In the course of the next few days Miss Buckston went back to her Surrey
cottage, and two friends of Helen's arrived. Helen was fulfilling her
promise of giving Althea all the people she wanted. Lady Pickering was
widowed, young, coquettish, and pretty; Sir Charles Brewster a lively
young bachelor with high eyebrows, upturned tips to his moustache, and
an air of surprise and competence. They made great friends at once with
Mildred, Dorothy and Herbert Vaughan, who shared in all Sir Charles's
hunting and yachting interests. Lady Pickering, after a day of tennis
and flirtation, would drift at night into Dorothy and Mildred's rooms to
talk of dresses, and for some days wore her hair tied in a large black
bow behind, reverting, however, to her usual dishevelled
picturesqueness. 'One needs to look as innocent as a pony to have that
bow really suit one,' she said.
Althea, in this accession of new life, again felt relegated to the
background. Helen did not join in the revels, but there was no air of
being relegated about her; she might have been the jaded and kindly
queen before whom they were enacted. 'Dear Helen,' said Lady Pickering
to Mildred and Althea, 'I can see that she's down on her luck and very
bored with life. But it's always nice having her about, isn't it? Always
nice to have her to look at.'
Althea felt that her guests found no such decorative uses for herself,
and that they took it for granted that, with a suitor to engage her
attention, she would be quite satisfied to remain outside, even if
above, the gayer circle. She could not deny that her acceptance of
Franklin's devotion before Helen's arrival, their air of happy
withdrawal--a withdrawal that had then made them conspicuous, not
negligible--absolutely justified her guests in their over-tactfulness.
They still took it for granted that she and Franklin wanted to be alone
together; they still left them in an isolation almost bridal; but now
Althea did not want to be left alone with Franklin, and above all wished
to detach herself from any bridal association; and she tormented herself
with accusations concerning her former graciousness, responsible as it
was for her present discomfort. She knew that she was very fond of dear
Franklin, and that she always would be fond of him, but, with these
accusations crowding thickly upon her, she was ill at ease and unhappy
in his presence. What could she say to Franklin? 'I did, indeed, deceive
myself into thinking that I might be able to marry you, and I let you
see that I thought it; and then my friend's chance words showed me that
I never could. What am I to think of myself, Franklin? And what can you
think of me?' For though she could no longer feel pride in Franklin's
love; though it had ceased, since Helen's words, to have any decorative
value in her eyes, its practical value was still great; she could not
think of herself as not loved by Franklin. Her world would have rocked
without that foundation beneath it; and the fear that Franklin might,
reading her perplexed, unstable heart, feel her a person no longer to be
loved, was now an added complication.
'O Franklin, dear Franklin!' she said to him suddenly one day, turning
upon him eyes enlarged by tears, 'I feel as if I were guilty towards
you.'
She almost longed to put her head on his shoulder, to pour out all her
grief, and be understood and comforted. Franklin had not been slow to
recognise the change in his beloved's attitude towards him. He had shown
no sign of grievance or reproach; he seemed quite prepared for her
reaction from the moment of only dubious hope, and, though quite without
humility, to find it natural, however painful to himself, that Althea
should be rather bored after so much of him. But the gentle lighting of
his face now showed her, too, that her reticence and withdrawal had hurt
more than the new loss of hope.
'You mean,' he said, trying to smile a little as he said it, 'you mean
that you've found out that you can't, dear?'
She stood, stricken by the words and their finality, and she slowly
nodded, while two large tears rolled down her cheeks.
Franklin Kane controlled the signs of his own emotion, which was deep.
'That's all right, dear,' he said. 'You're not guilty of anything.
You've been a little too kind--more than you can keep up, I mean. It's
been beautiful of you to be kind at all and to think you might be
kinder. Would you rather I went away? Perhaps it's painful to have me
about just now. I've got a good many places I can go to while I'm over
here, you know. You mustn't have me on your mind.'
'O Franklin!' Althea almost sobbed; 'you are an angel. Of course I want
you to stay for as long as you will; of course I love to have you here.'
He was an angel, indeed, she felt, and another dart of hostility towards
Helen went through her--Helen, cynical, unspiritual, blind to angels.
So Franklin stayed on, and the next day another guest arrived. It was at
breakfast that Althea found at her place a little note from Gerald Digby
asking her very prettily if she could take him in that evening. He was
in town and would start at once if she could wire that he might come.
Althea controlled, as best she could, her shock of delight. He had,
then, intended to come; he had not forgotten all about her. Even if she
counted only in his memory as tenant, it was good, she felt it
helplessly and blissfully, to count in any way with Gerald Digby. She
did not analyse and hardly recognised these sentiments, yet she strongly
felt the need for composure, and it was only with an air of soft
exhilaration that she made the announcement over the table to Helen.
'Isn't it nice, Helen? Mr. Digby is coming this evening.' The soft
exhilaration could not be noticeable, for everybody seemed in some
degree to share it.
'Dear Gerald, how delightful!' said Lady Pickering, with, to Althea's
consciousness, too much an air of possessorship. 'Gerald is a splendid
actor, Miss Pepperell,' Sir Charles said to Dorothy. 'Miss Buchanan, you
and he must do some of your best parts together.' The girls were full of
expectancy. It was Helen herself who looked least illuminated by the
news; but then, as Althea realised, to Helen Gerald must be the most
matter-of-fact thing in life.
They were all sitting under the trees on the lawn when Gerald arrived;
he had not lost the best train. Every one was in white, except Helen who
wore black, and Franklin who wore grey; every one was lolling on the
grass or extended on chairs, except Aunt Julia, erect and embroidering,
and Althea who was giving her attention to tea. It had just been poured
out when Gerald came strolling over the lawn towards them.
He carried his Panama hat doubled in his hand; he looked exquisitely
cool, and he glanced about him as he came, well pleased, apparently, to
find himself again in his old home. Althea felt his manner of
approaching them to be characteristic; it was at once so desultory and
so pleasant.
'You look like a flock of doves,' he said, as, smiling, he took Althea's
welcoming hand and surveyed the group. 'Hello, Helen, how are you?
Hello, Charlie; and how nice to find you, Frances.'
He was introduced to the others, continuing to smile with marked
approbation, Althea felt, upon Mildred and Dorothy, who certainly looked
charming, and then he dropped on the grass beside Lady Pickering's
chair.
Althea knew that if she looked like a dove, she felt like a very
fluttering one. She was much moved by this welcoming of Mr. Digby to his
home, and she wondered if the quickened beating of her heart manifested
itself in any change of glance or colour. She soon felt, however, as she
distributed teacups and looked about her circle, that if she were
visibly moved Mr. Digby would not be aware of the fact. The fact,
obviously, that he was most aware of was Lady Pickering's presence, and
he was talking to her with a lightness and gaiety that she could
presently only define, for her own discomfort, as flirtation. Althea had
had little experience of flirting, and the little had not been personal.
It had remained for her always a rather tasteless, rather ludicrous
spectacle; yet Mr. Digby's manner of flirting, if flirting it was, was
neither. It was graceful, unemphatic, composed of playful repartee and
merry glances. It was Lady Pickering who overdid her side of the
dialogue and brought to it a significance that Mr. Digby's eyes and
smile disowned even while they evoked it. One of the things of which Mr.
Digby had shown himself most completely unaware was Franklin Kane, who
sat, as usual, just outside the circle in the sun, balancing his tea-cup
on his raised knees and 'Fletcherising' a slice of cake. Gerald had
glanced at him as one might glance--Althea had felt it keenly--at some
nice little insect on one's path, a pleasant insect, but too small to
warrant any attention beyond a casual recognition of type. But Franklin,
who had a casual interest in nobody, was very much aware of the
newcomer, and he gazed attentively at Gerald Digby as he had gazed at
Helen on the first evening of their meeting, with less of interest
perhaps, but with much the same dispassionate intentness; and Althea
felt sure that he already did not approve of Gerald Digby.
She asked Helen that evening, lightly, as Helen had asked an equivalent
question about Franklin and Miss Buckston, whether Mr. Digby and Lady
Pickering were in love; she felt sure that they were not in love, which
made the question easier.
'Oh no; not at all, I fancy,' said Helen.
'I only asked,' said Althea, 'because it seemed the obvious
explanation.'
'You mean their way of flirting.'
'Yes. I suppose I'm not used to flirtation, not to such extreme
flirtation. I don't like it, do you?'
'I don't know that I do; but Gerald is only a flirt through sympathy and
good nature. It's Frances who leads him on; she is a flirt by
temperament.'
'I'm glad of that,' said Althea. 'I'm sure he is too nice to be one by
temperament.'
'After all, it's a very harmless diversion.'
'Do you think it harmless? It pains me to see a sacred thing being
mimicked.'
'I hardly think it's a sacred thing Frances and Gerald are mimicking,'
Helen smiled.
'It's love, isn't it?'
'Love of such a trivial order that I can't feel anything is being taken
in vain.'
Helen was amused, yet touched by her friend's standards. Such distaste
was not unknown to her, and Gerald's sympathetic propensities had caused
her qualms with which she could not have imagined that Althea's had any
analogy. Yet it was not her own taste she was considering that evening
after dinner when, in walking up and down with Gerald on the gravelled
terrace outside the drawing-room, she told him of Althea's standards.
She felt responsible for Gerald, and that she owed it to Althea that he
should not be allowed to displease her. It had struck her more than
once, immersed in self-centred cogitations as she was, that Althea was
altogether too much relegated.
'I wish you and Frances would not go on as you do, Gerald,' she said.
'It disturbs Althea, I am sure. She is not used to seeing people
behaving like that.'
'Behaving?' asked the innocent Gerald. 'How have I been behaving?'
'Very foolishly. You have been flirting, and rather flagrantly, with
Frances, ever since you came.'
'But, my dear, you know perfectly well that one can't talk to Frances
without flirting with her. All conversation becomes flirtation. The most
guileless glance, in meeting her eye, is transmuted, like a straight
stick looking crooked when you put it into water, you know. Frances has
a charmingly deviating quality that I defy the straightest of intentions
to evade.'
'Are yours so straight?'
'Well--she is pretty and pleasant, and perfectly superficial, as you
know. I own that I do rather like to put the stick in the water and see
what happens to it.'
'Well, don't put it in too often before Althea. After all, you are all
of you here because of her friendship with me, and it makes me feel
guilty if I see her having a bad time because of your misbehaviour.'
'A bad time?'
'Really. She takes things hard. She said it was mimicking a sacred
thing.'
'Oh! but, I say, how awfully funny, Helen. You must own that it's
funny.'
'Funny, but sweet, too.'
'She is a sweet creature, of course, one can see that; and her moral
approvals and disapprovals are firmly fixed, however funny; one likes
that in her. I'll try to be good, if Frances will let me. She looked
quite pretty this evening, Miss Jakes; only she dresses too stiffly.
What's the matter? Couldn't you give her a hint? She is like a
satin-box, and a woman ought to be like a flower; ought to look as if
they'd bend if a breeze went over them. Now you can't imagine Miss Jakes
bending; she'd have to stoop.'
Helen, in the darkness, smiled half bitterly, half affectionately.
Gerald's nonsense always pleased her, even when she was most exasperated
with him. She was not exasperated with Gerald in particular just now,
but with everything and everybody, herself included, and the fact that
he liked to flirt flagrantly with Lady Pickering did not move her more
than usual. It was not a particular but a general irritation that edged
her voice a little as she said, drawing her black scarf more closely
round her shoulders, 'Frances must satisfy you there. Your tastes, I
think, are becoming more and more dishevelled.'
But innocent Gerald answered with a coal of fire: 'No, she is too
dishevelled. You satisfy my tastes there entirely; you flow, but you
don't flop. Now if Miss Jakes would only try to dress like you she'd be
immensely improved. You are perfect.' And he lightly touched her scarf
as he spoke with a fraternal and appreciative hand.
Helen continued to smile in the darkness, but it was over an almost
irresistible impulse to sob. The impulse was so strong that it
frightened her, and it was with immense relief that she saw Althea's
figure--her 'box-like' figure--appear in the lighted window. She did
not want to talk to Althea, and she could not, just now, go on talking
to Gerald. From their corner of the terrace she indicated the vaguely
gazing Althea. 'There she is,' she said. 'Go and talk to her. Be nice to
her. I'm tired and am going to have a stroll in the shrubberies before
bed.'
She left Gerald obediently, if not eagerly, moving towards the window,
and slipping into the obscurity of the shrubberies she threw back her
scarf and drew long breaths. She was becoming terribly overwrought. It
had been, since so long, a second nature to live two lives that any
danger of their merging affected her with a dreadful feeling of
disintegration. There was the life of comradeship, the secure little
compartment where Gerald was at home, so at home that he could tell her
she was perfect and touch her scarf with an approving hand, and from
this familiar shelter she had looked for so long, with the calmest eye,
upon his flirtations, and in it had heard, unmoved, his encomiums upon
herself. The other life, the real life, was all outdoors in comparison;
it was all her real self, passionate, untamed, desolate; it was like a
bleak, wild moorland, and the social, the comrade self only a strongly
built little lodge erected, through stress of wind and weather, in the
midst of it. Since girlhood it had been a second nature to her to keep
comradeship shut in and reality shut out. And to-night reality seemed to
shake and batter at the doors.
She had come to Merriston House to rest, to drink _eau rougie_ and to
rest. She wanted to lapse into apathy and to recover, as far as might
be, from her recent unpleasant experiments and experiences. Had she
allowed herself any illusions about the experiment, the experience would
have been humiliating; but Helen was not humiliated, she had not
deceived herself for a moment. She had, open-eyed, been trying for the
'other things,' and she had only just missed them. She had intended to
marry a very important person who much admired her. She had been almost
sure that she could marry him if she wanted to, and she had found out
that she couldn't. It had not been, as in her youth, her own shrinking
and her own recoil at the last decisive moment. She had been resolved
and unwavering; her discomfiture had been sudden and its cause the quite
grotesque one of her admirer having fallen head over heels in love with
a child of eighteen--a foolish, affected little child, who giggled and
glanced and blushed opportunely, and who, beside these assets, had a
skilful and determined mother. Without the mother to waylay, pounce, and
fix, Helen did not believe that her sober, solid friend would have
yielded to the momentary beguilement, and Helen herself deigned not one
hint of contest; she had been resolved, but only to accept; she could
never have waylaid or pounced. And now, apathetic, yet irritated,
exhausted and sick at heart, she had been telling herself, as she lay in
the garden-chairs at Merriston House, that it was more than probable
that the time was over, even for the 'other things.' The prospect made
her weary. What--with Aunt Grizel's one hundred and fifty a year--was
she to do with herself in the future? What was to become of her? She
didn't feel that she much cared, and yet it was all that there was left
to care about, for Aunt Grizel's sake if not for her own, and she felt
only fit to rest from the pressure of the question. To-night, as she
turned and wandered among the trees, she said to herself that it hadn't
been a propitious time to come for rest to Merriston House. Gerald had
been the last person she desired to see just now. She had never been so
near to feeling danger as to-night. If Gerald were nice to her--he
always was--but nice in a certain way, the way that expressed so clearly
his tenderness and his dreadful, his merciful unawareness, she might
break down before him and sob. This would be too horrible, and when she
thought that it might happen she felt, rising with the longing for
tears, an old resentment against Gerald, fierce, absurd, and
unconquerable. After making the round of the lawns and looking up hard
and unseeingly at the stars, she came back to the terrace. Gerald and
Althea were gone, and she surmised that Gerald had not taken much
trouble to be nice. She was passing along an unillumined corner when she
came suddenly upon a figure seated there--so suddenly that she almost
fell against it. She murmured a hasty apology as Mr. Kane rose from a
chair where, with folded arms, he had been seated, apparently in
contemplation of the night.
'Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Helen. 'It's so dark here. I didn't see
you.'
'And I didn't hear you coming,' said Mr. Kane. 'I beg your pardon. I'm
afraid you hurt your foot.'
'Not at all,' Helen assured him. She had stepped into the light from the
windows and, Mr. Kane being beside her, she could see his face clearly
and see that he looked very tired. She had been aware, in these days of
somnolent retirement, that one other member of the party seemed, though
not in her sense retired from it, to wander rather aimlessly on its
outskirts. That his removal to this ambiguous limbo had been the result
of her own arrival Helen had no means of knowing, since she had never
seen Mr. Kane in his brief moment of hope when he and Althea had been
centre and everybody else outskirts. She had found him, during her few
conversations with him, so tamely funny as to be hardly odd, though his
manner of speaking and the way in which his hair was cut struck her as
expressing oddity to an unfortunate degree; but though only dimly aware
of him, and aware mainly in this sense of amusement, she had, since
Althea had informed her of his status, seen him with some
compassionateness. It didn't make him less funny to her that he should
have been in love with Althea for fifteen years, rather it made him more
so. Helen found it difficult to take either the devotion or its object
very seriously. She thought hopeless passions rather ridiculous, her own
included, but Gerald she did consider a possible object of passion; and
how Althea could be an object of passion for anybody, even for funny
little Mr. Kane, surpassed her comprehension, so that the only way to
understand the situation was to decide that Mr. Kane was incapable of
passion altogether. But to-night she received a new impression; looking
at Mr. Kane's face, thin, jaded, and kindly attentive to herself, it
suddenly became apparent to her that whatever his feeling might be it
was serious. He might not know passion, but his heart was aching,
perhaps quite as fiercely as her own. She felt sorry for Mr. Kane, and
her step lingered on her way to the house.
'Isn't it a lovely night,' she said, in order to say something. 'Do you
like sitting in the dark? It's very restful, isn't it?'
Franklin saw the alien Miss Buchanan's eyes bent kindly and observantly
upon him.
'Yes, it's very restful,' he said. 'It smooths you out and straightens
you out when you get crumpled, you know, and impatient.'
'I should not imagine you as ever very impatient,' smiled Helen.
'Perhaps you do sit a great deal in the dark.'
He took her whimsical suggestion with careful humour. 'Why, no, it's not
a habit of mine; and it's not a recipe that it would be a good thing to
overdo, is it?'
'Why not?' she asked.
'There are worse things than impatience, aren't there?' said Franklin.
'Gloominess, for instance. You might get gloomy if you sat out in the
dark a great deal.'
It amused her a little to wonder, as they went in together, whether Mr.
Kane disciplined his emotions and withdrew from restful influences
before they had time to become discouraging ones. She imagined that he
would have a recipe for everything.