"Then marry me," the musician was saying, half-an-hour later. It had not
struck him before that she might not possibly want to do so.
"But I have already told you that I do not love you," persisted Lady
Joan, who was enjoying herself immensely.
"What does that matter? It will come in time, it is sure to come.
Besides, I love you; is not that enough?"
It would have been, to most of his lady friends; but Lady Joan only
caught the humor of his words, and laughed derisively.
"You think you are going to put me off by pretending to laugh," he went
on patiently; this was to show his superior knowledge of her character;
"but the truth is that you dare not be serious, Lady Joan; why don't
you give in to your real feelings and stop making a joke of life just
this once?"
"I make a joke of life?" she cried; she was half in earnest now; "how is
that possible unless one has realized its sadness? You enthusiasts who
have never laughed at anything, and are always talking about taking life
seriously, you have never gone deep enough to see that it _is_ serious.
If you had, you would only laugh for the rest of your life, because--it
would be impossible after you had once realized _that_ to keep serious
and live."
For the first time in his life the musician did not want to argue.
"Don't you see that I love you as I have never loved any one before, as
I could never love any one again?" he said humbly.
"How am I to believe that?" she retorted sharply, and he flushed
slightly.
"Is that quite fair of you? Have I not been always perfectly open with
you? I told you the story of my marriage the first time I ever met you,
and I have told you to-day about poor little No--about Miss Bisley.
Could any man do more?"
"No," she said carelessly, "but you might very well have done less,--I
mean, the whole town told me about Miss Bisley directly I came home from
abroad, though, except for the name, the two accounts do not tally in
the least. But then, nothing in Relton shrinks in the washing."
The musician flinched, and tried another tactic.
"Then I suppose you merely think I am a brute who is taking advantage of
your loneliness to profess an affection for you which he does not feel?
A man has to pay a big penalty for your friendship, Lady Joan."
She would not have let him see it for the world, but she felt she had
gone a little too far, and a rapid change came over her mood.
"It is not that; I am afraid of myself, I think," she said with a sigh,
and she looked down at his boots.
His face lighted up.
"Then--" he began eagerly; but she put up her hand with a gesture of
warning.
"No, no, you mistake me; I do not believe that it is in me to love
anybody--for long. My friends say it is because I have never known a
mother's love; but if my parents had lived they would simply have made
me fight with them through their tiresome affection for me. Now, I know
what you are going to say--that I am speaking with the spirit of the
age, or some of that twaddle I have heard before. If I am, it is you who
have taught it me, for I don't allow anybody else to mention the age to
me; I am sick of it and the people who make their living out of abusing
it. I could never love you, or anybody. That's the truth, and--don't you
believe me?"
"Not quite," he said, and looked at her in an unpleasantly direct way.
"Besides," she said, rather awkwardly, catching at another loophole of
escape, "there is this Norah Bisley: how am I to know that she will not
come back?"
He shook his head, and she smiled at the guilelessness of his reply.
"I don't think it is possible. You see, I wrote three times--"
"The letters may have gone astray."
"The third one I sent by hand, and it was returned to me unopened. I can
see now that it is only what I might have expected; she did not have a
thought apart from her father, and her father never liked me well enough
to look on me in the light of a son-in-law. He took her away directly he
suspected our liking for one another, and when they got together and
away from me he must have persuaded her to give me up. I wrote to him
and I wrote to her, but, as you know, with no avail. She was a lovable
little thing, spoiled by her weakness of will, poor little Norah!"
"Poor little Norah!" she echoed half mockingly, and crumbled some mortar
off the broken wall and watched it splash into the water below. She was
wondering how it was that she had been more fascinated in half-an-hour
by handsome, empty-headed Jack Raleigh than she had been in three long
years by this large-hearted musician, with the high forehead and the
cavernous eyes, with his passion for metaphysics and Socialism, and his
ardent desires to reform society and the world in his own lifetime. Yet
she found him interesting sometimes, generally when he was not there and
she was thinking about him, and she wondered again why he did not
interest her more, and whether she would not have tumbled into a
commonplace engagement with him if her parents had been alive and he had
been asked to dine at the Court, like any ordinary young man, and she
had been forbidden, like any ordinary young woman, to come down to the
inn and play with his child. But she had no parents to impose
conventionality upon her, and she had gloried in her liberty for
twenty-five years, and she was loth to give it up now for the sake of a
man who, she felt sure, would bore her in a week with his desperate
enthusiasms, and whom she was not even sure that she loved. No, she
could not marry him, she felt sure, and she looked up to say so, and met
his restless eyes watching her with such a boy's eagerness that she
again went off on a side issue.
"I am not livable with, that is the truth," she said rather weakly, and
crumbled some more mortar off the wall, and wished he would not look at
her so gloomily. He was thinking that the courtship was not going as
smoothly as he expected it would, and beginning dimly to understand that
for the only time in his experience he was humbling himself before a
woman who was not going to fall a victim to his persuasions; and the
discovery did not make him more eloquent nor less humble, though it
tended to make him look at the question still more blindly from his own
point of view, and he told himself again, obstinately, that he could not
live without her for his wife.
"Lady Joan," he said suddenly, "is it me that you dislike, or marriage?"
"Both," she said, and laughed heartily, and became swiftly grave again,
and came up to him and took both his hands, an unwonted action that
brought the color to his cheeks; "don't you see, my dear friend, that if
we were to marry I should plague your life out, and you would never
write another note of music, and Mrs. Reginald Routh and all the others
would point at me with invective? And you would bore me to the verge of
extinction in a month! Of course if you didn't like me it might work
better, because then I should have to make you fall in love with me, and
that would prevent it from being such a deadly dull affair. Or if I
hated you I might do it, because then we could live our separate lives,
and there would be nothing to spoil. Don't you see how marriage always
spoils things? It is never romantic; it is expedient, that's all. It
does for people who are not fond of one another, or for people who do
not feel such things; but for two people who are in love, and one of
them a hypersensitive musician--bah! it would be madness! Not that I am
in love, of course."
He chose to ignore the feminine way in which she concluded, and as she
dropped his hands and swung away from him, he found himself feeling for
his tobacco pouch, and he reflected that the courtship was not much more
romantic than the married life she pictured.
"Then you believe in perpetual engagements?" he asked, for the sake of
saying something.
"Not a bit of it," she replied gayly, leaning over the broken wall and
watching the creatures in the water below; "engagements simply mean all
the conventional drawbacks without the moral conveniences. No, there is
only one way out of it, and that won't work when you come to examine
it."
"And what is that?" he asked, like a man, rashly.
"To marry some one who doesn't matter, and be in love with some one
else," she replied carelessly, and kept her face averted.
He rolled up his cigarette and lighted it, and wondered whether women
ever discussed among themselves these subjects which they had no
diffidence in approaching with men.
"No, it would hardly work, I am afraid," he said slowly. "Lady Joan, it
is an absurdly old-fashioned thing to say, but do you know I fancy,
after all, that marriage is the only way out of it?"
She turned round and faced him with hot cheeks and angry eyes.
"I think you are merely abusing your privilege as my friend," she cried;
"I am not going to stay here for you to draw me out and then--then laugh
at me. It is time we closed this--this absurd interview, and I wish--I
wish I had known you were here before I started for my walk. Do you
suppose that _I_ would say anything to _you_ that the whole world might
not hear?"
He certainly did suppose so from quite recent experience, but he only
apologized humbly for having his meaning mistaken, and allowed her to
retrace her steps across the field without uttering any commonplace
about meeting again as friends. Perhaps he knew quite well that when
they did meet again she would be by far the most self-possessed of the
two.
The musician walked back to the inn and tried to persuade himself that
he was a disappointed man.
"My engagements never do seem to go right," he thought dejectedly, as he
leaned out of the parlor window and looked vaguely among the
fruit-trees. The door was pushed open from without, and a rush of red
sunshine and childish footsteps came into the room.
"Here I are, daddy! Where is you, daddy? I've been a naughty boy,
_welly_ naughty Nanny says, 'cos I didn't say grace at tea-time. Why
don't _you_ never say grace, my daddy? When I are a big man I aren't
never going to say grace no more! Nanny says I are to kiss you free
times, and did you bring any sweets for me, daddy?"
"That will do, my son, yes," said Digby, nervously, as the boy clambered
on his knee and proceeded to cover him with sticky embraces; "Nanny is
always right, of course, but I think twice will be enough. Thanks. The
sweets are in this pocket, so you need not turn out all the others. And
you must not have any unless you stop jumping."
The musician was not fond of children, and he always imagined his own
was going to break his neck or damage himself in some way every time he
came into the room. Sonny on his part had his own views concerning this
mysterious daddy who came and went so strangely, and who was always
going to chastise him severely according to Mrs. Haxtell, but never did
anything worse than bring him sweets, and hold him by his sash until he
was nearly suffocated.
"And now for my story, daddy," he shouted, with his mouth full of
sugar-plums. "Be quick please, my daddy; once upon a time--go on,
daddy!"
"Once upon a time," began the musician vaguely, and his thoughts strayed
away to the lithesome figure swaying to and fro on the broken wall, and
he tried hard to realize his crestfallen condition now that she had
refused him.
"Yes, daddy, yes; go on, please, my daddy: are you forgotten the end of
my story, daddy dear?" pleaded the restless spirit in his arms.
"Oh, dear, once upon a time there was--there was--oh, confound it all,
there was a beautiful lady, wasn't there?" he began wearily.
"A booful lady? _Welly_ booful, daddy?"
"Very beautiful, my son."
"Oh," solemnly, "and what sort of daddy did she have?"
"Eh, what? Daddy? Oh--she didn't have one," said the musician, oblivious
of morality; he was going through an eloquent speech in his mind which
he might have said in the castle meadow if only he had not been so
absurdly nervous.
"Oh," said the baby voice, growing shrill with interest, "didn't she
never have no daddy at all?"
Of course, thought the musician, if he had said that to her instead of
stuttering over a few commonplaces she would have found him irresistible
at once.
"Daddy, _dear_," implored Sonny, tugging at his coat suggestively.
"Oh, the devil take the story!" shouted the musician; "didn't I tell you
she never had a daddy? Don't ask so many questions, Sonny."
The big blue eyes became tearful at the unusual tone of anger and at the
untimely end of the story, and Digby's conscience smote him a little.
"I aren't crying, only little girls cry," gasped the child between his
hardly suppressed sobs. "I was only just thinking, daddy, what a welly
funny booful lady she were, daddy."
"Yes, my son," said the musician, very much in the tone of respect he
would have used to a man of his own age who was battling with some
terrible grief, "yes, my son, she was a very funny beautiful lady, so
funny that daddy could not understand her at all, although he loved her
so much. And she laughed at daddy, and wouldn't be kind to him, though
she was kind to the whole world besides."
The musician almost choked with his own emotion this time; but Sonny
jumped up and down with glee at having at last discovered a human chord
in the mythical beautiful lady.
"Oh, so she were a _naughty_ booful lady, daddy? Then she won't have jam
for tea next Sunday, will she, daddy dear?"
The wooden door that led into the yard creaked open again, and again the
red light from the setting sun flooded the little room.
"Yes, Sonny, of course, she was a naughty beautiful lady, that's just
what she was! But do you know I've come back to say that I won't be
naughty any more just yet, at least if daddy lets me, and I'm going to
be kind to him--at least, if daddy wants me. Daddy, do say something.
May I be good for a change, and will you let me be kind to you? I've
come to say I am sorry, like a good little girl; and--I may have jam for
tea next Sunday, mayn't I? Oh, daddy, do say something, and don't look
so doleful! Don't you understand? I was wrong, and you were right,
and--oh, how stupid it all is! Why--daddy--I--I don't believe you want
me now!"
And Lady Joan flung herself into the old high-backed wooden settle, and
crossed her feet, and broke into her maddening, mocking laugh as if to
hide something she was ashamed of showing. But the musician, who knew
her better than she thought he did, in spite of his almost childish
ignorance of woman's nature, went up to her and put the child on her
lap, and smiled down into her upturned, laughing face.
"We both want our beautiful lady, don't we, Sonny? And may I make my
confession too, Lady Joan? I was not sure that I did want you so
desperately after you sent me away just now. But I found that I did
directly you opened the door and the sunshine came in, and I can never
do without you again. But it is better to understand one another at
starting, isn't it?"
"Much better. And ideals are such bosh when we have grown out of our
short frocks. So the understanding is quite complete; you don't know how
much you love me, so we will call it desperately, and I don't know how
much I love you, so we will call it desperately too. You have been in
love shoals of times before, and I--well, I am capable of falling in
love with some one else on my wedding-day. So neither of us will be
disappointed if it does not answer, but we have agreed to try. Hey-day,
what fun it is! The lonely lady at the Court marrying the musician at
the inn; the lady has the establishment, and the musician has the money
to keep it up: if you were truly modern you would have both, and be a
risen cabinet-maker. Relton will have enough to talk about for a year.
But you will not behave as if we were engaged, _just_ yet, will you?
I--I don't feel as if I could quite stand it; do you understand?"
He had never heard her voice falter like that before, and he nodded to
show that he quite understood. But she sprang to her feet with one of
her quick gestures before he had time to realize the intoxicating
feeling of that moment, and he experienced a sensation of chill.
"What wickedness to keep this child up so late; come along, Sonny lad, I
told Nanny that I would put you to bed for a treat, and daddy is going
to stay here and smoke his pipe."
And she vanished up the primitive staircase which led straight from the
parlor up to the room above; and daddy was left somewhat with the
feeling of having consented to Lady Joan's suggestion of marriage
without receiving the right to kiss her, and he sat by the window again
and looked among the fruit-trees, and called himself the happiest man in
the world, and felt that he would be able to write his Swinburne song
when the house was quiet.
A third time the wooden door creaked, and a third time the red sunlight
filled the room. But the musician did not notice it, for he was still
looking out of the window into the orchard, and he was telling himself
with a sense of profound relief that his engagement was at last going
right.
There was the sound of a low, soft, glad cry in the little inn parlor,
and something glided in noiselessly, hesitated for a moment, and then
sped across the ray of light to where he sat by the window. And the
musician turned his eyes away from the fruit-trees then, and fixed them
on the apparition before him, and a look of dumb amazement began to
creep slowly over his face.
"Digby, I've come at last. You said you would not mind waiting ten years
for me, and it has only been one; yet, oh! such a weary long one to me,
Digby! But it has not been my fault, it hasn't really, dear; they never
told me, and papa stopped your two first letters, and Roger Brill--it
was Roger, wasn't it?--never brought me the last one at all. It was all
a mistake, I can't tell you now, but I found it out and gave them the
slip, and came straight here. Oh, Digby, you are not angry with me, are
you? I never meant to keep you waiting so, but I did not find it all out
till yesterday, so I could not come before. Oh, it has been so sad,
waiting for you. And I have been so ill too, Digby; they did not know
what was the matter with me, but _I_ knew all the time. It is all over
now, though, and we are going to be happy at last, aren't we? And may I
have my kiss now, the one you promised me? I think if you had kissed me
before I went away I should never have been ill. But I am going to be
happy now, so happy. Oh, Digby, I feel so greedy over my happiness that
I am frightened of its slipping away again. Is it because I have
startled you that you are so silent? Tell me you are not angry with me,
Digby,--and--when may I have my kiss, please?"
He took her mechanically into his arms and kissed the mouth that was
held up to him, and he experienced dully the sort of shock that an
unconventional man feels when a woman he has always considered the type
of purity does something which a woman of the world would know better
than to risk her reputation by doing. Upstairs, in the room overhead, he
could hear Lady Joan singing his child to sleep. He passed his hand
across his brow and wondered in a vague sort of way how it was all
going to end; it seemed years since Lady Joan had spoken to him.
"No, Norah child, of course I am not angry with you; how could any one
be that? But--"
"I don't mind anything if you are not angry with me. Only, why are you
so quiet? Have you been suffering too, Digby; haven't they been kind to
you?"
"Who? the fates? No, I fancy they have not been kind to me. Did you come
alone, childie?"
"I came with old nurse; she is at the station. Digby, tell me, have you
been ill?"
"No, I have not been ill; I have been working rather hard, and perhaps
worrying as well. Forgive me, dear; you must own it is all rather
startling?"
She put her arms round him, and laughed her low, soft laugh; and he
writhed at the contrast it made to Lady Joan's loud mocking one, which
still rang in his ears.
"Of course it is; I feel as if I had begun to live all over again after
being asleep in a cold, dark place ever since last year. Have you ever
felt like that, Digby? Oh, I have never asked after Sonny; how is he?
Has he gone to bed? May I go up and kiss him?"
"No, stay here," he said vehemently, and then bit his moustache savagely
when she opened her great eyes at him; and he added in a quieter tone,
"he is quite bonny, but we--we won't disturb him yet. There is a lady
with him who--who has been kind to me, and--and she will be coming down
perhaps--"
"A lady? Oh, I see," wonderingly. "I am glad she has been kind to
you--very. Do you like her?"
Should he tell her then? It was not yet absolutely necessary.
"Yes, I like her," he said in a toneless voice, and he forced himself to
smile reassuringly at her.
"I should like to see her, then. Hark, she is coming downstairs; how
merry she is, your friend!" as the full healthy laugh came down the
stairs.
If there had been any means, however desperate, of putting off the
crisis for another ten seconds, the musician would have stooped to it.
But he realized that there was none, and with the same flash of
consciousness as he realized it he braced himself to meet the event as
manfully as such a pitiful situation would allow.
"Norah," he said sternly, putting her off his knee and standing up in
front of her, "I have something to say to you. Will you be brave and
hear me? It may all come right, of course, but--this lady was kind to my
boy--and to me, when no one else would hold out a hand to us; and I
thought you had forgotten me, and so--I asked her to marry me. It was
only this afternoon, and of course--"
The noisy peals of laughter came right into the room through the inner
door, and Lady Joan stood in the dull glow which was all that remained
of the sunlight.
"Oh, daddy, what do you think Sonny said? Why--who--what is it?"
Something white, and quivering, and small, had fallen with a thud across
her feet, and again the low, long child's cry with the joy gone out of
it sounded in the stillness of the summer evening.
The musician had sunk on a chair with his face in his hands.