According to the ordinary and inaccurate method of measuring time, a
fortnight may have gone by since the event last narrated, and Honora had
tasted at last the joys of authorship. Her name was not to appear, to
be sure, on the cover of the Life and Letters of General Angus Chiltern;
nor indeed, so far, had she written so much as a chapter or a page of a
work intended to inspire young and old with the virtues of citizenship.
At present the biography was in the crucial constructive stage. Should
the letters be put in one volume, and the life in another? or should
the letters be inserted in the text of the life? or could not there be
a third and judicious mixture of both of these methods? Honora's counsel
on this and other problems was, it seems, invaluable. Her own table
was fairly littered with biographies more or less famous which had been
fetched from the library, and the method of each considered.
Even as Mr. Garrick would never have been taken for an actor in his
coach and four, so our heroine did not in the least resemble George
Eliot, for instance, as she sat before her mirror at high noon with
Monsieur Cadron and her maid Mathilde in worshipful attendance. Some of
the ladies, indeed, who have left us those chatty memoirs of the days
before the guillotine, she might have been likened to. Monsieur Cadron
was an artist, and his branch of art was hair-dressing. It was by his
own wish he was here to-day, since he had conceived a new coiffure
especially adapted, he declared, to the type of Madame Spence. Behold
him declaring ecstatically that seldom in his experience had he had such
hairs to work with.
“Avec une telle chevelure, l'on peut tout faire, madame. Etre simple,
c'est le comble de l'art. Ca vous donne,” he added, with clasped hands
and a step backward, “ca vous donne tout a fait l'air d'une dame de
Nattier.”
Madame took the hand-glass, and did not deny that she was eblouissante.
If madame, suggested Monsieur Cadron, had but a little dress a la Marie
Antoinette? Madame had, cried madame's maid, running to fetch one
with little pink flowers and green leaves on an ecru ground. Could any
coiffure or any gown be more appropriate for an entertainment at which
Clio was to preside?
It is obviously impossible that a masterpiece should be executed under
the rules laid down by convention. It would never be finished. Mr.
Chiltern was coming to lunch, and it was not the first time. On her
appearance in the doorway he halted abruptly in his pacing of the
drawing-room, and stared at her.
“I'm sorry I kept you waiting,” she said.
“It was worth it,” he said. And they entered the dining room. A subdued,
golden-green light came in through the tall glass doors that opened out
on the little garden which had been Mrs. Forsythe's pride. The scent
of roses was in the air, and a mass of them filled a silver bowl in the
middle of the table. On the dark walls were Mrs. Forsythe's precious
prints, and above the mantel a portrait of a thin, aristocratic
gentleman who resembled the poet Tennyson. In the noonday shadows of
a recess was a dark mahogany sideboard loaded with softly gleaming
silver--Honora's. Chiltern sat down facing her. He looked at Honora
over the roses,--and she looked at him. A sense of unreality that was,
paradoxically, stronger than reality itself came over her, a sense of
fitness, of harmony. And for the moment an imagination, ever straining
at its leash, was allowed to soar. It was Chiltern who broke the
silence.
“What a wonderful bowl!” he said.
“It has been in my father's family a great many years. He was very fond
of it,” she answered, and with a sudden, impulsive movement she reached
over and set the bowl aside.
“That's better,” he declared, “much as I admire the bowl, and the
roses.”
She coloured faintly, and smiled. The feast of reason that we are
impatiently awaiting is deferred. It were best to attempt to record the
intangible things; the golden-green light, the perfumes, and the faint
musical laughter which we can hear if we listen. Thalia's laughter,
surely, not Clio's. Thalia, enamoured with such a theme, has taken the
stage herself--and as Vesta, goddess of hearths. It was Vesta whom they
felt to be presiding. They lingered, therefore, over the coffee, and
Chiltern lighted a cigar. He did not smoke cigarettes.
“I've lived long enough,” he said, “to know that I have never lived at
all. There is only one thing in life worth having.”
“What is it?” asked Honora.
“This,” he answered, with a gesture; “when it is permanent.”
She smiled.
“And how is one to know whether it would be--permanent?”
“Through experience and failure,” he answered quickly, “we learn to
distinguish the reality when it comes. It is unmistakable.”
“Suppose it comes too late?” she said, forgetting the ancient verse
inscribed in her youthful diary: “Those who walk on ice will slide
against their wills.”
“To admit that is to be a coward,” he declared.
“Such a philosophy may be fitting for a man,” she replied, “but for a
woman--”
“We are no longer in the dark ages,” he interrupted. “Every one, man
or woman, has the right to happiness. There is no reason why we should
suffer all our lives for a mistake.”
“A mistake!” she echoed.
“Certainly,” he said. “It is all a matter of luck, or fate, or whatever
you choose to call it. Do you suppose, if I could have found fifteen
years ago the woman to have made me happy, I should have spent so much
time in seeking distraction?”
“Perhaps you could not have been capable of appreciating her--fifteen
years ago,” suggested Honora. And, lest he might misconstrue her remark,
she avoided his eyes.
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “But suppose I have found her now, when I know
the value of things.”
“Suppose you should find her now--within a reasonable time. What would
you do?”
“Marry her,” he exclaimed promptly. “Marry her and take her to Grenoble,
and live the life my father lived before me.”
She did not reply, but rose, and he followed her to the shaded corner of
the porch where they usually sat. The bundle of yellow-stained envelopes
he had brought were lying on the table, and Honora picked them up
mechanically.
“I have been thinking,” she said as she removed the elastics, “that it
is a mistake to begin a biography by the enumeration of one's ancestors.
Readers become frightfully bored before they get through the first
chapter.”
“I'm beginning to believe,” he laughed, “that you will have to write
this one alone. All the ideas I have got so far have been yours. Why
shouldn't you write it, and I arrange the material, and talk about it!
That appears to be all I'm good for.”
If she allowed her mind to dwell on the vista he thus presented, she did
not betray herself.
“Another thing,” she said, “it should be written like fiction.”
“Like fiction?”
“Fact should be written like fiction, and fiction like fact. It's
difficult to express what I mean. But this life of your father deserves
to be widely known, and it should be entertainingly done, like Lockhart,
or Parton's works--”
An envelope fell to the floor, spilling its contents. Among them were
several photographs.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “how beautiful! What place is this?”
“I hadn't gone over these letters,” he answered. “I only got them
yesterday from Cecil Grainger. These are some pictures of Grenoble which
must leave been taken shortly before my father died.”
She gazed in silence at the old house half hidden by great maples and
beeches, their weighted branches sweeping the ground. The building was
of wood, painted white, and through an archway of verdure one saw the
generous doorway with its circular steps, with its fan-light above, and
its windows at the side. Other quaint windows, some of them of triple
width, suggested an interior of mystery and interest.
“My great-great-grandfather, Alexander Chiltern, built it,” he said, “on
land granted to him before the Revolution. Of course the house has been
added to since then, but the simplicity of the original has always been
kept. My father put on the conservatory, for instance,” and Chiltern
pointed to a portion at the end of one of the long low wings. “He
got the idea from the orangery of a Georgian house in England, and an
English architect designed it.”
Honora took up the other photographs. One of them, over which she
lingered, was of a charming, old-fashioned garden spattered with
sunlight, and shut out from the world by a high brick wall. Behind the
wall, again, were the dense masses of the trees, and at the end of a
path between nodding foxgloves and Canterbury bells, in a curved recess,
a stone seat.
She turned her face. His was at her shoulder.
“How could you ever have left it?” she asked reproachfully.
She voiced his own regrets, which the crowding memories had awakened.
“I don't know,” he answered, not without emotion. “I have often asked
myself that question.” He crossed over to the railing of the porch,
swung about, and looked at her. Her eyes were still on the picture. “I
can imagine you in that garden,” he said.
Did the garden cast the spell by which she saw herself on the seat? or
was it Chiltern's voice? She would indeed love and cherish it. And was
it true that she belonged there, securely infolded within those peaceful
walls? How marvellously well was Thalia playing her comedy! Which was
the real, and which the false? What of true value, what of peace and
security was contained in her present existence? She had missed the
meaning of things, and suddenly it was held up before her, in a garden.
A later hour found them in Honora's runabout wandering northward along
quiet country roads on the eastern side of the island. Chiltern, who was
driving, seemed to take no thought of their direction, until at
last, with an exclamation, he stopped the horse; and Honora beheld an
abandoned mansion of a bygone age sheltered by ancient trees, with wide
lands beside it sloping to the water.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Beaulieu,” he replied. “It was built in the seventeenth century, I
believe, and must have been a fascinating place in colonial days.” He
drove in between the fences and tied the horse, and came around by the
side of the runabout. “Won't you get out and look at it?”
She hesitated, and their eyes met as he held out his hand, but she
avoided it and leaped quickly to the ground neither spoke as they walked
around the deserted house and gazed at the quaint facade, broken by a
crumbling, shaded balcony let in above the entrance door. No sound broke
the stillness of the summer's day--a pregnant stillness. The air
was heavy with perfumes, and the leaves formed a tracery against the
marvellous blue of the sky. Mystery brooded in the place. Here, in this
remote paradise now in ruins, people had dwelt and loved. Thought ended
there; and feeling, which is unformed thought, began. Again she glanced
at him, and again their eyes met, and hers faltered. They turned, as
with one consent, down the path toward the distant water. Paradise
overgrown! Could it be reconstructed, redeemed?
In former days the ground they trod had been a pleasance the width of
the house, bordered, doubtless, by the forest. Trees grew out of the
flower beds now, and underbrush choked the paths. The box itself, that
once primly lined the alleys, was gnarled and shapeless. Labyrinth
had replaced order, nature had reaped her vengeance. At length, in
the deepening shade, they came, at what had been the edge of the old
terrace, to the daintiest of summer-houses, crumbling too, the shutters
off their hinges, the floor-boards loose. Past and gone were the idyls
of which it had been the stage.
They turned to the left, through tangled box that wound hither and
thither, until they stopped at a stone wall bordering a tree-arched
lane. At the bottom of the lane was a glimpse of blue water.
Honora sat down on the wall with her back to a great trunk. Chiltern,
with a hand on the stones, leaped over lightly, and stood for some
moments in the lane, his feet a little apart and firmly planted, his
hands behind his back.
What had Thalia been about to allow the message of that morning to creep
into her comedy? a message announcing the coming of an intruder not in
the play, in the person of a husband bearing gifts. What right had he,
in the eternal essence of things, to return? He was out of all time and
place. Such had been her feeling when she had first read the hastily
written letter, but even when she had burned it it had risen again from
the ashes. Anything but that! In trying not to think of it, she had
picked up the newspaper, learned of a railroad accident,--and shuddered.
Anything but his return! Her marriage was a sin,--there could be no
sacrament in it. She would flee first, and abandon all rather than
submit to it.
Chiltern's step aroused her now. He came back to the wall where she was
sitting, and faced her.
“You are sad,” he said.
She shook her head at him, slowly, and tried to smile.
“What has happened?” he demanded rudely. “I can't bear to see you sad.”
“I am going away,” she said. The decision had suddenly come to her. Why
had she not seen before that it was inevitable?
He seized her wrist as it lay on the wall, and she winced from the
sudden pain of his grip.
“Honora, I love you,” he said, “I must have you--I will have you. I will
make you happy. I promise it on my soul. I can't, I won't live without
you.”
She did not listen to his words--she could not have repeated them
afterwards. The very tone of his voice was changed by passion; creation
spoke through him, and she heard and thrilled and swayed and soared,
forgetting heaven and earth and hell as he seized her in his arms and
covered her face with kisses. Thus Eric the Red might have wooed. And
by what grace she spoke the word that delivered her she never knew. As
suddenly as he had seized her he released her, and she stood before him
with flaming cheeks and painful breath.
“I love you,” he said, “I love you. I have searched the world for you
and found you, and by all the laws of God you are mine.”
And love was written in her eyes. He had but to read it there, though
her lips might deny it. This was the man of all men she would have
chosen, and she was his by right of conquest. Yet she held up her hand
with a gesture of entreaty.
“No, Hugh--it cannot be,” she said.
“Cannot!” he cried. “I will take you. You love me.”
“I am married.”
“Married! Do you mean that you would let that man stand between you and
happiness?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, in a frightened voice.
“Just what I say,” he cried, with incredible vehemence. “Leave
him--divorce him. You cannot live with him. He isn't worthy to touch
your hand.”
The idea planted itself with the force of a barbed arrow from a
strong-bow. Struggle as she might, she could not henceforth extract it.
“Oh!” she cried.
He took her arm, gently, and forced her to sit down on the wall. Such
was the completeness of his mastery that she did not resist. He sat down
beside her.
“Listen, Honora,” he said, and tried to speak calmly, though his voice
was still vibrant; “let us look the situation in the face. As I told
you once, the days of useless martyrdom are past. The world is more
enlightened today, and recognizes an individual right to happiness.”
“To happiness,” she repeated after him, like a child. He forgot his
words as he looked into her eyes: they were lighted as with all the
candles of heaven in his honour.
“Listen,” he said hoarsely, and his fingers tightened on her arm.
The current running through her from him made her his instrument. Did he
say the sky was black, she would have exclaimed at the discovery.
“Yes--I am listening.”
“Honora!”
“Hugh,” she answered, and blinded him. He was possessed by the tragic
fear that she was acting a dream; presently she would awake--and shatter
the universe. His dominance was too complete.
“I love you--I respect you. You are making it very hard for me. Please
try to understand what I am saying,” he cried almost fiercely. “This
thing, this miracle, has happened in spite of us. Henceforth you belong
to me--do you hear?”
Once more the candles flared up.
“We cannot drift. We must decide now upon some definite action. Our
lives are our own, to make as we choose. You said you were going away.
And you meant--alone?”
The eyes were wide, now, with fright.
“Oh, I must--I must,” she said. “Don't--don't talk about it.” And she
put forth a hand over his.
“I will talk about it,” he declared, trembling. “I have thought it all
out,” and this time it was her fingers that tightened. “You are going
away. And presently--when you are free--I will come to you.”
For a moment the current stopped.
“No, no!” she cried, almost in terror. The first fatalist must have been
a woman, and the vision of rent prison bars drove her mad. “No, we could
never be happy.”
“We can--we will be happy,” he said, with a conviction that was
unshaken. “Do you hear me? I will not debase what I have to say by
resorting to comparisons. But--others I know have been happy are happy,
though their happiness cannot be spoken of with ours. Listen. You will
go away--for a little while--and afterwards we shall be together for all
time. Nothing shall separate us: We never have known life, either of us,
until now. I, missing you, have run after the false gods. And you--I say
it with truth-needed me. We will go to live at Grenoble, as my father
and mother lived. We will take up their duties there. And if it seems
possible, I will go into public life. When I return, I shall find
you--waiting for me--in the garden.”
So real had the mirage become, that Honora did not answer. The desert
and its journey fell away. Could such a thing, after all, be possible?
Did fate deal twice to those whom she had made novices? The mirage,
indeed, suddenly became reality--a mirage only because she had
proclaimed it such. She had beheld in it, as he spoke, a Grenoble which
was paradise regained. And why should paradise regained be a paradox?
Why paradise regained? Paradise gained. She had never known it, until
he had flung wide the gates. She had sought for it, and never found it
until now, and her senses doubted it. It was a paradise of love, to
be sure; but one, too, of duty. Duty made it real. Work was there, and
fulfilment of the purpose of life itself. And if his days hitherto had
been useless, hers had in truth been barren.
It was only of late, after a life-long groping, that she had discovered
their barrenness. The right to happiness! Could she begin anew, and
found it upon a rock? And was he the rock?
The question startled her, and she drew away from him first her hand,
and then she turned her body, staring at him with widened eyes. He
did not resist the movement; nor could he, being male, divine what was
passing within her, though he watched her anxiously. She had no thought
of the first days,--but afterwards. For at such times it is the woman
who scans the veil of the future. How long would that beacon burn which
flamed now in such prodigal waste? Would not the very springs of it dry
up? She looked at him, and she saw the Viking. But the Viking had
fled from the world, and they--they would be going into it. Could love
prevail against its dangers and pitfalls and--duties? Love was the word
that rang out, as one calling through the garden, and her thoughts ran
molten. Let love overflow--she gloried in the waste! And let the lean
years come,--she defied them to-day.
“Oh, Hugh!” she faltered.
“My dearest!” he cried, and would have seized her in his arms again
but for a look of supplication. That he had in him this innate and
unsuspected chivalry filled her with an exquisite sweetness.
“You will--protect me?” she asked.
“With my life and with my honour,” he answered. “Honora, there will be
no happiness like ours.”
“I wish I knew,” she sighed: and then, her look returning from the veil,
rested on him with a tenderness that was inexpressible. “I--I don't
care, Hugh. I trust you.”
The sun was setting. Slowly they went back together through the paths
of the tangled garden, which had doubtless seen many dramas, and the
courses changed of many lives: overgrown and outworn now, yet love was
loth to leave it. Honora paused on the lawn before the house, and looked
back at him over her shoulder.
“How happy we could have been here, in those days,” she sighed.
“We will be happier there,” he said.
Honora loved. Many times in her life had she believed herself to
have had this sensation, and yet had known nothing of these aches and
ecstasies! Her mortal body, unattended, went out to dinner that evening.
Never, it is said, was her success more pronounced. The charm of
Randolph Leffingwell, which had fascinated the nobility of three
kingdoms, had descended on her, and hostesses had discovered that she
possessed the magic touch necessary to make a dinner complete. Her
quality, as we know, was not wit: it was something as old as the world,
as new as modern psychology. It was, in short, the power to stimulate.
She infused a sense of well-being; and ordinary people, in her presence,
surprised themselves by saying clever things.
Lord Ayllington, a lean, hard-riding gentleman, who was supposed to be
on the verge of contracting an alliance with the eldest of the Grenfell
girls, regretted that Mrs. Spence was neither unmarried nor an heiress.
“You know,” he said to Cecil Grainger, who happened to be gracing his
wife's dinner-party, “she's the sort of woman for whom a man might
consent to live in Venice.”
“And she's the sort of woman,” replied, “a man couldn't get to go to
Venice.”
Lord Ayllington's sigh was a proof of an intimate knowledge of the
world.
“I suppose not,” he said. “It's always so. And there are few American
women who would throw everything overboard for a grand passion.”
“You ought to see her on the beach,” Mr. Grainger suggested.
“I intend to,” said Ayllington. “By the way, not a few of your American
women get divorced, and keep their cake and eat it, too. It's a bit
difficult, here at Newport, for a stranger, you know.”
“I'm willing to bet,” declared Mr. Grainger, “that it doesn't pay. When
you're divorced and married again you've got to keep up appearances--the
first time you don't. Some of these people are working pretty hard.”
Whereupon, for the Englishman's enlightenment, he recounted a little
gossip.
This, of course, was in the smoking room. In the drawing-room, Mrs.
Grainger's cousin did not escape, and the biography was the subject of
laughter.
“You see something of him, I hear,” remarked Mrs. Playfair, a lady the
deficiency of whose neck was supplied by jewels, and whose conversation
sounded like liquid coming out of an inverted bottle. “Is he really
serious about the biography?”
“You'll have to ask Mr. Grainger,” replied Honora.
“Hugh ought to marry,” Mrs. Grenfell observed.
“Why did he come back?” inquired another who had just returned from a
prolonged residence abroad. “Was there a woman in the case?”
“Put it in the plural, and you'll be nearer right,” laughed Mrs.
Grenfell, and added to Honora, “You'd best take care, my dear, he's
dangerous.”
Honora seemed to be looking down on them from a great height, and
to Reginald Farwell alone is due the discovery of this altitude; his
reputation for astuteness, after that evening, was secure. He had sat
next her, and had merely put two and two together--an operation that is
probably at the root of most prophecies. More than once that summer Mr.
Farwell had taken sketches down Honora's lane, for she was on what was
known as his list of advisers: a sheepfold of ewes, some one had called
it, and he was always piqued when one of them went astray. In addition
to this, intuition told him that he had taken the name of a deity in
vain--and that deity was Chiltern. These reflections resulted in another
after-dinner conversation to which we are not supposed to listen.
He found Jerry Shorter in a receptive mood, and drew him into Cecil
Grainger's study, where this latter gentleman, when awake, carried on
his lifework of keeping a record of prize winners.
“I believe there is something between Mrs. Spence and Hugh Chiltern,
after all, Jerry,” he said.
“By jinks, you don't say so!” exclaimed Mr. Shorter, who had a profound
respect for his friend's diagnoses in these matters. “She was dazzling
to-night, and her eyes were like stars. I passed her in the hall just
now, and I might as well have been in Halifax.”
“She fairly withered me when I made a little fun of Chiltern,” declared
Farwell.
“I tell you what it is, Reggie,” remarked Mr. Shorter, with more
frankness than tact, “you could talk architecture with 'em from now to
Christmas, and nothing'd happen, but it would take an iceberg to write a
book with Hugh and see him alone six days out of seven. Chiltern knocks
women into a cocked hat. I've seen 'em stark raving crazy. Why, there
was that Mrs. Slicer six or seven years ago--you remember--that Cecil
Grainger had such a deuce of a time with. And there was Mrs. Dutton--I
was a committee to see her, when the old General was alive,--to say
nothing about a good many women you and I know.”
Mr. Farwell nodded.
“I'm confoundedly sorry if it's so,” Mr. Shorter continued, with
sincerity. “She has a brilliant future ahead of her. She's got good
blood in her, she's stunning to look at, and she's made her own way
in spite of that Billycock of a husband who talks like the original
Rothschild. By the bye, Wing is using him for a good thing. He's sent
him out West to pull that street railway chestnut out of the fire.
I'm not particularly squeamish, Reggie, though I try to play the game
straight myself--the way my father played it. But by the lord Harry, I
can't see the difference between Dick Turpin and Wing and Trixy Brent.
It's hold and deliver with those fellows. But if the police get anybody,
their get Spence.”
“The police never get anybody,” said Farwell, pessimistically; for the
change of topic bored him.
“No, I suppose they don't,” answered Mr. Shorter, cheerfully finishing
his chartreuse, and fixing his eye on one of the coloured lithographs of
lean horses on Cecil Grainger's wall. “I'd talk to Hugh, if I wasn't as
much afraid of him as of Jim Jeffries. I don't want to see him ruin her
career.”
“Why should an affair with him ruin it?” asked Farwell, unexpectedly.
“There was Constance Witherspoon. I understand that went pretty far.”
“My dear boy,” said Mr. Shorter, “it's the women. Bessie Grainger here,
for instance--she'd go right up in the air. And the women had--well, a
childhood-interest in Constance. Self-preservation is the first law--of
women.”
“They say Hugh has changed--that he wants to settle down,” said Farwell.
“If you'd ever gone to church, Reggie,” said Mr. Shorter, “you'd know
something about the limitations of the leopard.”