A STUDY IN INDIFFERENCE
There are many spurs to a woman's vanity, but declared indifference is
surely the sharpest of them all. When Anna Gessner discovered that Alban
was not willing to enroll himself in the great band of worshippers who
knelt humbly at her golden shrine, she set about converting him with a
haste which would have been dangerous but for its transparent
dishonesty. In love herself, so far as such a woman could ever be in
love at all, with the dashing and brainless jockey who managed her
race-horses, she was quite accustomed, none the less, to add the
passionate confessions and gold-sick protestations of others to her
volume of amatory recollections, and it was not a little amazing that a
mere youth should be discovered, so obstinate, so chilly and so
indifferent as to remain insensible both to her charms and their value,
in what her father had called "pounds sterling."
When Alban first came to "Five Gables," his honesty amused her greatly.
She liked to hear him speak of the good which her father's money could
do in the slums and alleys he had left. It was a rare entertainment for
her to be told of those "dreadful people" who sewed shirts all day and
were frequently engaged in the same occupation when midnight came. "I
shall call you the Missionary," she had said, and would sit at his feet
while he confessed some of the wild hopes which animated him, or
justified his desire for that great humanity of the East whose supreme
human need was sympathy. Anna herself did not understand a word of
it--but she liked to have those clear blue eyes fixed upon her, to hear
the soft musical voice and to wonder when this pretty boy would speak of
his love for her.
But the weeks passed and no word of love was spoken, and the woman in
her began to ask why this should be. She was certain as she could be
that her beauty had dazzled the lad when first he came to "Five Gables."
She remembered what fervid glances he had turned upon her when first
they met, how his eyes had expressed unbounded admiration, nay worship
such as was unknown in the circles in which she moved. If this silent
adoration flattered her for the moment, honesty played no little part in
its success--for though there had been lovers who looked deep into her
heart before, the majority carried but liabilities to her feet and,
laying them there, would gladly have exchanged them for her father's
cheques to salve their financial wounds. In Alban she had met for the
first time a natural English lad who had no secrets to hide from her.
"He will worship the ground upon which I walk," she had said in the mood
of sundry novelettes borrowed from her maid. And this, in truth, the lad
might very well have come to do.
But the weeks passed and Alban remained silent, and the declaration she
had desired at first as an amusement now became a vital necessity to her
fasting vanity. Believing that their surroundings at Hampstead, the
formality, the servants, the splendor of "Five Gables," forbade that
little comedy of love for which she hungered, she went off, in her
father's absence, to their cottage at Henley, and compelling Alban to
follow her, she played Phyllis to his Corydon with an ardor which could
not have been surpassed. Aping the schoolgirl, she would wear her hair
upon her shoulders, carry her gown shortened, and bare her sleeves to
the suns of June. The rose garden became the arbor of her delights. "You
shall love me," she said to herself--and in the determination a passion
wholly vain and not a little hazardous found its birth and prospered.
For hours together now, she would compel this unconscious slave to row
her in the silent reaches or to hide with her in backwaters to which the
mob rarely came. Deluding him by the promise that her father was
returning shortly from Paris and would come to Henley immediately upon
his arrival, she led Alban to forget the days of waiting, petted him as
though he had been her lover through the years, invited him a hundred
times a day to say, "I love you--you shall be my wife."
In his turn, he remained silent and amazed, tempted sorely by her
beauty, not understanding and yet desiring to understand why he could
not love her. True, indeed, that the image of another would intervene
sometimes--a little figure in rags, wan and pitiful and alone; but the
environment in which the vision of the past had moved, the slums, the
alleys, the mean streets, these would hedge the picture about and then
leave the dreamer averse and shuddering. Not there could liberty be
found again. The world must show its fields to the wanderer when again
he dared it alone.
Alban remembered one night above all others of this strange seclusion,
and that was a night of a woman's humiliation. There had been great
bustle all day, the coming of oarsmen and of coaches to Henley, and all
the aquatic renaissance which prefaces the great regatta. Their own
cottage, lying just above the bridge with a shady garden extending to
the water's edge, was no longer the place apart that it had been.
Strangers now anchored a little way from their boat-house and consumed
monstrous packets of sandwiches and the contents of abundant bottles.
There were house-boats being tugged up and down the river, little groups
of rowing men upon the bridge all day, the music of banjos by night, and
lanterns glowing in the darkness. Anna watched this pretty scene as one
who would really take a young girl's part in it. She simulated an
interest in the rowing about which she knew nothing at all--visited the
house-boats of such of her friends as had come down for the regatta, and
was, in Willy Forrest's words, as "skittish as a two-year-old that had
slipped its halter." Forrest had been to and fro from the stable near
Winchester on several occasions. "He comes to tell me that I am about to
lose a fortune, and I am beginning to hate him," Anna said; and on this
occasion she enjoyed that diverting and unaccustomed recreation known as
speaking the truth.
There had been such a visit as this upon the morning of the day when
Anna spoke intimately to Alban of his future and her own. Her mood now
abandoned itself utterly to her purpose. The close intimacy of these
quiet days had brought her to the point where a real if momentary
passion compelled her to desire this boy's love as she had never desired
anything in all her life. To bring him to that declaration she sought so
ardently, to feel his kisses upon her lips, to play the young lover's
part if it were but for a day, to this folly her vanity had driven her.
And now the opportunities for words were not denied. She had spent the
afternoon in the backwaters up by Shiplake; there had been a little
dinner afterwards with the old crone who served them so usefully as
chaperone--a dependent who had eyes but did not see, ears which, as she
herself declared, "would think scorn to listen." Amiable dame, she was
in bed by nine o'clock, while Alban and Anna were lying in a punt at the
water's edge, listening to the music of a distant guitar and watching
the twinkling lights far away below the bridge where the boat-houses
stand.
A Chinese lantern suspended upon a short boat-hook cast a deep crimson
glow upon the faces of those who might well have been young lovers. The
river rippled musically against the square bows of their ugly but
comfortable craft. But few passed them by and those were also seekers
after solitude, with no eyes for their co-religionists in the amatory
gospel. Alban, wholly fascinated by the silence and the beauty of the
scene, lay at Anna's feet, so full of content that he did not dare to
utter his thoughts aloud. The girl caught the tiny wavelets in her
outstretched hand and said that Corydon had become blind.
"Do you like Willy Forrest?" she asked, "do you think he is clever,
Alban?"--a question, the answer to which would not interest her at all
if it did not lead to others. Alban, in his turn, husbanding the
secrets, replied evasively:
"Why should I think about him? He is not a friend of mine. You are the
one to answer that, Anna. You like him--I have heard you say so."
"Never believe what a girl says. I adore Willy Forrest because he makes
me laugh. I am like the poor little white rabbit which is fascinated by
the great black wriggly snake. Some day it will swallow me up--perhaps
on Thursday--after Ascot. I wish I could tell you. Pandora seems to have
dropped everything out of her basket except the winner of the Gold Cup.
If Willy Forrest is right, I shall win a fortune. But, of course, he
doesn't tell the truth any more than I do."
Alban was silent a little while and then he asked her:
"Do you know much about him, Anna? Did you ever meet his people or
anything?"
She looked at him sharply.
"He is the son of Sir John Forrest, who died in India. His brother was
lost at sea. What made you ask me?"
He laughed as though it had not been meant.
"You say that he doesn't tell the truth. Suppose it were so about
himself. He might be somebody else--not altogether the person he
pretends to be. Would it matter if he were? I don't think so, Anna--I
would much rather know something about a man himself than about his
name."
She sat up in the punt and rested her chin upon the knuckles of her
shapely hands. This kind of talk was little to her liking. She had often
doubted Willy Forrest, but had never questioned his title to the name he
bore.
"Have they ever told you anything about us, Alban?" she continued, "did
you ever hear any stories which I should not hear?"
"Only from Captain Forrest himself; he told me that he was engaged to
you. That was when I went to the Savoy Hotel."
"All those weeks ago. And you never mentioned it?"
"Was it any business of mine? What right had I to speak to you about
it?"
She flushed deeply.
"A secret for a secret," she said. "When you first came to Hampstead, I
thought that you liked me a little Alban. Now, I know that you do not.
Suppose there were a reason why I let Willy Forrest say that he was
engaged to me. Suppose some one else had been unkind when I wished him
to be very kind to me. Would you understand then?"
This was in the best spirit of the coquette and yet a great earnestness
lay behind it. Posing in that romantic light, the thick red lips
pouting, the black eyes shining as with the clear flame of a soul
awakened, the head erect as that of a deer which has heard a sound afar,
this passionate little actress, half Pole, half Jewess, might well have
set a man's heart beating and brought him, suppliant, to her feet. To
Alban there returned for a brief instant all that spirit of homage and
of awe with which he had first beheld her on the balcony of the house
in St. James' Square. The cynic in him laid down his robe and stood
before her in the garb of youth spellbound and fascinated. He dared to
say to himself, she loves me--it is to me that these words are spoken.
"I cannot understand you, Anna," he exclaimed, tortured by some plague
of a sudden memory, held back from a swift embrace he knew not by what
instinct. "You say that you only let Willy Forrest call himself engaged
to you. Don't you love him then--is it all false that you have told
him?"
"It is quite false, Alban--I do not love him as you would understand the
meaning of the word. If he says that I am engaged to him, is it true
because he says it? There are some men who marry women simply because
they are persevering. Willy Forrest would be one of them if I were weak
enough. But I do not love him--I shall never love him, Alban."
She bent low and almost whispered the words in his ear. Her hand covered
his fingers caressingly. His forehead touched the lace upon her robe and
he could hear her heart beating. An impulse almost irresistible came
upon him to take her in his arms and hold her there, and find in her
embrace that knowledge of the perfect womanhood which had been his dream
through the years. He knew not what held him back.
Anna watched him with a hope that was almost as an intoxication of doubt
and curiosity. She loved him in that moment with all a young girl's
ardor. She believed that the whole happiness of her life lay in the
words he was about to speak.