Lady Dover's letter to Madge was most elastic as regarded the date of
their visit and thoroughly cordial, for she never did things by halves,
and the welcome that would be given to her and Evelyn if he could
possibly spare time to visit so remote a place was sincerity itself.
About accepting it, she had her own view quite clearly formed, but her
own pride, her pride, too, in her husband, prevented her from giving the
slightest inkling of it to him. For she saw clearly that this visit was
proposed by Lady Dover with the definite purpose of showing an act of
friendliness after her marriage; it was clearly made with intention, and
in her heart of hearts Madge was intensely grateful. To hint this,
however, to Evelyn was impossible. But his frank eagerness to go made it
unnecessary for her to consider any more the diplomatic reason for doing
so.
"Oh, let's go," he said. "Surely Scotland is better than London. What is
there here? Just a stuffy town, and Battersea Park, and nothing whatever
to do."
Madge knew that her own feeling of being hurt at this was unreasonable.
This solitude of London had been unutterably dear to her, but she knew
her own feeling to be unreasonable, since she never doubted--and
rightly--how dear it had been to him. And why should he not want to be
externally amused--to shoot, to fish, to do all those things that he
delighted in? And echo answered "Why?"
It was at breakfast time that this letter arrived, and the bacon was
undeniably less good than it would have been two days previously. Evelyn
sniffed at it, and decided against it. But his sensitiveness to slightly
_passée_ bacon was sensitive to her feelings also.
"One doesn't want meat food in the summer," he said. "Tea and
marmalade--how delicious!"
Madge handed him his tea.
"You dear," she said. "It is high, and it's my fault; I thought it would
be good just for to-day. But it isn't. Oh, Evelyn, it was nice of you to
pretend you didn't want any. But you can't act before me. I always know
you. So give it up."
Evelyn gave a great shout of laughter.
"Madge and marmalade," he said. "That's good enough for me. In fact, I
would leave out the marmalade if required. Oh, Madge, why can't you be
serious and talk about this. By the way, I'll paint another sketch of
you called 'Bad bacon'; the yearning face of the young wife. You are
young, you know, and you are my wife. Don't chatter so, it confuses me.
Now Lady Dover, if you will be silent one moment, lives at Golspie."
"That's where you are wrong," said Madge. "You have to go to Golspie
before you begin."
"I don't want to begin. I want to get there. Don't you?"
Madge put on the woeful face that always introduced Ellesdee.
"I don't like the ticket man at King's Cross," she said. "I don't think
he is what he seems."
Evelyn had eaten by this time all the crust off a Hovis loaf.
"More crust," he said. "There isn't any. Very good; marmalade in a
spoon. But I won't distend my--my _vie intérieure_ with crumb. About the
ticket man. You are wrong if we are generous to Lady Dover with regard
to the length of our visit. Why mince matters? Can we afford it? I say
'Yes.' Board wages for our enormous establishment here. Tickets for
ourselves, third class--I wish there was a fourth or fifth--and what's
the dem'd total, as Mr. Mantalini said. Besides these"--Evelyn waved his
hand like a man commanding millions--"these are temporary economies. The
pink and butter-coloured is going to visit these classic abodes in
October, and if orders don't pour in like our own leaky roof, I'll eat
all the gamboge in my paintbox. I can't say fairer. And as I don't
possess gamboge," he added, "the bet finds no takers. I give you that
information, for though I am poor, I am honest."
Evelyn proceeded to eat marmalade with a spoon.
"It will be very _chic_, if you come to think of it," he said.
"Probably several ladies' maids and valets will arrive with their
respective owners by the same train. You, Madge, will flirt with one or
two of the valets, and I with several of the ladies' maids. The scene
then is shifted to Golspie station. You squeeze the hands of the valets
on the platform, and I gaze into the eyes of the ladies' maids. The
sumptuous motor has come for Lady Dover's guests. We strive to
subdue--quite ineffectually--our air of conscious superiority, and
squeeze the hands of Dukes and Duchesses. Then they will know us in our
true colours. Triumphal explosion of the motor-car. The valets and
ladies' maids are saved. Hurrah for the lower classes! Another cup of
tea, please. Right up to the top. And the point is the fare to Golspie.
Arrived there, we shall have no more food and drink to buy."
The reasoning was inevitable; given that domestic economy could manage
it, there was no reason that could reasonably indicate King's Road
instead. Yet, even after the A.B.C. had added its voice to the
overmastering argument, Madge hesitated. She could not quite see her
husband among the surroundings that awaited her there. She had been
there before, and knew. How would he and that particular _milieu_ suit
each other? All this was secondary to her original desire to go; her
private, incommunicable feeling that such a visit would _poser_
them--for she could not have been Lady Ellington's daughter so long
without that point of view having soaked into her--was paramount, but
the other was there, and the complication in her mind was that though
she wished, taking the reasons all round, to leave this hot house which
still was intertwined with exquisite and undying memories, she could not
see how Evelyn should wish to leave this, not having her own worldly
reasons for going to Golspie, without a pang. But since the question of
whether economy would allow had been decided in favour of going, there
was certainly no more to be said, and, so she told herself, no more to
be thought.
But, since the logical conclusion is the one conclusion in the world
that is absolutely without effect as regards results, she continued to
think. For the ordinary mind is not in the least reasonable; it would
cease to be reasonable the moment it was, and take its place among fixed
stars and other unattainable objects. Logic, reason, are perhaps the
most ineffective of human motives; they may be appealed to as a last
resort; but if there is any impulse still alive, it, and not logic, will
be seized on as a ground for action. Hence the divine uncertainty of
human affairs. If the world was ruled by reason it would become duller
than a week-old newspaper. But it is the fact that every human soul is
so impredicable that lends the zest to existence. Finding out, in fact,
not knowledge, is the spring that makes life fascinating. Whenever the
element of certainty enters, it is the death's head at the feast. Nobody
cares for the feast any more. The champagne is flat.
So to Golspie they went, and Evelyn's prophecy as regards the journey
was sufficiently fulfilled to make anybody believe that there must have
been something in it. He, at any rate, before they arrived at even
Inverness, was engaged in conversation with an agreeable female
opposite, a conversation which was not, however, so engrossing but that
he could observe with secret glee the fact that Madge was reading the
_Scotsman_, provided for her by an equally agreeable young man, who sat
opposite, and hoped that his cigarette would not be disagreeable. Then,
luck was really on his side that day, important people stepped out of
first-class carriages at Golspie, and, by the usages of this cruel
world, these acquaintances so pleasantly begun were rudely interrupted.
A cart waited for their travelling companions, and the swift motor
received them and the strangers, before whom their own travelling
acquaintances were but dust and ashes.
It was, in fact, but a short week after Lady Ellington's arrival at Glen
Callan that her daughter and son-in-law got there, and though she would,
as previously arranged, have gone on to her next house the day before
their arrival, she put off her departure for two days in order to have
the pleasure of seeing them. The party, in fact, was unaltered, and so
was their way of life; Mr. Osborne's flow of humour showed no signs of
running dry, nor was the blank amazement with which Lord Ellington
regarded him in the least abated. Mr. Dennison was getting steadily on
towards the completion of his panorama of Sutherland, and Lady Dover
found fresh lights and shadows on the purple heather every day.
Lady Ellington had carefully considered what her exact attitude towards
Madge and her husband should be, and had come to the most sensible
conclusion about it. Since the world had made up its mind to welcome
them, and to draw a wet sponge over the past, it was clear that unless
she wished to make an exception of herself, and not do in Rome what Rome
did, she must extend to them not merely the welcome of the world, but
the welcome of a mother also. And it was decidedly the best plan to make
this thorough; astonished as Madge might be, it was better to astonish
her than the world, and neither in public nor in private should she hear
one word of reproach nor an uncordial accent. Lady Ellington had no
desire to see private talks with her daughter; in fact, she meant rather
to avoid them; but her whole policy was to accept what had happened, and
welcome Madge in the flesh with the same unreservedness as she had shown
in the letter she had written her a week ago, urging her to accept Lady
Dover's invitation. She was determined, in fact (now that Lady Dover had
shown the way), to make the best of it, and, instead of bitterly
counting up (and mentally sending the bill in to Madge) all that would
have been at her command, had not the speculation with regard to Madge's
marriage failed, to make the most of the assets that remained to her.
And the more she thought of them, unattractive as they had seemed at
first, the more they seemed to her to have a promising air. Philip was
immensely wealthy, and Evelyn was poor, that was unfortunately
undeniable; but Evelyn--regarding him as a property--had certainly
prospects which Philip had not, and though nothing could quite make up,
to her mind, for the loss of much tangible wealth, yet Evelyn with his
brilliant gifts might easily be a rich man, while even now he was a much
more rising figure socially than the other. People talked about him,
admired his cleverness and charm, asked to be introduced to him. All
these merits, it is true, she had not seen in those days at Pangbourne,
when she looked upon him merely as an impossible young artist, but since
that impossible young artist had become an inevitable son-in-law, it was
wise to take him into account. So her welcome to both was going to be
unreserved.
They arrived, just as Lady Ellington had arrived, after the rest of the
party had gone in to dinner, and their host and hostess came out into
the hall as usual to meet them. Madge, it must be confessed, had gone
through a bad quarter of an hour of anticipatory shyness as they got
near; but this on arrival she found to have been a superfluous piece of
self-inflicted discomfort, for Lady Dover was absolutely natural, and
all that was required of her was that she should be natural too.
"Ah, dear Madge," she said, "how nice to see you and Mr. Dundas. And we
have such a surprise for you; your mother is here still. We persuaded
her to delay her departure a couple of days in order just to have a
glimpse of you. We call her Lady Salmon, and are eating a fish she
caught only this afternoon."
She turned to welcome her other guests, when Lady Ellington also
followed her from the dining-room.
"My dearest Madge," she cried, kissing her, "this is too delightful. How
well you are looking. But did you only wear this thin cloak for your
drive; surely that was rash? How are you, dear Evelyn? This is nice. I
could not help coming out of dinner to have a glimpse of you. You have
brought no maid, Madge?"
"Dear mother, I haven't got one to bring."
"No? Evelyn, she must have a maid. But Parkins, of course, shall attend
to you here. Now you must go and dress."
That her mother was still in the house had been absolutely a surprise to
Madge, but her welcome fully endorsed the cordiality of her letter. She
had not seen her since that afternoon in July when she had come to
Evelyn's studio, and whatever had caused this complete and radical
change she was grateful to it. It, too, bore its meaning as clearly
stamped as did Lady Dover's greeting; whatever had happened, had
happened but the past was over.
Everyone in the house, indeed taking the time from their hostess,
welcomed them with a very special cordiality. Lady Dover, in her quiet,
neat way, had dropped, casually enough, but letting the point of her
observations be fully seen, little remarks to most members of her party
on the very great pleasure she anticipated from the visit of the
Dundases. They were both so charming, it was no wonder that everyone
liked them. The meaning of this was explicit enough, and put without any
hint of patronising, or, indeed, of doing a kindness; and though Lady
Ellington had reflected that people followed Lady Dover's lead just
because she was ordinary and they were ordinary, it might be questioned
whether she herself could have given the lead so gently, for it hardly
appeared a lead at all, or so successfully, for everybody followed it.
From the fragments of Lady Dover's ordinary conversation already
indicated, it may not unfairly be gathered that she perhaps lacked
brilliance in her talk, and was not possessed of any particular
intellectual distinction. But after all, the hardest art to practise is
the art of living according to one's tastes, a thing which she certainly
succeeded admirably in doing, and the hardest medium to work in, more
difficult by far than metal or marble or oils, is men and women. But her
manipulation of them was masterly, and, to crown it, she did not seem to
manipulate at all.
In this instance, certainly, the subtlest diplomatist could not with all
his scheming have produced a more complete result. Mr. Dennison, as has
been seen, had on the tip of his tongue a conclusion disparaging in the
highest degree to Evelyn and his art. Gladys Ellington had let things
even more bitter pass the tip of her tongue, Madge's mother had felt not
so long ago that the shipwreck was total, and that there was no salvage.
Yet Lady Dover, with just a little repetition of the same sentence or
two, had swept all these things away, as a broom with a couple of
strokes demolishes all the weavings of spiders, and through the
unobscured windows the sun again shines. In fact the _volte-face_ of
Society had been begun at any rate with immense precision and certainty;
on the word of Lady Dover, who was in command, this particular company
had turned right about with the instantaneousness which is the instinct
of a well-drilled troop.
In effect the whole social balance of power was changed from the moment
of their appearance. Evelyn, as natural in his way, but that a more
vivacious one, than Lady Dover, gave a brilliant sketch of their
arrival--third class--at Golspie Station, and the adjustment of social
distinction consequent. Also, he had prophesied it, Madge would bear him
out in that, and he reproduced admirably Madge's face from behind the
_Scotsman_ which had been so kindly lent her. Mr. Osborne made one
attempt to reconstitute himself the life and soul of the party when he
addressed Gladys as Lady Grilse, and unfolded to Madge, who sat next
him, the history of that remarkable piece of wit, meaning to follow it
up by the sequel (sequels were usually disappointing, but this was an
agreeable exception) of the true circumstances under which her mother
had been called Lady Salmon. But Madge had cut the sequel short, without
any ironical purpose, but simply because she wanted to listen to and
contradict the libels Evelyn was telling of her conduct on the opposite
side of the table.
"How very amusing," she said. "You called her Lady Grilse (I see, do I
not), because she had caught one. Evelyn, I said nothing of the kind; I
only said that I rather liked the smell of a cigarette."
But her quite literal and correct explanation of Mr. Osborne's joke was
fatal to the joke; it was a pricked bladder, it would never be repeated
any more.
Then came the deposition of the Royal Academician. Mr. Dennison had
finished his picture of the upper glen only that afternoon, and the
occasion was therefore solemn. So was he.
"Yes, Lady Dover," he was saying, "I only touched the canvas a dozen
times to-day, yet I have done, as I said, a full day's work. _C'est le
dernier pas qui coûte_; it is on those last touches that the whole thing
depends. I knew when I went out this morning that I had not got what I
meant; I knew, too, that it was nearly there, and it is that "nearly"
that is yet so far. There was the shadow of a cloud, if you remember,
over the bank of gorse."
"Oh, I thought that shadow was quite perfect," said Lady Dover. "I hope
you have not touched it."
"It has gone," said Mr. Dennison, as if announcing the death of a near
relation who had left him money, for though his voice was mournful,
there was a hint of something comfortable coming. "Gone. I saw I could
not do it so as to make it true."
He looked up at this tragic announcement and caught Evelyn's eye.
"Mr. Dundas, I am sure, will bear me out," he said. "We poor artists are
bound, however it limits us, to put down only what we know is true. We
are not poets but chroniclers."
"Oh, Evelyn, and you've been telling such lies about me," said Madge,
from the other side.
"Chroniclers," resumed Mr. Dennison. "When we feel sure we are right we
record our impression. But unless that certainty of vision comes to us,
we must be honest, we must not attempt a vague impression merely. Is it
not so?"
Evelyn's face looked extraordinarily vital and boyish as he leaned
forward.
"Oh, I don't agree in the least," he said. "I think we always ought to
try to record just those suggestions--those vaguenesses--which you say
you leave out. Look at 'La Gioconda.' What did Andrea mean us to think
about that sphinx? I don't know, nor do you. And, what is more certain
than even that, nor did he know. Did he mean what Walter Pater said he
meant? It again is quite certain he did not. No, I think every picture
ought to ask an unanswerable riddle, any picture, that is to say, which
is a picture at all, a riddle like 'Which came first, the hen or the
egg?' Surely anything obvious is not worth painting at all."
Mr. Dennison had clearly not thought of things in this light. It was not
thus that the ordnance map of Sutherland would be made.
"An amusing paradox," he said. "Nobody is to know anything about a
picture, especially the man who painted it. Is that correct?"
His tone had something slightly nettled about it, and Evelyn's
imperturbable good humour and gaiety might perhaps represent the
indifference of the nettles towards the hand they had stung.
"Yes, just that," he said. "Take any of the arts. Surely it is because a
play has a hundred interpretations that it is worth seeing, and because
a hundred different people will experience a hundred different emotions
that an opera is worth listening to. And the very fact that when we hear
'The jolly roast beef of old England' we are all irresistibly reminded
of the jolly roast beef of old England shows that it is a bad tune."
Mr. Dennison waved his hand in a sketchy manner.
"I have not the pleasure of knowing that tune," he said; "but when I
paint the upper glen here, I mean it to produce in all beholders that
perception of its particular and individual beauty which was mine when I
painted it. And when you exercise your art, your exquisite art, over a
portrait, you, I imagine, mean to make the result produce in all
beholders the beauty you saw yourself."
Evelyn laughed.
"Oh, dear, no," he said. "You see, I so often see no beauty in my
sitters, because most people are so very plain. But I believe that the
finest portraits of all are those which, when you look at them, make you
feel as you would feel if you were on intimate terms and in the presence
of the people they represent. Besides, people are so often quite unlike
their faces; in that case you have to paint not what their faces are
like but what they are like."
Mr. Dennison's tone was rising a little; that impressive baritone could
never be shrill, but it was as if he wanted to be a tenor.
"Ah, that explains a great deal," he said; "it explains why sometimes I
find your portraits wholly unlike the people they represent. And the
conclusion is that if I knew them better, I should find them more like."
"That is exactly what I mean," said Evelyn.
But here Lady Dover broke in.
"You must have some great talks, Mr. Dundas," she said, "with Mr.
Dennison; it is so interesting to hear different points of view. One
cannot really grasp a question, can one, unless one hears both sides of
it. I think Lady Ellington has finished. Let us go."
But the verdict over this little passage of arms was unanimous; Mr.
Dennison was no longer in anyone's mind the pope and fountain-head of
all art and all criticism thereon. His impressiveness had in the last
ten minutes fallen into the disrepute of pomposity, his grave
pronouncements were all discredited; a far more attractive gospel had
been enunciated, far more attractive, too, was this new evangelist. And
as Lady Dover passed him on the way out she had one more word.
"That is a delightful doctrine, Mr. Dundas," she said. "You must really
do a portrait of yourself, and if we think it is unlike, the remedy will
be that we must see more of you."
Evelyn drew his chair next to the Academician; he had heard the rise of
voice and seen the symptoms of perturbation, to produce which there was
nothing further from his intention.
"I'm afraid I talk awful rot," he said, with the most disarming
frankness.
Now Mr. Dennison was conscious of having been rather rude and ruffled,
he was also conscious that Evelyn's temper had been calmer than the
moon. He felt, too, the charm of this confession, which was so evidently
not premeditated but natural.
"But that does not diminish my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Dundas," he
said.
Afterwards the same triumphant march continued. Mr. Dennison even showed
to Madge how a couple of his most astounding conjuring tricks were done,
and Lady Ellington talked to her son-in-law in a corner about Madge,
until the council of war summoned them to debate. Then, when it was
decided that Madge should join the fishmongers on the river, Mr. Osborne
instantly suggested that she would be Mrs. Sea-Trout, and though a
cavilling mind might find in this but a futile attempt to establish
himself once more as the life and soul of the party, it was not indeed
so, but meant merely as a compliment, a tribute to Madge. Then, when the
council of war was over, more remarkable things happened, for the whole
party played Dumb-Crambo till long after half-past ten, quite forgetful,
apparently, how important it was to get a good rest after all the day
spent in the open air. How such a subversion of general usage occurred
no one knew, but certainly there was something in Evelyn which conduced
to silly gaiety. And nobody was a whit the worse for it, while the
effects of the moon-light on the hills opposite, which had nightly been
the admiration of the whole party, went totally unheeded, and all the
exquisite lights and shadows, the subtlety of which it had become the
office of Mr. Dennison to point out and Lady Dover to appreciate, might
never have been in view at all.
Lady Ellington went with Madge to her room when the women retired; she
had not really meant to do so, but Lady Dover's "Good night" had made
this necessary.
"Dear Madge," she had said, "I know your mother will want to talk to
you, so I shall not come to see you to your room. I hope you have
everything you want. Breakfast at a quarter to ten, or would you rather
have it in your room after your journey? We have been so late to-night
too. How excellent Mr. Dundas's last charade was. Only Mr. Dennison
guessed. Good night, dear."
Lady Ellington was thus, so to speak, forced into Madge's room; she
carried with her her glass of hot water, she carried also, which was
even more warming, the memory of the undisguised welcome that not only
Madge but the impossible artist had received. She almost, in fact,
reconsidered her valuation of wealth; had Philip Home appeared in
Evelyn's place this evening, she knew quite well he would not have been
able to stir the deadly gentility of this house half so well as the
impossible artist. He could not have piped so as to make them dance, yet
this, this key to the sort of set which she knew really mattered most,
the solid, stolid, respectable upper class, had been just rats to his
piping. His natural enjoyment, his animal spirits, to put that influence
at its lowest, had simply played the deuce with the traditions of the
house, where she herself never ventured to lift her voice in opposition
or amendment to what was suggested. But Evelyn's "Oh, let's have one
more Dumb-Crambo" had revised the laws of the Medes and Persians, and
another they had. Even at the formal council of war he had refused to
say what he would like to do to-morrow, a thing absolutely
unprecedented.
"Oh, may I go and shoot if it is fine," he had said, "and do nothing at
all if it is wet? Don't you hate shooting, Lord Dover, if your barrels
are covered with rain? And birds look so awfully far away in the rain.
But I should love to shoot in any case," he added. "My goodness, Madge,
think of the King's Road and the 'buses."
Yet all this revolt against the established laws, so Lady Ellington
felt, had somehow not transgressed those laws of propriety which she was
so careful about here. Evelyn, from ignorance, no doubt, rode
rough-shod, and no one resented his trespasses. Even Lord Dover had been
stirred into speech, a thing he did not usually indulge in except on the
subject of the grouse that had been shot and the fish that had been
killed that day.
"My dear boy," he said, "you shall do exactly what you like to-morrow.
There is a rod for you on the river, or we should like another gun on
the moor. Tell us at breakfast."
* * * * *
All this Lady Ellington took up to Madge's room with her hot water; that
Lady Dover would be as good as her word, and that, having asked these
two to Glen Callan, would give them a genuine welcome, she had never
doubted, but what was surprising she was the extreme personal success
of her once better-forgotten son-in-law. This stronghold and central
fortress of what was correct and proper had received him as if he was
almost a new incarnation of what was correct and proper, or if that was
putting it too strongly, at any rate as if no question of his
correctness and propriety had ever arisen. Surprising though it was, it
was wholly satisfactory.
"We are so late, dear Madge," she said, "that I can only stop a minute.
Has it not been a delightful evening?"
The desire to say something salutary struggled long in her mind. She
wanted so much to indicate that it was for the sake of her feelings,
even in consequence of her own intervention, that so charming a welcome
had been extended to Madge and her husband. And to be quite truthful, it
was not the instinct for truth that prevented her, but the quite certain
knowledge that Madge would not stand anything that suggested a hint of
patronisation. Besides the house was Lady Dover's, that person who, as
Lady Ellington was beginning to learn, was natural because she happened
to be natural, and was quite truthful, not because this was a subtler
sort of diplomacy. That naked dagger of truth was an implement that
required a deal of mail-coat to ward off. Any moment Lady Dover might
wreck any scheming policy with one candid word, and the corresponding
surprise and candour of her eyes. But the welcome had been so warm that
Madge could not but be warmed by it, even to the point of confession.
"Oh, mother," she said, "I have been disquieting myself in vain. All
this last month I have been wondering secretly whether people were going
to be horrid to us. How senseless it all was! I have been thinking all
sorts of things."
She put down her candle and drew a couple of chairs to the fire.
"I have had all sorts of thoughts," she said. "You see, you did not
write to me. I thought you might--well, might have washed your hands of
me. I thought that people like Lady Dover would think I had been
heartless and Evelyn worse than heartless. I was hopelessly wrong;
everybody is as nice as possible. But, heavens, how I have eaten my
heart out over that all this month in London!"
She poked the fire with a certain viciousness, feeling that she pricked
these bubbles of senseless fear as she pricked the bubbling gas of the
burning coal.
"All in vain," she said; "I have been making myself--no, not miserable,
because I can't be otherwise than happy, but disquieted with all sorts
of foundationless fears. I thought people would disregard--yes, it is
that--would disregard Evelyn and me; would talk of the fine day instead.
And then, you see, Evelyn would also have nothing to do, nobody would
want to be painted by him. We should be miserably poor; he would have to
paint all sorts of things he had no taste for just to get a guinea or
two and keep the pot boiling. Ah, I shouldn't have minded that--the
poverty, I mean--but what I should mind would be that he should have to
work at what he felt was not worth working at. Don't you see?"
Never perhaps before had Madge so given herself away to her mother. Lady
Ellington's system had been to snip off all awkward shoots, and train
the plant, so to speak, in such a way as should make it most suitable as
a table ornament. The table for which it was destined, it need hardly be
remarked, was an opulent table. There was to be no wasting of sweetness
on the desert air; Mayfair was to inhale its full odour. And as things
now stood, the destination of this flower was as likely to be Mayfair as
ever. Lady Ellington respected success, nobody more so, nor was there
anything she respected so much, and on a rapid review of the evening,
the success she felt inclined to respect most was that of her impossible
son-in-law. If a plebiscite for popularity had knocked at the doors of
the occupied bedrooms, she had no doubt as to the result of the
election. There was nothing left for her but to retract, wholly and
entirely, all her own resentment and rage at the marriage. And since
this had to be done, it was better done at once.
"Dearest Madge," she said, "how foolish of you to make yourself
miserable! Of course at first I was vexed and troubled at it all, and I
was, and am still, very sorry for Philip. But though I did wish that
certain things had not happened, and that others had--I mean I wish that
you had been in love with Philip, for I am sure you would have been very
happy, yet since it was not to be so, and since you fell in love with
Evelyn, what other issue could I have desired?"
Suddenly, quick as a lizard popping out and in again of some hole in
the wall, there flashed through Madge's mind the impression--"I don't
believe that." She could not be held responsible for it, for it was not
a thought she consciously entertained. It just put its head out and said
"Here I am." What, however, mattered more was that this was her mother's
avowed declaration now; these were the colours anyhow she intended to
sail under. She had been launched anew, so to speak, with regard to her
attitude towards her daughter, and Lady Dover had christened her, and
broken a bottle of wine over her for good luck.
But having made her declaration, Lady Ellington thought she had better
be moving. From a child Madge had been blessed with a memory of hideous
exactitude, which enabled her, if she choose, to recall conversations
with the most convincing verbal accuracy, and Lady Ellington did not
feel equal, off-hand, to explaining some of those flower-like phrases
which had, she felt certain, fallen from her in her interview with Madge
after the thunderstorm in the New Forest, if perchance the fragrance of
them might conceivably still linger in her daughter's mind. Nor did she
wish to be reminded, however remotely (and as she thought of this she
made the greater speed) of the letter from Madge to Evelyn which had
lain in the hall one afternoon as she came in, with regard to which her
maternal instinct had prompted her to take so strong a line. So she
again referred to the lateness of the hour, "all owing to those amusing
games," and took the rest of her hot water to finish in her own room.
But she need not have been afraid; nothing was further from Madge's
intention than to speak of such things, and though she could not help
knowing that she did not believe what her mother had said, she
deliberately turned her mind away, and so far from exercising her memory
over the grounds of her disbelief, she put it all away from her
thoughts. Such generosity was easy, her present great happiness made it
that.
She felt in no mood to go to bed, even after the night she had spent in
the train, and from the thought of the vain disquietude she had felt
about how people would behave to them, she passed in thought to another
disquietude that she told herself was as likely to be as vain as that.
For what was the sense of measuring and gauging and taking soundings
into the manner of Evelyn's love for her, and comparing it unfavourably,
to tell the truth, with hers for him? For she knew quite well, the whole
fibre of her being knew, that in so far as he was complete at all, his
love for her was complete; there were no reservations in it; he loved
her with all his soul and strength. Yet when the best thing in the world
was given her, here she was turning it over, and wondering, so to speak,
if the ticket to show its price was still on it, and if it was
decipherable! It is ill to look thus at any gift, but when that gift is
the gift of love, which is without money and without price, such a deed
is little short, so she told herself now, of a desecration.
* * * * *
The next day bore out the reliability of Lord Dover's aneroid, and there
was no fear of Evelyn finding rain-drops on his gun-barrel. The
Honourable Company of Fishmongers--Mr. Osborne was at it again--went to
the river, Mr. Dennison to a further point of view up the glen, and the
shooters to the moor. They started a little before the party for the
river, and Madge saw them off at the door. They were to shoot over a
beat of moor not far from the house, which would bring them close to the
river by lunch-time, and it was arranged that both parties should lunch
together. Gladys started with them, for she was going to fish up the
river from the lower reaches; Lady Ellington and Madge would begin on
opposite sides at the top. This would bring them all together about two
o'clock at what was called the Bridge-pool, where Madge, fishing on this
side, would cross, meeting Lady Ellington and Gladys, who would have
worked up from below, while the shooters converged on them from the
moor.
It would indeed have been a sad heart that did not rejoice on such a
morning, while to the happy the cup must overflow. There had been a
slight touch of early frost in the night, which, as Madge skirted the
river bank, which was still in shadow, lay now in thick, diamond drops
on the grass, ready when the sun touched it to hover for a moment in
wisps of thin mist, and then to be drawn up into the sparkle of the day.
Swift and strong and coffee-coloured at her feet the splendid river
roared on its way, full of breakers and billows at the head of the
pools, and calming down into broad, smooth surfaces before it quickened
again into the woven ropes of water down which the river climbed to the
next pool. Every pool, too, was a mystery, for who knew what
silver-mailed monster might not be oaring his way about with flicks of
the spade-like tail that clove the waters and sent him arrow-like up the
stream? The mystery of it all, the romance of the gaudy fly thrown into
this seething tumult of foam and breaker, its circling journey (followed
by eager eye and beating heart) that might at any moment be interrupted
by a swirl of waters unaccounted for by the stream, and perhaps the
sight of a fin or a silver side; then a sudden check, the feeling of
weight, the nodding of the tapering rod in assent, and the shrill scream
of the reel--all this, all the possibility of every moment, the
excitement and tension, all added effervescence to the vivid happiness
that filled Madge and inspired all she did with a sort of rapture.
* * * * *
So step by step she made her way down the first pool; the broken water
at the head gave no reply to the casting of the fly upon the waters, and
with a little more line, and still a little more line as the pool grew
broader, she went down to the tail. There, far out in mid-stream, was a
big submerged rock, with a triangle of quiet water below it, and more
line and more line went out before she could reach it. Then--oh, moment
of joy!--the fly popped down on the far side of the rock, and with
entrancing little jerks and oscillations of the rod, she drew it across
the backwater. And then--she felt as if it must be so--the dark stream
was severed, a fin cut the surface, the rod nodded, bent to a curve,
with an accelerating whizz-z-z out ran the line, and a happy fishmonger
looked anxiously, rapturously at her gillie.
A couple of hours later Madge had come to within a hundred yards of the
Bridge-pool, her fish secure in the creel, and her aspirations for it
reaching, somewhat sanguinely as she knew, as high as sixteen pounds.
The Bridge-pool itself was this morning part of Lady Ellington's water,
for on Madge's side it ran swirling and boiling round a great cliff of
nearly precipitous rock, some fifty feet high, over which she had to
pass before getting to the skeleton wire bridge which crossed the river
just below the pool. She could see her mother half-way down the pool
already, and called to her, but her voice was drowned by the hoarse bass
of the stream as it plunged from rapid to rapid into the head of the
pool below, and after trying in vain to make her hear, and communicate
the glorious tidings of the fish, Madge followed her gillie up the
steep, rocky pass which led over this cliff. As she mounted the stony
stair, steep and lichen-ridden, the voice of the water that had been in
her ears all morning, and rang there still like the tones of some
secret, familiar friend, grew momently more faint, but another voice,
the voice of the sunny noon, as friendly as the other, took its place,
and grew more intense as the first faded. From the shadow and coolness
and water-voices she emerged into the windy sunlight of the moor; bees
buzzed hotly in the heather, making the thin, springlike stems of the
ling quiver and nod beneath their honey-laden alightings, swallows and
martins chided shrilly as they passed, and peewits cried that note which
is sad or triumphant according to the mood of the hearer. Then as she
gained the top of this rocky bastion, sounds more indicative of human
presences were in the air, the report of a gun came from not far off,
and immediately afterwards a string of shots. Though she had killed her
salmon with such gusto only an hour or two before, Madge could not help
a secret little joy at the thought that probably this particular grouse
had run the gauntlet of all the guns and had escaped again for another
spell of wild life on the heather. Then, following the gillie's finger,
she saw not half a mile away the shooting party, who were also
approaching the general _rendez-vous_ with the same coincident
punctuality as she, while a quarter of a mile further down from this
point of vantage she could see Gladys coming up. The shooters were
walking in line across a very steep piece of brae that declined towards
the river, three of them, but with the gillies and dog-men seeming quite
a party. The hillside was covered with heather, and sown with great grey
boulders.
Madge was a few minutes before the others; Gladys had still several
hundred yards to go before she reached the bridge which was now but
thirty yards off, while Lady Ellington had still the cream of the
Bridge-pool in front of her, and she sat down on a big rock at the top
of the cliff while the rest of the party converged. At this distance it
was impossible to make out the identity of the shooters; they were but
little grey blots on the hillside, but every now and then the muffled
report of a shot or of two or three shots reached her, and though she
had felt glad that one grouse had perhaps escaped the death-tubes, yet
she felt glad another way that they seemed to be having good sport. Then
her mind and her eye wandered; she looked up the glen down which she had
come; she saw the river sparkling a mile away in torrent of
sun-enlightened foam; above her climbed the heathery hill, crowned with
the larches of the plantation round the house itself, and from the house
the gleam of a vane caught her eye. Beside her sat the brown-bearded
gillie, in restful Scotch silence, ready and courteous to reply should
she speak to him, but silent till that happened. And "pop-pop" went the
guns from the hillside opposite.
Suddenly he got up, looking across no longer vaguely, but with focussed
eyes, and she turned. The little grey specks of men were closer, and it
was possible now to see that there was some commotion among them. From
the right a little grey speck was running down hill; from the left
another was running up. And that was all.
Madge watched for a moment or two, still full of sunny thoughts. Then
from the point of convergence of the little grey specks one started
running towards the bridge by which she would cross. At that, faint as
reflected starlight, an impulse of alarm came to her. But it was so
slight that no trace of it appeared in her voice.
"What is happening, do you think?" she asked the gillie.
But the courteous Scotsman did not reply; he gazed a moment longer, and
then ran down the steep descent to the bridge. And in Madge the faint
feeling of alarm grew stronger, though no less indefinable, as she
looked at the leaping little grey speck growing every moment larger. At
last she saw who it was; it was Mr. Osborne jumping and running for all
he was worth. At that she followed her gillie, and hurried after him
across the wire bridge. And as if a drum had beat to arms, legions of
fears no longer indefinable leaped into her brain in hideous tumult.
A hundred yards ahead her gillie had met the running figure, and in a
moment he had slung off the creel and started to run towards her,
leaving Mr. Osborne to drop down, as if exhausted, in the heather.
"What is it?" she cried as he approached.
"An accident, ma'am," he said. "I don't know what."
Madge did not delay him, but went on towards Mr. Osborne. As she got
near he sprang up from his seat.
"Ah, my dear Mrs. Dundas," he said; "don't go--don't go!"
His panting breath made him pause a moment, but he looked at her face of
agony and apprehension, and, clenching his hands, went on.
"No, not killed; there is nobody dead. But there has been an accident, a
ricochet off one of those rocks. Someone has been--yes, my poor, dear
lady, it is your husband. But don't go; it is terrible."
But before he could say more to stop her she had passed him, and was
running up the hill.
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