like a future he might one day lead the woman he loved home, that he
had taken any pleasure whatsoever in his involuntary purchase of the
old property known as The Dials. The gray house down in Glousceshire
in its half-forsaken seclusion, the lie of the land round it, its
shut-offness from the world, its ancient beauty, had been a constant
suggestion to him of a future dwelling, and the doors, the windows, the
low-inviting rooms, the shadowy stairways, ingles, gables, terraces,
the dials and sunken gardens, had appeared to him conceived, planned
and waiting to be the settings for a life of his own. He wanted very
much to tell Mrs. Falconer all about the lovely English country-seat.
In the room where they now talked, wreaths of fog filled the corners
like spiders' dusty webs that poised and swung. The odor that stamps
England hung in the mist, furthermore permeated with the scent of a
bouquet at Mrs. Falconer's elbow and which at one moment of his visit
Jimmy recognized for a lot of roses sent by parcel post from the
Westboro' greeneries.
"Do you ever sew?" he asked her, and she admitted to a thimble which
persistently, with a suggestion of reproach, turned up every now and
then amongst her belongings; now falling out from a jewel box, then
stowed away in a handkerchief case, out of place and continually
reproachful: kept because it had been her mother's.
If he did not speak other than in a general way of the rather long
visit he had been making to the Duke of Westboro' in Glousceshire, he
did tell his friend all about The Dials and dwelt on the fascination
that the old place possessed. The Dials was, in point of fact, very
agreeably described to Mrs. Falconer, who looked it out on the map of
Glousceshire, and Bulstrode's purchase (for he had legally gone in for
it, the whole thing), was made to seem a very jewel of a property.
"It's as lovely as an old print," she said, "as good as a Turner.
You're a great artist along your lines, Jimmy. Don't have it rebuilt
by some more than designing architect in trouble, or landscape-gardened
by some inebriated Adam out of charity. Leave it beautifully alone."
"Oh, I will," he assured her. "It shall tumble away and crush away in
peace. You shall see it all, however," he assured, "for you really
will come down for Christmas? You see, poor old fellow, Westboro's
house is rather empty."
"Yes," nodded Mrs. Falconer.
"You see, every one else has gone back on him."
"Poor dear," sympathized the lady. "Of course we'll go down."
No matter to what extent he had thought of her, and it was pretty sure
to be a wide one, her beauty struck him every time afresh. There was
the fine exquisiteness of _fin de race_ in Mary Falconer. Her father
had been an Irishman born, and the type of his island's lovely women
was repeated in his daughter's blue eyes, the set of her head and her
arms; her taper and small-boned little wrists, her cool hands with the
slender fingers told of muscle and moulding and completed the
well-finished, well turned-out creature whose race it had taken
generations to perfect. These distinctions her clever father
bequeathed her as well as her laugh and her wit, her blue eyes and her
curling hair.
Bulstrode stayed on in the dingy delightful room, until at an order of
his hostess, luncheon was served them on a small table, and over the
good things of an amazingly well-understood buffet and a bottle of
wine, they were left alone. Bulstrode stayed on until the fog in the
corners darkened to the blackest of ugly webs and choked the fire and
clutched the candles' slender throats as if to suffocate the flame.
Tea was served and put away and the period known as _entre chien et
loup_ at length stole up Portman Square alongside the fog and found
Bulstrode still staying on....
Later, much later, when the lamps in the street and the square found
themselves, with no visible transition, lighting night-time as they had
lighted day--when the hansoms began to swing the early diners along to
their destinations, a hansom drew up before No. ----, Portman Square.
It was at the hour soft-footed London had ceased to roll its rubber
tires down the little street, and only an occasional cab slipped by
unheard. But a small hand cart on which a piano organ was installed
wheeled by No. ----, Portman Square, and stopped directly under the
Sorghams' window and a man began to sing:
"I'll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of old Cashmere."
The creature was singing for his living, for his supper doubtless,
certainly for his breakfast, but he chanced to possess a remarkable
gift and he evidently loved his trade. The silence--wherein all London
appeared to listen, the quiet wherein the magically suspended room had
swung and swung until even Bulstrode's clear mind and good sense began
fatally to blur and swing with the pendulant room--was broken into by
the song.
And as Bulstrode moved and turned away his eyes from the woman's lovely
face, she sighed and covered her own eyes with her hands. The small
coffee table had been taken away. Mrs. Falconer was in a low chair
leaning forwards, her hands lying loosely in her lap. The distance
between the two his hand could have bridged in one gesture. The voice
of the street singer was superb, liquid and sweet. He sang his ballad
well.
"I'll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of old Cashmere."
Mrs. Falconer's guest rose.
"You'll come down for Christmas," he said, "and I'll meet you as we
have arranged, to-morrow."
"Jimmy," she protested, "it's only ten o'clock."
"I must, however, go."
"Nonsense. Where will you pass the next hour and a half? There's not
a cat in town."
"Nevertheless, I promised a man to meet him at the...."
"_Jimmy_!"
He had reached the door, making his way with a dogged determination
and, like a man who has touched terra firma after months on a dancing
brig, still not feeling quite sure of the land or its tricks.
"How you hurry from me," she said softly.
"Oh, I'm hurrying off," he explained brightly, "because I want to get
hold of that chap out there and take him to supper, and to find out why
he isn't on the operatic stage. He's got a jolly voice. Good night,
good night."
He was gone from her with scant courtesy and a brusquerie she knew
well, adored and hated! During these last years she had done her cruel
best, her wicked best, to soften and change and break it down.
The curtains, as she drew them back, showed that the fog had for the
most part lifted, and she was just in time to see the piano and the two
musicians disappear in the mist which still tenaciously held the end of
the street in shadow--a gentleman in long evening cloak and high hat
hurried after the street people. The woman's face was tender as she
watched the distinguished figure melt into the fog, and at her last
glimpse of her friend she blew a kiss against the pane.
Bulstrode did not go back that night to Westboro'. He wired out that
Mrs. Falconer and himself would be down for dinner the following day
and he also wired for a motor to meet him some few miles from Penhaven
Abbey, as the motor did the next day.
As he speeded towards Penhaven Bulstrode leaned towards the man who
drove him.
"Stop first at the inn, will you, Bowles? I'll order tea there, and
then drive on to the station at the Hants. It's the three o'clock from
London we're to meet, you know, and we've just the time."
The Abbey and its clustering village hung on the hill side some fifteen
lovely miles away to the south of them. And Bulstrode, who was at
length obediently answering the call of it, and in response to the
fancied bell of the entire country side, religiously hastening to
whatever might reward him, settled himself back in his corner.
He saw the mist fly by him as his carriage cut out its way rapidly
through Glousceshire. The air was not too cold in spite of the
dampness, for the vapor rose high, and above and below it the
atmosphere was clear.
Mrs. Falconer herself had chosen Penhaven as a place possible to drive
over to as far as Bulstrode was concerned, and far enough away to stop
over in, for tea. Bulstrode carried in his pocket the note of it, she
had written out for him. It bore the arrivals of trains, the address
of the inn; she had herself written this, recurring to a pretty fallacy
she liked to indulge in that Jimmy forgot trains, missed them, and
forgot rendezvous, and that he never really knew. Well, at all events,
he was not likely to miss meeting this one. He had thought about
nothing else since he left her in London and prepared for her as he was
always preparing for her as one makes ready for the dearest guest at a
feast.
The fact that not only had she divinely consented to the Penhaven
scheme, but that she had herself arranged the whole thing, made the
romance of the idea first appeal to herself and then readily to
Bulstrode; the fact that she had been the creator of the little
excursion that gave them to each other for several hours before what
the castle had to offer them of surprise or dulness--did not in any
measure rob the occasion of the charm of the _imprevue_ for the lady
herself. Nor did she in the least feel that it was any the less his
because it was so essentially her own plan.
It proved either too cold or too late to see the cathedral, to see
anything more than the close which, side by side, they had wandered
through together a few moments before tea. Penhaven's distinguished
gloom was not disturbed, and in their subterranean vaults lying all
along their stones, the dukes and the abbes and the duchesses remained
unlit in their stern crypts by the verger's candle on this Christmas
Eve.
At the little vulgar inn (in a stuffy sitting-room a fire had
spluttered for some quarter of an hour before the train arrived), Mrs.
Falconer had made Jimmy his tea in a vulgar little bowl-like teapot,
and as her hands touched the pottery's blue glaze served very well for
a halo. As she buttered him slices of toast herself, and spread them
with gooseberry jam and herself ate and drank and laughed and
chattered, she had been, with the tea things about her and her sleeves
turned back as she cut and buttered and spread, she had been with the
roundness of her wrists and the suave grace of her capable hands, most
adorably a woman, most adorably dear.
Her furs and coat laid aside, the hat at his asking laid aside in
order, although he did not tell her so, that the air of home might be
more complete for them. _Vis-a-vis_ they had eaten together and
laughed together and talked together till it grew later and later, and
the motor waited without in the yard amongst the ravens and the ducks
who peered from the straw of their winter quarters at the big awkward
machine.
"Jimmy" ... she had started when the crumbs and dishes had been cleared
away, and for some seconds did not follow up his name with any other
word. It was always Bulstrode who took wonderful care of the time. It
was he who gave her her hat, its pins, her coat, her furs, her gloves,
one by one, her muff last, his eyes on her, as each article slowly went
to place, until her big white veil wound and wound and pinned and
fastened and hid her. "Jimmy," she whispered, as he ruthlessly and
definitely opened the door and the cold rushed in, "let's build _here_."
Still it was she who took all the blame of their tardy departure from
the homely hospitality of the inn; she assured him that she could make
a wonderful toilet and in an incredibly short time, and that for once
she wouldn't be late for dinner at the castle.
"Not," Bulstrode assured her, "that it in the least matters, but the
Duke, as likely as not, would choose to dine alone; he was a man of
moods."
"In which case," she had stopped with her foot on the auto step,
"Penhaven isn't a bad place for tea, and why wouldn't dinner at this
perfect inn...."
But Bulstrode met her words with a shake of his head and a shrug of his
shoulders, and helped her firmly into the motor and sat again by her
side.
"I can't tell you," he said, "what will be going on at the castle. I
haven't been back since I left it two days ago, and almost anything can
have happened in that time. The Duchess of Westboro' herself, in the
interval, may have gone back to her husband."
"Heavens!" Mrs. Falconer exclaimed, "in which case how horribly _de
trop_ we shall be."
But Bulstrode consoled her with the thought that if they were _de trop_
they would at least be _de trop ensemble_.
Amongst the handful of letters waiting for her in her dressing-room at
the castle there had been a despatch from America. Even this, and a
hasty look at her mail had not succeeded in holding her attention or
even carrying it beyond the house. Her husband had expected to land in
Liverpool at the end of the coming week; he was to take her home with
him. And until he arrived she was breathing, as she always did in his
absence, deeply.
There had been no one to greet them as Bulstrode and herself came into
the castle, and she had hurried to her rooms to begin without loss of
time her boasted rapid toilet. The dress, whose harmony had impressed
her host, the Duke, on a former visit at the castle, had been laid out
for her; its sumptuous color overspread the bed. But the lady chose
instead a white gown whose art of holding to her, and holding her, in
its simple lines and splendid sheen, made its beauty.
There was much of the true woman in this entirely lovely creature, as
she stood before her glass and saw herself, the best example of the
really beautiful American. Her naturalness gave her a freedom, a
frankness, a grace, a certain imperial set of the head.
Bulstrode had once said to the Duchess of Westboro' that a woman should
above all "console." Mary Falconer would have known what he meant.
That sex she gloriously represented! The sweetness and dearness of
her. Well, there were few women no doubt like her. Jimmy hoped so for
the sake of the race, for the sake of the hearts of other men. She was
the ideal fireside of home, and when, as she had twice done, she bade
him, as that time she had said, "Build here," he knew what she meant
and felt, and that she herself was exquisitely home.
Leaning over her dressing-table she scrutinized not her face, whose
ardent beauty seemed to bloom upon the glass, but her hair as it fell
and rippled and flowed round her brows. Along the edge of one of the
lustrous waves was a touch as if her powder puff had brushed her hair.
Mrs. Falconer put up her hand, smoothed the line, then let it lie as it
grew. It so declared itself to be the first unmistakable white. A
gardener's basket full of roses and camelias, gardenias and carnations
had been sent up for her; but under the diamond at her breast she chose
rather to fasten in a spray of mistletoe with its pale, grape-like
berries. A long green scarf fell over her arm and against the
whiteness of her dress like a branch of spring verdure, and permitted
by the fashion of the day, there shook and trembled in her ears long,
pear-shaped pearls which, like her thimble, had been her mother's.
As she left the security of her room and fire for the corridors and the
publicity of the lower rooms, for the first time in her life she had a
sudden feeling of _pruderie_ at the bare beauty of her neck and arms.
She felt as if she were coming unclad into the street, and drew her
scarf across her breast. But she found herself to be quite alone in
the drawing-room, and before she had time to be bewildered at her long
desertion, a letter was handed her with a few murmured words by a
footman. It perhaps served her right, she reflected, for so blandly
coming into a house during a state of domestic upheaval, that she
should turn out to be not alone the only guest, but without host or
friend! The letter told her, as gently as it could without the
satisfaction of any explanation, that both Bulstrode and the Duke of
Westboro' were unavoidably absent. She turned the letter over with
keen disappointment. Her dress, her beauty which the drive from
Penhaven and the afternoon's happiness had heightened to a point that
she might be pardoned for seeing, was then all for nothing! On what
extravagant bent could the two men have gone?
"Both of them," she soliloquized with a shrug, "off on a hunt, I dare
say, after a fool of a woman who doesn't know enough to stop at home."
Before she could further lash at her absent hostess, she found herself
a few seconds later taking the scarcely palpable arm of the rector,
whom the Duke, in a moment of abstraction, had asked to the
Christmas-tree and whom he had subsequently forgotten to put off. The
rector alone, of all the expected, turned up, his smile vacuous and his
appetite in order. At the table laid for four, and great enough for
forty, the clergyman and the lady faced each other. Mrs. Falconer
smiled kindly, for as her friend had told the Duchess on the same
afternoon, she was kind; and if she resented the apology for a man her
slender _vis-a-vis_ presented, she did not show her scorn; she smiled
kindly at him. His cloth and habit, and cut even, wore the air of
disapproval. Her jewels, the bare splendor of her neck and arms,
seemed out of place, and yet she could not but be perfectly sure that
even the dull eyes of her _vis-a-vis_ not alone reflected, but
confirmed, how lovely she was.
The reverend gentleman was new to Glouceshire, but it turned out that
he already knew its hearsays and its _on dits_ and he knew when she
asked him, something of the country and The Dials. It may have been
that the bright aspect of the lady, her light mockery--for as she would
she could not help falling into them even with this half-human
creature--wickedly drew him on, gave the man license as he thought, to
descend to scandal; at all events, after dinner, over a cigar smoked in
her presence, the empty glass of Benedictine at his elbow, in his
cheeks a muddy red diffused from his wine, the gentleman leaned
forward, and tried to adapt his speech and topic to the worldly vein
which he imagined was the habitual tenor of a fashionable woman's life.
"Even this lovely shire," he drawled its beauty--"cannot, so it would
seem, be free from scandal. And where a minister would naturally look
for help, wretchedly enough for the most part he only finds examples
and warnings."
The rector lifted his eyes to the fine old ceiling as if in its shields
and blazons he was impressed by the blots of recent sins.
His hand touched the little liqueur glass. He picked it up and in a
second of abstraction tried to drain its oily emptiness.
"Let me ring," said Mrs. Falconer, "and send for some more Benedictine,
or better still, for some _fine_."
"No," he refused, and sedately put her right. "No more of anything, I
think, unless it might be a bottle of soda. You spoke of lovely
Glousceshire and then spoke of The Dials. Do you know the place?"
Only, she told him, by hearsay.
He solemnly supposed so; so he himself chiefly knew it, as indeed all
the country side was growing to know it.
The eyes of the lady to whom the rector was retailing his little gossip
were intently on him. But Mrs. Falconer in reality was not looking at
him, neither did she at once find ready words to refute, to cast down,
to blot out, his hideous suggestion that filled the room with it sooty
blot.
Mrs. Falconer, who had good-humoredly been amused by his intense
Britishness thus far, his pale lack of individuality, his perfect type,
now looked sharply at her companion.
The rector had been more than right, Mrs. Falconer was used to the
indifferent, rather brutal handling by society of human lives.
Possibly as she adored people, no one of her set was more interested in
the comedies and dramas of her _contemporains_. But there are ways and
channels: what runs clear in one runs muddy in another.
The rector, in his own way, told her that for several weeks a very
beautiful lady had been living at The Dials. She had, it appeared,
never been out of the garden gate, and the servants were foreign, all
save a deaf old gardener. But the beautiful lady who sought such
peculiar seclusion, had a very constant visitor. Of course the rector
was not able or sufficiently daring to affirm; with a cleverness worthy
a better story he left his hearer to guess, imagine, who the visitor
might be.
"Don't you think," Mrs. Falconer breathed, after a very short lapse
into silence, "that we might let such ghosts alone on Christmas Eve?"
She rose and stood before him in her soft, luminous dress; her eyes
were intent on him, but in reality she was not looking at him.
He had grown so detestable that she could bear his presence no longer;
she found herself, however, wanting to learn all his knowledge to its
finest detail. She found that she despised herself for any interest
she might take. She got rid of him at length, how, she never knew.
But she saw him leave her presence with relief.
When the miserable man, as she called him, had taken his leave, the
deserted guest looked about her rather defiantly, as if the objects
with which the room was filled were hostile. Then, with a half-audible
exclamation she sank down in a chair, her elbow on the left arm of it,
and her chin in her hand.
Well, the imputation, the character of what she had just heard vulgarly
said and to which, for a bewildered second, she had perhaps vulgarly
listened--was highly dreadful, highly disordering to her fashion of
thinking and believing about Jimmy Bulstrode! Oh, for a moment she had
half believed what that creature said, and her eyes had winked fast at
the game before them! In the swiftness of the revolutions it had
seemed for a sole flash real; but now that the noise had stopped and
the carousel as well, she saw how _wooden_ the horses were and that
they were as dead as doornails! If she had been disturbed, she came
loyally back now, with a glow and a rush of tenderness as she instantly
re-instated what could never lose caste.
Oh, The Dials! She couldn't conceive what Jimmy had in reality,
rashly, delightfully done there; what he had planted or installed, if
he had planted or installed anything. But whatever the truth was, it
was sure to be essentially right, as far as ethics went--she knew that
at least. But Jimmy's delicacy and his heart were all too fine for the
crude wisdom of the world or for her common-sense, which would have
told him no doubt, had he cared to ask, that he was rash and wild.
She was prepared to hear that he had made some Magdalen a home in this
prudish country place. At this possibility Jimmy's kindness and
charity stood out graciously in strong contrast to the prudish judgment.
There were several long mirrors set in the panels of the room like
lakes between green shores of old brocade, and they reflected her as
she leaned forwards in her chair and looked about her, taking in the
brightness of the perfect little room. It had been cut off from the
wider, grander spaces for more intimate passages in the social course
of events, but there was nothing newly planned in its colors and
tapestries, its hangings and furnishings; the effect was sombre rather,
the objects had the air of use, of having participated in past
existences, and like faithful servants, they seemed to wait to serve
perfectly new events.
The especial brightness of the room came from the gay festooning that
had found its way throughout the castle. The mirrors were dark with
the velvet rounds of hemlock from which the miserable face of scandal,
the sardonic face of divorce, under the conditions of the present
domestic situation might well grin satyr-like from the Christmas
wreaths. No doubt there were lots of ghosts about, ready to stride, to
flutter, or to walk; the American woman put their histories and their
legends impatiently by.
The facile way in which the Duchess of Westboro' had slipped out from
the chafing of domestic harness, the egotistical _geste_ with which she
had so widely thrown over her responsibilities, fetched Mrs. Falconer
up to her own life, from whose problems indeed her husband's absence
alone set her free. Her affairs had lately rapidly progressed, flying,
whirling. The circles the event of her marriage had originally
created, touched at last the farthest limit; there was nothing left for
them now but to scatter. The vortex had rapidly narrowed down, was
narrowing down, and nothing remained but a sole object in the bed of
the clear water; and as Mary Falconer looked at it she knew that the
thing was a stone.