Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford were to winter in Rome, but there was the
autumn still to be disposed of. Neither of them wanted Marienbad. They
knew the place inside out, and hated it; and after wasting half an hour
at the breakfast-table turning over a Continental Bradshaw, they had
only arrived more certainly at the conviction that they were tired of
everywhere.
The whole system of continental travelling was weariness and monotony:
the race to Dover through the freshness of morning, the race across
sunlit waves to Calais, the hurried luncheon in the station, and the
three hours' run to Paris, the huge Gare du Nord, with its turmoil of
blue blouses and loaded barrows; the long drive to the hotel, and the
early start in the Rapide for the South: or the Engadine express, with
the night journey through pine woods, and the rather weary awakening
at Lucerne, and then on to Locarno and the great lake. It had been
delicious while it was new, and while it was new for these two to be
together, wedded and inseparable for evermore. But all the tracks that
had been new were old now; and though they were lovers still, something
had come between them that darkened love.
"Tyrol, Engadine, Courmayeur? No," said Vera, throwing Bradshaw aside.
"No, no, no. The hotels are all alike, and they make the scenery seem
the same. If one could be adventurous, if one could stop at strange
inns, where one need never hear an English voice, it would be better.
But it is always the same hotel, the same rooms, and the same waiters,
and the same food."
"A little better or a little worse; generally worse," assented Claude.
"I have had a letter from Aunt Mildred this morning. She wants us to
spend August at Disbrowe."
"Would you like it?" he asked.
"Like it?" she echoed, with her eyes clouding, and a catch in her
voice; and then she started up from her seat and came to her husband,
and put her hand upon his shoulder.
"I think we have been getting rather modern of late, Claude," she said
in a low voice, "rather semi-detached. Disbrowe would bring us nearer
together again. We should remember the old days."
"Disbrowe, by all means, then," he answered gaily.
"We must never drift apart, Claude," she went on earnestly, with
something of tragedy in her voice, which trembled a little as she crept
closer to him. "Remember, we have nothing but our love, nothing else
between us and despair."
"Don't be tragic, Vera," he said quickly. "Disbrowe, by all means.
Let us play at being boy and girl again. Let us do daring things on
Okehampton's twopenny-halfpenny yacht, and ride horses that other
people are afraid to handle. Let us put fire into the embers of the
past. I suppose your aunt will have a few amusing people. It won't be
the vicar and his wife and sister-in-law every night, and the curate at
luncheon every other day."
"She will have all sorts and conditions, but that doesn't matter. I
want to be with you in the place where we were so happy."
"You want to fall in love with me again? Well, it was time," he said,
half gaily and half sadly; but with always the air of a man who means
to take life easily.
August was August that year, and Disbrowe was at its best. The great
red cliffs, the azure and emerald sea had the colour and the glory that
had made North Devon fairyland for the child Vera in her one blissful
summer.
Other children, as they grew up, had a succession of delicious summers
to look back upon, and could make comparisons, and wonder which was
happiest; but Vera had only one season of surpassing joy to remember.
She remembered it now, and contrived to draw a thick curtain over all
other memories.
Aunt Mildred was full of compliments.
"This air evidently suits you, child," she said, when her niece had
been with her a week. "You look ten years younger than when I saw you
last in London."
* * * * *
These two who had begun to be tired of each other were lovers
again--and even memory was kind--even memory, the slow torture of
thoughtful minds. They recalled the joys of fifteen years ago; and the
joys of to-day were almost the same. Instead of the thirteen two barb
there were half a dozen hunters--thoroughbreds of fine quality, the
disappointments of Claude's racing stud--instead of the dinghy there
was Okehampton's forty-ton cutter, a rakish craft that had begun life
at Cowes, another disappointment. There was the sea, and there was the
moorland, and there were the patches of wood on the skirts of the park,
that had seemed boundless forests to Vera in her twelfth year. Her
twelfth year? She remembered Claude's affected contempt for her youth.
"Why, you are only a dozen--and not a round dozen, only eleven and a
half. No wonder your cousins in the school-room look down upon you. If
there were still a nursery, you would be there, sitting on a high chair
at tea, your cheeks smeared with jam, and a bib tied under your chin."
She remembered all his foolish speeches now, and what serious insults
they had seemed to her, or to the child that she had once been--that
innocent child whose identity with herself was so hard to believe.
They were happy again, they were lovers again. Here they could say to
each other, "Do you remember?" Here memory was a gentle nymph, and not
an avenging fury.
For Vera, who had hunted with her husband every year since their
marriage, a season at Grantham, a season in the Shires, and two winters
in the Campagna, it might seem a small thing to ride with Claude and a
handful of squireens and farmers rattling up the cubs in the woods, yet
she found it pleasant to rise before the dawn, and creep through the
silent house and out into the crisp morning air, and to spring on to a
horse that seemed to skim the ground in an ecstasy of motion. Flying
could hardly be better than to sit on this light, leaping creature, and
see the dewy wood rush by, and the startled rabbits flash across the
path; or to be lifted into the air as the thoroughbred stood on end at
the whirr and rush of a pheasant.
A discarded racer was scarcely the best mount for pottering about
after the cubs; but the pursuit of pleasure, that was always a synonym
for excitement, had made Vera a fine horsewoman, and she loved the
surprises that a light-hearted four-year-old can give his rider; and
when the last cub had been slaughtered, to gratify Mr. Somebody's
hounds, Claude and Vera had to ride to please their horses, and there
was a spice of danger in the tearing gallop across great stretches
of pasture, where the green sward sloped upward or downward to the
crumbling edge of the red cliffs, and where they saw the wide, blue
floor of the sea, and the dim outline of the Welsh coast.
One morning, when they were riding shoulder to shoulder, at a wilder
pace than usual, and when Vera's horse was doing his best to get
absolute possession of his bridle, she turned with a light laugh to her
husband.
"Isn't this delicious?" she asked breathlessly, thrilled by the
freshness of the air and the rapture of the pace. "Would you mind if we
were not able to stop them on this side of the sea?"
"Would I mind?" he echoed, looking at her with his careless smile,
the smile in which there was often a touch of mockery. "Not I, my
love. It wouldn't be half a bad end, to finish one's last ride in a
headlong plunge over the cliff--to know none of the gruesome details of
dissolution--nothing but a sense of being hurled through bright air,
forty fathoms deep into bright water. All the same, I don't mean these
brutes to have their own way," he concluded in his most matter-of-fact
tone, with his hand upon Ganymede's bridle.
They turned their horses, and trotted quietly home, Vera pale and
somewhat shaken by the excitement of the long gallop. They were near
the end of their country holiday, and they were to part at the end of
the week, Claude to spend a fortnight at Newmarket, Vera to start alone
for Italy, stopping here and there for a few days, on her way to her
Roman villa, where Claude was to join her, bringing his hunters with
him, not these light thoroughbreds, but horses of coarser quality and
more experience, fitter for the rough work of the Campagna.
It had been Vera's own fancy to revisit familiar places in Italy.
Claude had been urgent with her to abandon the idea, but she would not
listen to him.
"I want to see San Marco, where I lived so long with Grannie; when we
were poor and shabby--such a humdrum life. I sometimes wonder how I
could bear it?"
"Poor child! It was hard lines for you. But why conjure up the memory
of things that were sad? Looking back is always a mistake. Looking back
at the old worn-out things, going back to long-trodden paths! Nobody
can afford to do that. _Plus ultra_ is my motto. In Rome there will be
plenty for us to do. We must make our third winter more astounding than
either of the other two. I know lots of people who are to be there, all
sorts of big pots, pretty women, scribblers, painters, soldiers. You
will have to invent new features for your evenings, new combinations of
all kinds, and you must cultivate the new lights. When the season is
over people must go about saying that Mrs. Rutherford has made Rome."
Vera looked at her husband curiously. How shallow he was, after all,
how trivial! There were moments when her heart felt frozen, dreadful
moments of disenchantment in which the man she had loved seemed to
change and become a stranger; moments when she asked herself with a
sudden wonder why she had ever loved him.
These were but flashes of disillusion. A touch of tenderness, a thought
of all they had been to each other, and her bitter need of his love,
made her again his slave. From the hour when he surrendered his chance
of redemption, and came to her in her Roman garden, came to claim her
with passionate words of love, he had been something more than her
lover and her husband. He had been her master, ruling her life even in
its trivialities, with a mind so shallow that it could find delight in
details, leading and directing her in an existence where there was to
be no room for thought.
He had planned their days at Disbrowe so that there should be no margin
for ennui. When they were not riding they were on the yacht racing
round the coast to Boscastle or Padstow: or they were playing tennis or
croquet with the house-party, creating an atmosphere of excitement.
They parted at Disbrowe, Claude leaving for Newmarket; and they were
not to meet till November, when he was to find Vera established in the
Roman villa. All gaiety and excitement seemed to have left her with
him, and Aunt Mildred remarked the change.
"You ought to have gone to Newmarket with your husband," she said,
"though I have always thought it a horrid place for women, a place
where they think of nothing but horses, and talk nothing but racing
slang, and are as full of their bets as professional book-makers. I
hate horsey women; but you and Claude are such a romantic couple, that
it seems a pity you should ever be separated."
"Romance cannot last for ever, my dear aunt. We have been married
nearly three years. It is time we became like other people. I have
just your feeling about Newmarket. I was keen about the stud for the
first year or two, petting the horses, and watching their gallops in
the early mornings; and then it began to seem childish to care so much
about them; and whether they won or lost it was the same thing over and
over again. The trainer and his boys said just the same things about
every success and every defeat. The crack jockeys were all the same,
and I hardly knew one from another. I still love the horses for their
own sake; and I am miserable if any of them are sold into bondage. But
I am sick to death of the whole business."
There was a fortnight to spare before Vera was to start for Italy, and
Lady Okehampton wanted her to stay at Disbrowe till a day or two before
she left England.
"Portland Place will be awfully _triste_," she said; "I cannot see why
you should go and bury yourself alive there for a fortnight."
Vera pleaded preparations--clothes to order for the winter.
"Surely not in London, when you can stop in Paris and get all you want."
There were other things to be done, arrangements to be made, Vera
told her aunt. A certain portion of the staff was to start for Rome,
by direct and rapid journeying, while she, with only her maid and a
footman, was to travel by easy stages along the Riviera.
Lady Okehampton was rather melancholy in the last hour she and her
niece spent together in her morning-room.
"I'm afraid the pace at which you and Claude are taking life must wear
you out before long," she said. "You are never quiet; always rushing
from one thing to another; even here, where I wanted you to come for
absolute rest, just to dawdle about the gardens, and doze in a hammock
all the afternoon, with a quiet evening's bridge. But you have given
yourself no more rest here than in London. Okehampton told me the way
you tore about on those ungovernable horses, miles and miles away over
the moor, while other people were jogging after the hounds, or waiting
about in the lanes. He said it was not cubbing, but skylarking; and the
skipper complained that Mr. Rutherford insisted on sailing the yacht
in the teeth of a dangerous gale. 'He's the generousest gentleman I've
ever been out with,' old Peter said, 'but he's the recklessest; and I
wouldn't give twopence for his chance of making old bones.'"
"Poor old Peter," sighed Vera. "We often had a squabble with him--what
he called a stand-further. He's a conscientious old dear, and a fine
sailor; but he would never have found the shortest way to India."
"You wanted rest, Vera; but instead of resting, you have done all the
most tiring things you could invent for yourself."
"Claude is the inventor, not I. And it is good for me to be tired; to
lie down with weary limbs and fall into a dreamless sleep or into a
sleep where the dreams are sweet, and bring back lost things."
"I should not say all this, if I were not anxious about your health,"
Aunt Mildred continued gravely. "You look well and brilliant at night,
but your morning face sometimes frightens me; and you are woefully
thin, a mere shadow. It is all very well for people to call you
ethereal, but I don't want to see you wasting away."
"There is nothing the matter. I was always thin. I have a little cough
that sometimes worries me at night, but that has been much better since
I came here."
"You ought to take care of your health, Vera. You have a great
responsibility."
"How do you mean?"
"Have you ever thought of those who have to come after you? Do you ever
consider that your splendid fortune dies with you, and that your power
to help those members of our family who need help--alas, too many of
them--depends upon your enjoying a long life."
"My dear aunt, I cannot promise to spin out a tedious existence in
order to find money for poor relations."
"That remark is not quite nice from you, Vera. You yourself began life
as a poor relation."
"I have not forgotten, and I have given my needy cousins a good deal of
money since I have been rich; and, of course, I shall go on doing so."
"As your aunt, and the most attached of all your own people, I must ask
a delicate question, Vera. Have you made your will?"
Lady Okehampton asked this question with such a thrilling awfulness,
that it sounded like a sentence of death.
"No, aunt. Why should I make a will? I have nothing to leave. You know
I have only a life interest in the Provana estate."
"Nothing to leave! But your accumulations? Your surplus income?"
"I don't think I can have any surplus. Claude and I have spent money
freely, at home and abroad; and I have given large sums for the
foundation of a hospital in Rome, in memory of Mario and his daughter.
Claude manages everything for me. I have never asked him whether there
was any money left at the end of the year."
"And of that colossal income--which you have enjoyed for five
years--you have nothing left? It is horrible to think of. What mad
waste, what incredible extravagance there must have been. You ought
not to have left everything in Claude's hands. Such a careless,
happy-go-lucky fellow ought never to have had the sole management of
your immense income. It would make Signor Provana turn in his grave to
know that his wealth has been wasted."
"He would not care. We never cared for money."
"Nothing left at the year's end, nothing of that stupendous wealth! It
is monstrous!"
"Don't agitate yourself, dear Aunt Mildred. There may have been a
surplus every year. I never asked Claude whether there was or not. But
I shall always be rich enough to help my poor relations."
There was no time for further remonstrance. Aunt Mildred parted from
her niece with more sighs than kisses, though those were many.
She perused the sweet, pale face with earnest scrutiny, for she thought
she saw the mark of doom on the forehead where the lines were deeper
than they should have been on the sunny side of thirty. She remembered
the short-lived mother, the consumptive father.
* * * * *
Vera sat in a corner of the reserved compartment and read Browning's
"Christmas Eve" all though the swift journey from the red cliffs of
North Devon and the wide, blue sky to the grey dullness of a London
twilight. It was a poem which she read again and again, which she knew
by heart. It lifted her out of herself. She felt as if she were out
in the winter darkness on the wind-swept common, as if her hands were
clutching the edge of the Divine raiment. Was not that sublime vision
something more than a dream in a stuffy Methodist chapel?
Were there not moments in life when earth touched heaven, when Divine
compassion was something more real than the words in a book; when
Christ the Redeemer came within reach of the sinner, and when Faith
became certainty? Nothing less than this, nothing but the assurance of
a Living God, could lift the despairing soul out of the abyss.
The house to which she was returning was a house of fear, and in spite
of all she had said to her aunt, she knew that there was no necessity
for her return. The rich man's widow had nothing to do that a telegram
to her housekeeper would not have done for her. But the house drew her
somehow. She had a morbid longing to be there, alone in the silence and
emptiness of unused rooms, without Claude, whose presence jarred in
rooms where another figure was still master.
She found all things in perfect order, no speck of dust in the
rooms on the ground floor, her morning-room brilliant with Japanese
chrysanthemums. She went to the library after her solitary dinner. The
evening was cold, and fires were burning in all the rooms. She drew a
low chair to the hearth, and sat brooding over the smouldering cedar
logs, perhaps one of the loneliest women in London; and yet not quite
alone, since nothing that had happened in her futile life of the last
years had shaken her belief in Mr. Symeon's creed, and she felt that
the dead were near her.
Giulia, who had loved her, Giulia, the happy soul who had known neither
sin nor sorrow, the yearning of unsatisfied love, or the seething fires
of guilty passion. Giulia's gentle spirit had been with her of late,
the spirit of her only girl friend, and she had lived over again the
tranquil hours at San Marco, the talk of books that had opened a new
world to her, Giulia having read so much and she so little. Father and
daughter had opened the gates of that new world for her. It was from
them that the poet's daughter had learnt to understand and love all
that is highest in the poetry of the world.
"If Giulia had lived," she thought to-night, as she crouched over the
lonely hearth, sitting in that low chair in which she used to sit,
as it were, at her husband's feet, sometimes in the dreamy twilight
letting her drooping head rest upon his knee, while his hand hovered
caressingly over the blonde hair.
Had Giulia lived, would everything have been different? Would Mario
have loved and married her, and would they three have lived in a
trinity of love? It seemed to her that Giulia would have been a
hallowing influence. They two would have been like sisters, loving and
understanding the man who loved them both. No cloud of jealousy could
have come between them; all would have been sympathy and understanding.
That wall of separation which had risen up between her and her husband
would never have been. Neither pride on her part nor distrust upon his
part would have killed love. Giulia would have sympathised with both;
and her love would have kept them united.
She mused long upon the life that might have been, the life without
a cloud. She thought with longing of the girl who had died sinless,
in the morning of an unsullied life. Was not such a life, wrapped
round with love, and free from the shadow of sin--such a death, before
satiety had come to change the gold to dross--the happiest fate that
God could give to His chosen?
"And to think that I was sorry for her, that I pitied her for being
taken from such a beautiful world, from such a devoted father. How
could I know that Death was the only security from sin?"
She sat long in that melancholy reverie, only rousing herself and
taking up a book from the table at her side, when she heard the door
opening, and a servant came in to put fresh logs on the fire.
She told the man that her maid, Louison, was not to sit up for her.
Nobody was to sit up. She would not be going upstairs for some time.
She wanted nothing, and she would switch off the lights.
In a house lighted by electricity the lights were of very little
consequence. The footman took elaborate pains with the fire, piling
up the logs, and arranging the large brass guard that fenced the
hearth, and then retired with ghostly step to remote regions, where
his fellows were lingering over the supper-table, some of them talking
of the journey to Rome, and those who were to remain in charge of the
house complaining of the dullness of a long winter, and the low figure
of board wages, which had remained more or less stationary, while
everything else was going up by leaps and bounds.
"I'd leap and bound you, if I had my way," said Mr. Sedgewick; "a pack
of lazy trash. If I were Mr. Rutherford, I should put a policeman and
a bull dog into the house, and lock it up till next May. You that are
left have a deal too soft a time, while we that go have to work like
galley slaves. Three parties a week, and a pack of Italian savages to
keep up to the mark; fellows who are more used to daggers and stilettos
than to soap and water, better for a brigand's cave than a high-class
pantry, and who think nothing of quarrelling and threatening to murder
each other in the middle of a dinner-party. There's no sense in a mixed
staff. My pantry was a regular pandemonium last Christmas, and I wished
myself back in sooty old London."
Mrs. Manby was to stay in Portland Place, mistress of the silent house,
with one footman, two housemaids to sweep and dust, and a kitchen wench
to cook for her. She had saved money, and was independent and even
haughty.
"When I go to Italy it will be to the Riviera, for my health, and I
shall go as a lady," she told Sedgewick, who, notwithstanding his
abhorrence of Roman footmen, liked his winter in Rome, as a period that
afforded better pickings than even a London season, Italian tradesmen
being more amenable than London purveyors, who had been harassed and
bound of late by grandmotherly legislation.
Supper had been finished in "hall" and housekeeper's parlour long
before Vera left the library. It was after midnight when a sudden
shivering, a vague horror of the silence came upon her, and she rose
from her low chair in front of the dying fire and began to wander from
room to room. The last of the logs had dropped into grey ashes in the
library, and all other fires had gone out. The formal room, with large,
official-looking chairs and severe office desk, where Mario Provana had
received formal visitors, was the abode of gloom in this dead hour of
the night: and yet it was not empty. The sound of the dead man's voice
was in the room, the voice of command--so strong, so stern in those
grave discussions which Vera had often overheard through the half-open
door of the library, in the days when she had shared her husband's
life--before fashion and Disbrowes had parted them.
His image was in the room, the massive figure, the commanding height,
the broad shoulders, a little bent, as if with the weight of the noble
head they had to carry. He was standing in front of his desk, facing
those other men with the grave look she knew so well--courteous,
serious, resolute--and then slowly, with a movement of weariness at the
conclusion of an interview, he sank into the spacious arm-chair. She
saw him to-night as she had seen him often, watching through the open
door, while she was waiting for the business people to go, and for him
to join her for their afternoon drive.
What ages ago--those tranquil days in which they had driven together
in the summer afternoons--not the dull circuit of the Park, but to
Hampton Court, or Wimbledon, or Richmond, or Esher, escaping from the
suburban flower-gardens to green fields and rural commons, glimpses
of woodland even, in the country about Claremont. Their airings were
no swift rushes in thirty horse-power car, but a leisurely progress
behind a pair of priceless horses, with time for seeing wild roses and
honeysuckle in the hedges, the dogs and children on rustic paths, and
the peace of cottage gardens.
She remembered how those tranquil afternoons had become impossible, by
reason of her perpetual engagements; and how quietly Mario Provana had
submitted to the change in her way of life, the succession of futile
pleasures, the hurry and excitement.
"I want you to be happy," he told her, when she made a feeble apology
for not having an afternoon at his service.
"You are young, and you must enjoy your youth. Things that seem trivial
and joyless to me are new and sweet to you. Be happy, love. I have
plenty of use for my time."
That was in the beginning of their drifting apart. Looking back
to-night she could but wonder as she remembered how gradually, how
imperceptibly that drifting apart had gone on; until she awoke one day
to find that she and her husband were estranged. He was kind, had only
an indulgent smile for the folly of her life, but the happy union of
their first wedded years was over and done with. In Lady Susan's brief
phrase, "They had become like other people."
And now she and Claude Rutherford had drifted apart, and were like
other people. The reunion of a few weeks at Disbrowe was but a flash of
summer across the gathering gloom of their lives.
"He can be happy," she thought, brooding in the night silence. "He
cares for so many things. I care for nothing but the things that are
gone."
And then, while the clock of All Souls struck that solemn single stroke
which has even a more awful note than the twelve strokes of midnight,
she thought of her dead--all her dead. Her poets, Tennyson, Browning,
Swinburne--men who had lived while she was living, and one by one had
vanished--of the great tragic actor whose genius had thrilled her
childish heart--of all that company of the great who had died long
before she was born--and it seemed to her in her dejection as if the
earth were an empty desert, in which nothing great or beautiful was
left. They had all gone through the dark gates of death--across the
wild that no man knows. Her poet father, her lovely young mother,
phantoms of beauty, distant and dim, evanescent shadows in the memory
of a child. Yet, if Francis Symeon's creed were true, they were not
gone for ever. They had not gone across the wild to dark distances
beyond the reach of human thought. They were only emancipated. The
worm had cast its earthly husk, and the spirit had spread its wings.
Released from the laws of space and time, the all-understanding mind of
the dead could be in sympathy with the elect among the living.
With Us, the elect, who have renounced the joys of sense, and lived
only to cultivate the pleasures of the mind: for us the poets we
worship still live, the minds that have been the light and leading of
our minds are our companions and friends. We need no salaried medium's
_abracadabra_ to summon them, no weary waiting round a table in a
darkened room, disturbed by suspicions of trickery. They come to us
uncalled, as we sit alone in the gloaming, or wander alone over the
desolate down, or by the long sea-shore. The poem we read is suddenly
illuminated with the soul of the poet: the printed page becomes a
message from the immortal mind.
To-night, in that silent hour, it was only of the dead Vera thought, as
she wandered from room to room in the house of fear, shrinking from the
prospect of the long, sleepless hours, weary yet restless. Restlessness
made her wander into regions that were almost strange.
She drew aside a heavy curtain, and pushed open a crimson cloth door
that led from the hall of ceremony to those inferior regions common to
servants and tradesmen--the long stone passage, with doors right and
left, the passage that ended at the door into the stable-yard, the door
by which Mario Provana had entered on the night of his death.
Rarely had her foot trodden the stone pavement, yet every detail of
the place--the form of the doors, the white ceiling, the unlovely drab
walls had been burnt into her brain.
A single electric lamp gave the kind of light that is more awful than
darkness. She heard clocks ticking: one that sounded solemn and slow,
as if it were some awful mechanism that was measuring the fate of men;
one with a thin and hurried beat, like the pulse of fever; she heard
the heavy breathing of more than one sleeper; and presently, in front
of the yard door, she came upon the watch dog, the Irish terrier, Boroo.
He was lying asleep on a rug in front of the door, and her light step
upon the stone had not roused him. It was only when she was close to
his rug that he started up and gave a low, muffled bark, and sniffed at
the skirt of her dress, and being assured that she was to be trusted,
sprang up with his fore-feet upon her hip and licked her hands.
She stooped over him and stroked his rough head, and let him nestle
close against her, and then she knelt down beside him and put her arms
round him and fondled him as he had never been fondled before by so
beautiful and delicate a creature. From those long thoughts of a world
peopled by the dead, the spontaneous love of this warm, living creature
touched her curiously. There was comfort in contact with anything so
full of life; and she laid her cold cheek against the dog's black nose,
called him by his name, and made him her friend for ever.
"Poor old dog, all alone in this cold place. Come upstairs with me;
come, Boroo."
The house dog needed no second invitation. He kept close to her
trailing silken skirt as she moved slowly through the hall, switching
off lights as she went, and so by the stately staircase to the second
floor.
The fire in her morning-room had been made up at a late hour by
Louison, who was now accustomed to her mistress's nocturnal habits;
and the logs were bright on the hearth, and brightly reflected on the
hedge-sparrow-egg blue of the tiled fireplace.
The terrier looked round the room with approval. Till this night he had
seen nothing finer than Mrs. Manby's parlour, where--when occasionally
suffered to lie in front of the fire--he had always to be on his best
behaviour. But in Vera's room he made himself at once at home, jumped
on and off the prettiest chairs, rioted among the silken pillows on the
sofa, looking at her with questioning eyes all the time, to see what
liberties he might take, and finally stretched his yellow-red body at
full length in the glow and warmth of the hearth, wagging a lazy tail
with ineffable bliss.
Vera seated herself in a low chair near him, and stooped now and then
to pat the broad, flat head. He was a big dog of his kind; and though
intended only for the humblest service, to rank with kitchen and
scullery-maids and under-footmen, he was naturally, in that opulent
household, a well-bred animal of an unimpeachable pedigree. His parents
and grandparents had been prize-winners, and his blood might have
entitled him to a higher place than the run of the servants' hall and
stables and a mat in a stone passage. But whatever his inherited merits
or personal charms, Vera's sudden liking for him had nothing to do with
his race or character. It was the chill desolation of the silent hour,
the freezing horror of the empty house, that had made her heart soften,
and her tears fall, at the contact of this warm, living creature in the
world of the dead. It was almost as if she had lost her way in one of
the Roman catacombs, and had met this friendly animal among the dead of
a thousand years, and in the horror of impenetrable darkness.
"You are my dog now, Boroo," she told the terrier, and the small,
bright, dark eyes looked up at her with a light that expressed perfect
understanding, while the pointed ears quivered with delight. He
followed her to the threshold of her bedroom, where she showed him
a White, fleecy rug on which he was to sleep, outside her door. He
threw himself upon his back, with his four legs in the air, protesting
himself her slave; and from that hour he worshipped her, and followed
her about her house in abject devotion.
He went with her to Italy. Of course, there would be difficulties about
his return to England; but canine quarantine might be ameliorated for a
rich man's dog. He became her companion and friend; and it was strange
how much he meant in her life. Strange, very strange; for in all the
years of folly and self-indulgence she had never given herself a canine
favourite. She had seen almost every one of her friends more or less
absurdly devoted to some small creature--Griffon, Manchester terrier,
Pekinese, Japanese, King Charles, Pomeranian--dogs whose merits seemed
in an inverse ratio to their size--or the slaves to some more dignified
animal, poodle or chow. She had seen this canine slavery, and had
wondered, with a touch of scorn; and now, in the stately spaciousness
of the Roman villa, she found herself listening for the patter of the
Irish terrier's feet upon the marble floors, and rejoicing when he came
bounding across the room, to lay his head upon her knee and express
unutterable affection with the exuberance of a rough, hairy tail.
The clue to the mystery came to her suddenly as she sat musing in the
firelight, with Boroo stretched at her feet.
She had wanted this dog. She had wanted some warm-hearted creature
to love her, and to be loved by her. It had been the vacant house of
her life that called for an inhabitant. She had awakened from her
fever-dream of happiness, to find herself alone, utterly alone, in a
world of which she was weary. Claude Rutherford was of no more account
to her. The thing that had happened was something worse than drifting
apart. Gradually and imperceptibly the distance between them had
widened, until she had begun to ask herself if she had ever loved him.
Boroo went with his mistress on the long journey to San Marco, and
behaved with an admirable discretion at the big hotel at Marseilles,
where, though he would have liked to try conclusions with a stalwart
_dogue de Bordeaux_ that he met in one of the long corridors, he
contented himself with a passing growl as he crept after Vera to his
post outside her room. All things were strange to him in these first
continental experiences; but he bore all things with sublime restraint,
concentrating all his brain-power and all his emotional force on the
one supreme duty of guarding the lovely lady who had adopted him.
At the Hôtel des Anglais Mrs. Rutherford was received with rapture,
and the spacious suite on the first floor was, as it were, laid at her
feet. She would, of course, occupy those rooms, and no other; the rooms
where Signor Provana and his sweet young daughter had lived. Signor
Canincio ignored the fact that the sweet young daughter had also died
there.
No. Mrs. Rutherford would have the rooms in which she had lived with
her grandmother.
"I want our old rooms, please," she said.
"The rooms in which you were so happy--where you spent two winters with
the illustrious Lady Felicia."
Signor Canincio at once perceived how natural it was for Madame to
prefer those rooms. Everything should be made ready immediately. His
season had not yet begun; but his hotel would be full to overflowing in
December, when he expected many of Madame's old friends to settle down
for the winter. Vera smiled as she remembered those "old friends" with
whom she had never been friendly; the sour spinsters and widows who
had always resented Lady Felicia's determination to deny herself the
advantage of their society.
It was the dead season of the year. The late lingering roses on the
walls had a sodden look, the pepper trees drooped disconsolately, and a
curtain of grey mist hung over the parade, where Vera had walked, alone
and dejected, before the coming of Giulia and her father. The hills
where they had driven looked farther away in the shadowy atmosphere.
There was no gleaming whiteness on the distant mountains. All was grey
and melancholy--and in unison with her thoughts of the dead. She had
come there to look upon her husband's grave. She had been prostrate
and helpless at the time of his burial, and had only just been capable
of arousing herself from a state of apathy, to insist that he should
be carried back to the country of his birth, and should lie beside his
daughter in the shadow of the cypresses, between the sea and the olive
woods.
Even in that agonising time the picture of that familiar spot had been
in her mind as she gave her instructions; and she had seen the marble
tomb in its green enclosure, and the tall trees standing deeply black
against the pale gold of the sky, as on that evening when Mario Provana
had found her sitting by his daughter's tomb. He must lie there, she
told his partner, nowhere else; no, not even in Rome, where his family
had their stately sepulchre. It was under the marble tomb he had made
for his idolised child that he must rest.
And now, in the dull grey November, she stood once more beside the
marble and read the lines that had been graven under Giulia's brief
epitaph. "Also in memory of Mario Provana, her father, who died in
London, on July the thirteenth, 19--, in the fifty-seventh year of his
age." And below this one word--"Re-united."
She stayed long in the green enclosure, her dog coming back to her
after much exploration of the wood above, where he had startled and
scattered any animal life that he could find there, and the seashore
below, where he stirred the tideless waves by the vehemence of his
plunges; and then she went for a long ramble in the familiar paths
where she had walked with Provana in those sunny afternoons, before the
ride to the chocolate mills. She stayed nearly a week at San Marco,
repeating the same process every day; first a lingering visit to the
grave, and then a long, lonely walk in the paths she had trodden with
the man whom she had thought of only as her friend's father, until by
an imperceptible progress he had made himself the one close friend
of her life. She took pains to find the very paths they had trodden
together, the humble shrines or chapels they had looked at, the rocks
where they had sat down to rest.
When she had first spoken of revisiting San Marco Claude had done his
uttermost to dissuade her. "Don't be morbid," he had said more than
once. "Your mind has a fatal leaning that way. You ought to fight
against it."
Yes, she knew that she was morbid, that she had taken to brooding upon
melancholy memories, that she was cultivating sadness. Alone in the
olive wood, watching the evening light change and fade, and the shadows
steal slowly from the valley and the sea, while memory recalled words
that had been spoken in that narrow pathway, among those grey old
trees in the light and shade of evenings that seemed ages ago, she had
a feeling that was almost happiness. It was a memory of happiness so
vivid that it seemed the thing itself.
She had been very happy in those tranquil evenings. She knew now that
she had begun to love Mario Provana many days before his impassioned
avowal had taken her by storm. His eloquence, his power of thought and
feeling, had made life and the world new. She "saw Othello's visage
in his mind." His rugged features and his eight-and-forty years were
forgotten in the charm of his conversation and the rare music of his
voice. The world of the scholar, of the thinker, and the poet, had
been an unknown world to the girl of eighteen, whose poor little bit
of flimsy education had been limited to the morning hours of a Miss
Greenhow at a guinea a week. He opened the gate of that divine world
and led her in, and they walked there together; he charmed by her
freshness and _naïveté_, she dazzled by his wealth of knowledge and his
power of imagination. Not even her poet father could have had a wider
knowledge of books, or a greater power of thought, she told herself;
which was a concession to friendship, as she had hitherto put her
father in the front rank of those who know.
She looked back at those innocent hours, when he who was so soon to be
her husband was only thought of as her first friend.
She looked back to hours that seemed to her to have been the happiest
in all her life. Yes, the happiest; for happiness is sunshine and calm
weather, not fever and storm. There were other hours more romantic and
more thrilling, but agonising to remember--sensual, devilish. Those
hours in the woods had been serene and pure, and she had walked there
with the heart of a child.
How kind he had been, how kind! It was the kindness in the low, grave
voice that had made its music: only the kindness of a friend of
mature years interested in her youth and ignorance, only a grave and
thoughtful friend, liking her because she had been loved by his dead
daughter. That is what she had thought of him for the greater part of
those quiet hours. Yet now and then she had been startled by a sudden
suggestion. She did not know, but she felt that he was her lover.
* * * * *
It was in vain that Signor Canincio pressed her to occupy his _piano
nobile_ as the only part of his hostel worthy of her. She insisted on
the old rooms, the _salon_ that had been growing shabbier and shabbier
in the years of her absence, and which had never been redecorated.
There were the same faded cupids flying about the ceiling, where many a
crack in the plaster testified to an occasional earthquake; and there
was the same shabby paper on the walls. Nothing had been altered,
nothing had been removed. Vera went out upon the balcony and looked
down at the little town, and the distant ridge where the walls of a
monastery rose white against the grey November sky. Everything was the
same. She had wanted to come back. It was a morbid fancy, perhaps, like
many of her fancies. She knew that she was morbid. She wanted to steep
herself in the memories of the time before she was Mario Provana's
wife; the time when she knew that he loved her, and was proud of his
love.
She walked up and down the room, touching things gently as she passed
them, as if those poor old pieces of furniture, with their white paint
and worn gilding, were a part of her history. This was the table where
she had sat making tea, a slow process, while Mario stood beside her,
watching her, as she watched the blue flame under Granny's old silver
kettle, the George-the-Second silver that gave a grace to the cheap
_salon_. Lady Felicia had kept her old silver--light and thin with much
use--as resolutely as she had kept her diamonds.
"If ever I were forced to part with those poor things of mine I should
feel myself no better than the charwoman who comes here to scrub
floors," she told Lady Okehampton, and that kind lady, who was taking
tea with "poor Lady Felicia," in her London lodgings, had approved a
sentiment so worthy of a Disbrowe.
Vera paced the room slowly in the thickening light: sometimes standing
by the open window, listening to footsteps on the parade, and the talk
of the women from the olive woods, tramping bravely homeward with
heavy baskets on their heads, baskets of little black olives for the
oil mills that dotted the steep sides of the gorge through which the
tempestuous little river went brawling down to the sluggish sea.
And then she went back into the shadows, and slowly, slowly, paced all
the length of the room, thinking of those evenings when she had made
tea for the Roman financier.
The shadows gathered momentarily and the shapes of all things became
vague and dim. There was Granny's sofa, and Granny was sitting there
among her silken pillows. She could see the pale, thin face, and the
frail figure wrapped in a China crape shawl. The white shawl had always
had a ghostly look in a dimly lighted room.
She went over to the sofa and felt the empty corner where Granny used
to sit. No, she was not there. The sofa was a bare, hard object, with
nothing phantasmal about it. There were no silken cushions. Those
amenities had been Lady Felicia's private property, travelling to and
fro by _petite vitesse_. There was no one on the sofa, and that dark
form, the tall figure near the tea-table, was nothing but shadow. It
vanished as she came near and there was only empty space, with the
white table shining in the faint light from the open window.
"Nothing but shadow," she thought, "like my life. There is nothing left
of that but shadow."
"How happy I must have been, when I lived in this room, how happy! But
I did not know it. How sweetly I used to sleep, and what dear dreams
I dreamt. I was only seventeen in our first winter, and I was a good
girl. Looking back I cannot remember that I had ever done wrong. I was
always obedient to Granny, and I tried hard to please her, and to care
for her when she was ill. I always spoke the truth. The truth? Why
should I have been afraid of truth in those days? There was no merit in
fearless truth. But the difference, the difference!"
It seemed so strange now that she had not been happier. To be young and
without sin: to believe in God and to love Christ. Was not that enough
for happiness?
The room was almost dark before she rang for lamps. In that southern
paradise the shutting of windows must precede the entrance of lighted
lamps; and one is apt to prolong the time _entre chien et loup_.
The darkness fostered those morbid feelings that she had indulged of
late. She thought of Francis Symeon, and his belief in the communion of
the living and the dead.
Her husband might be near her as she crept about in the darkness. She
might _know_ that he was there; but she was not to hope for any visible
sign of his presence.
To see was reserved for the elect; and for them only when the earthly
tabernacle was near its end, when the veil between life and death had
worn thin. _Then_ only, and for the choicest spirits only, would that
thin veil be rent asunder and the dead reveal themselves to the living,
in a divine anticipation of immortality.
"Not for all, not for those who have loved earthly things and lived the
sensual life, not for them the afterlife of reunion and felicity."
"Not for me--never for me." She fell on her knees by Granny's sofa,
and bowed her head upon her folded arms and prayed--a wild and fervent
prayer--a distracted appeal for mercy to One Who knew, and could pity.
Such a prayer as might have trembled on the Magdalen's pale lips while,
with bent head and hidden countenance, she washed the Redeemer's feet
with her tears.
The spell that was woven of silence and shadow was broken suddenly
by the opening of the door and the tumultuous entrance of the Irish
terrier, followed by Louison, who saw only darkness and an empty room.
"Mais où donc est Madame?" she exclaimed.
Boroo had found his mistress by something keener than the sense of
sight, and had pushed his cold, black nose against her cheek, despite
of the bowed head, and leapt about her as she rose to her feet, just in
time to hide all signs of agitation as Signor Canincio's odd man, in a
loose red jacket, looking like a reformed bandit, brought in a pair of
lamps and flooded the room with light.
Louison rushed to shut the windows and exclude _cette affreuse bête le
moustique_, from whose attentions she herself had suffered.
"Mais, madame, pourquoi ne pas sonner? Vous voilà sans lumière, sans
feu, et les fenêtres grandes ouvertes. Accendere, donc," to the odd
man, "apportez legno, molto legno, et faire un bon fuoco, presto,
subito, tout de suite."
It may be that this noisy solicitude was meant to cover a certain
want of attention to her mistress; Ma'mselle having lingered over
the tea-table in the couriers' room, where a dearth of couriers at
this dead season was atoned for by the presence of Signor Canincio
and his English wife, she dispensing the weakest possible tea, with
condescending kindness, and wife and husband both alert to hear
anything that Louison would tell them about her mistress, while the
animated gestures and expressive eyes of the host testified to his
admiration for _la belle Française_, an admiration that was made more
agreeable to Louison from the consuming jealousy which she saw depicted
in the countenance of the travelling footman, whose inferior status
ought to have excluded him from that table. But Louison knew that
Canincio's hotel had always been what Mr. Sedgewick called _une affaire
d'un seul cheval_.