Franklin had all his time free for sitting with Helen under the trees.
Althea's self-reproach, her self-doubt and melancholy, had been effaced
by the arrival of Gerald Digby, and, at that epoch of her life, did not
return at all. She had no time for self-doubt or self-reproach, no time
even for self-consciousness. Franklin had faded into the dimmest
possible distance; she was only just aware that he was there and that
Helen seemed, kindly, to let him talk a good deal to her. She could not
think of Franklin, she could not think of herself, she could think of
nobody but one person, for her whole being was absorbed in the thought
of Gerald Digby and in the consciousness of the situation that his
coming had created. From soft exhilaration she had passed to miserable
depression, yet a depression far different from the stagnant melancholy
of her former mood; this was a depression of frustrated feeling, not of
lack of feeling, and it was accompanied by the recognition of the fact
that she exceedingly disliked Lady Pickering and wished exceedingly that
she would go away. And with it went a brooding sense of delight in
Gerald's mere presence, a sense of delight in even the pain that his
indifference inflicted upon her.
He charmed her unspeakably--his voice, his smile, his gestures--and she
knew that she did not charm him in any way, and that Lady Pickering, in
her very foolishness, did charm him, and the knowledge made her very
grave and careful when she was with him. Delight and pain were hidden
beneath this manner of careful gravity, but, as the excitement of
Franklin's presence had at first done--and in how much greater
degree--they subtly transformed her; made her look and speak and move
with a different languor and gentleness.
Gerald himself was the first to feel a change, the first to become aware
of an aroma of mystery. He had been indifferent indeed, though he had
obeyed Helen and had tried not only to be very courteous but to be very
nice as well. Now, finding Althea's grave eyes upon him when he
sometimes yielded to Lady Pickering's allurements, finding them turned
away with that look of austere mildness, he ceased to be so indifferent,
he began to wonder how much the little Puritan disapproved and how much
she really minded; he began to make surmises about the state of mind
that could be so aloof, so gentle, and so inflexible.
He met Althea one afternoon in the garden and walked up and down with
her while she filled her basket with roses. She was very gentle, and
immeasurably distant. The sense of her withdrawal roused his masculine
instinct of pursuit. How different she was from Frances Pickering! How
charmingly different. Yes, in her elaborate little dress of embroidered
lawn, with her elaborate garden hat pinned so neatly on her thick fair
hair, she pleased him by the sense of contrast. There was charm in her
lack of charm, attraction in her indifference. How impossible to
imagine those grave eyes smiling an alluring smile--he was getting tired
of alluring smiles--how impossible to imagine Miss Jakes flirting.
'It's very nice to see you here,' he said. 'I have so many nice memories
about this old garden. You don't mind my cigarette?'
Althea said that she liked it.
'There is a beautiful spray, Miss Jakes. Let me reach it for you.'
'Oh, thank you so much.'
'You are fond of flowers?'
'Very fond.'
'Which are your favourites?'
'Lilies of the valley.' Althea spoke kindly, as she might have spoken to
a rather importunate child; his questions, indeed, were not original.
Gerald tried to mend the tameness of the effect that he was making.
'Yes, only the florists have rather spoiled them, haven't they? My
favourites are the wilder ones--honeysuckle, grass of Parnassus,
bell-heather. Helen always makes me think of grass of Parnassus and
bell-heather, she is so solitary and delicate and strong.' He wanted
Althea to realise that his real appreciation was for types very
different from Lady Pickering. She smiled kindly, as if pleased with his
simile, and he went on. 'You are like pansies, white and purple
pansies.'
It was then that Althea blushed. Gerald noticed it at once. Experienced
flirt as he was he was quick to perceive such symptoms. And, suddenly,
it occurred to him that perhaps the reason she disapproved so much was
the wish--unknown to herself, poor little innocent--that some one would
flirt a little with her. He felt quite sure that no one had ever
flirted with Althea. Helen had told him of Mr. Kane's hopeless suit, and
they had wandered in rather helpless conjecture about the outside of a
case that didn't, from their experience of cases, seem to offer any
possibilities of an inside. Gerald had indeed loudly laughed at the idea
of Mr. Kane as a wooer and Helen had smiled, while assuring him that
wooing wasn't the only test of worth. Gerald was rather inclined to
think it was. He was quite sure, though, that however worthy Mr. Kane
might be he had never made any one blush. He was quite sure that Mr.
Kane was incapable of flirting, and it pleased him now to observe the
sign of susceptibility in Althea. It was good for women, he felt sure,
to be made to blush sometimes, and he promised himself that he would
renew the experiment with Althea. All the same it must be very
unemphatically done; there would be something singularly graceless in
venturing too far with this nice pansy, for though she might, all
unaware, want to be made to blush, she would never want it to be because
of his light motives.
Meanwhile Althea was in dread lest he should see her discomposure and
her bliss. He did not see further than her discomposure.
They rehearsed theatricals all the next day--he, Helen, Lady Pickering,
and the girls--and Lady Pickering was very naughty. Gerald, more than
once, had caught Althea's eye fixed, repudiating in its calm, upon her.
It had been especially repudiating when Frances, at tea, had thrown a
bun at him.
'Do you know, Miss Jakes,' he said to her after dinner, when, to Lady
Pickering's discomfiture, as he saw, he joined Althea on her little
sofa, 'do you know, I suspect you of being dreadfully bored by all of
us. We behave like a lot of children, don't we?' He was thinking of the
bun.
'Indeed! I think it charming to be able to behave like a child, if one
feels like one,' said Althea, coldly and mildly.
'Don't you ever feel like one? Do you always behave like a gentle muse?'
'Do I seem to behave like a muse? How tiresome I must be,' smiled
Althea.
'Not tiresome, rather impressive. It's like looking up suddenly from
some nocturnal _fete_--all Japanese lanterns and fireworks--and seeing
the moon gazing down serenely and unseeingly upon one; it startles and
sobers one a little, you know.'
'I suppose you are sober sometimes,' said Althea, continuing to smile.
'Lord, yes!' Gerald laughed. 'Really and truly, Miss Jakes, I'm only
playing at being a child, you know. I'm quite a serious person. I like
to look at the moon.'
And again Althea blushed. She looked down, sitting straightly in the
corner of their sofa and turning her fan slowly between her fingers,
and, feeling the sense of gracelessness in this too easy success, Gerald
went on in a graver tone. 'I wish you would let me be serious with you
sometimes, Miss Jakes; you'd see I'd quite redeem myself in your eyes.'
'Redeem yourself? From what?'
'Oh! from all your impression of my frivolity and folly. I can talk
about art and literature and the condition of the labouring classes as
wisely as anybody, I assure you.'
He said it so prettily that Althea had to laugh. 'But what makes you
think I can?' she asked, and, delighted with the happy result of his
appeal, he said that Helen had told him all about her wisdoms.
He sounded these wisdoms next day when he asked her to walk with him to
the village. He told her, as they walked, of the various projects for
using his life to some advantage that he had used to make--projects for
improved agricultural methods and the bettering of the conditions of
life in the country. Althea had read a great deal of political economy.
She had, indeed, ground at it and mastered it in the manner advised by
Franklin to Helen. Gerald found her quiet comments and criticisms very
illuminating, not only of his theme, but of his own comparative
ignorance. 'But, Miss Jakes, how did you come to understand all this?'
he ejaculated; and she said, laughing a little at the impression she had
made, that she had only read, gone to a few courses of lectures, and had
a master for one winter in Boston. Gerald looked at her with new
interest. It impressed him that an unprofessional woman should take
anything so seriously. 'Have you gone into other profound things like
this?' he asked; and, still laughing, Althea said that she supposed she
had.
Her sympathy for those old plans of his, based on such understanding,
was really inspiring. 'Ah, if only I had the money,' he sighed.
'But you wouldn't care to live in the country?' said Althea.
'There's nowhere else I really care to live. Nothing would please me so
much as to spend the rest of my life at Merriston, dabbling at my
painting and going in seriously for farming.'
'Why don't you do it?'
'Why, money! I've got no money. It's expensive work to educate oneself
by experience, and I'm ignorant. You show me how ignorant. No; I'm
afraid I'm to go on drifting, and never lead the life I best like.'
Althea was silent. She hardly knew what she was feeling, but it pressed
upon her so, that she was afraid lest a breath would stir some
consciousness in him. She had money, a good deal. What a pity that he
had none.
'Now you,' Gerald went on, 'have all sorts of big, wise plans for life,
I've no doubt. It would interest me to hear about them.'
'No; I drift too,' said Althea.
'You can't call it drifting when you read and study such a lot.'
'Oh yes, I can, when there is no real aim in the work. You should hear
Mr. Kane scold me about that.'
Gerald was not interested in Mr. Kane. 'I should think, after all you've
done, you might rest on your oars for a bit,' he remarked. 'It's quite
enough, I should think, for a woman to know so much. If you liked to do
anything, you'd do it awfully well, I'm sure.'
Ah, what would she not like to do! Help you to steer to any port you
wanted was the half-articulate cry of her heart.
'She really is an interesting little person, your Althea,' Gerald said
to Helen. 'You were wrong not to find her interesting. She is so wise
and calm and she knows such a lot.'
'I'm too ignorant to be interested in knowledge,' said Helen.
'It's not mere knowledge, it's the gentle temperateness and independence
one feels in her.'
Helen, somehow, did not feel them, or, at all events, felt other
things too much to feel them preeminently. It was part of her
unselfconsciousness not to guess why Althea's relation to her had
slightly changed. She could hardly have followed with comprehension the
suffering instability of her friend's character, nor dream that her own
power over her was so great, yet so resented; but something in their
talk about Mr. Kane had made Helen uncomfortable, and she said no more
now, not wishing to emphasise any negative aspect of her attitude to
Althea at a time when their relation seemed to have become a little
strained. And she was pleased that Gerald should talk about political
economy with Althea--it was so much better than flirting with Frances
Pickering.
No one, indeed, unless it were Franklin Kane, gave much conjecture to
Gerald's talks with his hostess. Lady Pickering noticed; but she was
vexed, rather than jealous. She couldn't imagine that Gerald felt
anything but a purely intellectual interest in such talks. It was rather
as if a worshipper in some highly ritualistic shrine, filled with
appeals to sight and hearing, had unaccountably wandered off into a
wayside chapel. Lady Pickering felt convinced that this was mere vagrant
curiosity on Gerald's part. She felt convinced that he couldn't care for
chapels. She was so convinced that, moved to emphatic measures, she came
into the open as it were, marched processions and waved banners before
him, in order to remind him what the veritable church was for a person
of taste. Sometimes Gerald joined her, but sometimes he waved a friendly
greeting and went into the chapel again.
So it was that Althea suddenly found herself involved in that mute and
sinister warfare--an unavowed contest with another woman for possession
of a man. How it could be a real contest she did not know; she felt sure
that Lady Pickering did not love Gerald Digby, that she herself loved
him she had not yet told herself, and that he loved neither of them was
obvious. It seemed a mere struggle for supremacy, in which Lady
Pickering's role was active and her own passive. For when she saw that
Lady Pickering looked upon Gerald as a prey between them, that she
seized, threatened and allured, she herself, full of a proud disdain,
drew away, relinquished any hold, any faintest claim she had, handed
Gerald over, as it were, to his pursuer; and as she did this, coldly,
gravely, proudly, she was not aware that no tactics could have been more
effective. For Gerald, when he found himself pursued, and then dropped
by Althea at the feet of the pursuer, became more and more averse to
being seized. And what had been a gracefully amorous dialogue with Lady
Pickering, became a slightly malicious discussion. 'Well, what _do_ you
want of me?' he seemed to demand of her, under all his grace. Lady
Pickering did not want anything except to keep him, and to show Althea
that she kept him. And she was willing to go to great lengths if this
might be effected.
Gerald and Althea, walking one afternoon in the little wood that lay at
the foot of the lawn, came upon Lady Pickering seated romantically upon
a stone, her head in her hands. She said, looking up at them, with
pathetic eyes of suffering, that she had wrenched her ankle and was in
agony. 'I think it is sprained, perhaps broken,' she said.
Now both Althea and Gerald felt convinced that she was not in agony, and
had perhaps not hurt her ankle at all. They were both a little
embarrassed and a little ashamed for her.
'Take my arm, take Miss Jakes's,' said Gerald. 'We will help you back to
the house.'
'Oh no. I must sit still for a little while,' said Lady Pickering.' I
couldn't bear to stir yet. It must be only a wrench; yes, there, I can
feel that it is a bad wrench. It's only that the pain has been so
horrible, and I feel a little faint. Please sit down here for a moment,
Gerald, beside me, and console me for my sufferings.'
It was really very shameless. Without a word Althea walked away.
'Miss Jakes--we'll--I'll follow in a moment,' Gerald called after her,
while, irritated and at a loss, he stood over Lady Pickering. 'Have you
really hurt it?' was his first inquiry, as Althea disappeared.
'Why does she go?' Lady Pickering inquired. 'I didn't mean that she was
to go. Stiff, _guindee_ little person. One would really think that she
was jealous of me.'
'No, I don't think that one would think that at all,' Gerald returned.
Lady Pickering was pushed beyond the bounds of calculation, and when
quite sincere she was really charming. 'O Gerald,' she said, looking up
at him and full of roguish contrition, 'how unkind you are! And how
horribly clear sighted. It's I who am jealous! Yes, I really am. I can't
bear being neglected.'
'I don't see why you should,' said Gerald laughing, 'and I certainly
shouldn't show such bad taste as to neglect you. So that it is jealousy,
pure and simple. Is your ankle in the least hurt?'
'Really, I don't know. I did tumble a little, and then I saw you coming,
and felt that I wanted to be talked to, that it was my turn.'
'What an absurd woman you are.'
'But do say that you like absurd women better than solemn ones.'
'I shall say nothing of the sort. Sometimes absurdity is delightful, and
sometimes solemnity--not that I find Miss Jakes in the least solemn. It
would do you a world of good to let her inform your mind a little.'
'Oh, please, I don't want to be informed, it might make my back look
like that. My foot really is a little hurt, you know. Is it swollen?'
Gerald looked down, laughing, but very unsympathetic, at the perilous
heel and pinched, distorted toe. 'Really, I can't say.'
'Do sit down, there is plenty of room, and tell me you aren't cross with
me.'
'I'm not at all cross with you, but I'm not going to sit down beside
you,' said Gerald. 'I'm going to take you and your ankle back to the
house and then find Miss Jakes and go on talking.'
'You may make _me_ cross,' said Lady Pickering, rising and leaning her
arm on his.
'I don't believe I shall. You really respect me for my strength of
character.'
'Wily creature!'
'Foolish child!' They were standing in the path, laughing at each other,
far from displeased with each other, and it was fortunate that neither
of them perceived among the trees Althea, passing again at a little
distance, and glancing round irrepressibly to see if Gerald had indeed
followed her; even Lady Pickering might have been slightly discomposed,
for when Gerald said 'Foolish child!' he completed the part expected of
him by lightly stooping his head and kissing her.
He then took Lady Pickering back to the house, established her in a
hammock, and set off to find Althea. He knew that he had kept her
waiting--if she had indeed waited. And he knew that he really was a
little cross with Frances Pickering; he didn't care to carry flirtation
as far as kissing.
Althea, however, was nowhere to be found. He looked in the house, heard
that she had been there but had gone out again; he looked in the garden;
he finally went back to the woods, an uncomfortable surmise rising; and
finding her nowhere there, he strolled on into the meadows. Then,
suddenly, he saw her, sitting on a rustic bench at a bend of the little
brook. Her eyes were bent upon the running water, and she did not look
up as he approached her. When he was beside her, her eyes met his,
reluctantly and resentfully, and he was startled to observe that she had
wept. His surmise returned. She must have seen him kiss Frances. Yet
even then Gerald did not know why it should make Miss Jakes weep that
he should behave like a donkey.
'May I sit down here?' he asked, genuinely grieved and genuinely anxious
to find out what the matter was.
'Certainly,' said Althea in chilly tones.
He was a little confused. It had something to do with the kissing, he
felt sure. 'Miss Jakes, I'm afraid you'll never believe me a serious
person,' he said.
'Why should you be serious?' said Althea.
'You are angry with me,' Gerald remarked dismally.
'Why should I be angry?'
He raised his eyebrows, detached a bit of loosened wood from the seat,
and skipped it over the water. 'Well, to find me behaving like a child
again.'
'I should reserve my anger for more important matters,' said Althea. She
was angry, or she hoped she was, for, far more than anger, it was misery
and a passion of shame that surged in her. She knew now, and she could
not hide from herself that she knew; and yet he cared so little that he
had not even kept his promise; so little that he had stayed behind to
kiss that most indecorous woman. If only she could make him think that
it was only anger.
'Ah, but you are angry, and rather unjustly,' said Gerald. His eyes were
seeking hers, rallying, pleading, perhaps laughing a little at her. 'And
really, you know, you are a little unkind; I thought we were
friends--what?'
She forced herself to meet those charming eyes, and then to smile back
at him. It would have been absurd not to smile, but the effort was
disastrous; her lips quivered; the tears ran down her cheeks. She rose,
trembling and aghast. 'I am very foolish. I have such a headache. Please
don't pay any attention to me--it's the heat, I think.'
She turned blindly towards the house.
The pretence of the headache was, he knew it in the flash of revelation
that came to him, on a par with Frances's ankle--but with what a
difference in motive! Grave, a little pale, Gerald walked silently
beside her to the woods. He did not know what to say. He was a little
frightened and a great deal touched.
'Mr. Digby,' Althea said, when they were among the trees again--and it
hurt him to see the courage of her smile--'you must forgive me for being
so silly. It is the heat, you know; and this headache--it puts one so on
edge. I didn't mean to speak as I did. Of course I'm not angry.'
He was ready to help her out with the most radiant tact. 'Of course I
knew it couldn't make any real difference to you--the way I behaved.
Only I don't like you to be even a little cross with me.'
'I'm not--not even a little,' she said.
'We are friends then, really friends?'
His smile sustained and reassured her. Surely he had not seen--if he
could smile like that--ever so lightly, so merrily, and so gravely too.
Courage came back to her. She could find a smile as light as his in
replying: 'Really friends.'