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The Invader
A NOVEL
By
Margaret L. Woods
New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1907
Copyright, 1907, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
Published May, 1907.
* * * * *
TO
Hilda Greaves
AND THE DUMB COMPANIONS OF TAN-YR-ALLT
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THEIR
GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE
FRIEND
* * * * *
THE INVADER
CHAPTER I
Dinner was over and the ladies had just risen, when the Professor had
begged to introduce them to the new-comer on his walls. The Invader, it
might almost have been called, this full-length, life-size portrait,
which, in the illumination of a lamp turned full upon it, seemed to take
possession of the small room, to dominate at the end of the polished-oak
table, where the light of shaded candles fell on old blue plates, old
Venetian glass, a bit of old Italian brocade, and chrysanthemums in a
china bowl coveted by collectors. Every detail spoke of the
connoisseurship, the refined and personal taste characteristic of Oxford
in the eighties. The authority on art put up his eye-glasses and
fingered his tiny forked beard uneasily.
"There's no doubt it's a good thing, Fletcher," he said, presently--"really
quite good. But it's too like Romney to be Raeburn, and too like Raeburn to
be Romney. You ought to be able to find out the painter, if, as you say,
it's a portrait of your own great-grandmother--"
"He did say so!" broke in Sanderson, exultantly. "He said it was an
ancestress. Fletcher, you're a vulgar fraud. You've got no ancestress.
You bought her. There's a sale-ticket still on the frame under the
projection at the right-hand lower corner. I saw it."
Sanderson was a small man and walked about perpetually, except when
taking food: sometimes then. He was a licensed insulter of his friends,
and now stood before the picture in a belligerent attitude. The
Professor stroked his amber beard and smiled down on Sanderson.
"True, O Sanderson; and at the same time untrue. I did buy the picture,
and the lady was my great-grandmother once, but she did not like the
position and soon gave it up. This picture must have been done after she
had given it up."
"Is this a conundrum or blather, invented to hide your ignominy in a
cloud of words?" asked Sanderson.
"It's a _hors d'oeuvre_ before the story," interposed Ian Stewart,
throwing back his tall dark head and looking up at the picture through
his eye-glasses, his handsome face alive with interest. "'Tak' awa' the
kickshaws,' Fletcher, 'and bring us the cauf.'"
The Professor gathered his full beard in one hand and smiled
deprecatingly.
"I don't know how the ladies will like my ex-great-grandmother's story.
It was a bit of a scandal at the time."
"Never mind, Mr. Fletcher," cried a young married woman, with a face
like a seraph, "we're all educated now, and scandal about a lady with
her waist under her arms becomes simply classical."
"Not so bad as that, Mrs. Shaw, I assure you," returned the Professor;
"but I dare say you all know as much as I do about my great-grandmother,
for she was the well-known Lady Hammerton."
There were sounds of interest and surprise, for most of the party knew
her name, and were curious to learn how she came to be Professor
Fletcher's great-grandmother. Mr. Fletcher explained:
"My great-grandfather was a distinguished professor in Edinburgh a
hundred years ago. When he was a widower of forty with a family, he was
silly enough to fall in love with a little miss of sixteen. He taught
her Latin and Greek--which was all very well--and married her, which was
distinctly unwise. She had one son--my grandfather--and then ran away
with an actor from London. After that she made a certain sensation on
the stage, but I suspect she was clever enough to see that her real
successes were personal ones; at all events, she made a good marriage as
soon as ever she got the chance. The Hammerton family naturally
objected. You'll find all about it in those papers which have come out
lately. I believe, ladies, they were almost as much scandalized by her
learning as by her morals."
"She told Sydney Smith years after, I think," observed Stewart, "that
she had to be a wit lest people should find out she was a blue. There's
a good deal about her in the Englefield _Memoirs_. She travelled
extraordinarily for a woman in those days, and most of the real
treasures at Hammerton House come from her collections."
"I thought they were nearly all burned in a great fire, and she was
burned trying to save them," said Mrs. Shaw.
"A good many were saved," returned Fletcher; "she had rushed back to
fetch a favorite bronze, was seen hurling it out of the window--and was
never seen again."
"She must have been a very remarkable woman," commented Stewart,
meditatively, his eyes still fixed on the picture.
"Know nothing about her myself," remarked Sanderson; "Stewart knows
something about everybody. It's sickening the way he spends his time
reading gossip and calling it history."
"Gossip's like many common things, interesting when fossilized,"
squeaked a little, white-haired, pink-faced old gentleman, like an
elderly cherub in dress-clothes. He had remained at the other end of the
room because he did not care for pictures. Now he toddled a little
nearer and every one made way for him with a peculiar respect, for he
was the Master of Durham, whose name was great in Oxford and also in the
world outside it. He looked up first at the pictured face and then at
Milly Flaxman, a young cousin of Fletcher's and a scholar of Ascham
Hall, who had taken her First in Mods, and was hoping to get one in
Greats. The Master liked young girls, but they had to be clever as well
as pleasing in appearance to attract his attention.
"It's very like Miss Flaxman," he squeaked.
Every one turned their eyes from the picture to Milly, whose pale cheeks
blushed a bright pink. The blush emphasized her resemblance to her
ancestress, whose brilliant complexion, however, hinted at rouge.
Milly's soft hair was amber-colored, like that of the lady in the
picture, but it was strained back from her face and twisted in a minute
knot on the nape of her neck. That was the way in which her aunt Lady
Thomson, whose example she desired to follow in all things, did her
hair. The long, clearly drawn eyebrows, dark in comparison with the
amber hair, the turquoise blue eyes, the mouth of the pictured lady were
curiously reproduced in Milly Flaxman. Possibly her figure may have been
designed by nature to be as slight and supple, yet rounded, as that of
the white-robed, gray-scarfed lady above there. But something or some
one had intervened, and Milly looked stiff and shapeless in a green
velveteen frock, scooped out vaguely around her white young throat and
gathered in clumsy folds under a liberty silk sash.
Mrs. Shaw cried out enraptured at the interesting resemblance which had
escaped them all, to be instantly caught by the elderly cherub in the
background, who did not care about art, while the Professor explained
that both Milly's parents were, like himself, great-grandchildren of
Lady Hammerton. The seraph now fell upon Milly, too shy to resist, had
out her hair-pins in a trice and fingered the fluffy hair till it made
an aureole around her face. Then by some conjuring trick producing a
gauzy white scarf, Mrs. Shaw twisted it about the girl's head, in
imitation of the lady on the wall, who had just such a scarf, but with a
tiny embroidered border of scarlet, twisted turban-wise and floating
behind.
"There!" she cried, pushing the feebly protesting Milly into the full
light of the lamp the Professor was holding, "allow me to present to you
the new Lady Hammerton!"
There was a moment of wondering silence. Milly's pulses beat, for she
felt Ian Stewart's eyes upon her. Neither he nor any one else there had
ever quite realized before what capacities for beauty lay hid in the
subdued young face of Milly Flaxman. She had nothing indeed of the
charm, at once subtle and challenging, of the lady above there. She,
with one hand on the gold head of a tall cane, looking back, seemed to
dare unseen adorers to follow her into a magic, perhaps a fatal
fairyland of mountain and waterfall and cloud; a land whose dim mists
and silver gleams seemed to echo the gray and the white of her floating
garments, its autumn leaves to catch a faint reflection from her hair,
while far off its sky showed a thin line of sunset, red like the border
of her veil. Milly's soft cheeks and lips were flushed, her eyes bright
with a mixture of very innocent emotions, as she stood with every one's
eyes, including Ian Stewart's, upon her.
But in a minute the Master took up Mrs. Shaw's remark.
"No," he said, emphatically; "not a new Lady Hammerton; only a rather
new Miss Flaxman; and that, I assure you, is something very preferable."
"I'm quite sure the Master knows something dreadful about your
great-grandmother, Mr. Fletcher," laughed Mrs. Shaw.
"I think we'd better go before he tells it," interposed Mrs. Fletcher,
who saw that Milly was feeling shy.
When the ladies had left, the men reseated themselves at the table and
there was a pause. Everyone waited for the Master, who seemed meditating
speech.
"My mother," he said--and somehow they all felt startled to learn the
fact that the Master had had a mother--"my mother knew Lady Hammerton in
the twenties. She was often at Bath."
The thin, staccato voice broke off abruptly, and three out of the five
other men present being the Master's pupils, remained silent, knowing he
had not finished. But Mr. Toovey, a young don overflowing with mild
intelligence, exclaimed, deferentially:
"Really, Master! Really! How extremely interesting! Now do please tell
us a great deal about Lady Hammerton."
The Master took no notice whatever of Toovey. He sat about a minute
longer in his familiar posture, looking before him, his little round
hands on his little round knees. Then he said:
"She was a raddled woman."
And his pupils knew he had finished speaking. What he had said was
disappointingly little, but uttered in that strange high voice of his,
it contained an infinite deal more than appeared on the face of it. A
whole discreditable past seemed to emerge from that one word "raddled."
Ian Stewart, to whose imagination the woman in the picture made a
strange appeal, now broke a lance with the Master on her account.
"She may have been raddled, Master," he said, "but she must have been
very remarkable and charming too. Hammerton himself was no fool, yet he
adored her to the last."
The Master seemed to hope some one else would speak; but finding that no
one did, he uttered again:
"Men often adore bad wives. That does not make them good ones."
Stewart tossed a rebel lock of raven black hair back from his forehead.
"Pardon me, Master, it does make them good wives for those men."
"Oh, surely not good for their higher natures!" protested Toovey,
fervently.
The Master took three deliberate sips of port wine.
"I think, Stewart, we are discussing matters we know very little about,"
he said, in a particularly high, dry voice; and every one felt that the
discussion was closed. Then he turned to Sanderson and made some remark
about a house which Sanderson's College, of which he was junior bursar,
was selling to Durham.
Fletcher, the only married man present, mourned inwardly over his own
masculine stupidity. He felt sure that if his wife had been there she
would have gently led Stewart's mind through these paradoxical
matrimonial fancies, to dwell on another picture; a picture of marriage
with a nice girl almost as pretty as Lady Hammerton, a good girl who
shared his tastes, and, above all, who adored him. David Fletcher felt
himself pitiably unequal to the task, although he was as anxious as his
wife was that Stewart should marry Milly. Did not all their friends wish
it? It seemed to them that there could not be a more suitable couple. If
Milly was working so terribly hard to get her First in Greats, it was
largely because Mr. Stewart was one of her tutors and she knew he
thought a good deal of success in the Schools.
There could be no doubt about Milly Flaxman's goodness; in fact, some of
the girls at Ascham complained that it "slopped over." Her clothes were
made on hygienic principles which she treated as a branch of morals, and
she often refused to offer the small change of polite society because it
weighed somewhat light in the scales of truth. But these were foibles
that the young people's friends were sure Ian Stewart would never
notice. As to him, although only four and thirty, he was already a
distinguished man. A scholar, a philosopher, and an archæologist, he had
also imagination and a sense of style. He had written a brilliant book
on Greek life at a particular period, which had brought him a reputation
among the learned and also found readers in the educated public. His
disposition was sweet, his character unusually high, judged even by the
standard of the academic world, which has a higher standard than most.
Obviously he would make an excellent husband; and equally obviously, as
he had no near relations and his health was delicate, it would be a
capital thing for him to have a home of his own and a devoted wife to
look after him. Their income would be small, but not smaller than that
of most young couples in Oxford, who contrived, nevertheless, to live
refined and pleasant lives and to be well-considered in a society where
money positively did not count.
But if Fletcher did not succeed in forwarding this matrimonial scheme in
the dining-room, his wife succeeded no better when the gentlemen came
into the drawing-room. She rose from a sofa in the corner, leaving Milly
seated there; but Mr. Toovey made his way straight to Miss Flaxman,
without a glance to right or left, and bending over her before he seated
himself at her side, fixed upon her a patronizing, a possessive smile
which would have made some girls long for a barbarous freedom in the
matter of face-slapping. But Milly Flaxman was meek. She took Archibald
Toovey's seriousness for depth, and as his attentions had become
unmistakable, had several times lain awake at night tormenting herself
as to whether her behavior towards him was or was not right. Accordingly
she submitted to being monopolized by Mr. Toovey, while Ian Stewart
turned away and made himself pleasant to an unattractive lady-visitor of
the Fletchers', who looked shy and left-alone. When Mrs. Fletcher tried
to effect a change of partners, Ian explained that he found himself
unexpectedly obliged to attend a College meeting at ten o'clock. In a
place where there are no offices to close and business engagements are
liable to crop up at any time in the evening, there was no need for
extravagance of apology for this early departure.
He changed his shoes in the narrow hall and put on his seedy-looking
dark overcoat, quite unconscious that Mrs. Fletcher had had the collar
mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp
November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of
night, on whatever corner of earth he might chance to find it descended,
remained always a romantic, mysterious thing, setting his imagination
free among visionary possibilities, without form, but not for that void.
The road between the railing of the parks and the row of old lopped
elms, was ill-lighted by the meagre flame of a few gas-lamps and hardly
cheered by the smothered glow of the small prison-like windows of Keble,
glimmering through the bare trees. There was not a sound near, except
the occasional drip of slow-collecting dews from the branches of the old
elms. Afar, too, many would have said there was not a sound; but there
was, and Ian's ear was attuned to catch it. The immense inarticulate
whisper of night came to him. It came to him from the deserted parks,
from the distant Cherwell flowing through its willow-roots and
osier-islands, from the flat meadow-country beyond, stretching away to
the coppices of the low boundary hills. It was a voice made up of many
whispers, each imperceptible, or almost imperceptible in itself; whisper
of water and dry reeds, of broken twigs and dry leaves fluttering to the
ground, of heaped dead leaves or coarse winter grass, stirring in some
slight movement of the air. It seemed to his imagination as though under
the darkness, in the loneliness of night, the man-mastered world must be
secretly transformed, returned to its primal freedom; and that could he
go forth into it alone, he would find it quite different from anything
familiar to him, and might meet with something, he knew not what,
secret, strange, and perhaps terrible.
Such fancies, though less crystallized than they must needs be by words,
floated in the penumbra of his mind, coming to him perhaps with the
blood of remote Highland ancestors, children of mountains and mist. His
reasonable self was perfectly aware that should he go, he would find
nothing in the open fields at that hour except a sleeping cow or two,
and would return wet as to the legs, and developing a severe cold for
the morning. But he heard these far-off whisperings of the night
playing, as it were, a mysterious "ground" to his thoughts of Milly
Flaxman. The least fatuous of men, he had yet been obliged to see that
his friends in general and the Fletchers in particular, wished him to
marry Milly, and that the girl herself hung upon his words with a
tremulous sensitivity even greater than the enthusiastic female student
usually exhibits towards those of her lecturer. In the abstract he
intended to marry; for he did not desire to be left an old bachelor in
college. He had been waiting for the great experience of falling in
love, and somehow it had never come to him. There were probably numbers
of people to whom it never did come. Should he now give up all hope of
it, and make a marriage of reason and of obligingness, such as his
marriage with Miss Flaxman would assuredly be? Thank Heaven! as her
tutor he could not possibly propose to her till she had got through the
Schools, so there were more than six months in which to consider the
question.
And while he communed thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the
night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient
trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the
dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past
them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always
passing, passing, passing so quickly to the great silent sea of death
and oblivion, to the dark night whose silence is only sometimes stirred
by vague whispers, anxious yet faint, dying upon the ear before the
sense can seize them.