passing out into the pleasant July twilight, he told himself that
for the present he had done with London; he would shake the dust of
the inhospitable city from off his feet, and go down to the place in
Wiltshire which was learning to call him master, to await better days
in company with his beloved falcons. He even found himself taking
comfort from this prospect while a hansom bore him swiftly to the Savoy
Theatre, and when he was safely ensconced in his stall he beguiled
the interval before the rising of the curtain--a period which his
impatience to escape from the club rather than any undue passion for
punctuality had made somewhat lengthy--by considering, speculatively,
the chances of society which the Willescombe neighbourhood seemed
to afford. He enjoyed the first act of the extravaganza with the
zest of a man to whom the work of the famous collaborators was an
entire novelty, his pleasure unalloyed by the fact, of which he was
blissfully unconscious, that one of the principal parts was played by
an understudy. His _ennui_ returning with the fall of the curtain,
he prepared to spend the entr’acte in contemplation of the people
who composed the house, rather than to incur the resentment of the
placid dowagers who were his neighbours, by passing and repassing,
like the majority of his fellow-men, in search of the distant haven
where cigarettes and drinks, obtained with difficulty, could be
hastily appreciated. More than once his wandering eyes returned to a
box next the stage on a dress-circle tier, and finally they rested
rather wistfully on its occupants, or, to be more accurate, on the
younger of the two ladies who were seated in front. It was not simply
because the girl was pretty, though her beauty, the flower-like charm
of a young Englishwoman fresh from the schoolroom, a fine example
of a type not particularly rare, would have furnished a sufficient
pretext: he was struck by a resemblance, a haunting reminiscence,
which at first exercised his curiosity, and ended by baffling and
tantalising him. There was something vaguely familiar, he thought, in
the manner of her smile, the inclination of her head as she turned
now and then to address a remark to her companion, the lady in grey,
whose face was hidden from him by the drapery at the side of the box.
When she laughed, furling a feathery fan, and throwing a bright glance
back at the gentleman whose white shirt-front was dimly visible in
the background, Sir Geoffrey felt himself on the verge of solving
his riddle, but at this point, while a name seemed to tremble on his
lips, the lights of the auditorium were lowered, and the rising of the
curtain on the fairyland of the second scene diverted his attention to
the stage. Later, when he had passed into the crowded lobby, and was
making his way slowly through a jungle of pretty dresses towards the
door, he recognised in front of him the amber-coloured hair and dainty,
pale-blue opera cloak of the damsel who had puzzled him. The two ladies
(her companion of the grey dress was close at hand) halted near the
door while their cavalier passed out in search of their carriage; the
elder lady turned, adjusting a cloud of soft lace about her shoulders,
and Sir Geoffrey was struck on the instant by a swift thrill. Here,
at last, was an old friend--that face could belong to no one else
than Margaret Addison. It was natural that her maiden name should
first occur to him, but he remembered, as he edged his way laboriously
towards her, that she had married just after he sailed for Burma; yes,
she had married that amiable scape-grace Dick Vandeleur, who had met
his death in the hunting-field nearly fifteen years ago.
As he drew near, Mrs. Vandeleur’s gaze fell upon him for a brief
instant; he thought that she had not recognised him, but before his
spirits had time to suffer any consequent depression, her eyes returned
to him, and as he smiled in answer to the surprise which he read in
them, he saw her face flush, and then grow a little pale, before a
responsive light of recognition dawned upon it. She took his hand
silently when he offered it, eyeing him with the same faint smile, an
expression in which welcome seemed to be gleaming through a cloud of
apprehension.
“I’m not a ghost,” he said, laughing; “I’m Geoffrey Vincent. Don’t be
ashamed of owning that you had quite forgotten me!”
“I knew you at once,” she said simply. “So you are home at last: you
must come and see me as soon as you can. This is my daughter Dorothy,
and here is my brother--of course you remember Philip?--coming to tell
us that the carriage is waiting. You will come, to-morrow--to prove
that you are not a ghost? We shall expect you.”
II
A fortnight later Sir Geoffrey was sitting in a punt, beguiling the
afternoon of a rainy day by luring unwary roach to their destruction
with a hair-line and pellets of paste, delicately kneaded by the
taper fingers of Miss Dorothy Vandeleur. He was the guest of Mrs.
Vandeleur’s brother, his school friend, Philip Addison the Q.C., and
Mrs. Vandeleur and her daughter were also staying at the delightful
old Elizabethan house which nestled, with such an air of immemorial
occupation, halfway down the wooded side of one of the Streatley hills,
its spotless lawn sloping steeply to the margin of the fairest river in
the world. Miss Vandeleur had enshrined herself among a pile of rugs
and cushions at the stern of the punt, where the roof of her uncle’s
boat-house afforded shelter from the persistent rain. She was arrayed
in the blue serge dear to the modern water-nymph; and at intervals
she relieved her feelings by shaking a small fist at the leaden vault
of sky. For the rest, her attention was divided impartially between
her novel, with which she did not seem to make much progress, her
fox-terrier Sancho, and the slowly decreasing lump of paste, artfully
compounded with cotton-wool for consistency, with which, as occasion
arose, she ministered to her companion’s predatory needs. The capture
of a fish was followed inevitably by a disarrangement of her nest
of cushions, and a pathetic petition for its instant release and
restoration to the element from which it had been untimely inveigled.
Occasionally, the rain varied the monotony of the dolorous drizzle by
a vehement and spirited downpour, lasting for some minutes, prompting
one of the occupants of the punt to remark, with misplaced confidence,
that it must clear up soon, after that. Then Sir Geoffrey would abandon
his rod, and beat a retreat to the stern of the punt; and during these
interludes, much desultory conversation ensued. Once, Miss Vandeleur
startled her companion by asking, suddenly, how it was that he seemed
so absurdly young?
“I hope I am not rude?” she added, “but really you do strike me as
almost the youngest person I know. You are much younger than Jack--Mr.
Wilgress--for instance, and it’s only about three years since he left
Eton.”
Sir Geoffrey smiled, wondering a little whether the girl was laughing
at him; for though a man of forty-seven, who has for twenty years
successfully resisted a trying climate, may consider himself as very
far from the burden of old age, it was conceivable that the views of a
maiden in her teens might be very different.
“It’s because I am having such a good time,” he hazarded. “You and your
mother are responsible, you know; before I met you at the Savoy, on
that memorable evening, I was feeling as blue as--as the sky ought to
be if it had any decency, and at least as old as the river. I suppose
it’s true that youth and good spirits are contagious.”
Dorothy gazed at him for a moment reflectively. “How lucky it was that
Uncle Philip took us to the theatre on that evening! It was just a
chance. And we might never have met you.”
“It was lucky for me!” declared the other simply. “But would you have
cared?”
“Of course!” said the girl promptly, but lowering her blue eyes. “You
see, I have never known a real live hero before. Do tell me about your
fight in the hill-fort, or how you caught the Dacoits! Uncle Philip
says that you ought to have had the V.C.”
Sir Geoffrey replied by a little disparaging murmur. “Oh, it was quite
a commonplace affair--all in the day’s work. Any one else would have
done the same.”
Dorothy settled herself back among her cushions resentfully, clasping
her hands, rather sunburned, across her knees.
“I should like to see them!” she declared contemptuously. “That’s just
what that Jack Wilgress said--at least he implied it. It is true, he
apologised afterwards. How I despise Oxford boys!”
“I thought he was a very good fellow,” said Sir Geoffrey,
diplomatically turning the subject from his own achievements. “I
suppose it might improve him to have something to do; but he strikes me
as a very good specimen of the ornamental young man.”
“Ornamental!” echoed Dorothy sarcastically. “It would do him good to
have to work for his living.”
“Poor beggar, he couldn’t help being born with a silver spoon in his
mouth--it isn’t his fault.”
“Spoon!” exclaimed Miss Vandeleur. “A whole dinner service I should
think. A soup-ladle at the very least. It’s quite big enough: perhaps
that accounts for it!”
The girl laughed, swaying back, with the grace of her years, against
her cushions; then, observing that her companion’s grave grey eyes were
fixed upon her, she grew suddenly demure, sighing with a little air of
penitence.
“I am very wicked to-day,” she confessed. “It’s the rain, I suppose,
and want of exercise. Do you ever feel like that, Sir Geoffrey? Do you
ever get into an omnibus and simply loathe and detest every single
person in it? Do you long to swear--real swears, like our army in
Flanders--at everybody you meet, just because it’s rainy or foggy, and
because they are all so ugly and horrid? I do, frequently.”
“I know, I know,” said the other sympathetically, while he reeled in
his line and deftly untied the tiny hook. “Only, the omnibus has not
figured very often in my case; it has generally been a hot court-house,
or a dusty dâk-bungalow full of commercial travellers. But I don’t feel
like that now, at all. I hope I am not responsible for your frame of
mind?”
“Oh,” protested Dorothy, “don’t make me feel such an abandoned wretch!
I should have been much worse if you had not been here. I should have
quarrelled with Uncle Phil, or been rude to my mother, or something
dreadful. I’m perfectly horrid to her sometimes. And as it is, I have
let her go up to town all alone--to see my dressmaker.”
Sir Geoffrey stood up and began to take his rod to pieces. “And are you
quite sure that you haven’t been ‘loathing and detesting’ me all the
afternoon?”
Dorothy picked up her novel and smoothed its leaves reflectively.
“I----But no. I won’t make you too conceited. Look, the sun is actually
coming out! Don’t you think we might take the Canadian up to the weir?
You really ought to be introduced to the big chub under the bridge.”
The rain had almost ceased, and when they had transferred themselves
into the dainty canoe, a few strokes of the paddle which Miss Vandeleur
wielded with such effective grace swept them out into a full flood
of delicate evening sunlight. The sky smiled blue through rapidly
increasing breaks in the clouds; the sunbeams, slanting from the west,
touched with pale gold the quivering trees, which seemed to lift
their wet branches and spread their leaves to court the warm caress.
A new radiance of colour crept into the landscape, as if it had been
a picture from which a smoky glass was withdrawn; the water grew very
still--this too was in the manner of a picture--with the peace of a
summer evening, brimming with an unbroken surface luminously from
bank to bank. Strange guttural cries of water-birds sounded from the
reed-beds; from the next reach came the rhythmic pulse of oars, faint
splashes, and the brisk rattle of row-locks; voices and laughter
floated down from the lock, travelling far beyond belief in the hushed
stillness of the evening. The wake of the light canoe trailed unbroken
to the shadows of the boathouse, and the wet paddle gleamed as it slid
through the water. Presently Dorothy stayed her hand.
“What an enchanting world it is!” she murmured, with wide eyes full of
the glamour of the setting sun. “Beautiful, beautiful----! How soon one
forgets the fogs, and rain, and cold! I feel as if I had lived in this
fairyland always.”
Her lips trembled a little as she spoke, and Sir Geoffrey found
something in the pathos of her youth which held him silent. When they
broke the spell of silence, their words were trivial, perhaps, but
the language was that of old friends, simple and direct. Sir Geoffrey
at least, for whom the charm of the occasion was a gift so rare that
he scarcely dared to desecrate it by mental criticism, was far from
welcoming the interruption which presently occurred, in the shape of
a youth, arrayed in immaculate flannels and the colours of a popular
rowing club, who hailed them cheerfully from a light skiff, resting on
his sculls and drifting alongside while he rolled a cigarette.
III
Dorothy sank down, rather wearily, in the low basket-chair which stood
near the open window of her mother’s bedroom--a tall French window,
with a wide balcony overrun by climbing roses, and a view of the river,
and waited for Mrs. Vandeleur to dismiss her maid. As she lay there,
adjusting absently the loose tresses of her hair, she could feel the
breath of the faint breeze as it wandered, gathering a light burden of
fragrance, through the dusky roses; she could see the river, dimly,
where the moonbeams touched its ripples, and once or twice the sound of
voices reached her from the distant smoking-room. The closing of the
door as the maid went out disturbed her reverie, and turning a little
in her chair she found her mother regarding her thoughtfully.
“No,” said Dorothy, swiftly interpreting her mother’s glance. “You
mustn’t send me away, my pretty little mother. I’ll promise not to
catch cold. I haven’t been able to talk to you all day.”
Mrs. Vandeleur half closed the window, and then seated herself with an
expression of resignation on the arm of her daughter’s chair. In the
dim light shed by the two candles on the dressing-table, one would have
thought them two sisters, plotting innocently the discomfiture of man.
The occasion did not prove so stimulating to conversation as might have
been expected. For a few minutes both were silent; Dorothy began to
hum an air from the Savoy opera, rather recklessly; she kicked off one
of her slippers, and it fell on the polished oak floor with a little
clatter.
“Little donkey!” murmured her mother sweetly. “So much for your
talking. I’m going to bed at once.” Then she added, carelessly, “Did
you see Jack to-day?”
The humming paused abruptly; then it went on for a second, and paused
again.
“Oh yes, the inevitable Mr. Wilgress was on the river, as usual. He
nearly ran us down in that idiotic skiff of his.”
Mrs. Vandeleur raised her eyebrows, gazing at her unconscious daughter
reflectively.
“You didn’t see him alone, then?” she inquired presently.
“Who? Mr. Wilgress? Ye-es, I think so. When we got back to the
boathouse he insisted on taking me out again in the canoe, to show me
the correct Indian stroke. Much he knows about it! That’s why I was so
late for dinner. Oh, please don’t talk about Mr. Wilgress.”
“Mr. Wilgress again?” murmured Mrs. Vandeleur. “I thought it always
used to be ‘Jack.’”
“Only, only by accident,” said the girl weakly. “And when he wasn’t
there.”
“Well, he isn’t here now. At least I hope not. You--you haven’t
quarrelled, have you Dolly?”
“No--yes. I don’t know. He--he asked me--oh, he was ridiculous. How I
hate boys--and jealousy.”
Mrs. Vandeleur shivered, then rose abruptly and closed the window
against which she leaned, gazing down at the formless mass of the
shrubs which cowered over their shadows on the lawn. Her mind, vaguely
troubled for some days past, and now keenly on the alert, travelled
swiftly back, bridging a space of nearly twenty years, to a scene
strangely like this, in which she and her mother had held the stage.
She too, a girl then of Dorothy’s eighteen years, had brought the
halting story of her doubts and scruples to her natural counsellor:
she could remember still how the instinct of reticence had struggled
with the yearning for sympathy, for the comfort of the confessional.
She could recall now and appreciate her mother’s tact and patient
questioning, her own perversity, the dumbness which seemed independent
of her own volition. A commonplace page of life. Two men at her
feet, and the girl unskilled to read her heart: one had spoken--that
was Dick Vandeleur, careless, brilliant, the heir to half a county;
the other--her old friend; she could not bear to think of him now.
Knowledge had come too late, and the light which made her wonder
scornfully at her blindness. And her mother--she of course had played
the worldly part; but her counsel had been honest, without bias: it
were cruel to blame her now. Loyal though she was, Margaret Vandeleur
had asked herself an hundred times, yielding to that love of threading
a labyrinth which rules most women, what would have been the story
of her life if she had steeled herself to stand or fall by her own
judgment, if she had refused to allow her mother to drop into the
wavering scale the words which had turned it, ever so slightly, in
favour of the richer man, the man whom she had married, whose name she
bore.
It seemed plain enough, to a woman’s keen vision--what sense so subtle,
yet so easily beguiled--that Dorothy’s choice was embarrassed, just
as her own had been. The girl and her two admirers--how the old story
repeated itself!--one, Jack Wilgress, the good-natured, good-looking
idler, whose devotion to the river threatened to make him amphibious,
and whose passion for scribbling verse bade fair to launch him adrift
among the cockle-shell fleet of Minor Poets; the other--Geoffrey
Vincent! To call upon Margaret Vandeleur to guide her daughter’s choice
between two men of whom Geoffrey Vincent was one--surely here was the
end and crown of Fate’s relentless irony. She felt herself blushing as
she pressed her forehead against the cool window-pane, put to shame
by the thoughts which the comparison suggested, which would not be
stifled. Right or wrong, at least her mother had been impartial: there
was a sting in this, a failure of her precedent. She sighed, concluding
mutely that silence was her only course; even if she would, she could
not follow in her mother’s footsteps--the girl must abide by her own
judgment.
When she turned, smiling faintly, the light of the flickering candles
fell upon her face, betraying a pallor which startled Dorothy from her
reverie. She sprang from her chair, reproaching her selfishness.
“You poor, tired, little mother,” she murmured penitently, with a hasty
kiss. “How could I be so cruel as to keep you up after your journey!
I’m a wretch, but I’m really going now. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” said her mother, caressing the vagrant coils of the
girl’s amber-coloured hair. “Don’t worry yourself; everything will come
right if--if you listen to your own heart.”
Dorothy’s answer was precluded by another kiss. “It’s so full of you
that it can’t be bothered to think of any one else,” she declared
plaintively, as she turned towards the door. Then she paused, fingering
nervously a little heap of books which lay upon a table. “He--he isn’t
so very old, you know,” she murmured softly before she made her escape.
When she was alone Mrs. Vandeleur sank into the chair which her
daughter had just quitted, nestling among the cushions and knitting
her brows in thought. The clock on the mantelpiece had struck twelve
before she rose, and then she paused for an instant in front of the
looking-glass, gazing into it half timidly before she extinguished
the candles. The face which she saw there was manifestly pretty, in
spite of the trouble which lurked in the tired eyes, and when she
turned away, a hovering smile was struggling with the depression at the
corners of the delicate, mobile lips.
IV
When Sir Geoffrey returned to Riverside, three days later, after a
brief sojourn in London, spent for the most part at the office of his
solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn, he found Mrs. Vandeleur presiding over
a solitary tea-table in a shady corner of the garden. A few chairs
sociably disposed under the gnarled walnut-tree, and a corresponding
number of empty tea-cups, suggested that her solitude had not been of
long duration, and this impression was confirmed when Mrs. Vandeleur
told her guest that if he had presented himself a short quarter of an
hour earlier he would have been welcomed in a manner more worthy of his
deserts.
Sir Geoffrey drew one of the low basket chairs up to the table,
protesting, as he accepted a cup of tea, that he could not have wished
for better fortune.
“This is very delightful,” he declared. “I don’t regret the tardiness
of my train in the least. The other charming people are on the river, I
suppose?”
Mrs. Vandeleur nodded. “Yes, the Patersons have just taken up their
quarters in that house-boat, which you must have noticed, near the
lock, and my brother and Dorothy have gone with Jack Wilgress and his
sisters to call upon them. You ought to have seen Daisy Wilgress; she
is very pretty.”
Sir Geoffrey smiled gravely, sipping his tea.
“If she is prettier than your daughter, Miss Wilgress must be very
dangerous. But I must see her with my own eyes before I believe that.”
“Oh, she is!” declared Mrs. Vandeleur, laughing lightly, but throwing a
quick glance at him. “Ask Philip; he is more wrapped up in her than he
has been in anything since his first brief.”
“Poor Philip!” said the other quietly, stooping to pick a fallen leaf
from the grass at his feet. “I--I have a fellow-feeling for him.”
“You know you may smoke if you want to,” interposed Mrs. Vandeleur,
rather hurriedly. “And perhaps--if you really won’t have any more
tea--you might like to go in pursuit of the other people; I don’t think
they have taken all the boats. But I daresay you are tired? London is
so fatiguing--and business.”
Sir Geoffrey smiled, his white teeth showing pleasantly against the tan
of his lean, good-humoured face.
“I _am_ rather tired, I believe,” he owned. “I have been spending a
great deal of time in my solicitor’s waiting-room, pretending to read
_The Times_. And I have been thinking--that is always fatiguing. If I
am not in your way, I should like to stay here.”
Mrs. Vandeleur professed her satisfaction by a polite little murmur,
leaning forward in her chair to marshal the scattered tea-cups on the
tray, while Sir Geoffrey watched her askance, rather timidly, with a
keen appreciation of the subtle charm of her personality; her face,
like a perfect cameo, or some rare pale flower, seeming to have gained
rather in beauty by the deliberate passage from youth; winning, just as
some pictures do, an added grace of refinement, a delicacy, which the
slight modification of contours served only to intensify.
“I told you just now that I had been thinking,” he said presently, when
she had resumed her task of embroidering initials in the corner of a
handkerchief: “would it surprise you if I said that I had been thinking
of you?”
Mrs. Vandeleur raised her eyebrows slightly, her gaze still intent upon
her patient needle.
“Perhaps it was natural that you should think of us,” she hazarded.
“But I meant you,” he continued; “you, the Margaret of the old days,
before I went away. For I used to call you ‘Margaret’ then. We were
great friends, you know.”
“I have always thought of you as a friend,” she said simply. “Yes, we
were great friends before--before you went away.”
“It doesn’t seem so long ago to me,” he declared, almost plaintively,
struck by something in the tone of her voice. Mrs. Vandeleur smiled
tolerantly, scrutinising her embroidery, with her head poised on one
side, a little after the manner of a bird.
“And now that I have found you again,” he added with intention,
dropping his eyes till they rested on the river, rippling past the
wooden landing-stage below in the sunshine, “I--I don’t want to lose
you, Margaret!”
Mrs. Vandeleur met this declaration with a smile, which was courteous
rather than cordial, merely acknowledging, as of right, the propriety
of the aspiration, treating it as quite conventional. The simplicity
of the gesture testified eloquently of the discipline of twenty years;
only a woman would have detected the shadow of apprehension in her
eyes, the trembling of the hands which seemed so placidly occupied.
Her mind was already anxiously on the alert, racing rapidly over the
now familiar ground which she had quartered of late so heedfully. For
her, his words were ominous; it was of Dorothy surely that he wished
to speak, and yet----! In the stress of expectation her thoughts took
strange flights, following vague clues fantastically. The inveterate
habit of retrospection carried her back, in spite of her scruples; her
honest desire to think singly of Dorothy, regarding the fortune of her
own life as irrevocably settled, impelled her irresistibly to call to
the stage of her imagination a scene which she had often set upon it, a
duologue, entirely fictive, which might, but for her perversity, have
been enacted--twenty years ago.
Sir Geoffrey rose, and stood leaning with one hand on the back of his
chair. This interruption--or perhaps it was the sound of oars and
voices which floated in growing volume from the river--served to recall
his companion to the present. The silence, of brief duration actually,
seemed intolerable. She must break it, and when she spoke it was to
name her daughter, aimlessly.
“Dorothy?” repeated Sir Geoffrey, as she paused. “She is
extraordinarily like you were before I went away. Not that you are
changed--it is delightful to come back and find you the same. It’s only
when she is with you that I can realise that there is a difference,
a----”
“I was never so good as Dorothy,” put in Mrs. Vandeleur quickly; “she
will never have the same reason to blame herself----I don’t think you
could imagine what she has been to me.”
“I think I can,” said Sir Geoffrey simply. Then he added, rather shyly:
“Really, we seem to be very good friends already: it’s very nice of
her--it would be so natural for her to--to resent the intrusion of an
old fellow like me.”
“You need not be afraid of that; she looks upon you as--as a friend
already.”
“Thank you!” murmured the other. “And you think she might grow to--to
like me, in time?”
Mrs. Vandeleur nodded mutely. Sir Geoffrey followed for a moment the
deliberate entry and re-entry of her needle, reflectively; then, as
his eyes wandered, he realised vaguely that a boat had reached the
landing-stage, and that people were there: he recognised young Wilgress
and Miss Vandeleur.