
the delicacy of the young girl, and was well, a woman to count with.
He thought of this as he walked behind her and Phillis through the
thronging market-place. She talked to him over her shoulder, hardly
listening to his objections. They threaded the crowd. Fusty interested
groups were collected round this or that shrewd cheap Jack. He
extolled, in the clearings they willingly made for him, now yards of
tawdry lace, now pieces of coarse netting warranted never to tear, now
rough crockery warranted never to break. And Ensor could hardly hear
Adelaide’s unmodulated voice, through the clatter of hoofs on the
stone causeways as the clumsy, puzzled animals were run along them at
a gallop by sweating, panting stable-boys, anxious to exhibit their
paces to intending purchasers. Adelaide would stop dead every now and
then and become absorbed in the contemplation of melancholy stallions
with straw-plaited tails, which stood, their shiny black hocks turned
outward, all adown the smooth bits of stone flagging intersecting the
rough cobbles.
Ensor, to call her attention to his protests, punctuated his remarks
at intervals with, “My dear Mrs.----” She took no notice, and if she
heard, did not care to supply the name. Now and again Phillis would
turn and smile, a sweet irresponsible smile, at him and sketch an
inviting gesture. Ensor liked all children, and especially girls of
that age, and after one of these little demonstrations followed with
less travail of the spirit and fewer protests. He rather wanted, too,
to see the Mary “be-damned” who was said to be waiting, cold, tired,
and neglected in the car.
They had reached the outer fringe of booths, the raucous voices of
cheap Jacks and the heartrending moos of the cows faded out of
hearing, and the broad street in front of the Antelope Inn, before
whose open yard door many conveyances stood, lay before him. He
crossed the road and was now faced with the immediate problem of
acceptance or refusal of Adelaide’s invitation.
There was another child in the motor, hunched up and cowering among
the rolling swathes of the leather motor hood pushed back. She was
obviously cold and tired of waiting. She seemed about ten years old.
Her dull eyes fixed themselves on him stupidly, wearily, with a kind
of painful animal interest.… She did not take them off him. Her white,
wide, flat face did not light up in the least when Adelaide
approached, and in reply to Ensor’s tacit inquiry, said briefly--
“No, not mine. The cook’s. You remember Gertrude--the cook that
couldn’t cook? Ha! ha! Didn’t you worry me about it? I have Mary here
for her health, and I leave her in the car because she’s afraid of
cows. Now, Phillis, be quick, go and get the things at Storr’s, and
come back. It’s a fairly long run home, Wald.…” She busied herself
with some rugs.…
Phillis departed, saying in a child’s flirtatious way as she obeyed
her mother’s request, “Now mind you come,” while Ensor slavishly
entered the hotel, sought his room and gathered up his belongings. The
other child seemed to him to have seconded the invitation too, in her
own dreamy, spiritless way. It touched him. He fancied he might cheer
her up a bit if he could once get her to take to him and gain her
confidence. Children liked him.
When he came out of the hotel again Phillis and the other child were
safely stowed away in the back of the car under one rug, pressed up
against each other to keep warm. They seemed to get on very well
together, Ensor was glad to see.
Adelaide invited her guest to take his seat in front beside her, and
they started.
* * * * * * *
Adelaide drove in a careless, slapdash way which suggested the hand of
little practice. She took risks, she showed ignorance of some
fundamental rules of safety. This, however, did not disconcert Ensor
at all, he had plenty of physical courage. Full tilt they ran along
dull lanes and roads, blackish under foot, hedge-bordered in a sullen
craven green. The Plain of York in all its mediocre dreariness
unrolled itself before them. Adelaide, from between her pursed lips,
made no attempt to point out landmarks or objects of interest. There
were no interesting features to point out. Dull bryony shoots and
clematis tendrils were spread over the hedges, like a dusty net
coverlet on a lodging-house bed, neutral-tinted nettles carpeted them
at the foot, and at due intervals in their extent, clean, neatly-made
gates shut off the entry into fields each one like the other. The same
kind of stupid, spiritless bird rose up now and again, and lighted on
the tedious brown furrow that hid the one behind it. Mean clumps of
trees that veiled no possible trysting-place, bordered the road or
looked over it here and there. Ensor heard the little girls behind him
whispering and chuckling in the well of the carriage where they had
declined in laughing avoidance of the cold wind that blew steadily
over the plain. At least he heard Phillis’s voice and took Mary’s for
granted. The two seemed to be very good friends.
And then Adelaide began to talk to him in her wiredrawn inartistic
tones which suggested to Ensor something like a rope, lashing, being
trailed along a gravel walk, for he longed to bid her lift it, to try
to get taut now and then. The crude passion that smouldered in her
eyes, only lent an edge to her voice. It always did. When his mind
dwelt on the changes in her, he could think of no feature that had
altered much in twelve years, except her mouth which, from having been
as nearly as possible straight, had now lost all suggestion of curve,
and opening generally in raspishness, closed always in a helpless
peevishness. Her face reminded him of the matronly yet at the same
time old-maidish faces of those mentally starved, materially satisfied
women of the Renaissance he had seen in pictures and reproductions. It
was the same drawing over the cheeks, the same anxious slope of the
flesh away from the consumptive peaks and hollows of the bones. Her
nervous little hands, clawlike, handled the wheel with ill-regulated
vigour and obstinate determination to excel. Her vanity amused Ensor,
and since it made so decidedly for efficiency, commended itself to
him. He liked women to show grit, and did not on the whole object to
be managed by any person exhibiting marked competency.
As he reckoned, she had to give most of her real attention to the
driving of the car. Her vanity stimulated her to attempt to pay off
her guest with a conversation composed of ideas long since formulated
by herself or others.
“Isn’t it a grim country?” she said cheerfully. “They say that there
are more heirs and heiresses of solitary habit and tottering reason to
the square inch here than in any other county in England. You see,”
she knitted her brows, “these old feudal people have all along paid no
attention to physiological rules; they have chosen to intermarry so
fearfully.”
“Your old preoccupation, eh!” said Ensor, smiling.
“Don’t sneer, Wald. We met and took to each other on that ground, you
remember, and I am keener on it than ever. I hate anything of a
misbegotten or deformed nature like death or sin, which indeed it is.”
She looked at him keenly. “Do you know if I was not a Christian woman
I should find myself beating Mary here within an inch of her life?”
Ensor made a sound indicating his wish and his conviction that it were
proper that she should lower her voice. Adelaide accepted the
criticism and to some extent heeded its remonstrance, in the next few
words she said.
“But as she’s poor faithful old Gertrude’s unique scion I stay my
hand, and give her instead Parrish’s Food.”
“It’s very good of you,” Ensor murmured, oppressed. He remembered the
baby in the chest of drawers, and, besides, he felt those big helpless
opaque-seeming eyes of the child in the car behind, plumb in the
middle of his back.…
“Dead against my own theories too,” Adelaide went on. “That sort of
distinct evidence of a parent’s physiological failure ought to be
stamped out at birth.”
“Perhaps,” said Ensor slowly and strainedly. “Perhaps she is going to
be a poet? I fancy Keats had those beautiful suffering eyes.”
“Eyes of a sick monkey, pah!” ejaculated Adelaide, brutally, and as
loudly as she had ever spoken before. “Let us not think of her. Tell
me all about yourself.”
Wald Ensor obeyed and gave her an account of his doings during the
last twelve years. As he talked in the even, rather tame manner which
in him was accentuated, not diminished, by deep feeling, he was
conscious all the time of a duel waged within him by two opposing but
strong moods.
One side of him longed to lay his hand on Adelaide’s and get her to
stop the car, and allow him to step out of the range of her puissant
personality, which alarmed while it interested him. The other side,
the explorer-adventurer side, divorced from her image, wanted to stay
and see it through, and have another look at the two youthful beings
for whom Adelaide was making herself responsible, more especially the
cook’s ailing child. One long, attenuated, but distinct thread of
passionate feeling linked him to her.… He had felt like that towards a
monkey from a tropical island on the ship that the captain was
bringing home to colder climes, and which resented it in sadness and
melancholy.
With regard to adventure, he could not help wondering if when they
reached a place called High Walls, where Adelaide said she lived, a
fond husband would come to the portal, and welcome his wife and the
stranger she had chosen to bring home. For Adelaide had volunteered no
information about herself on that head, and he was too shy, or too
apprehensive of difficulties to ask for any. He only gathered that she
was well off and had bought High Walls herself, for Dr. Favarger had
left his only daughter everything.
Ensor expected, he knew not why, that the car would turn in at some
majestic drive, bordered by fine old trees. He was the more surprised
when after going for half-a-mile or so along a bit of road bordered by
hedges on one side, and a high brick wall on the other, overhung by
heavy elm-trees, Adelaide stopped the car opposite a small sunk door
in this very wall.
“I live here,” she said. “Wald, will you ring?”
Rooks cawed from their nests in the clumps of high trees that seemed
to fill all the enclosure, and a dog barked, evidently hearing the
noise of the car and anxious to welcome its mistress. Ensor, as he
stood in the roadway after having pulled the long iron handle of the
bell, had the sense of being at the postern gate of some embattled
fortress standing tall and grimly self-contained in the gloomy plateau
of the Wolds.
Time passed. No one came to the door, the dog inside barked fitfully.
Adelaide’s voice sounded unreal in the great spaces.… Yet she was
talking as people talk in cities.
“Nice old place!” she was saying jauntily. “I bought it, it went so
well with my own peculiar mentality. It belonged to one of the
crocky-minded noblemen I told you of; he came to need only one
room--somewhere else and padded--so I got it cheap, freehold and all.
It takes delightfully few servants to keep it up, and that’s what I
like. I hate servants spying. What are mine about.… Hollo!”
She stood up in the car and called out. Her voice was not good. At
last, a shuffling old manservant appeared, and stood holding the door,
not attempting to make himself useful in any way. It was Ensor who
helped Adelaide out. Then he turned to the two children.… Phillis had
already leaped out. Ensor looked keenly at the other child, sitting or
rather crouching in the wide seat. Their eyes met for a moment. Then
Adelaide seemed to intercept them.
“Mary, stop in the car!… No, she may as well come round with us,” she
said fussily.
The man got in and took the vehicle off somewhere, and piled with
motor-rugs, Ensor stumbled after Adelaide and the two children. A
narrow path, flagged with stones, not a carriage drive, led up the
very short way to the house. On the steps an ugly puppy rushed at
them, and covered Phillis with damp paw-marks. The child tried to
abash and quieten it, in vain. Adelaide in her unnatural, would-be
forcible tones, called it off, and bade it come to her. The dog
obeyed, but in Ensor’s opinion, without enthusiasm.
Adelaide seemed to think differently. “You see,” she said. “He loves
the hand that chastens him. I do the chastening. I have to, all these
people are so tender-hearted, except Gertrude--she has good strong
hands.”
“I do hate to hear it howling, Addie,” remarked Phillis.
“All young things,” said her mother, gravely, “need to go through a
period of misery and due correction before they are fitted for social
purposes. And this is a good dog, or you bet I shouldn’t keep him or
trouble about him at all. I hate mongrels, human or otherwise, don’t
you, Wald?”…
Her eyes hardened, embittered in expression, fell on the puny child,
who held an immense rug that trailed on the ground beside her. She was
evidently too shy or helpless to put it down or act at all until an
order was expressly given her. Ensor took the rug from her. She did
not look up. He began to think this instance of Adelaide’s
philanthropic kindness was half-witted.…
“Go in, Mary,” said Adelaide sharply. “Don’t stand fiddling there!”
* * * * * * *
Some one did thrash the puppy next day, for Ensor heard it howling
loudly beneath his bedroom window. Its cry was for all the world like
that of a child that was being beaten. He could not rest in bed
through the noise, though he knew well enough that dogs must be
trained. He rose and employed the hour or so thus gained on the day to
examine carefully the position of the room he was in, its means of
exit, etc., in the style of all well-seasoned travellers. He then put
on his hat and went out by a back entrance, half stumbling over and
apologizing to a small child in a cotton frock who was scrubbing the
steps of it. He examined the shape of the house, the extent of the
garden, and counted the number of tall elm-trees that surrounded it,
and were in their turn circumscribed by the high, dull brick wall that
gave Adelaide’s house its name.
High Walls was a composite building, finished in late Georgian period,
but including portions dating from almost every period after
Elizabeth. The Elizabethan part was more or less built up in the
interior. A Georgian architect of the worst years had carefully
enclosed and hidden it away, and faced all with a frontage that
offended every canon of art and taste and depressed every eye as well.
The high brick wall, Ensor fancied, represented a still more recent
addition, for the hideous expensive portal and colonnade of the
façade which had been evidently designed to dazzle the countryside,
was dwarfed and crushed out of all proportion by the encroaching
circumference which ate up both air and space, and gave the house the
air of an asylum or a prison.
His voyage of discovery ended, he went quietly in by the front door in
the middle of the colonnade, and found himself in a shiny-floored
hall, carpeted here and there with wild beast skins, among which he
recognized his own handsome present to Miss Adelaide Favarger. One
corner of the hall, rendered rather dark in daylight by the pillars of
the colonnade, was palisaded off with old German screens, or
arm-chairs that successfully fended off draughts from the front door,
and permitted it to be used as a lounge and smoking-room.
It was panelled with oak and furnished in the old-fashioned regulation
country-house style in dark browns and yellows. Several heavy antlered
heads of deer hung on the walls. Their sad, glassy eyes leered down
pensively. He noticed, as he went round, pince-nez in hand, that there
were some very good engravings. But they all embodied the usual
gloating cruelties of the sportsman. There was a print of the fighting
deer of Landseer with antlers interlocked till death, another of the
rabbit in the trap, and one of the stag pulled down by its yelping
enemies. All these famous works of art were repugnant to Ensor. He
was, if he thought about it, inclined to be anti-vivisectionist.
On the broad hearth, although it was July, charred logs rested on the
iron dogs and fell slowly away into a bed of soft grey ash, the
reduced ghosts of themselves. There was a growing heap of detritus
that was never buried or cleared away. The gnawing flame lurked there
somewhere at its heart, but gave no warmth, and the man, used to
Californian summers, felt chilly and longed to stir the logs, though
it was summer, into some semblance of wintry activity.
He knew how to behave, however, and taking up an out-of-date local
paper that was lying about, he sat down with a patient eye on the main
staircase which he expected his hostess to presently descend. The
paper was dull to the uninitiated in local gossip, and he dropped it
and began to go over again in his mind the last words that Adelaide
had said to him as she ascended that very staircase last night. One
small, finely-shaped foot was on the stair. With her small
housekeeping letter-bag in one hand--the bag he had never seen her
without since they came to High Walls--she had held out to him the
other hand, saying gravely, without suspicion of vulgar archness--
“Good-night. Sleep well. I shan’t.”
He had said nothing, disconcerted, but had let her go. He was
outraged, not so much by her words, as by the look with which she had
punctuated them. It made him remember, with an intense, shy, conscious
memory, the last time he had seen her eyes as she had turned to him on
the gas-lit doorstep--the eyes of a sick monkey--she had given him the
phrase herself--the yellow sofa in its corner at Portland Place--the
wide gleaming doorstep again, when placated, reproachless, seeking not
to bind him, she had let him out into the dawn.
He had begun by admiring her for her fine non-deprecatory attitude,
her bold reliance on the social and moral efficacy of her own
standards and principles. She denied nothing, deprecated nothing,
dropped nothing. The yellow sofa was there, in the hall, he had
recognized it overnight, a handsome piece of furniture. He had not
supposed that she cared to invest it with sentimental recollections of
her old home and her maiden days. Or did she?
He brooded over the ways of women, of which he proudly supposed
himself to know nothing, when a female servant came through the outer
hall, bearing to-day’s paper, which she laid down on the yellow
cushions beside him. He had no time to ask her a question as to
Adelaide’s morning plans, for she quickly passed back again through
the red baize door that led, so Ensor imagined, to the kitchen region.
She left the door open. A waft of sounds came to him, voices, one of
which he fancied was the voice of the famous and omnipotent Gertrude,
on whom so far he had never set eyes, while the other he knew to be
Adelaide’s. She was already down and afoot, then; she was a good
housekeeper, and gave her orders early?
She was evidently holding the handle of the door preparatory to coming
through, finishing a sentence which he did not hear. The tone in which
Gertrude permitted herself to answer her mistress set him against her;
it was raucous, coarsely good-humoured, and her speech, of which he
caught fragments here and there, grossly familiar.
“With me? You’ve told Phillis? Well, that’s quick work, I must say!”
“It’s got to be done,” Adelaide replied sturdily, he heard her. “And
the sooner the better.”
“The other’ll miss her!”
“That can’t be helped. _You_ needn’t mind--Phillis’ll profit. This
very day, mind!”
There was a pause. The cook had gone back into the kitchen some little
way before she replied, and the vicious emphasis with which she spoke
was accentuated by the clang of a dish, roughly set down on some
pantry shelf or other.
“I don’t mind, but it seems a queer sort of way to go and treat your
own flesh and blood!”
Adelaide let the door go sharply and, bag in hand, came forward to
greet her guest. She had not expected to see him already down, and
said so. She looked excessively handsome, if a trifle pale, as she
pushed her hand through the cloudy swathes of hair that lay across her
forehead. With characteristic crankiness, she arranged her hair
across, not over or back from her forehead. It became her.
She stood chatting to her guest, telling him that breakfast was not
ready yet, for that lazy little Phillis, whose business it was to make
the tea, had had a fit of temper this morning early, and was not
dressed yet. While she was speaking, Phillis looked over the
banisters, and addressed her mother, calling her by her Christian
name, a fashion that Ensor disliked. He fancied that perhaps the child
was allowed, nay enjoined to do so, in order to minimize the effect of
her size and the precocious development on the age-estimation of her
mother, a natural weakness to which Adelaide, like other ladies, was
probably prone.
“Oh, Addie!” the child said appealingly. “Mayn’t I really have Mary to
sleep with me any more?”
“No,” replied Adelaide. “It is high time Gertrude began to train her.…
Now, don’t worry, it would be poor kindness to keep her any longer
with you, spoiling a good servant and unfitting her for her station.
Go in and make tea.”
Phillis obeyed sulkily. Ensor was glad to see her put up a good fight
for her companion.
Adelaide perched with a childish movement on the arm of the sofa,
showing a pretty ankle in its openwork stocking. She looked like a
handsome, capable gipsy, as she sat there, dangling her everlasting
bag.…
* * * * * * *
“I’ve been asking Gertrude,” she said carelessly, “if she remembers
you, and she says she does. You must look her up after breakfast.”
“But I never saw her!” he said, unwillingly, remembering her voice so
lately heard. “You mean your cook in Portland Place?”
“Not much of a cook, was she? But so faithful. And I needed it. She
needed me. She had a lover who was a prize-fighter, and he deserted
her and left her with that wretched child you’ve seen, to keep.… It is
a case of atavism, I expect, for he was a fine fellow.”
“Was that she beating the dog this morning?”
“Yes. She’s got good strong hands.”
An exultant gleam, an instantaneous flicker, as though by some new
unexpected mode of invention, he had been afforded a kodak view of the
suddenly protruded forked tongue of a viper, crossed Ensor’s excited
vision. He shuddered. And Adelaide suddenly, but with an air of
intense premeditation, slipped off the arm of the sofa and kissed him.