Borden's car came to a standstill in the avenue, and Marcia looked
across the strip of green turf towards the cottage with a queer little
thrill of remembrance.
"You are sure you won't mind waiting?" she asked, as she sprang down.
"If there is any fatted calf about, I'll call you in."
Borden showed her his pockets, bulging with newspapers.
"I shall be perfectly content here," he said, "however long you may be.
I shall back the car on to the turf and read."
She nodded, turned away, lifted the latch of the gate and made her way
towards the cottage,--curiously silent, and with no visible sign of
habitation except for the smoke curling up from the chimney. As she
drew nearer to the rustic entrance, she hesitated. A rush of those
very sensations at which she had so often gently mocked swept through
her consciousness, unsteadying and bewildering her. Mandeleys,
imposing in its grim stillness, seemed to be throwing out shadows
towards her, catching her up in a whirlpool of memories, half
sentimental, half tragical. It was in the little cottage garden where
she now stood, and in the woods beyond, that she had wandered with that
strange new feeling in her heart of which she was, even at that moment,
intensely conscious, gazing through the mists of her inexperience
towards the new world and new heaven which her love was unfolding
before her. A hundred forgotten fancies flashed into her brain. She
remembered, with a singular and most unnerving accuracy, the silent
vigils which she had spent, half hidden amongst those tall hollyhocks.
She had seen the grey twilight of morning pass, seen the mists roll
away and, turret by turret, the great house stand out like some fairy
palace fashioned from space in a single night. She had seen the
thrushes hop from the shrubberies and coverts on to the dew-spangled
lawn, had heard their song, growing always in volume, had seen the
faint sunlight flash in the windows, before she had crept back to her
room. Another day in that strange turmoil which had followed the
coming of her love! She had watched shooting parties assemble in the
drive outside, her father in command, she herself hidden yet watchful,
her eyes always upon one figure, her thoughts with him. And then the
nights--the summer nights--when men and women in evening costume
strolled down from the house. She could see their white shirt fronts
glistening in the twilight. Again she heard the firm yet loitering
step and the quiet, still voice which had changed the world for her.
"Is Vont about, Miss Marcia?" she would hear him say. "I want to have
a talk with him about the partridge drives to-morrow." She closed her
eyes. The smell of the honeysuckle and the early cottage roses seemed
suddenly almost stupefying. There were a few seconds--perhaps even a
minute--before Vont had donned his brown velveteen coat and issued from
the cottage--just time for a whispered word, a glance, a touch of the
fingers.--Marcia felt her knees shake as she lingered underneath the
porch. She was swept with recalcitrant memories, stinging like the
lash of a whip. Perhaps this new wisdom of hers was, after all, a
delusion, the old standards of her Calvinistic childhood unassailable.
Then, for the first time, she was conscious of a familiar figure.
Richard Vont was seated in a hard kitchen chair at the end of the
garden, with a book upon his knee and his face turned to Mandeleys. At
the sound of her little exclamation he turned his head. At first it
was clear that he did not recognise his visitor. He laid down the book
and rose to his feet. Marcia came a few steps towards him and then
paused. Several very ingenious openings escaped her altogether.
"Father," she began, a little hesitatingly, "you see, I've come to see
you. Are you glad?"
He stood looking at her--a man of rather more than middle height but
bowed, with silvery hair and a little patch of white whiskers. The
rest of his face was clean-shaven, still hard and brown as in his
youth, and his eyes were like steel.
"No," he answered, "I am not glad. Since you are here, though, take
this chair. I will fetch another while I hear what you have to say."
"Shall we go inside?" she suggested.
He shook his head.
"Your mother lived and died there," he reminded her.
Marcia set her teeth.
"I suppose she walked in the garden sometimes," she said resentfully.
"The garden is different," he declared. "The earth changes from
generation to generation, just as the flowers here throw out fresh
blossoms and the weeds come and go. But my rooftree stands where it
always did. Wait."
He disappeared into the house and returned in a few moments with a
chair which he placed a few feet away from Marcia. Then he sat and
looked at her steadily.
"So you are Marcia," he said. "You've grown well-looking."
"Marcia--your daughter," she reminded him gently. "Are you going to
forget that altogether?"
"Not," he replied, "if you are in need of succour or help, but I judge
from your appearance that you need neither. You are flesh of my flesh,
as I well know."
"I want nothing from you, father, except a little kindness," she
pleaded.
His hands trembled.
"Kindness," he repeated. "That's strange hearing. You are without
friends, perhaps? You made some, maybe, and they heard of your
disgrace, and they've cast you off?"
She shook her head.
"No, it isn't that at all. I have many friends, and they most of them
know my history."
"Friends of your own sort, then!"
Marcia moved uneasily in her chair.
"Father," she said gently, "don't you sometimes think that your views
of life are a little narrow? I am very sorry indeed for what I did,
inasmuch as it brought unhappiness to you. For the rest, I have
nothing to regret."
He was breathing a little harder now.
"Nothing to regret?" he muttered.
"Nothing," she repeated firmly. "For many years the man who took me
away from you gave me everything I asked of him in life, everything he
promised. He is still willing to do the same. If any change comes
into our relations, now or in the future, it will be my doing, not his."
"Meaning," he demanded, "that you've seen the wickedness of it?"
"Meaning nothing of the sort," she replied. "I want you to try and
realise, father, if you can, that I have passed into a larger world
than you or this little village community here know very much about. I
have written books and been praised for them by men whose praise is
worth having. There are plenty of perfectly good and well-living
people who know what I have done and who are glad to be my friends.
There is one who wants to marry me."
Richard Vont looked at her long and steadily. Marcia was, as usual,
dressed with extreme simplicity, but her clothes were always good, and
economy in boots and hats was a vice which she had never practised.
When she told him that she had passed into a world apart from his, he
realised it. The only wonder was that she had ever been his daughter!
"To marry you!" he repeated. "It's one of those of your own loose way
of thinking, eh? One of those who have forgotten the laws of God and
have set up for themselves some graven image in which there's nought of
the truth?"
"The man who wishes to marry me, father," she said warmly, "is a man of
honour and position. Can't you believe me when I assure you that there
is another way of looking at what you consider so terrible? I have
been as faithful to my vows as you to your marriage ones. The man whom
I am told you still hate has never wavered in his loyalty to me, any
more than I have in my fidelity to him. Can't you believe that to some
extent, at least, we have sanctified our love?"
James Vont passed his hand a little wearily over his forehead.
"It's blasphemous gibberish that you're talking," he declared. "If you
had come back to me, Marcia, in rags and in want, maybe there is
something in my heart would have gone, and I'd have taken you and we'd
have found a home somewhere far away. But to see you sitting there,
soft and well-spoken, speaking of your success, pleased with your life,
turns that very hatred you spoke of into fury! You and your learning
and your writing of books! Why, you're ignorant, woman, more ignorant
than the insects about you. You don't know right from wrong."
"Father," she pleaded--
"Aye, but listen," he went on. "You've children, eh?"
"No," she answered softly.
"No children to bear your shame, eh? And why not?"
She looked for a moment into his eyes, and then away.
"That may be the one weak spot," she confessed.
"The one weak spot!" he repeated bitterly. "Shall I tell you what you
are, you women who live cheerfully with the men you sell yourselves to,
and defy the laws of God and the teaching of the Bible? You're just
wastrels and Jezebels. Ay, and there's the garden gate, Marcia, and my
heart's as hard as a flint, even though the tears are in your eyes and
you look at me as your mother used to look. It's no such tears as
you're shedding as'll bring you back into my heart. Your very
prosperity's an offence. You carry the price of your shame on your
back and in your smooth speech and in this false likeness of yours to
the world you don't belong to. If it's duty that's brought you here,
you'd better not have come."
Marcia rose to her feet.
"You're very hard, father," she said simply.
[Illustration: "You're very hard, father," she said simply.]
"The ways of the transgressors are hard," he replied, pointing still
towards the gate. "If you'd come here in shame and humiliation, if
you'd come here as one as had learnt the truth, you'd have found me all
that you sought. But you come here a very ignorant woman, Marcia, and
you leave me a little harder than ever before, and you leave the curses
that choke my throat a little hotter, a little more murderous."
His clenched fist was pointing towards Mandeleys, his face was like
granite. Marcia turned and left him without a word, opened the gate,
walked across the little strip of turf, and half shrank from, half
clung to the hand which helped her up into the car.
"Get away quickly, please," she implored him. "Don't talk to me,
James. Outside the gates as quickly as you can go!"
He started his engine, and they drove off, through the lodge gates into
the country lane, where the hedges were beautiful with fresh green
foliage and fragrant with early honeysuckle.
"To London," she begged. "Don't stop--anywhere yet."
He nodded and drove a little faster, his eyes always upon the road. It
was not until they had reached the heath country and the great open
spaces around Newmarket that a little colour came back into her cheeks.
"It wasn't a success, James," she said quietly.
"I was afraid it mightn't be," he admitted.
"Nothing but a Drury Lane heroine would have moved him," she went on,
with an uneasy little laugh. "If I could have gone back in rags, in a
snowstorm, with a child in my arms, he'd have forgiven me. As I am
now, I am an offence to all that he holds right, and his ideas are like
steel cables--you can't twist or bend them."
Borden nodded. He relaxed his speed a little and glanced towards his
companion.
"You know what our friend said in that Russian manuscript I lent you,"
he reminded her: "'The primitive laws are for the primitive world.'"
"But what do we learn, Jim?" she asked him tremulously. "What is its
value? Is it sophistry or knowledge? I lived in that little cottage
once. I have smiled at the memory of those days so often. I did
homely tasks and dreamed of books and learning. To me it seems,
although my fingers are bleeding, that I have climbed. And to him--and
he looked just like something out of the Bible, Jim--I am nothing
more--"
"Don't," he interrupted. "He is of his world and you of yours. You
can't work out the sum you are trying to solve, there isn't any common
denominator."
"I don't know," she answered, a little pitifully. "There was a single
second, as I saw him sitting there with his Bible on his knee and
remembered that he was a clean, well-living, honest man, when my heart
began to shake. I remembered that he was my father. It seems to me
that it is all wrong that there should be any difference between us. I
suddenly felt that a brain really didn't count for anything, after all,
that all the culture in the world wasn't so beautiful as a single right
feeling."
He slackened again the speed of the car. As far as they could see was
a great open space of moorland, with flaming bushes of yellow gorse,
little clumps of early heather, and, in the distance, a streak of blue
from the undergrowth of a long belt of firs. She looked about her for
a moment and closed her eyes.
"There," he said, "is one of the simplest phases of beauty, the world
has ever given us--flowers and trees, an open space and a west wind.
There isn't any one who can look at these things and be happy who isn't
somewhere near the right path, Marcia."
She leaned back, her eyes fixed dreamily upon the blue distance.
"Just drive on, please, Jim," she begged.