BOTHER MRS. BAILEY! A GOOD CREATURE. MARCUS CURTIUS AND
UNMAIDENLINESS. THE DREAM WITCH AND HER DAUGHTERS. HOW GWEN TOLD OF
HER TRICK, AND MR. TORRENS OF HOW HE WAKED UP TO HIS OWN BLINDNESS.
THE PECULIARITIES OF DOWAGER-DUCHESSES. CAN GRIGS READ DIAMOND
TYPE? THE HYPOTHESIS MR. TORRENS WAS AFFIANCED TO. ADONIS, AND THAT
DETESTABLE VENUS. EARNESTNESS AND A CLIMAX. AN EARTHQUAKE, OR
HEARTQUAKE
The Philosopher may see absurdity in the fact that, when two persons
make concordant consecutive noises for ten minutes, the effect upon
their relativities is one that without them might not have come about in
ten weeks. We are not prepared to condemn the Philosopher, for once. He
is prosy, as usual; but what he says refers to an indisputable truth.
Nothing turns diversity into duality quicker than Music.
Gwen did not think the breakdown of the tenor at all funny, and was
rather frightened, suggesting Mrs. Bailey. "Bother Mrs. Bailey!" said
Adrian. "Only it's very ungrateful of me to bother Mrs. Bailey." Said
Gwen:--"She really is a good creature." He replied:--"That's what she is
precisely. A good creature!" Gwen interpreted this as disposing of Mrs.
Bailey. Acting as her agent, she piloted the blind man through the
perils of the furniture to a satisfactory sofa, but could not prevail on
him to lie down on it. He seemed determined to assert his claim to a
discharge cured; allowing a small discount, of course, in respect of
this plaguy eye-affection. In defence of his position that it was a
temporary inconvenience, sure to vanish with returning vigour, he simply
nailed his colours to the mast--would hear of no surrender.
Tea was negotiated, as customary at the Towers, and he made a parade of
his independence over it. No great risks were involved, the little
malachite table placed as a cup-haven being too heavy to knock over
easily. He was able, too, to make a creditable show of eyesight over the
concession of little brown biscuits to Achilles; only really Achilles
did all the seeing. A certain pretence of vision was possible too, in
the distinguishing of those biscuits which were hard from a softer sort;
which Achilles accepted, under protest always, with an implication that
he did it to oblige the donor. He had sacrificed his sleep--that was his
suggestion--and he did not deserve to be put off with shoddy goods.
"He always has a nap during music now," said his master. "He used to
insist on singing too, if he condescended to listen. I had some trouble
to convince him that he couldn't sing--hadn't been taught to produce his
voice...."
"Dear creature!--his voice produced itself like mine. M. Sanson--you
know the great training man?--wanted me to sing in one of my thoraxes or
glottises or oesophaguses. I believe I have several, but I don't know
which is which. He said my voice would last better. But I said I would
have both helpings at once; a recollection of nursery dinner, you
know...."
"I understand--Achilles's view. There, you see!" This was a claim that
an audible tail-flap on the ground was applause. It really was nothing
but its owner's courteous recognition of his own name, to which he was
always alive.
Gwen continued:--"Luckily I met the Signore, who told me Sanson's view
was very natural. What would become of all the trainers if people
produced their own voices?"
"What, indeed? But you did get some sort of drill?"
"Of course. The dear old Signore gave me some lessons. He told me an
infallible rule for people with souls. I was to sing as if the composer
was listening. I might sing scales and exercises if I liked. They had a
use. They prevented one's spoiling the great composers by hacking them
over and over before one could sing."
Adrian felt that chat of this sort was the best after all, to keep safe
for him his _modus vivendi_ with this girl, in a world she was suddenly
lighting up for him in defiance of his darkness. He _could_ have
friendship, and he was not prepared to admit that estrangement might be
the more livable _modus_ of the two. So he shut his mental eyes as close
as his physical ones, and chatted. He told a story of how a great poet,
being asked a question in a lady's album:--"What is your favourite
employment?" wrote in reply:--"Cursing the schoolmaster who made me hate
Horace in my boyhood." It was a pity to spoil "Ah vous dirai-je, maman?"
for the young pianist, but _pluies de perles_ taught nobody anything.
Gwen for her part was becoming painfully alive to the difficulties of
her Quixotic undertaking. Marcus Curtius's self-immolation was easy by
comparison, with all the cheers of assembled Rome crowding the Forum to
back him. If only the horse her metaphor had mounted would take the bit
in his teeth and bolt, tropically, how useful a phantasy it would be!
She became terribly afraid her heroic resolve might die a natural death
during intelligent conversation. Bother _pluies de perles_ and the young
pianist! This dry alternation of responses quashed all serious
conversation. And if this Adrian Torrens went away, to-morrow or next
day, what chance would there be in the uncertain future to compare with
this one? When could she be sure of being alone with him for an hour, at
his father's house or elsewhere? She must--she would--at least find from
him whether some other parallel of the Roman Knight had bespoken the
plunge for herself. She could manage that surely without being
"unmaidenly," whatever that meant. If she couldn't, she would just cut
the matter short and _be_ unmaidenly. But know she _must_!
There is a time before the sun commits himself to setting--as he has
done every day till now, and we all take it for granted he will do
to-morrow--when the raw afternoon relents and the shadows lengthen over
the land; an hour that is not sunset yet, but has begun to know what
sunset means to do for roof and tree-top, and the high hills when a
forecast of the night creeps round their bases; and also for the good
looks of man and wench and beast, and even ugly girls. This hour had
come, and with it the conviction that everybody was sure to be very late
to-night, before Gwen, sitting beside the blind man on the sofa he had
flouted as a couch, got a chance to turn the conversation her way--to
groom the steed, so to speak, of Marcus Curtius for that appointment in
the Forum. It came in a lull, consequent on the momentary dispersion of
subject-matter by the recognition of Society's absence and its probable
late recurrence.
"I was so sorry yesterday, Mr. Torrens." A modulation of Gwen's tone was
not done intentionally. It came with her wish to change the subject.
"What for, then?" said Mr. Torrens, affecting a slight Irish accent with
a purpose not quite clear to himself. It might have given his words
their degree on a seriometer, granted the instrument.
"Don't laugh at me, because I'm in earnest. I mean for being so
unfeeling...."
"Unfeeling?"
"Yes. I don't think talking about it again can make it any worse. But I
do want you to know that I only said it because I got caught--you know
how words get their own way sometimes...."
"But what?--why?--when? What words got their way this time?"
"I'm almost sorry I've spoken, if you didn't notice it. Because then I'm
such a fool for raking it up again.... Why, of course, when I pitched on
those lines of yours. And any others would have done just as well...."
"Lord 'a massy me!--as Mrs. Bailey says. 'The daughters of the Dream
Witch'? What's the matter with _them_? _They're_ all right."
"Oh yes--they're all right, no doubt. But I was thinking of.... Oh, I
can't bear to talk about it!... Oh dear!--I wish I hadn't mentioned
it...."
"Yes, but _do_ mention it. Mention it again. Mention it lots of times.
Besides, I know what you mean...."
"What?"
"The 'watchman sorrowing for the light,' of course! It seemed like me.
Do you know it never crossed my mind in that connection?"
"Is that really true? But, then, what an idiot I was for saying anything
about it! Only I couldn't help myself. I was so miserable! It laid me
awake all night to think of it." This was not absolutely true, because
Gwen had really lain awake on the main question, the responsibility of
her family for that shot of old Stephen's. But, to our thinking, she was
justified in using any means that came to hand. She went on:--"I'm not
sure that it would not have come to nearly the same thing in any
case--the sleepless night, I mean. I did not know till yesterday how ...
b-bad your eyes were"--for she had nearly said the word
_blind_--"because they kept on making the best of it for our sakes,
Irene and Mrs. Bailey did...."
Adrian cut her speech across with an ebullition of sound sense--a
protest against extremes--a counterblast to hysterical judgments.
Obviously his duty! He succeeded in saying with a sufficient infusion of
the correct bounce:--"My dear Lady Gwendolen, indeed you are distressing
yourself about me altogether beyond anything that this unlucky mishap
warrants. In a case of this sort we must submit to be guided by medical
opinion; and nothing that either Sir Coupland Merridew or Dr. Nash has
said amounts to more than that recovery will be a matter of time. We
must have patience. In the meantime I am really the gainer by the
accident, for I shall always look upon my involuntary intrusion on your
hospitality as one of the most fortunate events of my life...."
"'Believe me to remain very sincerely yours, Adrian Torrens.'" She
struck in with a ringing laugh, and finished up what really would have
been a very civil letter from him. "Now, dear Mr. Torrens, do stop being
artificial. Say you're sorry, and you won't do so any more."
"Please, I'm sorry and I won't do so any more.... But I did do it very
well, now didn't I? You must allow that."
"You did indeed, and Heaven knows how glad I should be to be able to be
taken in by it and believe every word the doctors say. But when one has
been hocus-pocussed about anything one ... one feels very strongly
about, one gets suspicious of everybody.... Oh yes--indeed, I think very
likely the doctors are right, and if Dr. Merridew had only said that you
couldn't see at all now, but that the sight was sure to come back, I
should have felt quite happy yesterday when...." She stopped,
hesitating, brought up short by suddenly suspecting that she was driving
home the fact of his blindness, instead of helping him to keep up heart
against it. But how could she get to her point without doing so? How
could Marcus Curtius saddle up for his terrible leap, and keep the words
of the Oracle a secret?
At any rate, he could not see her confusion at her own
_malapropos_--that was something! She recovered from it to find him
saying:--"But what I want to know is--_what_ happened yesterday? I mean,
how came you to know anything you did not know before? Was it anything
_I_ did? I thought I got through it so capitally." He spoke more
dejectedly than hitherto, palpably because his efforts at pretence of
vision had failed. The calamity itself was all but forgotten.
Gwen saw nothing ahead but confession. Well--it might be the best way to
the haven she wanted to steer for. "It was not what you _did_," said
she. "You made believe quite beautifully all the time we were sitting
there, talking talk. It was when I was just going. You remember when
mamma had gone away with 'Rene, and I put my foot in it over those
verses?"
"Yes, indeed I do. Only, you know, that wasn't because of the Watchman.
I never mixed him in--not with my affairs. A sort of Oriental
character!"
"Well--that was my mistake. You remember when, anyhow? Now, do you know,
all the time I was standing there talking about the Watchman, I was
holding out my hand to you to say good-night, and you never offered to
take it, and put your hands in your pockets? It must have gone on for
quite two minutes. And I was determined not to give a hint, and there
was no one else there...." Gwen thought she could understand the
gesture that made her pause, a sudden movement of the blind man's right
hand as though it had been stung by the discovery of its own
backwardness.
He dropped it immediately in a sort of despairing way, then threw it up
impatiently. "All no use!" he said. "No use--no use--no use!" The sound
of his despair was in his voice as he let the hand fall again upon his
knee. He gave a heart-broken sigh:--"Oh dear!" and then sat on silent.
Gwen was afraid to speak. For all she knew, her first word might be
choked by a sob. After a few moments he spoke again:--"And there was
I--thinking--thinking...." and stopped short.
"Thinking what?" said Gwen timidly.
"I will tell you some time," he said. "Not now!" And then he drew a long
breath and spoke straight on, as though some obstacle to speech had
gone. "It has been a terrible time, Lady Gwendolen--this first knowledge
of ... of what I have lost. Put recovery aside for a moment--let the
chance of it lie by, until it is on the horizon. Think only what the
black side of the shield means--the appalling darkness in the miserable
time to come--the old age when folk will call me the blind Mr. Torrens;
will say of me:--'You know, he was not born blind--it was an accident--a
gunshot wound--a long while back now.' And all that long while back will
have been a long vacuity to me, and Heaven knows what burden to
others.... I have known it all from the first. I knew it when I waked to
my senses in the room upstairs--to all my senses but one. I knew it when
I heard them speak hopefully of the case; hope means fear, and I knew
what the fear was they were hoping against. That early morning when
stupor came to an end, and my consciousness came back, I remembered all.
But I thought the darkness was only the sweet, wholesome darkness of
night, and my heart beat for the coming of the day. The day came, sure
enough, but I knew nothing of it. The first voice I heard was Mrs.
Bailey's, singing paeans over my recovery. She had been lying in wait for
it, in a chair beside the bed which I picture to myself as a chair of
vast scope and pretensions. I did not use my tongue, when I found it, to
ask where I was--because I knew I was somewhere and the bed was very
comfortable. I asked what o'clock it was, and was told it was near nine.
Then, said I, why not open the shutters and let in the light?"
"What did Mrs. Bailey say?"
"Mrs. Bailey said Lord have mercy, gracious-goodness-her, and I at once
perceived that I was in the hands of a good creature. I must have done
so, because I exhorted her to act in her official capacity. When she
said:--'Why ever now, when the sun's a-shining fit to brile the house
up!' I said to her--to remove ambiguity, you see--'Do be a good creature
and tell me, _is_ the room light or dark? She replied in a form of
affidavit:--'So help me, Mr. Torrens, if this was the last Bible word I
was to speak, this room is light, not dark, nor yet it won't be, not
till this blessed evening when there come candles or the lamp, as
preferred.' I had a sickening perplexity for a while whether I was sane
or mad, awake or dreaming, lying there with my heart adding to my
embarrassment needlessly by beating in a hurry. Then I remember how it
came to me all at once--the whole meaning of it. Till now, blind men had
been other people. Now I was to be one myself.... Say something!... I
don't like my own voice speaking alone.... there _is_ no one else in the
room, is there?"
"Not a soul. And nobody will come. The dowager-duchess is having tea in
her own room, and all the others will be late."
Something in this caused Mr. Torrens to say, with ridiculous
inconsecutiveness:--"Then you're not engaged to Lord Cumberworld?"
"I certainly am _not_ engaged to Lord Cumberworld," said Gwen with cold
emphasis. "Why did you think I was?"
"Mrs. Bailey."
"Mrs. Bailey! And why did you think I wasn't?"
"That requires thought. I don't quite see, now I come to think of it,
why a lady shouldn't be engaged to a party and speak about his grandma
as ..."
"As I spoke of his just now? Why not, indeed? She _is_ a
dowager-duchess."
"I admit it. But there are ways and ways of calling people
dowager-duchesses. It struck me that your way suggested that there was
something ridiculous about ... about _dowadging_."
"So there is--to me. I believe it arose from the newspaper saying, when
we had a ball in London for me to come out, that the Dowager Lady
Scamander had a magnificent diamond stomacher. Perhaps you don't happen
to know the shape of that good lady?... Never mind. Anyhow, I am _not_
engaged to this one's grandson; and she's safe in the west wing, where
the ghost never goes. We've got it all to ourselves. Go on!"
"My first idea was how to prevent Europe and Asia finding it out and
frightening my family, at least until my eyes had had time to turn
round. The next voice I heard was the doctor's, summoned, I suppose, by
Mrs. Bailey. It was cheerful, and said that was good hearing, and now
we should do. He said:--'You lie quiet, Mr. Torrens, and I'll tell you
what it all was; because I daresay you don't know, and would like to.' I
said yes--very much. So he told me the story in a comfortable optimist
way--said it was a loss of blood from the occipital artery that had made
such a wreck of me, but that a contusion of the head had been the cause
of the insensibility, which had nearly stopped the action of the heart,
else I might have bled to death...."
"Oh, how white you were when we found you!" Gwen exclaimed--"So terribly
white! But I half think I can see how it happened. Your heart stopped
pumping the blood out, because you were stunned, and that gave the
artery a chance to pull itself together. That's the sort of idea Dr.
Merridew gave me, with the long words left out."
"What a very funny thing!" said Adrian thoughtfully, "to have one's life
saved by being nearly killed by something else. _Similia similibus
curantur._ However, all's fish that comes to one's net. Well--when Sir
Coupland had told me his story, he said casually:--'What's all this Mrs.
Bailey was telling me about your finding the room so dark?' I humbugged
a little over it, and said my eyesight was very dim. Whatever he
thought, he said very little to me about it. Indeed, he only said that
he was not surprised. A shock to the head and loss of blood might easily
react on the optic nerve. It would gradually right itself with rest. I
said I supposed he could try tests--lenses and games--to find out if the
eyes were injured. He said he would try the lenses and games later, if
it seemed necessary. For the present I had better stay quiet and not
think about it. It would improve. Then my father and 'Rene came, and
were jolly glad to hear my voice again. For I had only been
half-conscious for days, and only less than half audible, if, indeed, I
ever said anything. But I was on my guard, and my father went away home
without knowing, and I don't believe 'Rene quite knows now. It was your
father who spotted the thing first. Had he told you, to put you up to
the hand-shaking device?"
"He never said a word. The handshaking was my own brilliant idea. When I
found--what I did find out--I went away and had a good cry in mamma's
room." This speech was an effort on Gwen's part to get a little
nearer--ever so little--to Marcus Curtius; nearer, that is, to her
metaphorical parallel of his heroism. Marcus had got weaker as an
imitable prototype during the conversation, and it had seemed to Gwen
that he might slip through her fingers altogether, if no help came. Her
"good cry" reinforced Marcus, and quite blamelessly; for who could find
fault with her for that much of concern for so fearful a calamity? What
had she said that she might not have said to a friend's husband, cruelly
and suddenly stricken blind? Indeed, could she as a friend have said
less? Was her human pity to be limited to women and children and cases
of special licence, or pass current merely under _chaperonage_? No--she
was safe so far certainly.
"Oh, Lady Gwendolen, I can't stand this," was Adrian's exclamation in a
tone of real distress. "Why--why--should I make you miserable and lay
you awake o' nights? I couldn't help your finding out, perhaps. But what
a selfish beast I am to go on grizzling about my own misfortune....
Well--I _have_ been grizzling! And all the while, as like as not, the
medicos are right, and in six weeks I shall be reading diamond type as
merry as a grig...."
"Do grigs read diamond type?"
"_I_ may be doing so, anyhow, grigs or no!" He paused an instant, his
absurdity getting the better of him. "I may have employed the expression
'grigs' rashly. I do not really know how small type they can read. I
withdraw the grigs. Besides, there's another point of view...."
"What's that?" Gwen is a little impatient and absent. Marcus Curtius has
waned again perceptibly.
"Why--suppose I had been knocked over two miles off, carried in, for
instance, at the Mackworth Clarkes', where 'Rene's gone...!"
"But you weren't!"
"Lady Gwendolen, you don't understand the nature of an hypothesis"--his
absurdity gets the upper hand again--"the nature of an hypothesis is
that its maker is always in the right. I am, this time. If I had been
nursed round at the Mackworth Clarkes', you would have known nothing
about me except as a mere accident--a person in the papers--a person one
inquires after...."
Gwen interrupts him with determination. "Stop, Mr. Torrens," she says,
"and listen to me. If you had been struck by a bullet fired by my
father's order, by his servant, on his land, it would not have mattered
what house you were taken to, nor who nursed you round. I should have
felt that the guilt--yes, the guilt!--the _sin_ of it was on the
conscience of us all; every one of us that had had a hand, a finger, in
it, directly or indirectly. How could I have borne to look your sister
in the face...?"
"You wouldn't have known her! Come, Lady Gwen!"
"Very well, then, give her up. Suppose, instead, the girl you are
engaged to had been a friend of mine, how could I have borne to look
_her_ in the face?"
"_She's_ a hypothesis. There's no such interesting damsel--that I know
of...."
"Oh, isn't there?... Well--she's a hypothesis, and I've a right to as
many hypothesisses as you have."
"I can't deny it."
"Then how should I look her in the face? Answer my question, and don't
prevaricate."
"What a severe--Turk you are! But I won't prevaricate. You wouldn't be
called on to look the hypothesis in the face. She would have broken me
off, like a sensible hypothesis that knew what was due to itself and its
family...."
"Do be serious. Indeed _I_ am serious. It was in my mind all last
night--such a dreadful haunting thought!--what would this girl's
feelings be to me and mine? I made several girls I know stand for the
part. You know how one overdoes things when one is left to oneself and
the darkness?..."
"Yes--that I do! No doubt of it!" The stress of a meaning he could not
help forced its way into his words, in spite of himself. Surely you need
not have shown it, said an inner voice to him. He made no reply. But he
did not see how.
Almost before he had time to repent she had cried out:--"Oh, there now!
See what I have done again! I did not mean it. Do forgive me!" Neither
saw a way to patching up this lapse, and it was ruled out by tacit
consent. Gwen resumed:--"You know, I mean, how one dreams a thousand
things in a minute, and everything is as big as a house, even when it's
only strong coffee. This was worse than strong coffee. There were plenty
of them, these hypothesisses.... Oh yes!--we know plenty of girls you
do. I could count you up a dozen...."
"--One's enough!--that means that one's the allowance, not that it's one
too many...."
"Well--there were a many reproachful dream-faces, and every one of them
said to me:--'See what you have made of my life that might have been so
happy. See how you have con ...'" Gwen had very nearly said _condemned_,
but stopped in time. She could not refer to the demands of an eyeless
mate for constant help in little things, and all the irksomeness of a
home.
Adrian, pretending not to hear "con," spoke at once. "But did none of
these charming girls--I'm sure I should have loved heaps of them--did
none of them remind you that they were hypothetical?"
"Dear Mr. Torrens, I can't tell you how good and brave you seem to me
for laughing so much, and turning everything to a joke. But I _was_ in
earnest."
"So was I."
"_Then_ I did not understand."
"What did you think I meant?"
"I thought you were playing fast and loose with the nonsense about the
hypothesis. I did indeed."
"Well, I was serious underneath. Listen, and I'll tell you. This
_fiancee_ of mine that you seem so cocksure about has no existence. I
give you my honour that it is so, and that I am glad of it.... Yes--glad
of it! How could I bear to think I was inflicting myself on a woman I
loved, and making her life a misery to her?"
Gwen thought of beginning:--"If she loved you," and giving a little
sketch of a perfect wife under the circumstances. It never saw the
light, owing to a recrudescence of Marcus Curtius, who stood to win
nothing by his venture--was certainly not in love with Erebus. An act of
pure self-sacrifice on principle! Nothing could be farther from her
thoughts, be so good as to observe, than that she _loved_ this man!
He went on uninterrupted:--"No, indeed I am heartily glad of it. It
would be a terrible embarrassment at the best. I should want to let her
off, and she would feel in honour bound to hold on, and really of all
the things I can't abide self-sacrifice is.... Well, Lady Gwendolen,
only consider the feelings of the chap on the altar! Hasn't he a right
to a little unselfishness for his own personal satisfaction?" This was a
sad wet blanket for Marcus Curtius.
Gwen did not believe that Adrian's disclaimer of any preoccupation of
his affections was genuine. According to her theory of life--and there
is much to be said for it--a full-blown Adonis, that is to say, a
lovable man, refusing to love any woman on any terms, was a sort of
monstrosity. The original Adonis of Art and Song was merely an _homme
incompris_, according to this young lady. He hated Venus--odious
woman!--and no wonder. _She_ to claim the rank of a goddess! Besides,
Gwen suspected that Adrian was only prevaricating. Trothplight was one
thing, official betrothal another. It was almost too poor a shuffle to
accuse him of, but she was always flying at the throat of equivocation,
even when she knew she might be outclassed by it. "You are playing with
words, Mr. Torrens," said she. "You mean that you and this young lady
are not 'engaged to be married'? Perhaps not, but that has nothing to
do with the matter. I cannot feel it in my bones--as Mrs. Bailey
says--that any woman you could care for would back out of it because you
... because of this dreadful accident." Her voice was irresolute in
referring to it, and some wandering wave of that electricity that her
finger-tips were so full of made a cross-circuit and quickened the
beating of her hearer's heart. The vessel it struck in mid-ocean had no
time to right itself before another followed. "Surely--if she were worth
a straw--if she were worth the name of a woman at all--she would feel it
her greatest happiness to make it up to you for such...." She was going
to say "a privation," but she always shied off designating the calamity.
In her hurry to escape from "privation" she landed her speech in a
phrase she had not taken the full measure of--"Well--perhaps I oughtn't
to say that! I may be taking the young woman's name in vain. I only mean
that that is what _I_ should feel in her position."
It had come as a chance speech before she saw its bearings. There was
not the ghost of an _arriere pensee_ behind the simple fact that she had
no choice but to judge another woman's mind by her own; a natural
thought! Her first instinct was to spoil the force she had not meant it
to have, by dragging the red herring of some foolish joke across the
trail.
But--to think of it! Here had she been hatching such a brave scheme of
making her own life, and all the devotion she somehow believed she could
give, a compensation for a great wrong, and here she was now affrighted
at the smell of powder! Pride stepped in, and the memory of Quintus
Curtius. No--she would not say a single word to undo the effect of her
heedlessness. Let the worst stand! They had left her in the place of
that hypothesis whom she had herself discarded. It was no fault of hers
that had involved her personally. Was she bound to back out? She bit her
lip to check her own impulse to utter some cheap corrective.
Until that rather scornful disclaimer of the Duke's son, Mrs. Bailey's
piece of fashionable intelligence had served--whether Adrian believed it
or not--as a sort of chaperon's aegis extended over this interview. It
had protected him against himself--against his impulse to break through
a silence that his three weeks' memory of this girl's image had made
painful. Recollect that her radiant beauty, in that setting sun-gleam,
was the last thing human his eyes had rested on before the night came on
him--the night that might be endless. It was not so easy, now that an
imaginary _fiancee_ had been curtly swept away, to fight against a
temptation he conceived himself bound in honour not to give way to. Not
so easy because _something_, that he hoped was not his vanity, was
telling him that this girl beside him, her very self that he had seen
once, whose image was to last for ever, was at least not placing
obstacles in his way. For anything that _she_ was doing to prevent it,
he might drive a coach-and-six through the social code that blocks a
declaration of passion to a girl under age without the consent of her
parents. He was conscious of this code, and his general acceptance of
it. But he was not so law-abiding but that he must needs get on the
box--of the coach-and-six--and flick the leaders with his whip.
For he asked abruptly:--"How do you know that?" driving home the nail of
personality to the head.
"Perhaps I am wrong," said Gwen, dropping her flag an inch. "But I was
thinking so all last night. I was in a sort of fever, you see, because I
felt so guilty, and it grew worse and worse...."
"You were thinking that...?"
"Well--you know--it was before I had any idea she was a hypothesis. I
thought she was real because of the ring."
"My ring! Fancy!... But I'll tell you about my ring presently. Tell me
what you were thinking...."
"Why--what I said before!"
"But what _was_ it?"
"Do you know, I think it was only a sort of attempt to get a little
sleep. You were so fearfully on my conscience, and it made it so much
easier to bear.... Only it worried me to think that perhaps she might
turn round and say:--'This was no fault of mine. Why should I bear for
life the burden of other people's sins?' ... If she was a perfect
beast--_beast_, you know!..."
"The hypothesis would not have been a perfect beast. She would have been
a perfect lady, and Mrs. Bailey would have attested it. She would have
pointed out the desirability of a sister's love--at reasonable
intervals; visits and so on--for a man with his eyes poked out. She
might even have gone the length of insinuating that the finger of
Providence did it...."
"Now you are talking nonsense again. Do be serious!"
"Well--let's be serious! Suppose you tell me what it was you were
thinking that made the existence of that very dry and unsatisfying
hypothesis such a consolation!"
"I should like to tell you--only I know I shall say it wrong, and you
will think me an odd girl; or unfeeling; which is worse."
"I should do nothing of the sort. But I'll tell you what I should
think--what I have thought all this time I have been hearing your
voice--I merely mention it as a thing of pathological interest...."
"Go on."
"I should think it didn't matter what you said so long as you went on
speaking. Because whenever I hear your voice I can shut my eyes and
forget that I am blind."
"Is that empty compliment, or are you in earnest?"
"I was jesting a minute ago, but now I am in earnest. I mean what I say.
Your voice takes the load off my heart and the darkness off my brain,
and we are standing again by that stone bridge over yonder--Arthur's
Bridge--and I see you in all your beauty--oh! such beauty--as I look up
from Ply's cut collar against the sunset sky. That was my last hour of
vision, and its memory will go with me to the grave. And now when I hear
your voice, it all comes back to me, and the terrible darkness has
vanished--or the sense of it anyhow!..."
"If that is so you shall hear it until your sight comes back--it
will--it must!"
"How if it never comes back? How if I remain as I am now for life?"
"I shall not lose my voice."
How it came about neither could ever say; but each knew that it happened
then, just at that turn in the conversation, and that no one came
rushing into the drawing-room as they easily might have done--this lax
structure of language was employed later in reference to it--nor did any
of the thousand interruptions occur that might have occurred. Mrs.
Bailey might have come to Mr. Torrens to know how many g's there were in
agreeable, or a tea-collector might have prowled in to add relics to her
collection, or even the sound of the carriage afar--inaudible by
man--might have caused Achilles to requisition the opening of the
drawing-room door, that he might rush away to sanction its arrival. Two
guardian angels--the story thinks--stopped any of these things
happening. What did happen was that Gwen and Adrian, who a moment before
were nominally a lady and gentleman chatting on a sofa near the piano,
whose separation involved no consequences definable for either, were
standing speechless in each other's arms--speechless but waiting for the
power to speak. For nobody can articulate whose heart is thumping out of
all reason. He has to wait--or she, as may be. One of each is needed to
develope an earthquake of this particular kind.
It was just as well that the Hon. Percival Pellew and Aunt Constance
Smith-Dickenson, who had started to walk from the flower-show with a
couple of young monkeys whose object in life was to spare everybody else
their company from selfish motives, did _not_ come rushing into the
drawing-room just then, but a quarter of an hour later. For even if the
parties had caught the sound of their arrival in time, the peculiarity
of Mr. Torrens' blindness would have stood in the way of any successful
pretence that he and Lady Gwendolen had been keeping their distance up
to Society point. We know how easy it is for normal people, when caught,
to pretend they are looking at dear Sarah's interesting watercolours
together, or anything of that sort. And even if the blind man had been
able to strike a bar or two carelessly on the piano, to advertise his
isolation, their faces would have betrayed them. Not that the tears of
either could have been identified on the face of the other. It was a
matter of expression. Every situation in this world has a stamp of its
own for the human face, and no stamp is more easily identified than that
on the face of lovers who have just found each other out.
* * * * *
Anyhow this story cannot go on, until the absurd tempest that has passed
over these two allows them to speak. Then they do so on an absolutely
new footing, and the man calls the girl his dearest and his own, and
Heaven knows what else. There one sees the difference between the B.C.
and A.D. of the Nativity of Love. It is a new Era. Call it the Hegira,
if you like.
"I saw you once, dear love,"--he is saying--"I saw you once, and it was
you--you--you! The worst that Fate has in store for me cannot kill the
memory of that moment. And if blindness was to be the price of this--of
this--why, I would sooner be blind, and have it, than have all the eyes
of Argus and ... and starve."
"You wouldn't know you were starving," says Gwen, who is becoming
normal--resuming the equanimities. "Besides, you would be such a Guy.
No--please don't! Somebody's coming!"
"Nobody's coming. It's all right. I tell you, Gwen, or Gwendolen--do you
know I all but called you that, when you came in, before we sang...?"
"Why didn't you quite? However, I'm not sorry you didn't on the whole.
It might have seemed paternal, and I should have felt squashed. And then
it might never have happened at all, and I should just have been a young
lady in Society, and you a gentleman that had had an accident."
"It would have happened just the same, _I_ believe. Because why? I had
_seen_ you. At least, it _might_ have."
"It _has_ happened, and must be looked in the face. Now whatever you
do, for Heaven's sake, don't go talking to papa and being penitent, till
I give you leave."
"What should I be able to say to him? _I_ don't know. I can't justify my
actions--as the World goes...."
"Why not?"
"Nobody would hold a man blameless, in my circumstances, who made an
offer of marriage to a young lady under...."
"It's invidious to talk about people's ages."
"I wasn't going to say twenty-one. I was going to say under her father's
roof...."
"Nobody ever makes offers of marriage on the top of anybody's father's
roof. Besides, you never made any offer, strictly speaking. You
said...."
"I said that if I had my choice I would have chosen it all as it now is,
only to hear your voice in the dark, rather than to be without it and
have all the eyes of ... didn't I say Argus?"
"Yes--you said Argus. But that was a _facon-de-parler_; at least I hope
so, for the sake of the Hypothesis.... Oh dear!--what nonsense we two
are talking...." Some silence; otherwise the _status quo_ remained
unchanged. Then he said:--"_I_ wonder if it's all a dream and we shall
wake." And she replied: "Not both--that's absurd!" But she made it more
so by adding:--"Promise you'll tell me your dream when we wake, and I'll
tell you mine." He assented:--"All right!--but don't let's wake yet."
By now the sun was sinking in a flame of gold, and every little rabbit's
shadow in the fern was as long as the tallest man's two hours since, and
longer. The level glare was piercing the sheltered secrets of the
beechwoods, and choosing from them ancient tree-trunks capriciously, to
turn to sudden fires against the depths of hidden purple beyond--the
fringe of the mantle the vanguard of night was weaving for the hills.
Not a dappled fallow-deer in the coolest shade but had its chance of a
robe of glory for a little moment--not a bird so sober in its plumage
but became, if only it flew near enough to Heaven, a spark against the
blue. And the long, unhesitating rays were not so busy with the world
without, but that one of them could pry in at the five-light window at
the west end of the Jacobean drawing-room at the Towers, and reach the
marble Ceres the Earl's grandfather brought from Athens. And on the way
it paused and dwelt a moment on a man's hand caressing the stray locks
of a flood of golden hair he could not see--might never see at all. Or
who might live on--such things have been--to find it grey to a
half-illuminated sight in the dusk of life. So invisible to him now; so
vivid in his memory of what seemed to him no more than a few days
since! For half the time, remember, had been to him oblivion--a mere
blank. And now, in the splendid intoxication of this new discovery, he
could well afford to forget for the moment the black cloud that overhung
the future, and the desperation that might well lie hidden in its heart,
waiting for the day when he should know that Hope was dead. That day
might come.
"Shall I tell you now, my dearest, my heart, my life"--this is what he
is saying, and every word he says is a mere truth to him; a sort of
scientific fact--"shall I tell you what I was going to say an hour
ago?..."
"It's more than an hour, but I know when. About me sticking my hand
out?"
"Just exactly then. I was thinking all the while that in another moment
I should have your hand in mine, and keep it as long as I dared. Eyes
were nothing--sight was nothing--life itself was nothing--nothing was
anything but that one moment just ahead. It would not last, but it would
fill the earth and the heavens with light and music, and keep death and
the fiend that had been eating up my soul at bay--as long as it lasted.
Dear love, I am not exaggerating...."
"Do you expect me to believe that? Now be quiet, and perhaps I'll tell
you what I was thinking when I found out you couldn't see--have been
thinking ever since. I thought it well over in the night, and when I
came into this room I meant it. I did, indeed."
"Meant what?"
"Meant to get at the truth about that ring of yours. I had got it on the
brain, you see. I meant to find out whether she was anybody or nobody.
And if she was nobody I was going to...." She comes to a standstill;
for, even now--even after such a revelation, with one of his arms about
her waist, and his free hand caressing her hair--Marcus Curtius sticks
in her throat a little.
"What were you going to?" said Adrian, really a little puzzled. Because
even poets don't understand some women.
"Well--if it wasn't you I wouldn't tell. I ... I had made up my mind to
apply for the vacant place." This came with a rush, and might not have
come at all had she felt his eyes could see her; knowing, as she did,
the way the blood would quite unreasonably mount up to her face the
moment she had uttered it. "It all seemed such plain sailing in the
middle of the night, and it turned out not quite so easy as I thought it
would be. You know.... Be quiet and let me talk now!... it was the
guilt--my share in it--that was so hard to bear. I wanted to do
_something_ to make it up to you. And what could I do? A woman is in
such a fix. Oh, how glad I was when you opened fire on your own account!
Only _frightened_, you know." He was beginning to say something, but she
stopped him with:--"I know what you are going to say, but that's just
where the difficulty came in. If only I hadn't cared twopence about you
it would have been so easy!... Did you say how? Foolish man!--can't you
see that if I hadn't loved you one scrap, or only half across your lips
as we used to say when we were children, it would have been quite a
let-off to be met with offers of a brother's love ... and that sort of
thing.... Isn't that them?" This was colloquial. No doubt Gwen was
exceptional, and all the other young ladies in the Red Book would have
said:--"Are not these they?"
This story does not believe that Gwen's statement of her recent
embarrassment covered the facts. Probably a woman in her position would
be less held at bay by the chance of a rebuff, than by a deadly fear of
kisses chilled by a spirit of self-sacrifice.... Ugh!--the hideous
suspicion! The present writer, from information received, believes that
little girls like to think that they are made of sugar and spice and all
that's nice, and that their lover's synthesis of slugs and snails and
puppy-dogs' tails doesn't matter a rap so long as they are ravenous. But
they mustn't snap, however large a percentage of puppy-dogs they
contain.
Anyhow, Marcus Curtius never came off. He was really impossible; and, as
we all know, what's impossible very seldom comes to pass. And this case
was not among the exceptions.
It wasn't them. But a revision of the relativities was necessary. When
Miss Dickenson and the Hon. Percival did come in, Gwen was at the piano,
and Adrian at the right distance for hearing. Nothing could have been
more irreproachable. The newcomers, having been audibly noisy on the
stairs, showed as hypocritical by an uncalled-for assumption of
preternatural susceptibility to the absence of other members of their
party acknowledging their necessity to make up a Grundy quorum. There is
safety in number when persons are of opposite sexes, which they
generally are.
"Can't imagine what's become of them!" said Mr. Pellew, rounding off
some subject with a dexterous implication of its nature. "By
Jove!--that's good, though! Mr. Torrens down at last!" Greetings and
civilities, and a good pretence by the blind man of seeing the hands he
meets half-way.
"That young Lieutenant What's-his-name and the second Accrington girl,
Gwen dear. They must have missed us and gone round by Furze Heath. I
shall be in a fearful scrape with Lady Accrington, I know. Why didn't
you come to the flower-show?" Thus Miss Dickenson, laying unnecessary
stress on the absentees.
"I had a headache," says Gwen, "and Gloire de Dijon roses always make my
headaches worse.... Yes, it's very funny. Mr. Torrens and I have been
boring one another half the afternoon. But I've written some letters. Do
you know this in the new Opera--Verdi's?" She played a phrase or two of
the _Trovatore._ For it was the new Opera that year, and we were boys
... _eheu fugaces_!
"I really think I ought to walk back a little and see about those young
people," says Aunt Constance fatuously. Thereupon Gwen finds she would
like a little walk in the cool, and will accompany Aunt Constance. But
just after they have left the room Achilles, whose behaviour has really
been perfect all along, is seized with a paroxysm of interest in an
inaudible sound, and storms past them on the stairs to meet the carriage
and keep an eye on things. So they only take a short turn on the terrace
in the late glow of the sunset, and go up to dress.
Adrian and the Hon. Percival spend five minutes in the growing twilight,
actively ignoring all personal relations during the afternoon. They
discuss flower-shows on their merits, and recent Operas on theirs. They
censure the fashions in dress--the preposterous crinolines and the
bonnets almost hanging down on the back like a knapsack--touch politics
slightly: Louis Napoleon, Palmerston, Russian Nicholas. But they follow
male precedents, dropping trivialities as soon as womankind is out of
hearing, and preserve a discreet silence--two discreet silences--about
their respective recencies. They depart to their rooms, Adrian risking
his credit for a limited vision by committing himself to Mr. Pellew's
arm and a banister.