Althea went down to Merriston House in the middle of July. Helen
accompanied her to see her safely installed and to set the very torpid
social ball rolling. There were not many neighbours, but Helen assembled
them all. She herself could stay only a few days. She was bound, until
the middle of August, in a rush of engagements, and meanwhile Althea,
rather ruefully, was forced to fall back on Miss Buckston for
companionship. She had always, till now, found Miss Buckston's cheerful
dogmatism fortifying, and, even when it irritated her, instructive; but
she had now new standards of interest, and new sources of refreshment,
and, shut up with Miss Buckston for a rainy week, she felt as never
before the defects of this excellent person's many qualities.
She had fires lighted, much to Miss Buckston's amusement, and sat a good
deal by the blaze in the drawing-room, controlling her displeasure when
Miss Buckston, dressed in muddy tweed and with a tweed cap pulled down
over her brows, came striding in from a ten-mile tramp and said, pulling
open all the windows, 'You are frightfully frusty in here.'
It was not 'frusty.' Althea had a scientific regard for ventilation, and
a damp breeze from the garden blew in at the furthest window. She had
quite enough air.
Miss Buckston was also very critical of Merriston House, and pointed out
the shabbiness of the chintz and faded carpets. The garden, she said,
was shamefully neglected, and she could not conceive how people could
bear to let a decent place like this go to ruin. 'But he's a slack
creature, Gerald Digby, I've heard.'
Althea coldly explained that Mr. Digby was too poor to live at Merriston
and to keep it up. She did not herself in the least mind the shabbiness.
'Oh, I don't mind it,' said Miss Buckston. 'I only think he's done
himself very well in getting you to take the place in this condition.
How much do you give for it?'
Althea, more coldly, named the sum. It was moderate; Miss Buckston had
to grant that, though but half-satisfied that there was no intention to
'do' her friend. 'When once you get into the hands of hard-up
fashionable folk,' she said, 'it's as well to look sharp.'
Althea did not quite know what to say to this. She had never in the past
opposed Miss Buckston, and it would be difficult to tell her now that
she took too much upon herself. At a hint of hesitancy, she knew, Miss
Buckston would pass to and fro over her like a steam-roller, nearly as
noisy, and to her own mind as composedly efficient. Hesitancy or
contradiction she flattened and left behind her.
She had an air of owning Bach that became peculiarly vexatious to
Althea, who, in silence, but armed with new standards, was assembling
her own forces and observed, in casting an eye over them, that she had
heard five times as much music as Miss Buckston and might be granted the
right of an opinion on it. She took satisfaction in a memory of Miss
Buckston's face singing in the Bach choir--even at the time it had
struck her as funny--at a concert to which Althea had gone with her some
years ago in London. It was to see, for her own private delectation, a
weak point in Miss Buckston's iron-clad personality to remember how very
funny she could look. Among the serried ranks of singing heads hers had
stood out with its rubicund energy, its air of mastery, the shining of
its eye-glasses and of its large white teeth; and while she sang Miss
Buckston had jerked her head rhythmically to one side and beaten time
with her hand as if to encourage and direct her less competent
companions. Sometimes, now, she looked almost as funny, when she sat
down to the piano and gave forth a recitative.
After Bach, Woman's Suffrage was Miss Buckston's special theme, and,
suspecting a new hint of uncertainty in Althea, whose conviction she had
always taken for granted, she attacked her frequently and mercilessly.
'Pooh, my dear,' she would say, 'don't quote your frothy American women
to me. Americans have no social conscience. That's the trouble with you
all; rank individualists, every one of you. When the political attitude
of the average citizen is that of the ostrich keeping his head in the
sand so that he shan't see what the country's coming to, what can you
expect of the women? Your arguments don't affect the suffrage question,
they merely dismiss America. I shall lose my temper if you trot them
out to me.' Miss Buckston never lost her temper, however; other people's
opinions counted too little with her for that.
At the end of the first week Althea felt distinctly that though the
country, even under these dismal climatic conditions, might be
delightful if shared with some people, it was not delightful shared with
Miss Buckston. She did not like walking in the rain; she was a creature
of houses, cabs and carriages. The sober beauty of blotted silhouettes,
and misty, rolling hills at evening when the clouds lifted over the
sunset, did not appeal to her. She wished that she had stayed in London;
she wished that Helen and Mr. Digby were with her; she was even glad
that Aunt Julia and the girls were coming.
There was a welcome diversion afforded for her, when Aunt Julia came, by
the prompt hostility that declared itself between her and Miss Buckston.
Aunt Julia was not a person to allow a steam-roller to pass over her
without protest, and Althea felt that she herself had been cowardly when
she saw how Aunt Julia resented, for them both, Miss Buckston's methods.
Miss Buckston had a manner of saying rude things in sincere
unconsciousness that they could offend anybody. She herself did not take
offence easily; she was, as she would have said, 'tough.' But Mrs.
Pepperell had all the sensitiveness--for herself and for others--of her
race, the British race, highly strung with several centuries of
transplantation to an electric climate. If she was rude it was never
unconsciously so. After her first talk with Miss Buckston, in which the
latter, as was her wont, told her a number of unpleasant facts about
America and the Americans, Mrs. Pepperell said to her niece, 'What an
intolerable woman!'
'She doesn't mean it,' said Althea feebly.
'Perhaps not,' said Aunt Julia; 'but I intend that she shall see what I
mean.'
Althea's feeling was of mingled discomfort and satisfaction. Her
sympathies were with Aunt Julia, yet she felt a little guilty towards
Miss Buckston, for whom her affection was indeed wavering. Inner loyalty
having failed she did not wish outer loyalty to be suspected, and in all
the combats that took place she kept in the background and only hoped to
see Aunt Julia worst Miss Buckston. But the trouble was that Aunt Julia
never did worst her. Even when, passing beyond the bounds of what she
considered decency, she became nearly as outspoken as Miss Buckston,
that lady maintained her air of cheerful yet impatient tolerance. She
continued to tell them that the American wife and mother was the most
narrow, the most selfish, the most complacent of all wives and mothers;
and, indeed, to Miss Buckston's vigorous virginity, all wives and
mothers, though sociologically necessary, belonged to a slightly
inferior, more rudimentary species. The American variety, she said, were
immersed in mere domesticity or social schemes and squabbles. 'Oh, they
talked. I never heard so much talk in all my life as when I was over
there,' said Miss Buckston; 'but I couldn't see that they got anything
done with it. They had debates about health, and yet one could hardly
for love or money get a window open in a train; and they had debates on
the ethics of citizenship, and yet you are governed by bosses. Voluble
and inefficient creatures, I call them.'
Aunt Julia, conscious of her own honourable career, with its
achievements in enlightened philanthropy and its background of careful
study, heard this with inexpressible ire; but when she was dragged to
the execrable taste of a retaliation, and pointed to the British
countryside matron, as they saw her at Merriston--a creature, said Aunt
Julia, hardly credible in her complacency and narrowness, Miss Buckston
rejoined with an unruffled smile: 'Ah, we'll wake them up. They've good
stuff in them--good, staying stuff; and they do a lot of useful work in
keeping down Radicalism and keeping up the sentiment of our imperial
responsibilities and traditions. They are solid, at all events, not
hollow.' And to this poor Aunt Julia, whose traditions did not allow her
the retort of sheer brutality, could find no answer.
The absurd outcome of the situation was that Althea and Aunt Julia came
to look for succour to the girls. The girls were able--astonishingly so,
to cope with Miss Buckston. In the first place, they found her
inexpressibly funny, and neither Althea nor Aunt Julia quite succeeded
at that; and in the second, they rather liked her; they did not argue
with her, they did not take her seriously for a moment; they only played
buoyantly about her. A few months before, Althea would have been gravely
disturbed by their lack of reverence; she saw it now with guilty
satisfaction. Miss Buckston, among the nets they spread for her, plunged
and floundered like a good-tempered bull--at first with guileless
acquiescence in the game, and then with growing bewilderment. They
flouted gay cloaks before her dizzy eyes, and planted ribboned darts in
her quivering shoulders. Even Althea could not accuse them of
aggressiveness or rudeness. They never put themselves forward; they were
there already. They never twisted the tail of the British lion; they
never squeezed the eagle; they were far too secure under his wings for
that. The bird, indeed, had grown since Althea's youth, and could no
longer be carried about as a hostile trophy. They took it for granted,
gaily and kindly, that America was 'God's country,' and that all others
were schools or playgrounds for her children. They were filled with a
confident faith in her future and in their own part in making that
future better. And something in the faith was infectious. Even Miss
Buckston felt it. Miss Buckston felt it, indeed, more than Althea, whose
attitude towards her own native land had always been one of affectionate
apology.
'Nice creatures,' said Miss Buckston, 'undisciplined and mannerless as
they are; but that's a failing they share with our younger generation. I
see more hope for your country in that type than in anything else you
can show me. They are solid, and don't ape anything.'
So by degrees a species of friendship grew up between Miss Buckston and
the girls, who said that she was a jolly old thing, and more fun than a
goat, especially when she sang Bach. Mildred and Dorothy sang
exceptionally well and were highly equipped musicians.
Althea could not have said why it was, but this progress to friendliness
between her cousins and Miss Buckston made her feel, as she had felt in
the Paris hotel drawing-room over a month ago, jaded and unsuccessful.
So did the fact that the vicar's eldest son, a handsome young soldier
with a low forehead and a loud laugh, fell in love with Dorothy. That
young men should fall in love with them was another of the pleasant
things that Mildred and Dorothy took for granted. Their love affairs,
frank and rather infantile, were of a very different calibre from the
earnest passions that Althea had aroused--passions usually initiated by
intellectual sympathy and nourished on introspection and a constant
interchange of serious literature.
It was soon evident that Dorothy, though she and Captain Merton became
the best of friends, had no intention of accepting him. Mrs. Merton, the
vicar's wife, had at first been afraid lest she should, not having then
ascertained what Mrs. Pepperell's fortune might be; but after satisfying
herself on this point by a direct cross-examination of Althea, she was
as much amazed as incensed when her boy told her ruefully that he had
been refused three times. Althea was very indignant when she realised
that Mrs. Merton, bland and determined in her latest London hat, was
trying to find out whether Dorothy was a good enough match for Captain
Merton, and it was pleasant to watch Mrs. Merton's subsequent
discomfiture. At the same time, she felt that to follow in Mildred and
Dorothy's triumphant wake was hardly what she had expected to do at
Merriston House.
Other things, too, were discouraging. Helen had hardly written at all.
She had sent a postcard from Scotland to say that she would have to put
off coming till later in August. She had sent another, in answer to a
long letter of Althea's, in which Gerald had been asked to come with
her, to say that Gerald was yachting, and that she was sure he would
love to come some time in the autumn, if his plans allowed it; and
Althea, on reading this, felt certain that if she counted for little
with Helen, she counted for nothing with Mr. Digby. Whom did she count
with? That was the question that once more assailed her as she saw
herself sink into insignificance beside Mildred and Dorothy. If Mildred
and Dorothy counted for more than she, where was she to look for
response and sympathy? And now, once again, as if in answer to these
dismal questionings, came a steamer letter from Franklin Winslow Kane,
announcing his immediate arrival. Althea had thought very little about
Franklin in these last weeks; her mind had been filled with those
foreground figures that now seemed to have become uncertain and
vanishing. And it was not so much that Franklin came forward as that
there was nothing else to look at; not so much that he counted, as that
to count so much, in every way, for him might almost atone for counting
with no one else. Physically, mentally, morally, Franklin's
appreciations of her were deep; they were implied all through his
letter, which was at once sober and eager. He said that he would stay at
Merriston House for 'just as long as ever she would let him.' Merely to
be near her was to him, separated as he was from her for so much of his
life, an unspeakable boon. Franklin rarely dealt in demonstrative
speeches, but, in this letter, after a half-shy prelude to his own
daring, he went on to say: 'Perhaps, considering how long it's been
since I saw you, you'll let me kiss your beautiful hands when we meet.'
Franklin had only once kissed her beautiful hands, years ago, on the
occasion of her first touched refusal of him. She had severe scruples as
to encouraging, by such graciousness, a person you didn't intend to
marry; but she really thought, thrilling a little as she read the
sentence, that this time, perhaps, Franklin might. Franklin himself
never thrilled her; but the words he wrote renewed in her suddenly a
happy self-confidence. Who, after all, was Franklin's superior in
insight? Wrapped in the garment of his affection, could she not see with
equanimity Helen's vagueness and Gerald's indifference? Why, when one
came to look at it from the point of view of the soul, wasn't Franklin
their superior in every way? It needed some moral effort to brace
herself to the inquiry. She couldn't deny that Franklin hadn't their
charm; but charm was a very superficial thing compared to moral beauty.
Althea could not have faced the perturbing fact that charm, to her,
counted for more than goodness. She clung to her ethical valuations of
life, feeling, instinctively, that only in this category lay her own
significance. To abandon the obvious weights and measures was to find
herself buffeted and astray in a chaotic and menacing universe. Goodness
was her guide, and she could cling to it if the enchanting
will-o'-the-wisp did not float into sight to beckon and bewilder her.
She indignantly repudiated the conception of a social order founded on
charm rather than on solid worth; yet, like other frail mortals, she
found herself following what allured her nature rather than what
responded to the neatly tabulated theories of her mind. It was her
beliefs and her instincts that couldn't be made to tally, and in her
refusal to see that they did not tally lay her danger, as now, when with
an artificially simplified attitude she waited eagerly for the coming of
somebody who would restore to her her own sense of significance.
Franklin Winslow Kane arrived late one afternoon, and Althea arranged
that she should greet him alone. Miss Buckston, Aunt Julia, the girls,
and Herbert Vaughan had driven over to a neighbouring garden-party, and
Althea alleged the arrival of her old friend as a very valid excuse. She
walked up and down the drawing-room, dressed in one of her prettiest
dresses; the soft warmth and light of the low sun filled the air, and
her heart expanded with it. She wondered if--ah, if only!--Franklin
would himself be able to thrill her, and her deep expectation almost
amounted to a thrill. Expectation culminated in a wave of excitement and
emotion as the door opened and her faithful lover stood before her.
Franklin Winslow Kane (he signed himself more expeditiously as Franklin
W. Kane) was a small, lean man. He had an air of tension, constant, yet
under such perfect control, that it counted as placidity rather than as
strain. His face was sallow and clean-shaven, and the features seemed
neatly drawn on a flat surface rather than modelled, so discreet and so
meagre were the sallies and shadows. His lips were calm and firmly
closed, and had always the appearance of smiling; of his eyes one felt
the bright, benignant beam rather than the shape or colour. His straight
stiff hair was shorn in rather odd and rather ugly lines along his
forehead and temples, and of his clothes the kindest thing to say was
that they were unobtrusive. Franklin had once said of himself, with
comic dispassionateness, that he looked like a cheap cigar, and the
comparison was apt. He seemed to have been dried, pressed, and moulded,
neatly and expeditiously, by some mechanical process that turned out
thousands more just like him. A great many things, during this process,
had been done to him, but they were commonplace, though complicated
things, and they left him, while curiously finished, curiously
undifferentiated. The hurrying streets of any large town in his native
land would, one felt, be full of others like him: good-tempered, shrewd,
alert, yet with an air of placidity, too, as though it were a world that
required effort and vigilance of one, and yet, these conditions
fulfilled, would always justify one's expectations. If differences there
were in Franklin Kane, they were to be sought for, they did not present
themselves; and he himself would have been the last to be conscious of
them. He didn't think of himself as differentiated; he didn't desire
differentiation.
He advanced now towards his beloved, after a slight hesitation, for the
sunlight in which she stood as well as her own radiant appearance seemed
to have dazzled him a little. Althea held out her hands, and the tears
came into her eyes; it was as if she hadn't known, until then, how
lonely she was. 'O Franklin, I'm so glad to see you,' she said.
He held her hands, gazing at her with a gentle yet intent rapture, and
he forgot, in a daring greater than any he had ever known, to kiss them.
Franklin never took anything for granted, and Althea knew that it was
because he saw her tears and saw her emotion that he could ask her now,
hesitatingly, yet with sudden confidence: 'Althea, it's been so
long--you are so lovely--it will mean nothing to you, I know; so may I
kiss you?'
Put like that, why shouldn't he? Conscience had not a qualm, and
Franklin had never seemed so dear to her. She smiled a sisterly benison
upon his request, and, still holding her hands, he leaned to her and
kissed her. Closing her eyes she wondered intently for a moment, able,
in the midst of her motion, to analyse it; for, yes, it had thrilled
her. She needed to be kissed, were it only Franklin who kissed her.
They went, hand in hand, to a sofa, and there she was able to show him
only the sisterly benignity that he knew so well. She questioned him
sweetly about his voyage, his health, his relatives--his only near
relative was a sister who taught in a college--and about their mutual
friends and his work. To all he replied carefully and calmly, though
looking at her delightedly while he spoke. He had a very deliberate,
even way of speaking, and in certain words so broadened the a's that,
almost doubled in length by this treatment, they sounded like little
bleats. His 'yes' was on two notes and became a dissyllable.
After he had answered all her questions he took up the thread himself.
He had tactfully relinquished her hand at a certain moment in her talk.
Althea well remembered his sensitiveness to any slightest mood in
herself; he was wonderfully imaginative when it came to any human
relation. He did not wait for her to feel consciously that it was not
quite fitting that her hand should be held for so long.
'This is a nice old place you've got, Althea,' he said, looking about.
'Homelike and welcoming. I liked the look of it as I drove up. Have you
a lot of English people with you?'
'Only one; Miss Buckston, you know. Aunt Julia and the girls are here,
and Herbert Vaughan, their friend. You know Herbert Vaughan; such a nice
young creature; his mother is a Bostonian.'
'I know about him; I don't know him,' said Franklin, who indeed, as she
reflected, would not be likely to have met the fashionable Herbert. 'And
where is that attractive new friend of yours you wrote to me about--the
one you took care of in Paris--the Scotch lady?'
'Helen Buchanan? She is coming; she is in Scotland now.'
'Oh, she's coming. I am to see her, I hope.'
'You are to see everybody, dear Franklin,' said Althea, smiling upon
him. 'You are to stay, you know, for as long as you will.'
'That's sweet of you, Althea.' He looked at her. Her kindness still
buoyed him above his wonted level. He had never allowed himself to
become utterly hopeless, yet he had become almost resigned to hope
deferred; a pressing, present hope grew in him now. 'But it's ambiguous,
you know,' he went on, smiling back. 'If I'm to stay as long as I will,
I'm never to leave you, you know.'
Hope was becoming to Franklin. Althea felt herself colouring a little
under his eyes. 'You still feel that?' she said rather feebly.
'I'll always feel that.'
'It's very wonderful of you, Franklin. It makes me, sometimes, feel
guilty, as though I kept you from fuller happiness.'
'You can't do that. You are the only person who can give me fuller
happiness.'
'And I give you happiness, like this--even like this?--really?'
'Of course; but,' he smiled a little forcedly, 'I can't pretend it's
anything like what I want. I want a great deal.'
Althea's eyes fell before the intent and gentle gaze.
'Dear Franklin--I wish----'
'You wish you could? I wonder--I wonder, Althea, if you feel a little
nearer to it just now. I seem to feel, myself, that you are.'
Was she? How she wished she were. Yet the wish was mixed with fear. She
said, faltering, 'Don't ask me now. I'm so glad to see you--so glad; but
that's not the same thing, is it?'
'It may be on the way to it.'
'May it?' she sighed tremblingly.
There was a silence; and then, taking her hand again, he again kissed
it, and holding it for an insistent moment said, 'Althea, won't you try
being engaged to me?'
She said nothing, turning away her face.
'You might make a habit of loving me, you know,' he went on half
whimsically. 'No one would know anything about it. It would be our
secret, our little experiment. If only you'd try it. Dearest, I do love
you so deeply.'
And then--how it was she did not know, but it was again Franklin's words
rather than Franklin that moved her, so that he must have seen the
yielding to his love, if not to him, in her face--she was in his arms,
and he was kissing her and saying, 'O Althea, won't you try?'
Althea's mind whirled. She needed to be kissed; that alone was evident;
for she did not draw away; but the tears came, of perplexity and pathos,
and she said, 'Franklin, dear Franklin, I'll try--I mean, I'll try to be
in love with you--I can't be engaged, not really engaged--but I will
try.'
'Darling--you are nearer it----'
'Yes--I don't know, Franklin--I mustn't bind myself. I can't marry you
unless I am in love with you--can I, Franklin?'
'Well, I don't know about that,' said Franklin, his voice a little
shaken. 'You can't expect me to give you an impartial answer to that
now--can you, dear? I feel as if I wanted you to marry me on the chance
you'd come to love me. And you do care for me enough for this, don't
you? That in itself is such an incredible gift.'
Yes, she evidently cared for him enough for this; and 'this' meant his
arm about her, her hand in his, his eyes of devotion upon her, centre of
his universe as she was. And 'this' had, after years of formality,
incredibly indeed altered all their relation. But--to marry him--it
meant all sorts of other things; it meant definitely giving up; it meant
definitely taking on. What it meant taking on was Franklin's
raylessness, Franklin's obscurity, Franklin's dun-colour--could a wife
escape the infection? What it meant giving up was more vague, but it
floated before her as the rose-coloured dream of her youth--the hero,
the earnest, ardent hero, who was to light all life to rapture and
significance. And, absurdly, while the drift of glamour and regret
floated by, and while she sat with Franklin's arm about her, her hand in
his, it seemed to shape itself for a moment into the gay, irresponsible
face of Gerald Digby. Absurd, indeed; he was neither earnest nor ardent,
and if he were he would never feel earnestness or ardour on her account.
Franklin certainly responded, in that respect, to the requirements of
her dream. Yet--ah, yet--he responded in no other. It was not enough to
have eyes only for her. A hero should draw others' eyes upon him; should
have rays that others could recognise. Althea was troubled, and she was
also ashamed of herself, but whether because of that vision of Gerald
Digby, or whether because she was allowing Franklin privileges never
allowed before, she did not know. Only the profundity of reverence that
beamed upon her from Franklin's eyes enabled her to regain her
self-respect.
Smiling a little constrainedly, she drew her hand from his and rose. 'I
mustn't bind myself,' she repeated, standing with downcast eyes before
him, 'but I'll try; indeed, I'll try.'
'You want to be in love with me, if only you can manage it, don't you,
dear?' he questioned; and to this she could truthfully reply, 'Yes, dear
Franklin, I want to be in love with you.'