"Come with me into the village, and help me to do errands," said
Fanny on the following morning, just as Lawrence was feeling for his
pipe in his pocket after breakfast. "You can smoke till we get
there. It wouldn't hurt you to smoke less, anyway."
They went down through the garden, fresh and dewy still from the
short, cool night, towards the sea. The path to the village lies
along a low sea-wall, just high enough and strong enough to keep the
tide from the lawns. But the tide was beginning to run out at that
hour, and was singing and rocking itself away from the shore, leaving
the big loose stones and the chocolate-coloured rocks all wet and
shining in the morning sun. The breeze was springing up in the
offing and would reach the land before long, kissing each island as
it passed softly by, and gently breaking with dark blue the smoothly
undulating water.
The sun was almost behind the pair as they walked along the sands,
and shone full upon the harbour as it came into view, lighting up the
deep green of the islands between which passes the channel, and
bringing up the warm brown of the soil through thick weaving spruces.
The graceful yachts caught the sunshine, too, their hulls gleaming
darkly, or dazzlingly white, their slender masts pencilled in light,
against the trees, and standing out like threaded needles when they
showed against the pale, clear sky. In the bright northern air, the
artist would have complained that there was no atmosphere--no
'depth,' nor 'distance,' but only the distinct farness of the objects
a long way off--nothing at all like 'atmospheric perspective.'
"Isn't it a glorious day!" exclaimed Fanny, looking seaward at a
white-sailed fishing-schooner, which scarcely moved in the morning
air.
"It's a little bit too swept and garnished," answered Lawrence.
"That is--for a picture, you know. It's better to feel than to look
at, if you understand what I mean. It feels so northern, that when
you look at it, it seems bare and unfinished without a little snow."
"But you like it, don't you?" asked the young girl, in prompt protest.
"Of course I do. What a question! I thought I'd been showing how
much I liked it, ever since I got here."
"I'm not sure that you show what you like and don't like," said
Fanny, in a tone of reflexion. "Perhaps it's better not to."
"You don't, at all events. At least--aren't you rather an
inscrutable person? Of course I don't know," he added rather
foolishly, pulling his woollen cap over his eyes and glancing at her
sideways.
"Inscrutable! What a big word! 'The inscrutable ways of
Providence'--that's what they always say, don't they? Still--if you
mean that I don't 'tell,' you're quite right. I don't--when I can
keep my countenance. Do you? It's always far better not to tell.
Besides, if you commit yourself to an opinion, you're committing
yourself to gaol."
"What a way of putting it! But it's really true. I should so much
like to ask you a question about one of your opinions."
"Why don't you?" asked Fanny, turning her eyes to his.
"Oh--lots of reasons: I'm afraid, in the first place; and then, I'm
not sure you have one, and then--"
"Say it all--I hate people who hesitate!"
"Well--no. There's a great deal more to say than I want to say.
Let's talk about the landscape."
"No. I want to know what the question is which you wished you might
ask," insisted Fanny.
"It's about Mr. Brinsley," said Lawrence, plunging.
"Well, what about him?" Fanny's tone changed perceptibly, and her
expression grew cold and forbidding.
"Nothing particular--unless it's impertinent--so I won't ask it."
"You won't?" asked Fanny, slackening her pace and looking hard at
him. "Not if I ask you to?"
"No," answered Lawrence. "I'd oblige you by asking a different
question, but not that one. You wouldn't know the difference."
"That's ingenuous, at all events." She looked away again and laughed.
"I never fight when I can help it, and you looked dangerous just now.
You always are, in one way or another."
"What do you mean?"
"Only that when you don't happen to be frightening me out of my wits,
you are charming me into a perfect idiot."
"Something between an express train and the Lorelei," laughed Fanny.
But the quick, girlish blood had sprung to her sunny cheeks and
lingered a moment, as though it loved the light. They were now in
the village--in the broad street where the shops are. At that hour
there were many people moving about on foot and in every sort of
vehicle, short of broughams and landaus. There was the smart couple
in a high buckboard, just out for a morning drive; there was the
elderly farmer with his buggy or his hooded cart--his wife seated
beside him, with her queer, sad, winter-blighted face, and her
decent, but dusty black frock;--there was the young farmer 'sport'
driving his favourite trotting horse in a sulky. And of pedestrians
there was no end. A smart party bent on a day's excursion by sea
came down the board walk, brilliant in perfectly new blue and white
serge, with bits of splendid orange and red here and there, fresh
faces, light hearts, great appetites, and the most trifling of
cares--the care for trifles themselves. Fanny nodded and smiled, and
was smiled at, while Lawrence attempted to lift his soft woollen cap
from his head with some sort of grace--a thing impossible, as men who
wear soft woollen caps well know. But the air seemed lighter and
brighter for so much youth laughing in it.
Fanny dived into one shop after another, Lawrence following her,
rather awkwardly, as a man always does under the circumstances, until
he is old enough to find out that there is a time for watching as
well as a time for talking, and that more may be learned of a woman's
character from the way she treats shopkeepers than is generally
supposed. Fanny showed surprising alternations of firmness and
condescension, for she had the gift of managing people and of getting
what she wanted, which is a rare gift and one not to be despised.
She asked very kindly after the fishmonger's baby, but she did not
hesitate to tell the grocer the hardest of truths about the butter.
"I always do my own marketing," she said to Lawrence, in answer to
his look of surprise. "It amuses me, and I get much better things.
My poor dear cousins don't understand marketing a bit--though they
ought to. That's the reason why they never get on, somehow. I
believe marketing is the best school in the world for learning what's
worth having and what isn't. Don't you?"
"I never had a chance to learn," laughed Lawrence. "I wish you'd
teach me how to get on, as you call it."
"Oh--it's very easy! You only need know exactly what you want, and
then try to get it as hard as you can. Most people don't know, and
don't try."
"For that matter I know perfectly well what I want."
"Then why don't you try and get it?" asked Fanny, pausing at the door
of another shop as though interested in his answer.
"I'm not sure that it's in the market," answered the young man, his
eyes in hers.
"Have you enquired?" Fanny's mouth twitched with the coming smile.
"No--not exactly. I'm trying to find out by inspection."
"If you don't think it's likely to be too dear, you'd better
ask--whatever it is."
"Money couldn't buy it. Besides, I've got none," added Lawrence.
"You might get it on credit," said Fanny. "But I think it's very
doubtful."
Thereupon she entered the shop, and Lawrence followed her, meditating
deeply upon his chances, and asking himself whether he should run the
great risk at once, or wait and watch Brinsley. To tell the truth,
he thought his own chances very small; for he under-estimated all his
advantages by looking at them in the light of his present poverty,
not seeing that in so doing he might be underestimating Fanny
Trehearne as well. A somewhat excessive caution, which sometimes
goes with timidity, though not at all of the sort which produces
cowardice, is often the result of an education which has not brought
a man closely into competition with other men. No one in common
sense, save the Miss Miners and Lawrence himself, could have imagined
that Brinsley had a chance against him. For anything that people
knew, Brinsley might turn out to be an adventurer of the worst kind,
whereas Lawrence was of good birth, a man of whom many knew who he
was, and whence he came, and that he had as good a right to ask for
Fanny's hand as any man. He was poor just now, but no one believed
that his rich uncle, a childless widower of fifty-five, would marry
again, and Lawrence was sure to have money in the end, though he
might wait thirty years for it.
As for Brinsley, Fanny Trehearne either could not or would not
pretend that she liked him, even in the most moderate degree of
distant liking, after she had satisfied herself that he was not a
truthful person in those matters in which truth decides the right of
a man to be considered honourable. Being, on the whole, more careful
than most people about the accuracy of what she said, she was less
inclined to make allowances for others than a great many of her
contemporaries. Besides, Brinsley had not only told a lie, which was
mean in itself, but he had allowed himself to be found out, which
Fanny considered contemptible.
Up to this time she had seemed to think him very pleasant company and
not a bad addition to the society of the place.
"He's so good-looking!" she had often said to the approving Miss
Miners. "And he has good manners, and knows how to come into a room,
and how to sit down and get up--and do lots of things," she added
vaguely.
In this opinion her three old-maid cousins fully concurred, and they
were quite ready to say as much in his favour as Fanny could have
heard without laughing. They were therefore greatly distressed when
she changed her mind.
"He's handsome," Fanny now admitted. "But he's a little too showy.
I've seen men like him at races, but they were not the men who were
introduced to me. I don't think they knew anybody I knew--that sort
of man, don't you know? And his English accent isn't quite English,
and I don't like his little flat whiskers, and his hands irritate me.
Besides, he said he had been in the navy, and now he admits that he
never was. That's enough."
"My dear Fanny," Cordelia answered, on such occasions, "there was a
misunderstanding about that, you know. He was in the navy, since he
was an officer of Marines, but of course he wasn't expected to know--"
"The Marines!" exclaimed Fanny, contemptuously. "It's only a way of
getting out of it, I'm sure!"
Thereupon the three Miss Miners told her that she was very unjust and
prejudiced, as they retired together to praise Mr. Brinsley, out of
hearing of their young cousin's tart comment. Miss Cordelia had made
it all right by giving the man an opportunity of justifying himself
after he had privately explained to her that the Marines were an
integral part of the navy, but that they were not called upon to know
anything about navigation,--a fact which must account for his
ignorance.
He had very firm friends, to say the least of it, in the three
spinsters, who might have been said to worship the ground on which he
walked, and who thought it a sin and a shame that Fanny should treat
him as she did. As for young Lawrence, he looked on, with his
observant artist's eyes, and never mentioned Brinsley, except to
Fanny herself. For he was not at all lacking in tact, however
deficient he might be in the manly accomplishments.
"Do you know," Fanny began, one day when they were walking in the
woods, "I don't half mind you're being such a bad hand at things.
It's funny. I thought I should, at first--but I don't."
"I'm awfully glad," answered Lawrence, not finding anything else to
say to express his gratitude.
"Oh, you may well be!" laughed Fanny. "I don't forgive everybody for
being a duffer. And that's what you are, you know. You don't mind
my saying so?"
"Oh no, not at all." The tone in which he spoke did not express much
conviction, however.
"I believe you do," said Fanny, thoughtfully.
They were following a narrow path which led upwards along the bank of
a brook under overarching trees. Here and there the bank had fallen
away, and the woodmen had laid down 'slabs' of the rippings first
taken off by the saw-mill in squaring timber. It was damp under
foot, for it had lately rained, and the wet, chocolate-coloured dead
leaves of the previous year filled the chinks between the bits of
wood, and sometimes lay all over them, a slippery mass. It was still
and hot and damp all through the thick growth on the midsummer's
afternoon. The whispered mystery of countless living things filled
the quiet air with a vibration more felt than heard, which overcame
the silence, but did not break the stillness.
The path was very narrow, and Fanny had to walk before her companion.
Their voices seemed to echo back to them from very near, as they
talked, for amongst the trees the rich undergrowth grew man-high. On
their right, below them, the brook laughed softly to itself as a faun
might laugh, drowsily, half asleep in a hollow of the deep woods.
And then, through the warm-breathing secret places, where all that
was living was growing fiercely in the sudden summer, stole the
heart-thrilling fragrance of all that lived, than which nothing more
surely stirs young blood in the glory of the year.
For some minutes the pair walked on in silence, Fanny leading. The
young man watched the strong, lithe figure of the girl as she moved
swiftly and sure-footed before him. Suddenly she stopped, without
turning round, and she seemed to be listening. A low ray of sunlight
ran quivering through the trees and played with a crisp ringlet of
her hair, too full of life and strength to be smoothed to dull order
with the rest.
"What is it?" asked Lawrence, in a low voice, watching her.
"I thought I heard some one in the woods," she answered quickly, and
then listened again.
Not a sound broke the dream-like stillness.
"I'm sure I heard something," said Fanny. Then she laughed a little.
"Besides," she added, "it's very likely. It's awfully hot. Here's a
good place to sit down."
It was not a particularly good place, being damp and sloping, and
Lawrence planted his heels firmly amongst the wet, dead leaves to
keep himself from slipping down into the path as he sat beside her.
"There's always something going on in the woods," she said softly and
dreamily. "The trees talk to each other all day long, and the
squirrels sit and crack nuts while they listen to the conversation.
I like the woods. Somehow one never feels alone when one gets where
things grow--does one?"
"I don't mind being alone when I can't be--I mean--" Lawrence did
not finish his sentence, but bent down and picked up a twig from the
ground. "Isn't it funny!" he exclaimed, twisting it in his hands.
"All the bark's loose, and turns round."
"Of course--it's an old twig, and it's wet. When don't you mind
being alone? You were saying something--'when you couldn't be
with'--something, or somebody."
"Oh--you know! What's the use of my saying it?" Lawrence kept his
eye on the twig.
"I don't know, and if I want you to say anything, that's the use,"
answered Fanny, whose prose style, so to say, was direct if it was
anything.
"Yes--but you see--I didn't mean anything in particular." He broke
the twig in two and tossed it over the path into the brook below.
Fanny changed her position a little, leaning forward and clasping her
gloved hands round her knees.
"You're very nice, you know," she said meditatively. "I like you."
"Because I don't answer your questions?" asked Lawrence, looking at
her face, which was half turned from him.
"Yes. That's one of the reasons."
"It's a very funny one. I don't see much reason in it, I confess."
"Don't you? Don't you know that a woman sometimes likes a man for
what he doesn't say?"
"I never thought of it in that way. I daresay you're right. You
ought to know much better than I do. Especially if you really like
me, as you say you do."
"Oh--I'm honest. I never said I'd been in the navy!" Fanny laughed.
"Besides, if I didn't like you, why should I say so? Just to say
something civil? The way Mr. Brinsley does?"
"Brinsley's a horror! Don't talk about him--especially here."
"I don't mean to. I hate him. But if we were going to talk about
him, this would be a good place--one's sure that he's not just round
the corner of the verandah making one of my three cousins miserable."
"How do you mean?"
"Why--they all love him. Can't you see it? I don't mean
figuratively. Not a bit. They're in love with him, poor dears!"
"Nonsense! not really?" Lawrence laughed incredulously.
"Yes--really. It's a rather dismal sort of love--they've kept their
hearts in pickle for such an age, you know--old pickles aren't good,
either. I've no patience with old maids who fall in love and make
fools of themselves!"
"Perhaps they can't help it," suggested the young man. "Nobody can
help falling in love, you know."
"No," answered Fanny, rather doubtfully. "Perhaps not. I don't
know. It depends."
"People don't generally try to keep themselves from falling in love,"
remarked Lawrence, with the air of a philosopher. "It's more apt to
be the other way. They are generally trying to make some one else
fall in love with them. That's the hard thing."
"Is it?" Fanny smiled. "Perhaps it is," she added, after a pause.
"I'd like to tell you something--"
She hesitated and stopped. Lawrence looked at her, but did not
speak, expecting her to go on. The silence continued for some time.
Once or twice Fanny turned and met his eyes, and her lips moved as
though she were just going to say something. She seemed to be in
doubt.
"I don't believe in friendship, and I don't believe in promises,--and
I don't believe much in anything," she said at last, in magnificent
generalization. "But I'd like to tell you, all the same. Do you
mind?"
"I won't repeat it if you do," said Lawrence, simply.
"No--I don't believe you will. You see I haven't any friends, so I
never tell things,--at least, not much. I don't believe much in
telling, anyway. Do you?"
"Not if you mean to keep a secret."
"Oh--well--this isn't exactly a secret--only I don't want any one to
know it. Yes, I know! You laugh because I'm going to tell you. But
you're different, somehow--"
"Am I?"
"Oh yes,--you don't count!"
Lawrence's face fell a little at this last remark, and there was
silence again for a few moments.
"I'm not sure that I'll tell you, after all," said Fanny, at last.
The quiet lids were half closed over the grey eyes, and she seemed to
be thinking out something. Lawrence was unconsciously wondering why
he did not think the white lashes ugly, especially when she had just
told him that he did not 'count.'
"Are you sure you won't tell?" asked the young girl, after another
long pause.
"If you don't want me to, of course I won't," answered Lawrence,
mechanically.
"It's a sort of confession," said Fanny. "That's the reason why I
don't like to tell you. It's cowardly to be afraid of confessing
that one's been an idiot, so I am going to do it at once and get it
over."
"It's a startling confession!" laughed Lawrence, softly. "I don't
believe it. Is that all?"
"If you laugh at me, I won't tell you anything more. Then you'll be
sorry."
"Shall I?"
"Yes."
"All right! I'm serious now," said Lawrence.
"Don't you want to smoke?" asked Fanny, suddenly. "I wish you would.
I should be less--less nervous, you know."
"What a curious idea! But I'll smoke if you like."
He proceeded to fill and light a big brier-root pipe.
"I like the smell of a pipe," said Fanny, watching the operation.
"I'm so tired of the everlasting cigarette."
"I'm ready," Lawrence said, puffing slowly into the still, hot air.
"Are you sure you won't laugh at me? Well, I'll tell you. I liked
Mr. Brinsley awfully--at first."
Lawrence looked at her quickly and took his pipe from his mouth.
"Not really?" he exclaimed, only half-interrogatively, but with a
change of colour. "But then--well--I don't suppose you mean anything
particular by that," he added, to comfort himself. "You don't mean
that you--" He stopped.
Fanny nodded slowly, and the blush that rose in her face reddened her
sunny complexion.
"Yes. That's what I mean. I cared for him, you know,--that sort of
thing."
"It hasn't taken you long to get over it, at all events," answered
Lawrence, gravely, and wondering inwardly why she made the
extraordinary confession, seeing that it hurt him and could do her no
good.
"No--it hasn't taken long, has it? That's what frightens me. If I
weren't frightened, I shouldn't talk to you about it."
"I don't understand--why are you frightened? Especially since you've
got over it. I don't see--"
"I thought you might," said Fanny, enigmatically.
A long silence followed, this time. Lawrence crossed his hands on
his knees as Fanny was doing, holding his pipe, which was going out.
They both sat staring at the opposite bank of the brook.
The vital loveliness of the still woods was all around them,
whispering in their young ears, breathing into their young nostrils
the breath of nature's life, caressing them with bountiful warmth.
They sat side by side, very near, staring at the opposite bank, and
for a long time no words passed their lips. At last the young girl
spoke in a low and almost monotonous tone.
"He has an influence over people who come near him," she said.
"Besides, that kind of man appeals to me. It's natural, isn't it?
I'm so fond of all sorts of things out-of-doors, that I can't help
admiring a man who can do everything so well. And he's a splendid
creature. You've never seen him ride. You don't know--it's
wonderful! I wish you could see him on that thoroughbred Teddy Van
De Water has brought up this summer--Teddy's a good rider, but he
can't do anything with the mare. You ought to see Brinsley--Mr.
Brinsley--you'd understand better."
"But I understand perfectly, as it is," said Lawrence, rather
gloomily.
"Do you? I wonder whether you really do. Do you think there's
any--any excuse for me?"
The words were spoken in a faltering shamefaced way very unlike
Fanny's usual manner.
"As though you needed any excuse for taking a fancy to any one who
pleases you!" answered Lawrence, rather coldly. "Aren't you
perfectly free to like anybody who turns up?"
During the pause which followed, he slowly relighted his pipe, which
had quite gone out by this time.
"I was afraid you wouldn't understand," said Fanny, in a disappointed
tone.
"But I do--"
"No--not what I mean. I hate explaining things, but I shall have to."
Louis Lawrence wondered vaguely what there could be to explain, and,
if there were anything, why she should be so anxious to explain to
him in particular.