Helen Buchanan was a person greatly in demand, and, in her migratory
existence, her pauses at her Aunt Grizel's little house near Eaton
Square were, though frequent, seldom long. When she did come, her
bedroom and her sitting-room were always waiting for her, as was Aunt
Grizel with her cheerful 'Well, my dear, glad to see you back again.'
Their mutual respect and trust were deep; their affection, too, though
it was seldom expressed. She knew Aunt Grizel to the ground, and Aunt
Grizel knew her to the ground--almost; and they were always pleased to
be together.
Helen's sitting-room, where she could see any one she liked and at any
time she liked, was behind the dining-room on the ground floor, and from
its window one saw a small neat garden with a plot of grass, bordering
flower-beds, a row of little fruit-trees, black-branched but brightly
foliaged, and high walls that looked as though they were built out of
sooty plum cake. Aunt Grizel's cat, Pharaoh, sleek, black, and stalwart,
often lay on the grass plot in the sunlight; he was lying there now,
languidly turned upon his side, with outstretched feet and drowsily
blinking eyes, when Helen and her cousin, Gerald Digby, talked together
on the day after her return from Paris.
Gerald Digby stood before the fireplace looking with satisfaction at his
companion. He enjoyed looking at Helen, for he admired her more than any
woman he knew. It was always a pleasure to see her again; and, like Aunt
Grizel, he trusted and respected her deeply, though again, like Aunt
Grizel, he did not, perhaps, know her quite down to the ground. He
thought, however, that he did; he knew that Helen was as intimate with
nobody in the world as with him, not even with Aunt Grizel, and it was
one of his most delightful experiences to saunter through all the
chambers of Helen's mind, convinced that every door was open to him.
Gerald Digby was a tall and very slender man; he tilted forward when he
walked, and often carried his hands in his pockets. He had thick,
mouse-coloured hair, which in perplexed or meditative moments he often
ruffled by rubbing his hand through it, and even when thus disordered it
kept its air of fashionable grace. His large, long nose, his finely
curved lips and eyelids, had a delicately carved look, as though the
sculptor had taken great care over the details of his face. His brown
eyes had thick, upturned lashes, and were often in expression absent and
irresponsible, but when he looked at any one, intent and merry, like a
gay dog's eyes. And of the many charming things about Gerald Digby the
most charming was his smile, which was as infectious as a child's, and
exposed a joyous array of large white teeth.
He was smiling at his cousin now, for she was telling him, dryly, yet
with a mocking humour all her own, of her Paris fiasco that had delayed
her return to London by a fortnight, and, by the expense it had
entailed upon her, had deprived her of the new hat and dress that she
had hoped in Paris to secure. Talking of Paris led to the letter she had
sent him four or five days ago. 'About this rich American,' said Gerald;
'is she really going to take Merriston, do you think? It's awfully good
of you, Helen, to try and get a tenant for me.'
'I don't know that you'd call her rich--not as Americans go; but I
believe she will take Merriston. She wanted to take it at once, on
faith; but I insisted that she must see it first.'
'You must have cried up the dear old place for her to be so eager.'
'I think she is eager about pleasing me,' said Helen. 'I told her that I
loved the place and hadn't been there for years, and that moved her very
much. She has taken a great fancy to me.'
'Really,' said Gerald. 'Why?'
'I'm sure I don't know. She is a dear little person, but rather funny.'
'Of course, there is no reason why any one shouldn't take a fancy to
you,' said Gerald, smiling; 'only--to that extent--in so short a time.'
'I appealed to her pity, I think; she came in and took care of me, and
was really unspeakably kind. And she seemed to get tremendously
interested in me. But then, she seemed capable of getting tremendously
interested in lots of things. I've noticed that Americans often take
things very seriously.'
'And you became great pals?'
'Yes, I suppose we did.'
'She interested you?'
Helen smiled a little perplexedly, and lit a cigarette before
answering. 'Well, no; I can't say that she did that; but that, probably,
was my own fault.'
'Why didn't she interest you?' Gerald went on, taking a cigarette from
the case she offered. He was fond of such desultory pursuit of a
subject; he and Helen spent hours in idle exchanges of impression.
Helen's answer was hardly illuminating: 'She wasn't interesting.'
'It was rather interesting of her to take such an interest in you,' said
Gerald subtly.
'No.' Helen warmed to the theme. It had indeed perplexed her, and she
was glad to unravel her impressions to this understanding listener. 'No,
that's just what it wasn't; it might have been if one hadn't felt her a
person so easily affected. She had--how can I put it?--it seems brutal
when she is such a dear--but she had so little stuff in her; it was as
if she had to find it all the time in other things and people. She is
like a glass of water that would like to be wine, and she has no wine in
her; it could only be poured in, and there's not room for much. At best
she can only be _eau rougie_.'
Gerald laughed. 'How you see things, and say them! Poor Miss
Jakes!--that's her name, isn't it? She sounds tame.'
'She is tame.'
'Is she young, pretty?'
'Not young, about my age; not pretty, but it's a nice face; wistful,
with large, quite lovely eyes. She knows a lot about everything, and has
been everywhere, and has kept all her illusions intact--a queer mixture
of information and innocence. It's difficult to keep one's mind on what
she's saying; there is never any background to it. She wants something,
but she doesn't know whether it's what other people want or whether it's
what she wants, so that she can't want anything very definitely.'
Gerald still laughed. 'How you must have been taking her in!'
'I suppose I must have been, though I didn't know it. But I did like
her, you know. I liked her very much. A glass of water is a nice thing
sometimes.'
'Nicer than _eau rougie_; I'm afraid she's _eau rougie_.'
'_Eau rougie_ may be nice, too, if one is tired and thirsty and needs
mild refreshment, not altogether tasteless, and not at all intoxicating.
She was certainly that to me. I was very much touched by her kindness.'
'I shall be touched if she'll take Merriston. I'm fearfully hard up. I
suppose it would only be a little let; but that would be better than
nothing.'
'She might stay for the winter if she liked it. I shan't try to make her
like it, but I'll do my best to make her stay on if she does, and with a
clear conscience, for I think that her staying will depend on her seeing
me.'
'Wouldn't that mean that she'd be a great deal on your hands?'
'I shouldn't mind that; we get on very well. She will be here next week,
you know. You must come to tea and meet her.'
'Well, I don't know. I don't think that I'm particularly eager to meet
her,' Gerald confessed jocosely.
'You'll have to meet her a good deal if you are to see much of me,' said
Helen; on which he owned that, with that compulsion put upon him, he
and Miss Jakes might become intimates.
Gerald Digby was a young man who did very little work. He had been
vaguely intended, by an affectionate but haphazard family, for the
diplomatic service, but it was found, after he had done himself some
credit at Eton and Oxford, that the family resources didn't admit of
this obviously suitable career for him; and an aged and wealthy uncle,
who had been looked to confidently for succour, married at the moment,
most unfeelingly, so that Gerald's career had to be definitely
abandoned. Another relation found him a berth in the City, where he
might hope to amass quite a fortune; but Gerald soon said that he far
preferred poverty. He thought that he would like to paint and be an
artist; he had a joyful eye for delicate, minute forms of beauty, and
was most happily occupied when absorbed in Japanese-like studies of
transient loveliness--a bird in flight, a verdant grasshopper on a
wheat-blade, the tangled festoons of a wild convolvulus spray. His
talent, however, though genuine, could hardly supply him with a
livelihood, and he would have been seriously put to it had not his
father's death left him a tiny income, while a half-informal
secretaryship to a political friend, offered him propitiously at the
same time, gave him leisure for his painting as well as for a good many
other pleasant things. He had leisure, in especial, for going from
country-house to country-house, where he was immensely in demand, and
where he hunted, danced, and acted in private theatricals--usually in
company with his cousin Helen. Helen's position in life was very much
like his own, but that she hadn't even an informal secretaryship to
depend upon. He had known Helen all his life, and she was almost like a
sister, only nicer; for he associated sisters with his own brood, who
were lean, hunting ladies, pleasant, but monotonous and inarticulate.
Helen was very articulate and very various. He loved to look at her, as
he loved to look at birds and flowers, and he loved to talk with her. He
had many opportunities to look and talk. They stayed at the same houses
in the country, and in London, when she was with old Miss Buchanan, he
usually saw her every day. If he didn't drop in for a moment on his way
to work at ten-thirty in the morning, he dropped in to tea; and if his
or Helen's day were too full to admit of this, he managed to come in for
a goodnight chat after a dinner or before a dance. He enjoyed Helen's
talk and Helen's appearance most of all, he thought, at these late
hours, when, a little weary and jaded, in evening dress and cloak, she
lit her invariable cigarette, and mused with him over the events and
people of the day. He liked Helen's way of talking about people; they
knew an interminable array of them, many involved in enlivening
complications, yet Helen never gossiped; the musing impersonality and
impartiality with which she commented and surmised lifted her themes to
a realm almost of art; she was pungent, yet never malicious, and the
tolerant lucidity of her insight was almost benign.
Her narrow face, leaning back in its dark aureole of hair, her strange
eyes and bitter-sweet lips--all dimmed, as it were, by drowsiness and
smoke, and yet never more intelligently awake than at these nocturnal
hours--remained with him as most typical of Helen's most significant and
charming self. It was her aspect of mystery and that faint hint of
bitterness that he found so charming; Helen herself he never thought of
as mysterious. Mystery was a mere outward asset of her beauty, like the
powdery surface of a moth's wing. He didn't think of Helen as
mysterious, perhaps because he thought little about her at all; he only
looked and listened while she made him think about everything but
herself, and he felt always happy and altogether at ease in her
presence. There seemed, indeed, no reason for thinking about a person
whom one had known all one's life long.
And Helen was more than the best of company and the loveliest of
objects; she was at once comrade and counsellor. He depended upon her
more than upon any one. Comically helpless as he often found himself, he
asked her advice about everything, and always received the wisest.
He had had often, though not so much in late years, to ask her advice
about girls, for in spite of his financial ineligibility he was so
engaging a person that he found himself continually drawn to the verge
of decisive flirtations. His was rarely the initiative; he was
responsive and affectionate and not at all susceptible, and Helen, who
knew girls of her world to the bone, could accurately gauge the effect
upon him of the pleading coquetry at which they were such adepts. She
could gauge them the better, no doubt, from having herself no trace of
coquetry. Men often liked her, but often found her cold and cynical, and
even suspected her of conceit, especially since it was known that she
had refused many excellent opportunities for establishing herself in
life. She was also suspected by many of abysmal cleverness, and this
reputation frightened admiring but uncomplicated young men more than
anything else. Now, when her first youth was past, men more seldom fell
in love with her and more frequently liked her; they had had time to
find out that if she were cold she was also very kind, and that if
abysmally clever, she could adapt her cleverness to pleasant, trivial
uses.
Gerald, when he thought at all about her, thought of Helen as indeed
cold, clever, and cynical; but these qualities never oppressed him,
aware from the first, as he had been, of the others, and he found in
them, moreover, veritable shields and bucklers for himself. It was to
some one deeply experienced, yet quite unwarped by personal emotions,
that he brought his recitals of distress and uncertainty. Lady Molly was
a perfect little dear, but could he go on with it? How could he if he
would? She hadn't any money, and her people would be furious; she
herself, he felt sure, would be miserable in no time, if they did marry.
They wouldn't even have enough--would they, did Helen think?--for love
in a cottage, and Molly would hate love in a cottage. They would have to
go about living on their relations and friends, as he now did, more or
less; but with a wife and babies, how could one? Did Helen think one
could? Gerald would finish dismally, standing before her with his hands
thrust deeply into his pockets and a ruffled brow of inquiry. Or else it
was the pretty Miss Oliver who had him--half alarmed, half enchanted--in
her toils, and Gerald couldn't imagine what she was going to do with
him. For such entanglements Helen's advice had always shown a way out,
and for his uncertainties--though she never took the responsibility of
actual guidance--her reflective questionings, her mere reflective
silences, were illuminating. They made clear for him, as for her, that
recklessness could only be worth while if one were really--off one's own
bat, as it were--'in love'; and that, this lacking, recklessness was
folly sure to end in disaster. 'Wait, either until you care so much that
you must, or else until you meet some one so nice, so rich, and so
suitable that you may,' said Helen. 'If you are not careful you will
find yourself married to some one who will bore you and quarrel with you
on twopence a year.'
'You must be careful for me,' said Gerald. 'Please warn and protect.'
And Helen replied that she would always do her best for him.
It had never occurred to Gerald to turn the tables on Helen and tell her
that she ought to marry. His imagination was not occupied with Helen's
state, though once, after a conversation with old Miss Buchanan, he
remarked to Helen, looking at her with a vague curiosity, that it was a
pity she hadn't taken Lord Henry or Mr. Fergusson. 'Miss Buchanan tells
me you might have been one of the first hostesses in London if you
hadn't thrown away your chances.'
'I'm all right,' said Helen.
'Yes, you yourself are; but after she dies?'
Helen owned, with a smile, that she could certainly do with some few
thousands a year; but that, in default of them, she could manage to
scrape along.
'But you've never had any better chances, have you?' said Gerald rather
tentatively. He might confide everything in Helen, but he realised, as a
restraining influence, that she never made any confidences, even to him,
who, he was convinced, knew her down to the ground.
Helen owned that she hadn't.
'Your aunt thinks it a dreadful pity. She's very much worried about
you.'
'It's late in the day for the poor dear to worry. The chances were over
long ago.'
'You didn't care enough?'
'I was young and foolish enough to want to be in love when I married,'
said Helen, smiling at him with her half-closed eyes.
And Gerald said that, yes, he would have expected that from her; and
with this dismissed the subject from his mind, taking it for granted
that Helen's disengaged, sustaining, and enlivening spinsterhood would
always be there for his solace and amusement.