The season in London this year had been particularly amusing; there had
been a quite unusually large number of balls, the opera had been one
perpetual coruscation of evening stars that sang together, the conduct
of May and early June from a meteorological point of view had been
impeccable, and in consequence when the world in general came back after
Whitsuntide they came for the most part with a pleasurable sense of
returning for the second act of a play of which the first had been
really enchanting. Like taking one's seat again for a play was the sense
that various unfinished situations which had been left in an interesting
stage would now move forward to their dramatic climaxes. One,
however--this was rather unfair--had developed itself to a happy close
in the country, and Madge Ellington's engagement to Philip was generally
pronounced to be very nice indeed. On both sides, indeed, it was very
nice; for it had not been seemly that a millionaire should be unmarried
so long, and on the other hand it had not been seemly that Madge should
be unmarried so long. But now they had both seen the error of their
ways, and had agreed to marry each other.
And above all, it was very nice for Lady Ellington, about whom it was
generally known that she had made a considerable sum in speculation
lately. To do that was universally recognised as being an assured
advance towards the bankruptcy court, but to have captured a wealthy
son-in-law who was a magnate in the South African market turned her
steps, or might be hoped to turn them, away from the direction of the
courts, and point instead towards the waters of comfort and cash.
Another thing that excited to some extent the attention and applause of
the world was a certain change of demeanor in Madge, which was very
noticeable after her return to London from the Whitsuntide holiday. She
had always been rather given to put her head in the air, and appear not
to notice people; but her engagement had brought to her an added
geniality. Hitherto she had been something of "a maid on yonder mountain
height," but the shepherd, Philip Home, had, it appeared, convinced her
that "love was of the valley," and she had quite distinctly come down.
This, at any rate, was the conclusion at which Gladys Ellington, the
present Lady Ellington, arrived within two minutes of the time when she
met Madge next.
She was of about Madge's own age, and the two, in spite of old Lady
Ellington's rooted dislike to her nephew, had always been friends.
Gladys was charmingly pretty, most successful in all she did, and
universally liked. This was only fair, for she took immense trouble to
be liked, and never did an ill-natured thing to anyone, unless it was
quite certain that she would not be found out. She had come to tea on
the afternoon succeeding Madge's return to London, and, though she
professed regrets at the absence of Madge's mother, was really delighted
to find her friend alone. She had a perfect passion for finding things
out, and her method of doing so was to talk with extreme volubility
herself, so that no one could possibly conjecture that she had any
object of the sort in her mind. But her pauses were well calculated, and
her questions few, while with regard to these, she always gave the
appearance of not attending to the answers, which further disarmed
suspicion. She was, however, a little afraid of Madge's mother, who
always gave her the idea of seeing through her. This made her volubility
a little threadbare at times, and consequently she bore her absence with
more than equanimity.
"Darling, I think it is too charming," she was saying, "and I always
hoped that you would do just this. Mr. Home is perfectly adorable, I
think, and though it sounds horribly worldly to say so, it is an
advantage, you know, to marry a very rich man. We're as poor as mice,
you see, and so I know. Yes, please--a cup of tea, though we're told now
that a cup of tea is the most unwholesome thing in the world. And you
had a nice party? Mrs. Home, too, just like a piece of china scented
with lavender. And who else was there?"
"Only two more men," said Madge, "Mr. Merivale and Mr. Evelyn Dundas."
"The Hermit of the New Forest!" cried Gladys, directing her remarks to
him because she wished to hear more of the other. "How too exciting! He
lives on cherry jam and brown bread, does he not, and whistles to the
cows, who lay their heads on his shoulder and purr. I used to know him
in the old days before he was a hermit at all. And Mr. Dundas, too! Do
you like him?"
"Yes, very much, very much indeed," said Madge gravely. "He is such a
child, you know, and he makes one laugh because he is so silly. He is
going to do my portrait, by the way; mine and Philip's."
"How delightful! He ought to make a really wonderful thing of you, dear
Madge. Do tell me, how much does he charge? I'm dying to be painted by
him, but he is so frightfully expensive, is he not? And you liked him;
what a good thing, as you are going to sit to him. It must be awful
being painted by a man who irritates you."
Madge laughed.
"He doesn't irritate me in the slightest," she said. "In fact, I don't
think I ever got to know a man so quickly. I don't know how it is;
somehow he is like clear water. You can see straight to the bottom."
Gladys regarded her rather closely as she nibbled with rather a
bird-like movement at a sugared bun.
"Madge, you've quite changed," she said. "You are actually beginning to
take an interest in your fellow-creatures. That is so wise of you. Of
course Evelyn Dundas is adorable; I'm hopelessly in love with him
myself, but I should have thought he was just the sort of man who would
not have interested you in the least. Nor would he have a few weeks ago.
Dearest, you've stepped down from your pedestal, where you really used
to be rather a statue, you know, like Galatea, and it does improve you
so. I saw it the moment I came into the room. And just falling in love
has done it all."
A sudden look of pain came over Madge's face, and her companion, with a
well-chosen pause, waited for her to express it in words.
"Ah, Gladys, are you sure you are right?" she said. "Because I think I
must tell you this even as I told Philip--I don't feel as if I had
fallen in love. I like him, I esteem and respect him, but--but it isn't
what I expected. I'm not--I hate the word--but I'm not thrilled."
Gladys rustled sympathetically, and Madge went on:
"I had it all out with my mother, too," she said, "who very sensibly
said that as I had lived twenty-five years without falling in love in
that sort of sense, I was very unlikely to begin now. On the other hand,
she said that it was much better that I should be married than remain
single. And so I am going to marry Philip Home."
Again Gladys rustled sympathetically, and gave a murmured "Yes," for
Madge evidently had more to say.
"Anyhow, I have been honest with him," she said, "and I have told him
that. And he seems to think that it can easily form the basis for
happiness, and accepts it. But tell me, am I frightfully cold-blooded?
And have I any right to marry him?"
Gladys' quick little brain had hopped over a dozen aspects of this
question, and pecked, so to speak, at a dozen different fruits, while
Madge was speaking; but with a whirr of wings she was back again, up to
time as usual.
"No, not the least cold-blooded, and you have every right to marry him,"
she said. "For you may be quite sure that you soon will be in love with
him, because I assure you that already it has made an enormous
difference in you. How do I know that? I can't possibly tell you, any
more than you can tell exactly why a person looks ill. You say her face
looks drawn. What's drawn? Why, the same as ill. You've woke up,
dearest; you've come to life. Life! there's nothing in the world so good
as that."
Madge leaned forward, and spoke more eagerly.
"Yes, you're right," she said, "though I don't know that your reason is
right I have somehow come to life. But it puzzles me a little to know
how it has happened, or why."
Gladys nodded her head with an air of wisdom, and got up. At this time
of the year she seldom spent more than an hour in any one place, and
still more seldom with only one person, and both Madge and Madge's house
had now enjoyed their full share of her time.
"Ah, I am very bad at riddles," she said, "and, besides, none of us know
'why' about anything, and, on the whole, reasons and motives matter very
little. Things that happen are so numerous and so interesting that one
has literally not time to probe into them and ask how and why. And after
all, dear, when anything so very nice has happened as your engagement,
which too has brought such a gain to you in yourself, I am more than
content, and so should you be, to accept that as it is. Now, I must
simply fly; I am dining out and going to the opera, and to a dance
afterwards. What a pity there are not forty-eight hours in every day."
This regret was subsequently shared by Madge herself, who found that the
life of a young woman who is going to be married in six weeks' time, for
the wedding had been fixed for the end of July, implies a full
engagement book. And in addition to the ordinary calls on her time,
hours were further claimed from her by Evelyn Dundas, who apparently had
insisted to another sitter on the prior rights of this subsequent
engagement, and announced himself free to begin her portrait at once, to
give her sittings whenever she could sit, and finish it as quickly as
his powers of brush would permit him. His impetuousness, as usual, swept
away all difficulties, and before a fortnight had elapsed, Madge had
already given him four sittings, and the picture itself was beginning to
live and breathe on his canvas.
These sittings, or rather the artist's manners and moods during them,
were strangely various. Sometimes for half-an-hour, as Madge complained,
he would do nothing but stare at her, grunting to himself, and biting
the ends of his brushes. Then in a moment all would be changed, and
instead of staring and grunting with idle hands, he would glance at her
and record, record and glance again, absorbed in the passion of his
creation, whistling sometimes gently to himself, or at other times
silent, but with a smiling mouth. Then that wind of inspiration that
bloweth where it listeth would leave him again, and he would declare
roundly that he did not know what she was like, or what his picture was
like, but that the only thing quite certain was that his picture was not
like her. Then, even while these gloomy announcements were on his lips,
even in the middle of a sentence, he would murmur to himself, "Oh, I
see," and the swish of the happy brush would alone break the silence. At
other times there was no silence to break, and from the time she stepped
up on to the platform till when she left it, he would pour out a perfect
flood of inconsequent nonsense. Or, again, the hours passed in unbroken
conversation between the two, the talk sometimes flitting like a
butterfly over all the open flowers of life, but at other times, as it
had done once or twice at Philip's house, dropping suddenly into the
heart of things, finding sometimes honey there, but sometimes shadows
only.
A sitting of this latter kind had just come to an end, and Evelyn, after
seeing his sitter into her carriage, had returned to his studio, still
palette in hand, meaning to work for an hour at the background.
Certainly in this short space of time he had made admirable progress,
and he knew within himself that this was to be a landmark of his work,
and up to the present, at any rate, his high-water mark. He had drawn
the girl standing very upright, as was her wont, but with head a little
thrown back, and her face, eyes, and mouth alike laughed. It was a
daring conception, but the happiness of the execution was worthy of it,
and the fore-shortening of the face owing to the throw-back of the head,
the drawing, too, of the open mouth and of the half-closed eyes was a
triumph. Her figure was shown in white evening dress, with hands locked
together, carrying a feather fan, and arms at full length in front of
her; over her shoulders, half thrown back, was a scarlet opera cloak,
the one note of high colour in all the scheme. Behind her, on the wall,
he had introduced, by one of those daring feats that were labelled by
detractors as "cheeky," but by any who estimated fairly the excellence
of the execution, a round gilt-framed mirror, with a convex glass in it,
on which was distortedly reflected the room itself and the back of the
girl's figure. It was at this that he had returned to work now.
Evelyn's studio, like all rooms much used by anyone who has at all a
vivid personality, had caught much of the character of its owner. He had
made it out of the top floor in his house in the King's Road, by
throwing all the attics into one big room. Often for a whole day he
would not stir from it till it was too dark to paint, having a tray of
lunch brought him which sometimes he would savagely devour, at other
times leave untouched till he was literally faint with hunger. It was
easy to see, too, how the room had grown, so to speak, how it had picked
up his characteristics. The big divan, for instance, in the window,
piled with brightly-coloured cushions, had evidently been of the early
furniture, a remnant of imperishable childhood; so, too, no doubt, was
the open Dutch-tiled fireplace, the Chippendale table, the few big
chairs that stood about, and the Japanese screen by the door. After
that, however, all sorts of various tastes showed themselves. A heap of
dry modelling clay in one corner recorded a fit of despair, when he had
asserted that the only real form of art was form itself, not colour; a
violin with two strings missing denoted that after hearing Sarasate he
was convinced, for several hours at least, that the music of strings was
alone the flower worth plucking, and showed also a delightful conviction
that it was never too late to learn, though the broken strings might
imply that it was now too late to mend. A set of _Punch_, complete from
the beginning, lay like a heap of morraine stones round the sofa, a bag
of rusty golf-clubs stood in a corner, and behind the Japanese screen
leaned a bicycle on which dust had collected, an evidence of its being,
for the time at any rate, out of date far as its owner was concerned.
But three months before or three months afterwards a visitor might
scarcely have recognised the room again. A portrait might have been
finished, and with disengaged eyes Evelyn would survey what he would
certainly call his pigsty. The bicycle would be sent to the cellar with
the golf clubs slung on to it, the heap of modelling clay be dumped on
the dustheap, the Japanese screen banished to the kitchen, because for
the moment Japanese art was a parody and a profanation, and the violin,
perhaps, have its strings mended. Or again, instead of the Japanese
screen being banished, Japan might have flooded the whole studio as its
armies flood Manchuria, and an equally certain and uncompromising gospel
pronounce that it alone was good.
It was then to this temple of contradictions that Evelyn returned, three
steps to a stride, after seeing Madge off. The figure was right; he felt
sure of that, but the tone of the background somehow was not yet quite
attuned to it. Above all, the mirror must be bright burnished gold, not
dull, for the flame of the cloak, if it was the only note of high colour
in the picture, consumed itself, burned away ineffectually, and it was
with a heart that beat fast, not only from his gallop upstairs, but from
excitement in this creation that was his, that he again stood before the
picture. Yes, that was it; another high light was necessary.
For a moment he looked at the laughing face on his canvas, almost
laughing himself. Then all on a sudden his laughter died, the need of
his picture for another high light died too, for though his eyes were
looking on his own presentment of Madge, it was Madge herself that his
soul saw. And even as his eyes loved the work of his hands, so he knew
in a burning flash of self-revelation that his soul loved her. Up till
now, up till this very moment, he had not known that this was so; that
it was possible he had long since recognised, that the possibility was
reaching its tentacles out into regions of the probable he had
recognised, so to speak, out of the corner of his eye, had recognised,
but cut it, and now came the knowledge.
Evelyn gave a great sigh, raising his hands, one with the palette on the
thumb, the other with the brush it held, to full stretch, and let them
fall again, and stood still in front of his own inimitable portrait,
drinking in no longer with the artist's eye only, but with the eye of
the lover, the incomparable beauty of his beloved. That rush of sudden
knowledge, so impetuous, so overwhelming, for the moment drowned all
else; it did not enter his head to consider "What next?" The present
moment was so blindingly bright that everything that lay outside it was
in impenetrable shadow. The intimate relations into which he was thrown
with the girl, by reason of this portrait; the fact that she was
engaged, and that to his best friend, did not at first have any
existence in his mind; he but looked at this one fact, that he loved her
to the exclusion of all else. Then, as must always happen, came reaction
from the ecstatic moment, and in the train of reaction, like some grey
ghost, thought. But even thought for the time was gilded by the light of
that central sun, and it was long before he could frame the situation in
the bounding lines of life and conduct. For love is a force which is
impatient of opposition, and against opposition it will hurl itself,
like a wild bird against the wires of its cage, careless of whether it
is dashed to pieces, knowing only the overwhelming instinct and need of
liberty, to gain which death is but the snap of a careless finger.
Then, almost with a laugh at himself, came that most important factor
that he had overlooked. For a couple of minutes his egoism had run away
with him, taking the bit in its teeth, and the thought that he loved
her, that he needed her, had not only been uppermost, but alone in his
mind. But what of her? She was engaged to Philip, and shortly to be
married to him, and he himself was merely to be relegated to that
somewhat populous class of "odd man out." That ebb from the full flood
of his passion was swift; it came in a moment, as swiftly as the other
had come. So that was all that was left of him, all that was possible;
that he should just stand aside while the other two went on their way,
not daring even to touch the hem of her garment, for she would most
surely draw it away from him. That clearly was the logical outcome, but
logical as it was, not a single fibre of his inmost self accepted it.
That, the one thing which to the reasonable mind must assuredly happen
was to him the one thing which could not possibly happen. The very
strength of his newly-awakened love was the insuperable bar to it; it
could not be, for what--and the question seemed to himself at that
moment perfectly unanswerable--what on earth was to happen to him in
that case? Here was the Pagan, the interesting survival, as Tom Merivale
had called him, most unmistakably surviving, shouting, as it were, that
its own happiness, its own need, was the one thing which the rest of the
world must accept and respect. And, since the only way in which due
acceptation could be secured for it was conditional on Madge's loving
him, that had to happen also. Yes, nothing else would do; she had to
love him.
This reasoning, if one can call by so deliberate a word these leaping
conclusions, was not any act of reflecting egoism. His emotions, his
whole being, had been suddenly stirred, and there necessarily rose to
the surface the sediment, so to speak, of that which dwelt in its
depths. The whole course and habit of his past life no doubt was
responsible for what was there, but he was no more responsible at this
particular moment for the thoughts and conclusions that leaped in fire
into his mind than is a man who is suddenly startled responsible for
starting; his nerves have acted without the dictation of his brains. But
with Evelyn, as the minutes passed, and he still sat there with
heightened colour and flashing eyes, looking at his unfinished picture,
he ceased to be comparable to a suddenly startled man; the thoughts that
had sprung unbidden to his mind were not put away; they remained there,
and they grew in brightness. His conscious reflections endorsed the
first instinctive impulse.
It so happened that he had arranged to go down that afternoon to spend a
couple of nights in the New Forest with the Hermit, but when this
engagement was again remembered by him, it seemed to him at first
impossible to go. What he had learned in this last hour was a thing so
staggering that he felt as if all the affairs of life, social
intercourse, the discussion of this subject or of that, as if any
subject but one contained even the germ or protoplasm of importance, had
become impossible. But go or stay, everything was impossible except to
win Madge's love. Then another impossibility, bigger perhaps than any,
made its appearance, for the most impossible thing of all was to be
alone, anything was more endurable than that; and side by side with that
rose another, namely, the impossibility of keeping his knowledge to
himself. He must, he felt, tell somebody, and of all people in the world
the Hermit was the person whom it would be most easy to tell.
Then a sort of pale image of Philip came into his mind. He was conscious
of no disloyalty to him, because he was incapable of thinking of him at
all, except as of somebody, a vague somebody, who dwelt among the
shadows outside the light. Mrs. Home was no more, nobody was anything
more than a dweller in these shadows. Nor, indeed, had he been able to
think of Philip directly, concentratedly, would he have accused himself
of disloyalty; either Madge would never love himself, in which case no
harm was done to anyone, or she would do so, in which case her marriage
with Philip was an impossibility--an impossibility, too, the existence
of which had better be found out before it was legally confirmed. Yet
all this but quivered through his mind and was gone again, he caught but
as passing a glimpse of the world of life and conduct as he caught of
the stations that his train thundered through in its westerly course;
they but brushed by his inward eye, and had passed before they had ever
been focussed or seen with anything like clearness.
The Hermit had once told him, it may be remembered, that he wanted
deepening, and Evelyn on that occasion had enunciated the general
principle that he had no use for deeps, the surface being sufficient for
his needs. And even now, though his egotism was so all-embracing, it was
in no sense whatever profound. He did not probe himself, it was of the
glittering surface alone on which shone this sun of love that he was
conscious. Deeps, perhaps, might lie beneath, but they were unexplored;
life like a pleasure boat with shallow-dipping oars went gaily across
him. Indeed it was probable that before the depth--if depths were
there--could be sounded the sun, so to speak, would have to go in, for
with that dazzle on the water it was impossible to see what lay below.
Tom Merivale's cottage, which had begun life as two cottages, stood very
solitary some mile or two outside Brockenhurst, and though the high road
passed within a few hundred yards of it, it was impossible to conceive a
place that more partook of the essential nature of a hermitage. Between
it and the high road lay a field, with only a rough track across it;
beyond that, and nearer to the house, an orchard, while a huge
box-hedge, compact and homogeneous with the growth and careful clipping
of many years, was to any who wished to be shut off from the outer world
a bar as impenetrable as a ring of fire. Immediately beyond this stood
the cottage itself, looking away from the road; in front a strip of
garden led down to the little river Fawn, and across the river lay a
great open expanse of heath, through which, like a wedge, came down a
big triangular wood of beech-trees. It was this way, over the garden and
the open forest, that the cottage looked; not a house of any kind was in
sight, and one might watch, like a ship-wrecked mariner for a sail, for
any sign of human life, and yet in a long summer day perhaps the watcher
would see nothing to tell him that he was not alone as far as humankind
went in this woodland world. Tom had built out a long deep verandah that
ran the whole length of the cottage on the garden front; brick pillars
at the two corners supported a wooden roof, and a couple of steps led
down into the garden. Down the centre of that ran a pergola, over which
climbed in tangled luxuriance the long-limbed tribes of climbing roses.
Ramblers spilt their crimson clusters over it, or lay in streaks and
balls of white and yellow foam, while carmine pillar seemed to struggle
in their embrace, and honeysuckle cast loving tendrils round them both
and kissed them promiscuously. And though a gardener might have deplored
this untended riot of vegetation, yet even the most orderly of his
fraternity could not have failed to admire. Nature and this fruitful
soil and the warm, soft air to which frost was a stranger, had taken
matters into their own hands, and the result, though as fortuitous
apparently as the splashed glories of a sunset, had yet a sunset's
lavishness and generosity of colour. On each side of this pergola lay a
small lawn of well-tended turf, and a shrubbery on one side of lilacs
and syringa and on the other a tall brick wall with a deep garden bed
below it gave a fragrant frame to the whole. The Hermit's avowal,
indeed, that for the last year he had done nothing except carpentering
and gardening implied a good deal of the latter, for the turf, as has
been stated, was beautifully rolled and cut, and the beds showed
evidence of seed-time and weeding, and had that indefinable but
unmistakable air of being zealously cared for. But since such operations
were concerned with plants, no principle was broken.
Evelyn arrived here soon after six, and found himself in undisturbed
possession. Mr. Merivale, so said his servant, had gone off soon after
breakfast that morning and had not yet returned. His guest, however, had
been expected, and he himself would be sure to be in before long. Indeed
in a few minutes his cry of welcome to Evelyn sounded from the lower end
of the garden, and he left his long chair in the verandah and went down
through the pergola to meet him.
"Ah, my dear fellow," said Tom, "it is delightful to see you. You have
come from London, have you not, where there are so many people and so
few things. I have been thinking about London, and you have no idea how
remote it seems. And how is the picture getting on--Miss Ellington's, I
mean?"
Evelyn looked at him with his direct, luminous gaze. Though he had come
down here with the object of telling his friend what had happened, he
found that at this first moment of meeting him, he was incapable of
making his tongue go on its errand.
"Ah, the portrait," he said; "it really is getting on well. Up to this
morning, at any rate, I have put there what I have meant to put there,
and, which is rarer with me, I have not put there anything which I did
not mean. Do you see how vastly more important that is?"
The Hermit had passed his day in the open merely in shirt and trousers,
but his coat was lying in a hammock slung between two pillars of the
pergola, and he put it on.
"Why, of course," he said, "a thing which ought not to be there poisons
the rest; anything put in which should be left out sets the whole thing
jarring. That's exactly why I left the world you live in. There was so
much that shouldn't have been there, from my point of view at least."
Evelyn laughed.
"But if we all left out all that each of us thinks shouldn't be there,
there would be precious little left in the world," he said. "For
instance, I should leave out Lady Ellington without the slightest
question."
He paused a moment.
"And when the portrait is finished she, no doubt, would leave out me,"
he added, with charming candour.
"Quite so," said Merivale; "and since I, not being an uncontrolled
despot, could not 'leave out' people, which I suppose is a soft way of
saying terminate their existence, I went away instead to a place where
they were naturally left out, where for me their existence was
terminated. It is all part of the simplifying process."
They had established themselves in the verandah again, where a
silent-footed man was laying the table for dinner; and it struck Evelyn
for the moment as an inconsistency that the tablecloth should be so fine
and the silver so resplendent.
"But in your simplification," said Evelyn, indicating the table, "you
don't leave out that sort of thing."
"No, because if I once opened the question of whether I should live on
the bare necessities of life, or allow myself, so to speak, a little
dripping on my bread, the rest of my life would be spent in settling
infinitesimal points which I really don't think much matter. I could no
doubt sell my silver and realize a few hundred pounds, and give that
away. But I don't think it matters much."
"All the same, it is inconsistent."
"In details that does not seem to me to matter either," said Merivale.
"For instance, I don't eat meat partly because I think that it is better
not to take life if you can avoid it. But when a midge settles on my
hand and bites me, if possible I kill it."
"Well, anyhow your inconsistencies make up a very charming whole," said
the other, looking round. "It is all charming."
"I'm glad, and you think you can pass a day or two here without missing
the--the complications you live among? I wish Philip could have come
down, too; but he is buried in work, it appears, and we know how his
leisure is occupied just now."
Evelyn moved suddenly in his chair.
"Ah, do you know, I am rather glad Philip isn't here," he said. "I don't
think----" and he broke off again. "And as soon as I've finished this
portrait, I'm going to do his," he added.
He was silent a moment, feeling somehow that he never would do Philip's
portrait. He would not be able to see him, he would not be able to paint
him; something, no shadow, but something so bright would stand between
him and the canvas that he would be unable to see beyond or through it.
But Merivale did not seem to notice the check. His eyes were looking out
over the glowing garden, where all colours were turned to flame in the
almost level rays of the sun as it drew near to its setting. The wall
behind the deep garden bed glowed as if the bricks themselves were
luminous, light seemed to exude from the grass, the flowers were bells
and cups of fire.
"Ah, this is the best moment of all the day," he said, "when sunset
comes like this. The whole of the sunshine of the hours seem distilled
into it, it is the very essence of light."
He rose from his chair, and went to the edge of the verandah, stretching
his arms wide and breathing deeply of the warm, fragrant air. Then he
turned again to his companion.
"That, too, I hope is what death will be like," he said. "All the
sunlight of life will be concentrated into that moment, until one's mere
body can hold no more of the glow that impregnates it, and is shattered.
Look at those clusters of rambler; a little more and they must burst
with the colour."
Evelyn got up too.
"Don't be so uncomfortable, Tom," he cried, in a sort of boyish
petulance. "I could go mad when I think of death. It is horrible,
frightening. I don't want to die, and I don't want to get old. I want to
be young always, to feel as I feel to-day, and never a jot less keenly.
That's what you must tell me while I am here; how am I to remain young?
You seem to have solved it; you are much younger than when I knew you
first."
Tom laughed.
"And another proof of my youth is that I feel as I do about death," he
said. "The more you are conscious of your own life, the more absurd the
notion that one can die becomes. Why, even one's body won't die; it
will make life, it will be grass on one's grave, just as the dead leaves
that fall from the tree make the leaf-mould which feeds that tree or
another tree or the grass. It doesn't in the least matter which, it is
all one, it is all life."
Evelyn shivered slightly.
"Yes, quite true, and not the least consoling," he said; "for what is
the use of being alive if one loses one's individuality? It doesn't make
death the least less terrible to me, even if I know that I am going to
become a piece of groundsel and be pecked at by your canary. I don't
want to be groundsel, I don't want to be pecked at, and I don't want to
become your canary. Great heavens, fancy being a bit of a canary!"
"Ah, but only your body," said the other.
Evelyn got up.
"Yes, and what happens to the rest? You tell me that a piece of me, for
my body is a piece of me, becomes a canary, and you don't know about the
rest. Indeed it is not a cheerful prospect. If some--some bird pecks my
eyes out, is it a consolation to me, who becomes blind, to learn that a
bird has had dinner?"
Merivale looked at him; even as Gladys had seen that some change had
come in Madge, so he saw that something had happened to Evelyn, and he
registered that impression in his mind. But the change, whatever it was,
was not permanent--it was a phase, a mood only, for next moment Evelyn
had broken out into a perfectly natural laugh.
"You shan't make me think of melancholy subjects any more," he cried.
"Indeed you may try, but you won't be able to do it. I have never been
more full of the joy of life than to-day. That was why I was so glad to
come down here, as you are a sort of apostle of joy. But it's true that
I also want to talk to you some time about something quite serious. Not
now though, but after dinner. Also you will have to show me all the bag
of conjuring tricks, the mechanical nightingale, the disappearing
omelette--I could do that, by the way--and the Pan pipes. Now, I'm going
upstairs to change; I've got London things on, and my artistic eye is
offended. Where shall I find you?"
"I shall go down to bathe. Won't you come?" said Merivale.
Evelyn wrinkled up his nose.
"No, I've not been hot enough. Besides, one is inferior to the frog in
the water, which is humiliating. Any frog swims so much better!"
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[Illustration: text decoration]