Of finite hearts that yearn.’
I quite agree with you, he is a charming creature. So now I repeat the
second part of my rash little prophecy: Before the summer’s over he
will have accepted at least a good half of his paternal fortune. Ce que
femme veut, le diable ne saurait pas l’empêcher. He will, he
shall, even if I have to marry him to make him.—Yours ever, Johannah
Silver.” III
Will left his room somewhat early the next morning, and went down into
the garden. The sun was shining briskly, the dew still sparkled on the
grass, the air was heady with a hundred keen earth-odours. A mile away,
beyond the wide green levels of Sumpter Meads, the sea glowed blue
as the blue of larkspur, under the blue June sky. And everywhere,
everywhere, innumerable birds piped and twittered, filling the world
with a sense of gay activity, of whole-hearted, high-hearted life.
“What! up already?” a voice called softly, from behind him.
He turned, and met Johannah.
“Why not, since you are?” he responded.
She laughed, and gave him her hand, a warm, elastic hand, firm of grasp.
In a garden-hat and a white frock, her eyes beaming, her cheeks faintly
flushed, she seemed to him a sort of beautiful incarnation of the spirit
of the summer morning, its freshness, and sweetness, and richness.
“Oh, we furriners,” she explained; “we’re all shocking
early risers. In Italy we love the day when it is young, and deem it
middle-aged by eight o’clock. But in England I had heard it was the
fashion to lie late.”
“I woke, and couldn’t go to sleep again, so I tossed the fashion
to the winds. Perhaps it was a sort of dim presentiment that I should
surprise Aurora walking in the garden, that banished slumber,” he
suggested, with a flourish.
“Flowery speeches are best met by flowery deeds,” said she. “Come
with me to the rosery, and I will give you a red, red rose.”
And in the rosery, as she stood close to him, pinning the red, red rose
in his coat, her smooth cheek and fragrant hair so near, so near, he
felt his heart all at once begin to throb, and he had to control a
sudden absurd longing to put his arms round her and kiss her. “Good
heavens,” he said to himself, “I must be on my guard.”
“There,” she cried, bestowing upon her task a gentle pat, by way of
finish, “that makes us quits.” And she raised her eyes to his, and
held them for an instant with a smile that did anything but soothe the
trouble in his heart, such a sly little teasing, cryptic smile. Could
it possibly be, he wondered wildly, that she had divined his monstrous
impulse, and was coquetting with it?
“Now let’s be serious,” she said, leading the way back to the
lawn. “It’s like a hanging-garden, high up here, with the meads and
the sea below, isn’t it? And àpropos of the sea, I would beg you to
observe its colour. Is it blue? I would also ask you kindly to cast an
eye on that line of cliffs, there to the eastward, as it goes winding in
and out away to the vanishing point. Are the cliffs white?”
“Oh, yes, the cliffs are white,” agreed the unwary Will.
“How can you tell such dreadful fibs?” she caught him up. “The
cliffs are prismatic. White, indeed! when they gleam with every
transparent tint from rose to violet, as if the light that falls on
them had passed through rubies and amethysts, and all sorts of precious
stones. That is an optical effect due doubtless to reflection or
refraction or something—no?”
“I should say it was almost certainly due to something,” he
acquiesced.
“And now,” she continued, “will you obligingly turn your attention
to the birds? Tweet-weet-willow-will-weet. I don’t know what it means,
but they repeat it so often and so earnestly, I’m sure it must be
true.”
“It’s relatively true,” said he. “It means that it’s a
fine morning, and their digestion’s good, and their affairs are
prospering—nothing more than that. They’re material-minded little
beasts, you know.”
“All truth is relative,” said she, “and one’s relatively a
material-minded little beast oneself. Is the greensward beyond
there (relatively) spangled with buttercups and daisies? Is the park
(relatively) leafy, and shadowy, and mysterious, and delightful? Is the
may in bloom? Voyons donc! you’ll never be denying that the may’s
in bloom. And is the air like an elixir? I vow, it goes to one’s head
like some ethereal elixir. And yet you have the effrontery to tell
me that you’re pining for the flesh-pots of Great College Street,
Westminster, S.W.”
“Oh, did I tell you that? Ah, well, it must have been with intent to
deceive, for nothing could be farther from the truth,” he owned.
“The relative truth? Then you’re not homesick?”
“Not consciously,” said he.
“Neither am I,” said she.
“Why should you be?” he asked.
“This is positively the first day since my arrival in England that I
haven’t been, more or less,” she answered.
“Oh?” he wondered sympathetically.
“You can’t think how dépaysée I’ve felt. After having lived
all one’s life in Prague, suddenly to find oneself translated to the
mistress-ship of an English country house,” she submitted.
“In Prague? I thought you had lived in Rome and Paris, chiefly,” he
exclaimed.
“Prague is a figure of rhetoric,” she reminded him. “I mean the
capital of Bohemia. Wasn’t my father a sculptor? And wasn’t I born
in a studio? And haven’t my playmates and companions always been of
Florizel the loyal subjects? So whether you call it Rome or Paris or
Florence or Naples, it was Prague, none the less.”
“At that rate, I live in Prague myself, and we’re compatriots,”
said Will.
“That’s no doubt why I don’t feel homesick any more,” she
responded, smiling. “Where two of the faithful are gathered together
they can form a miniature Prague of their own. If I decide to stay in
England, I shall send for a lot of my Prague friends to come and visit
me, and you can send for an equal number of yours; and then we’ll turn
this bright particular corner of the British Empire into a province of
Bohemia, and the County may be horrified with reason. But meanwhile,
let’s be Pragueians in practice as well as theory. Let’s go to the
strawberry beds, and steal some strawberries,” was her conclusion.
She walked a little in front of him. Her garden-hat had come off,
and she was swinging it at her side, by its ribbons. Will noticed the
strong, lithe sway and rhythm of her body, as she moved. “What a woman
she is,” he thought; “how one feels her sex.” And with that,
he all at once became aware of a singular depression. “Surely,” a
malevolent little voice within him argued, “woman that she is, and
having passed all her life with the subjects of Florizel, surely,
surely, she must have had... experiences. She must have loved—she must
have been loved.” And (as if it was any of his business!) a kind of
vague jealousy of her past, a kind of suspiciousness and irrelevant
resentment, began to burn, a small dull spot of pain, somewhere in his
breast.
She, apparently, was in the highest spirits. There was something
expressive of joyousness in the mere way she tripped over the grass,
swinging her garden-hat like a basket; and presently she fell to
singing, merrily, in a light voice, that prettiest of old French songs,
Les Trots Princesses, dancing forward to its measure:
“Derrièr’ chez mon père,
(Vole, vole, mon cour, vole!)
Derrièr’ chez mon père,
Ya un pommier doux,
Tout doux, et iou,
Ya un pommier doux.”
“Don’t you like that song?” she asked. “The tune of it is like
the smell of faded rose-leaves, isn’t it?”
And suddenly she began to sing a different one, possibly an
improvisation:
“ And so they set forth for the strawberry beds,
The strawberry beds, the strawberry beds,
And so they set forth for the strawberry beds,
On Christmas day in the morning.”
And when they had reached the strawberry beds, she knelt, and plucked a
great red berry, and then leapt up again, and held it to her cousin’s
lips, saying, “Bite—but spare my fingers.” And so, laughing, she
fed it to him, while he, laughing too, consumed it. But when her pink
finger-tips all but touched his lips, his heart had a convulsion, and
it was only by main-force that he restrained his kisses. And he said
to himself, “I must go back to town to-morrow. This will never do.
It would be the devil to pay if I should let myself fall in love with
her.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve felt terribly dépaysée,” she told him again,
herself nibbling a berry. “I’ve felt like the traditional cat in
the strange garret. And then, besides, there was my change of name. I
can’t reconcile myself to being called Miss Silver. I can’t realise
the character. It’s like an affectation, like making-believe. Directly
I relax my vigilance, I forget, and sink back into Johannah Rothe. I’m
always Johannah Rothe when I’m alone. Directly I’m alone, I push a
big ouf, and send Miss Silver to Cracklimbo. Then somebody comes,
and, with a weary sigh, I don my sheep’s clothing again. Of course,
there’s nothing in a name, and yet there’s everything. There’s a
furious amount of mental discomfort when the name doesn’t fit.”
“It’s a discomfort that will pass,” he said consolingly. “The
change of name is a mere formality—a condition attached to coming into
a property. In England, you know, it’s a rather frequent condition.”
“I’m aware of that,” she informed him. “But to me,” she went
on, “it seems symbolic—symbolic of my whole situation, which is
false, abnormal. Silver? Silver? It’s a name meant for a fair person,
with light hair and a white skin. And here I am, as black as any Gipsy.
And then! It’s a condition attached to coming into a property. Well, I
come into a property to which I have no more moral right than I have to
the coat on your back; and I’m obliged to do it under an alias, like a
thief in the night.”
“Oh, my dear young lady,” he cried out, “you’ve the very best of
rights, moral as well as legal. You come into a property that is left to
you by will, and you’re the last representative of the family in whose
hands it has been for I forget how many hundreds of years.”
“That,” said she, “is a question I shall not refuse to discuss
with you upon some more fitting occasion. For the present I am tempted
to perpetrate a simply villainous pun, but I forbear. Suffice it to say
that I consider the property that I’ve come into as nothing more nor
less than a present made me by my cousin, William Stretton. No—don’t
interrupt!” she forbade him. “I happen to know my facts. I happen to
know that if Will Stretton hadn’t, for reasons in the highest degree
honourable to himself, quarrelled and broken with his father, and
refused to receive a penny from him, I happen to know, I say, that Sir
William Silver would have left Will Stretton everything he possessed
in the world. Oh, it’s not in vain that I’ve pumped the man named
Burrell. So, you see, I’m indebted to my Quixotic cousin for something
in the neighbourhood, I’m told, of eight thousand a year. Rather a
handsome little present, isn’t it? Furthermore, let me add in passing,
I absolutely forbid my cousin to call me his dear young lady, as if he
were seven hundred years my senior and only a casual acquaintance. A
really nice cousin would take the liberty of calling me by my Christian
name.”
“I’ll take the liberty of calling you by some exceedingly
unChristian name,” he menaced, “if you don’t leave off talking
that impossible rot about my making you a present.”
“I wasn’t talking impossible rot about your making me a present,”
she contradicted. “I was merely telling you how dépaysée I’d
felt. The rest was parenthetic. So now, then, keep your promise, call me
Johannah.”
“Johannah,” he called, submissively.
“Will,” said she. “And when you feel, Will, that on the whole,
Will, you’ve had strawberries enough, Will, quite to destroy your
appetite, perhaps it would be as well if we should go in to breakfast,
Willie.” IV.
They were seated on the turf, under a great tree, in the park, amid
a multitude of bright-coloured cushions, Johannah, Will, and Madame
Dornaye. It was three weeks later—whence it may be inferred that he
had abandoned his resolution to “go back to town to-morrow.” He was
smoking a cigarette; Madame Dornaye was knitting; Johannah, hatless, in
an indescribable confection of cream-coloured muslin, her head pillowed
in a scarlet cushion against the body of the tree, was gazing off
towards the sea with dreamy eyes.
“Will,” she called languidly, by-and-by.
“Yes?” he responded.
“Do you happen by any chance to belong to that sect of philosophers
who regard gold as a precious metal?”
“From the little I’ve seen of it, I am inclined to regard it as
precious—yes,” he answered.
“Well, then, I wouldn’t be so lavish of it, if I were you,” said
she.
“If you don’t take care,” said he, “you’ll force me to admit
that I haven’t an idea of what you’re driving at.”
“I’m driving at your silence. You’re as silent as a statue. Please
talk a little.”
“What shall I talk about?”
“Anything. Nothing. Tell us a story,” she decided.
“I don’t know any stories.”
“Then the least you can do is to invent one,” was her plausible
retort.
“What sort of a story would you like?”
“There’s only one sort of story a woman ever sincerely
likes—especially on a hot summer’s afternoon, in the country,” she
affirmed.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly invent a love-story,” he disclaimed.
“Then tell us a true one. You needn’t be afraid of shocking Madame
Dornaye. She’s a realist herself.”
“Jeanne ma fille!” murmured Madame Dornaye, reprovingly.
“The only true love-story I could tell has a somewhat singular
defect,” said he. “There’s no heroine.”
“That’s like the story of what’s-his-name—Narcissus,” Johannah
said.
“With the vastest difference. The hero of my story wasn’t in love
with his own image. He was in love with a beautiful princess,” Will
explained.
“Then how can you have the face to say that there’s no heroine?”
she demanded.
“There isn’t any heroine. At the same time, there’s nothing else.
The story’s all about her. You see, she never existed.”
“You said it was a true love-story,” she reproached him.
“So it is—literally true.”
“I asked for a story, and you give me a riddle.” She shook her head.
“Oh, no, it’s a story all the same,” he reassured her. “Its
title is Much Ado about Nobody.”
“Oh? It runs in my head that I’ve met with something or other with a
similar title before,” she considered.
“Precisely,” said he. “Something or other by one of the
Elizabethans. That’s how it came to occur to me. I take my goods where
I find them. However, do you want to hear the story?”
“Oh, if you’re determined to tell it, I daresay I can steel myself
to listen,” she answered, with resignation.
“On second thoughts, I’m determined not to tell it,” he teased.
“Bother! Don’t be disagreeable. Tell it at once,” she commanded.
“Well, then, there isn’t any story,” he admitted. “It’s simply
an absurd little freak of child psychology. It’s the story of a boy
who fell in love with a girl—a girl that never was, on sea or land.
It happened in Regent Street, of all romantic places, ’one day still
fierce ’mid many a day struck calm.’ I had gone with my mother to
her milliner’s. I think I was ten or eleven. And while my mother was
transacting her business with the milliner, I devoted my attention to
the various hats and bonnets that were displayed about the shop. And
presently I hit on one that gave me a sensation. It was a straw hat,
with brown ribbons, and cherries, great glossy red and purple cherries.
I looked at it, and suddenly I got a vision—a vision of a girl. Oh,
the loveliest, loveliest girl! She was about eighteen (a self-respecting
boy of eleven, you know, always chooses a girl of about eighteen to fall
in love with), and she had the brightest brown eyes, and the rosiest
cheeks, and the curlingest hair, and a smile and a laugh that made
one’s heart thrill and thrill with unutterable blisses. And there hung
her hat, as if she had just come in and taken it off, and passed into
another room. There hung her hat, suggestive of her as only people’s
hats know how to be suggestive; and there sat I, my eyes devouring it,
my soul transported. The very air of the shop seemed all at once to
have become fragrant—with the fragrance that had been shaken from her
garments as she passed. I went home, hopelessly, frantically in love. I
loved that non-existent young woman with a passion past expressing, for
at least half a year. I was always thinking of her; she was always with
me, everywhere. How I used to talk to her, and tell her all my childish
fancies, desires, questionings; how I used to sit at her feet and
listen! She never laughed at me. Sometimes she would let me kiss her—I
declare, my heart still jumps at the memory of it. Sometimes I would
hold her hand or play with her hair. And all the real girls I met
seemed so tame and commonplace by contrast with her. And then, little
by little, I suppose, her image faded away.—Rather an odd experience,
wasn’t it?”
“Very, very odd; very strange and very pretty,” Johannah murmured.
“It seems as if it ought to have some allegorical significance, though
I can’t perceive one. It would be interesting to know what sort
of real girl, if any, ended by becoming the owner of that hat. You
weren’t shocked, were you?” she inquired of Madame Dornaye.
“Not by the story. But the heat is too much for me,” said that
lady, gathering up her knitting. “I am going to the house to make a
siesta.”
Will rose, as she did, and stood looking vaguely after her, as she moved
away. Johannah nestled her head deeper in her cushion, and half closed
her eyes. And for a while neither she nor her cousin spoke. A faint,
faint breeze whispered in the tree-tops; now a twig snapped, now a bird
dropped a solitary liquid note. For the rest, all was still summer heat
and woodland perfume. Here and there the greensward round them, dark in
the shadow of dense foliage, was diapered with vivid yellow by sunbeams
that filtered through.
“Oh, dear me,” Johannah sighed at last.
“What is it?” Will demanded.
“Here you are, silent as eternity again. Come and sit
down—here—near to me.”
She indicated a position with a lazy movement of her hand. He obediently
sank upon the grass.
“You’re always silent nowadays, when we’re alone,” she
complained.
“Am I? I hadn’t noticed that.”
“Then you’re extremely unobservant. Directly we’re alone, you
appear to lose the power of speech. You mope and moon, and gaze off at
things beyond the horizon, and never open your mouth. One might suppose
you had something on your mind. Have you? What is it? Confide it to me,
and you can’t think how relieved you’ll feel,” she urged.
“I haven’t anything on my mind,” said he.
“Oh? Ah, then you’re silent with me because I bore you? You find me
an uninspiring talk-mate? Thank you,” she bridled.
“You know perfectly well that that’s preposterous nonsense,”
answered Will.
“Well, then, what is it? Why do you never talk to me when we’re
alone?” she persisted.
“But I do talk to you. I talk too much. Perhaps I’m afraid of boring
you,” he said.
“You know perfectly well that that’s a preposterous subterfuge,”
said she. “You’ve got something on your mind. You’re keeping
something back.” She paused for a second; then, softly, wistfully,
“Tell me what it is, Will, please.” And she looked eagerly,
pleadingly, into his eyes.
He looked away from her. “Upon my word, there’s nothing to tell,”
he said, but his tone was a little forced.
She broke into a merry peal of laughter, looking at him now with eyes
that were derisive.
“What are you laughing at?” he asked.
“At you, Will,” said she. “What else could you imagine?”
“I’m flattered to think you find me so amusing.”
“Oh, you’re supremely amusing. ’Refrain thou shalt; thou shalt
refrain!’ Is that your motto, Will? If I were a man, I’d choose
another. ’Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold!’ That should be
my motto if I were a man.”
“But as you’re a woman———” he began.
“It’s my motto, all the same,” she interrupted. “Do you mean to
say you’ve not discovered that yet? Oh, Will, if I were you, and
you were I, how differently we should be employing this heaven-sent
summer’s afternoon.” She gazed at the sky, and sighed.
“What should we be doing?” asked he.
“That’s a secret. Pray the fairies to-night to transpose our souls,
and you’ll know by to-morrow morning—if the fairies grant your
prayer. But in the meanwhile, you must try to entertain me. Tell me
another story.”
“I can’t think of any more stories till I’ve had my tea.”
“You shan’t have any tea unless you earn it,” she stipulated.
“Now that Madame Dornaye’s no longer present, you can tell me
of some of your grown-up love affairs, some of your flesh-and-blood
ones.”
“I’ve never had a grown-up love affair,” he said.
“Oh, come! you can’t expect me to believe that,” she cried.
“It’s the truth, all the same.”
“Well, then, it’s high time you should have one,” was her
conclusion. “How old did you say you were?”
“I’m thirty-three.”
She lifted up her hands in astonishment. “And you’ve never had
a love affair! Fi donc! I’m barely twenty-eight, and I’ve had a
hundred.”
“Have you?” he asked, a little ruefully.
“No, I haven’t. But everybody’s had at least one. So tell me
yours.”
“Upon my word, I’ve not had even one,” he reiterated.
“It seems incredible. How have you contrived it?”
“The circumstances of my birth contrived it for me. It would be
impossible for me to have a love affair with a woman I could love,” he
said.
“Impossible? For goodness sake, why?” she wondered.
“What woman would accept the addresses of a man without a name?”
“Haven’t you a name? Methought I’d heard your name was William
Stretton.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Then permit me to remark,” she answered him, “that what you mean
is quite superlatively silly. If you loved a woman, wouldn’t you tell
her so?”
“Not if I could help it.”
“But suppose the woman loved you?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t come to that.”
“But suppose it had come to that?” she persevered. “Suppose
she’d set her heart upon you? Would it be fair to her not to tell
her?”
“What would be the good of my telling her, since I couldn’t possibly
ask her to marry me?”
“The fact might interest her, apart from the question of its
consequences,” Johannah suggested. “But suppose she told you?
Suppose she asked you to marry her?”
“She wouldn’t,” said he.
“All hypotheses are admissible. Suppose she should?”
“I couldn’t marry her,” he declared.
“You’d find it rather an awkward job refusing, wouldn’t you?”
she quizzed. “And what reasons could you give?”
“Ten thousand reasons. I’m a bastard. That begins and ends it. It
would dishonour her, and it would dishonour me; and, worst of all, it
would dishonour my mother.”
“It would certainly not dishonour you, nor the woman you married.
That’s the sheerest, antiquated, exploded rubbish. And how on earth
could it dishonour your mother?”
“For me to take as my wife a woman who could not respect her?” Will
questioned. “My mother’s memory for me is the sacredest of sacred
things. You know something of her history. You know that she was in
every sense but a legal sense my father’s wife. You know why they
couldn’t be married legally. You know, too, how he treated her—and
how she died. Do you suppose I could marry a woman who would always
think of my mother as of one who had done something shameful?”
“Oh, but no woman with a spark of nobility in her soul would or could
do that,” Johannah cried.
“Every woman brought up in the usual way, with the usual prejudices,
the usual traditions, thinks evil of the woman who has had an
illegitimate child,” asserted he.
“Not every woman. I, for instance. Do you imagine that I could think
evil of your mother, Will?” She looked at him intensely, earnestly.
“Oh, you’re entirely different from other women. You’re——”
But he stopped at that.
“Then—just for the sake of a case in point—if I were the woman
you chanced to be in love with, and if I simultaneously chanced to be
in love with you, you could see your way to marrying me?” she pursued
him.
“What’s the use of discussing that?”
“For its metaphysical interest. Answer me.”
“There are other reasons why I couldn’t marry you.”
“I’m not good-looking enough?” she cried.
“Don’t be silly.”
“Not young enough?”
“Oh, I say! Let’s talk of something reasonable.”
“Not old enough, perhaps?”
He was silent.
“Not wise enough? Not foolish enough?” she persisted.
“You’re foolish enough, in all conscience,” said he. “Well,
then, why? What are the reasons why you couldn’t marry me?”
“What is the good of talking about this?” he groaned.
“I want to know. A man has the hardihood to inform me to my face that
he’d spurn my hand, even if I offered it to him. I insist upon knowing
why.” She feigned high indignation.
“You know why. And you know that ’spurn’ is very far from the
right word,” was his rejoinder.
“I don’t know why. I insist upon your telling me,” she repeated,
fierily.
“You know that you’re Sir William Silver’s heiress, I suppose,”
he suggested.
“Oh, come! that’s not my fault. How could that matter?”
“Look here, I’m not going to make an ass of myself by explaining the
obvious,” he declared.
“I daresay I’m very stupid, but it isn’t obvious to me.”
“Well, then, let’s drop the subject,” he proposed.
“I’ll not drop the subject till you’ve elucidated it. If you were
in love with me, Will, and I were in love with you, how on earth could
it matter, my being Sir William Silvers heiress?”
“Wouldn’t I seem a bit mercenary’ if I asked you to marry me?”
“Oh, Will!” she remonstrated. “Don’t tell me you’re such a
prig as that. What! if you loved me, if I loved you, you’d give me
up, you’d break my heart, just for fear lest idiotic people, whose
opinions don’t matter any more than the opinions of so many deep-sea
fish, might think you mercenary! When you and I both knew in our own two
souls that you really weren’t mercenary’ in the least! You’d pay
me a poor compliment, Will. Isn’t it conceivable that a man might love
me for myself?”
“You state the case too simply. You make no allowances for the shades
and complexities of a man’s feelings.”
“Bother shades and complexities. Love burns them up. Your shades and
complexities are nothing but priggishness and vanity,” she asserted
hotly. “But there! I’m actually getting angry over a purely
supposititious question. For, of course, we don’t really love each
other the least bit, do we, Will?” she asked him softly.
He appeared to be giving his whole attention to the rolling of a
cigarette; he did not answer. But his fingers trembled, and presently he
tore his paper, spilling half the tobacco in his lap.
Johannah watched him from eyes full of languid, half mocking, half
pensive laughter.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she sighed again, by-and-by.
He looked at her; and he had to catch his breath. Lying there on the
turf, the skirts of her frock flowing round her in a sort of little
billowy white pool, her head deep in the scarlet cushion, her black
hair straying wantonly where it would about her face and brow, her eyes
lambent with that lazy, pensive laughter, one of her hands, pink and
white, warm and soft, fallen open on the grass between her and her
cousin, her whole person seeming to breathe a subtle scent of womanhood,
and the luxury and mystery of womanhood—oh, the sight of her, the
sense of her, there in the wide green stillness of the summer day, set
his heart burning and beating poignantly.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she sighed, “I wish the man I am in love
with were only here.”
“Oh! You are in love with some one?” he questioned, with a little
start.
“Rather!” said she. “In love! I should think so. Oh, I love him,
love him, love him. Ah, if he were here! He wouldn’t waste this golden
afternoon as you’re doing. He’d take my hand—he’d hold it,
and press it, and kiss it; and he’d pour his soul out in tumultuous
celebration of my charms, in fiery avowals of his passion. If he were
here! Ah, me!”
“Where is he?” Will asked, in a dry’ voice.
“Ah, where indeed? I wish I knew.”
“I’ve never heard you speak of him before,” he reflected.
“There’s none so deaf as he that will not hear. I’ve spoken of
him to you at least a thousand times. He forms the staple of my
conversation.”
“I must be veryy deaf indeed. I swear this is absolutely news to
me.”
“Oh, Will, you are such a goose—or such a hypocrite,” said she.
“But it’s tea-time. Help me up.”
She held out her hand, and, he took it and helped her up. But she
tottered a little before she got her balance (or made, at least, a feint
of doing so), and grasped his hand tight as if to save herself, and all
but fell into his arms.
He drew back a step.
She looked straight into his eyes. “You’re a goose, and a hypocrite,
and a prig, and—a dear,” she said. V.
Their tea was served in the garden, and whilst they were dallying over
it, a footman brought Johannah a visiting-card.
She glanced at the card; and Will, watching her, noticed that a look of
annoyance—it might even have been a look of distress—came into her
face.
Then she threw the card on the tea-table, and rose. “I shan’t be
gone long,” she said, and set out for the house.
The card lay plainly legible under the eyes of Will and Madame Dornaye.
“Mr. George Aymer, 36, Boulevard Rochechouart” was the legend
inscribed upon it.
“Tiens,” said Madame Dornaye; “Jeanne told me she had ceased to
see him.”
Will suppressed a desire to ask, “Who is he?”
But Madame Dornaye answered him all the same.
“You have heard of him? He is a known personage in Paris, although
English. He is a painter, a painter of great talent; very young, but
already decorated. And of a surprising beauty—the face of an angel.
With that, a thorough-paced rascal. Oh, yes, whatever is vilest,
whatever is basest. Even in Montmartre, even in the corruptest world of
Paris, among the lowest journalists and painters, he is notorious for
his corruption. Johannah used to see a great deal of him. She would not
believe the evil stories that were told about him. And with his rare
talent and his beautiful face, he has the most plausible manners, the
most winning address. We were afraid that she might end by marrying him.
But at last she found him out for herself, and gave him up. She told me
she had altogether ceased to see him. I wonder what ill wind blows him
here.”
Johannah entered the drawing-room.
A man in grey tweeds, the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour gleaming
in his buttonhole, was standing near a window: a man, indeed, as Madame
Dornaye had described him, with a face of surprising beauty—a fine,
clear, open-air complexion, a clean-cut, even profile, a sensitive, soft
mouth, big, frank, innocent blue eyes, and waving hair of the palest
Saxon yellow. He could scarcely have been thirty; and the exceeding
beauty of his face, its beauty and its sweetness, made one overlook his
figure, which was a trifle below the medium height, and thick-set, with
remarkably square, broad shoulders, and long arms.
Johannah greeted him with some succinctness. “What do you want?” she
asked, remaining close to the door.
“I want to have a talk with you,” he answered, moving towards her.
He drawled slightly; his voice was low and soft, conciliatory, caressing
almost. And his big blue eyes shone with a faint, sweet, appealing
smile.
“Would you mind staying where you are?” said she. “You can make
yourself audible from across the room.”
“What are you afraid of?” he asked, his smile brightening with
innocent wonder.
“Afraid? You do yourself too much honour. One does not like to
find oneself in close proximity with objects that disgust one,” she
explained.
He laughed; but instead of moving further towards her, he dropped into a
chair. “You were always brutally outspoken,” he murmured.
“Yes; and with advancing years I’ve become even more so,” said
Johannah, who continued to stand.
“You’re quite sure, though, that you’re not afraid of me?” he
questioned.
“Oh, for that, as sure as sure can be. If you’ve based any sort of
calculations upon the theory that I would be afraid of you, you’ll
have to throw them over.”
He flushed a little, as if with anger; but in a moment he said calmly,
“You’ve come into a perfect pot of money since I last had the
pleasure of meeting you.”
“Yes, into something like eight thousand a year, if the figures
interest you.”
“I never had any head for figures,” he answered, smiling. “But
eight thousand sounds stupendous. And a lovely place, into the bargain.
The park, or so much of it as one sees from the avenue, could not be
better. And I permitted myself to admire the façade of the house and
the view of the sea.”
“They’re not bad,” Johannah assented.
“It’s heart-rending,” he remarked, “the way things are shared
in this world. Here are you, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, you who
have done nothing all your life but take your pleasure; and I, who’ve
toiled like a galley-slave, I remain as poor as any church-mouse. It’s
monstrous.”
Johannah did not answer.
“And now,” he went on, “I suppose you’ve settled down and become
respectable? No more Bohemia? No more cakes and ale? Only champagne
and truffles? A County Family! Fancy your being a County Family, all
by yourself, as it were! You must feel rather like the reformed rake of
tradition—don’t you?”
“I mentioned that I am not afraid of you,” she reminded him, “but
that doesn’t in the least imply that I find you amusing. The plain
truth is, I find you deadly tiresome. If you have anything special to
say to me, may I ask you to say it quickly?”
Again he flushed a little; then again, in a moment, answered smoothly,
“I’ll say it in a sentence. I’ve come all the way to England, for
the purpose of offering you my hand in marriage.” And he raised his
bright blue eyes to her face with a look that really was seraphic.
“I decline the offer. If you’ve nothing further to keep you here,
I’ll ring to have you shown out.”
Still again he flushed, yet once more controlled himself. “You decline
the offer! Allons donc! When I am prepared to do the right thing, and
make an honest woman of you.”
“I decline the offer,” Johannah repeated.
“That’s foolish of you,” said he.
“If you could dream how remotely your opinion interests me, you
wouldn’t trouble to express it,” said she.
His anger this time got the better of him. He scowled, and looked at her
from the corners of his eyes. “You had better not exasperate me,” he
said in a suppressed voice.
“Oh,” said she, “you must suffer me to be the mistress of my own
actions in my own house. Now—if you are quite ready to go?” she
suggested, putting her hand upon the bell-cord.
“I’m not ready to go yet. I want to talk with you. To cut a long
business short, you’re rich. I’m pitiably poor. You know how poor
I am. You know how I have to live, the hardships, the privations I’m
obliged to put up with.”
“Have you come here to beg?” Johannah asked.
“No, I’ve come to appeal to your good-nature. You refuse to marry
me. That’s absurd of you, but—tant pis! Whether you marry me or
not, you haven’t the heart to leave me to rot in poverty, while you
luxuriate in plenty. Considering our oldtime relations, the thing’s
impossible on the face of it.”
“Ah, I understand. You have come here to beg,” she said.
“No,” said he. “One begs when one has no power to enforce.”
“What is the use of these glittering aphorisms?” she asked wearily.
“If you are ready to behave well to me, I’ll behave handsomely
to you. But if you refuse to recognise my claims upon you, I’m in a
position to take reprisals,” he said very quietly.
Johannah did not answer.
“I’m miserably, tragically poor; you’re rich. At this moment
I’ve not got ten pounds in the world; and I owe hundreds. I’ve not
sold a picture since March. You have eight thousand a year. You can’t
expect me to sit down under it in silence. As the French attorneys
phrase it, cet état de choses ne peut pas durer.”
Still Johannah answered nothing.
“You must come to my relief,” said he. “You must make it
possible for me to go on. If you have any right feeling, you’ll do it
spontaneously. If not—you know I can compel you.”
“Oh, then, for goodness’ sake, compel me, and so make an end of this
entirely tedious visit,” she broke out.
“I’d immensely rather not compel you. If you will lend me a helping
hand from time to time, I’ll promise never to take a step to harm you.
I shall be moderate. You’ve got eight thousand a year. You’d
never miss a hundred now and then. You might simply occasionally buy a
picture. That would be the best way. You might buy my pictures.”
“I should be glad to know definitely,” remarked Johannah, “whether
I have to deal with a blackmailer or a bagman.”
“Damn you,” he exploded, with sudden savagery, flushing very red
indeed.
Johannah was silent.
After a pause, he said, “I’m staying at the inn in the village—at
the Silver Arms.”
Johannah did not speak.
“I’ve already scraped acquaintance with the parson,” he went on.
Then, as she still was silent, “I wonder what would become of your
social position in this County if I should have a good long talk about
you with the parson.”
“To a man of your intelligence, the solution of that problem can
surely present no difficulty,” she replied wearily.
“You admit that your social position would be smashed up?”
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put it
together again,” she said.
“I’m glad to find at least that you acknowledge my power,” said
he.
“You have it in your power to tell people that I was once
inconceivably simple enough to believe that you were an honourable man,
that I once had the inconceivable bad taste to be fond of you. What
woman’s character could survive that revelation?”
“And I could add—couldn’t I?—that you once had the inconceivable
weakness to become my mistress?”
“Oh, you could add no end of details,” she admitted.
“Well, then?” he questioned.
“Well, then?” questioned she.
“It comes to this, that if you don’t want your social position, your
reputation, to be utterly smashed up, you must make terms with me.”
“It’s a little unfortunate, from that way of looking at it,” she
pointed out, “that I shouldn’t happen to care a rush about my social
position—as you call it.”
“I think I’ll have a good long talk with the parson,” he said.
“Do by all means,” said she.
“You’d better be careful. I may take you at your word,” he
threatened.
“I wish you would. Take me at my word—-and go,” she urged.
“You mean to say you seriously don’t care?”
“Not a rush, not a button,” she assured him.
“Oh, come! You’ll never try to brazen the thing out,” he
exclaimed.
“I wish you’d go and have your long talk with the parson,” she
said impatiently.
“It would be so easy for you to give me a little help,” he pleaded.
“It would be so easy for you to ’smash up’ my reputation with the
parson,” she rejoined.
“You never used to be close-fisted. It’s incomprehensible that you
should refuse me a little help. Look. I’m willing to be more than
fair. Give me a hundred pounds, a bare little hundred pounds, and I’ll
send you a lovely picture.”
“Thank you, I don’t want a picture.”
“You won’t give me a hundred pounds—a beggarly hundred pounds?”
He looked incredulous.
“I won’t give you a farthing.”
“Well, then, by God, you jade,” he cried, springing to his feet, his
face crimson, “by God, I’ll make you. I swear I’ll ruin you. Look
out!”
“Are you really going at last?” she asked brightly.
“No, I’m not going till it suits my pleasure. You’ve got a sort of
bastard cousin staying here with you, I’m told,” he answered.
“I would advise you to moderate your tone or your language,” said
she. “If my sort of bastard cousin should by any chance happen to hear
you referring to him in those terms, he would not be pleased.”
“I want to see him,” said he.
“I would advise you not to see him,” she returned.
“I want to see him,” he insisted.
“If you really wish to see him, I’ll send for him,” she consented.
“But it’s only right to warn you that he’s not at all a patient
sort of man. If I send for him, he will quite certainly make things
disagreeable for you.”
“I’m not afraid of him. You know well enough that I’m not a
coward.”
“My cousin is more than a head taller than you are,” she mused.
“He would be perfectly able and perfectly sure to kick you. If
there’s any other possible way of getting rid of you, I’d rather not
trouble him.”
“I think I had better have a talk with your cousin, as well as with
the parson,” he considered.
“I think you had better confine your attentions to the parson. I do,
upon my word,” she counselled him.
“I am going to make a concession,” said Aymer. “I’m going to
give you a night in which to think this thing over. If you care to send
me a note, with a cheque in it, so that I shall receive it at the inn by
to-morrow at ten o’clock, I’ll take the next earliest train back to
town, and I’ll send you a picture in return. If no note comes by ten
o’clock, I’ll call on the parson, and tell him all I know about you;
and I’ll write a letter to your cousin. Now, good day.”