THE DAY’S JOURNEY
[Illustration: “CECILY,” HE SAID SUDDENLY, “WHAT ARE YOU
GOING TO DO?”
[PAGE 260]]
THE
DAY’S JOURNEY
BY
NETTA SYRETT
AUTHOR OF “ROSANNE,” “THE TREE OF LIFE,” ETC.
“Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.”
[Illustration]
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1906
COPYRIGHT
A. C. MCCLURG & CO.
1906
Published September 15, 1906
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
THE DAY’S JOURNEY
THE DAY’S JOURNEY
CHAPTER I
Rose Summers paused a moment before she lifted the latch of a little
gate set between two walls of yew. It was June. The sky had the blue of
larkspur, the air was sweet with the scent of flowers. The gate in the
yew hedge opened upon a small flagged court leading to a porch wreathed
with roses. Above the porch clematis and ivy continued the wall of
living green almost to the gables of what had once been an Elizabethan
farm-house, and was now the picturesque home of Robert Kingslake and of
Cecily his wife.
To the left, above a walled garden, great chestnut trees reared
their heads, and flung shadows across the lane in which Mrs. Summers
was standing. The stillness, broken only by the sleepy clucking of
fowls, was of that peculiar peacefulness which broods over an English
country-side. On the white dust in the road the shadows lay asleep.
The trees themselves drowsed against the blue sky; the very roses above
the house-porch laid their pink faces together, and, cradled in leaves,
dreamt in the sunshine.
Only a moment passed before Mrs. Summers lifted the latch, yet in that
moment she saw in imagination one hill station after another; she
hurried through adventures and experiences which had filled five years,
and came back to the realization that, in the meantime, her cousin
Cecily had just lived here at the Priory, listening to the clucking
of the fowls, looking at the chestnut trees against the sky, perhaps
tending the roses round the porch. She walked up the flagged path and
rang the bell. The door was opened in a few moments by a neat maid, who
said that Mrs. Kingslake was out. “But she won’t be long, ma’am, if
you’ll come in,” she added.
The porch led almost directly into one of those square, panelled
halls which make the most charming of sitting-rooms. At the farther
end a long, low casement window framed a vista of the garden--green,
luxuriant, brilliant with flowers. On the window-ledge there was a
china bowl of sweet peas.
Mrs. Summers looked about her with interest. There was not much
furniture, but each piece, though simple, was beautiful in form at
least, and in some cases obviously rather costly. It was furniture
chosen with discretion. “Better off than they used to be,” was her
mental comment.
She glanced at the fresh chintz curtains, at the two or three little
pieces of silver, exquisitely cared for, on mantelpiece and tables;
at the flowers everywhere. “She’s as dainty as ever,” was her next
reflection.
A photograph on the top of a writing-table caught her wandering
attention. She took it up, and examined it with interest.
It was that of a man of a possible five-and-thirty, clean-shaven,
handsome, with something eager, enthusiastic, almost childlike about
the eyes, and the mouth of a sensualist.
Mrs. Summers replaced the photograph; it was of Cecily’s husband, but
she was more interested in Cecily, and of her she could find no picture.
She walked presently to the door which led into the garden. Looking
out upon its cool greenness and beauty, her thoughts were full of its
owner. A very close friendship, rather than the tie of blood, bound her
to the woman for whose coming she waited. Much of her girlhood had
been spent with Cecily, and up to the time of her own marriage, six
years ago, she had stayed weeks at a time at the Merivales’ house in
Chelsea. It had been an interesting house to visit. Cecily’s father,
a widower and a well-known doctor, was the type of man who attracted
the better minds, the more striking personalities, and Cecily was
undoubtedly the woman to keep them.
Apparently gazing into the quiet Surrey garden, in reality Mrs.
Summers was looking into the drawing-room at Carmarthen Terrace,
seeing it as it had appeared on many an evening in the past. The
room was full of firelight and candlelight, a quiet, restful room,
a little old-fashioned with its traces of mid-Victorianism, brought
by Cecily’s clever touch into harmony with a more modern standard
of taste. Mrs. Summers remembered the pattern of the long chintz
curtains, remembered the subdued tone of the walls, the china in the
big cabinet, the water-colors which were the pride of her uncle’s
heart. She saw him talking earnestly at one end of the room, his fine
gray head conspicuous among the group of men who surrounded him--men
well known in the world of science, of letters, and of art. Even
more distinctly she saw Cecily, the young hostess and mistress of the
house, in the midst of the younger men and women of their circle. She
heard the laughter. There was always laughter near Cecily, whose airy
_insouciance_ was amusing enough successfully to disguise real
ability.
“I’m quite clever enough to pass for a fluffy fool--when necessary.”
This, a long-ago remark of her cousin’s, suddenly recurred to Mrs.
Summers, _à propos_ of nothing, and she wondered whether Cecily
ever wrote anything now. Then her thoughts went back to Cecily as a
hostess. She had been looked upon by some of her friends as a brilliant
woman, a woman whose social gifts, whose power of pleasing--as well as
leading--should carry her far in the yet wider world which would open
for her when she made the excellent marriage that every one predicted.
And, after all, Cecily had married Robert Kingslake, a writer with
nothing but his pen between him and starvation.
Rose remembered the first day he came to the house, a rather sombre,
rather picturesque figure, with his dark eyes and graceful, lithe body.
Things moved very quickly after that first evening, so quickly that in
retrospect there seemed to Mrs. Summers to have been scarcely a moment
of ordinary acquaintanceship. There was a slight interval devoted to
impetuous, ardent love-making, and then the wedding, for which she,
herself a year-old bride, had not been able to stay.
Her husband’s regiment had been ordered to India a week before Cecily
Merivale became Cecily Kingslake, and she had sailed with him. A breath
of warm air swept towards the open door, and fanned the short curtains
at the window; it brought with it the scent of carnations, and to Mrs.
Summers a sudden vision of Cecily as she had last seen her.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed in her room at Carmarthen
Terrace. The room was flooded with sunshine. The basin on the washstand
was, Mrs. Summers remembered, full of carnations, and as she entered
the room she had exclaimed at their beauty.
“They’ve just come. I’m going to arrange them,” Cecily had said. She
held a letter which had also evidently just come, and as she raised
her head the look on her face had startled her cousin. She remembered
fearing for her. Could any human being with impunity be as ecstatically
happy as that? It was like tempting Providence.
Something of this, half in jest, half seriously, she had tried to say,
and Cecily had laughed, the low, trembling laugh of a delight too deep
to find other expression. She had given herself over to her love as the
woman a little difficult, more than a little fastidious, always gives
herself--with a surrender complete and unquestioning.
The sunny bedroom, the dainty new frocks over the backs of the
chairs, the litter of boxes and paper about the room, the brilliant
flowers, and Cecily in her white petticoat, her white shoulders
bare;--beautiful, proud, and smiling,--Mrs. Summers saw her as though
five days rather than five years had passed since they had met.
She moved, and glanced back over her shoulder. The memory was so vivid
that it stirred her to impatience. Why didn’t Cecily come? A door
closed sharply.
“Where? Where is she?” It was the same clear, eager voice, and Mrs.
Summers smiled, suddenly reassured.
The next moment Cecily’s arms were round her, and there was a rush of
incoherent questions. Then Rose gently pushed her back, and they looked
at one another.
Involuntarily an exclamation rose to the elder woman’s lips,
mercifully checked, as she recognized, by Cecily’s eager words.
“You are just the same!” she cried. “You’ve scarcely changed at all.”
And then came the inevitable pause. Rose listened to a thrush singing,
and to the distant sound of a mowing-machine. She seemed to have been
listening quite a long time before Cecily broke in so sharply that her
voice was almost like a cry.
“Ah no! don’t look at _me_! I’m old and ugly. I’ve changed,
haven’t I, Rose?” The question ended in a nervous laugh.