It was the music-room in Mr. Bevis Urquhart's mansion in Park Street.
The floor was polished, the walls panelled in white and gold, the
ceiling painted in the Watteau style. About forty fashionably dressed
people sat on gilded chairs in the body of the room. High in front of
them towered the organ; beneath it stretched a low platform containing a
white and gold grand piano pushed into a corner, and a Louis XV. table,
at which sat half a dozen men. Among these was Roderick, looking worn
and jaded, and from the front row of the chairs Ella Defries viewed him
in some concern. The committee of the Walden Art Colony had called
a general meeting of those interested in the project, and Mr. Bevis
Urquhart had lent his music-room for the purpose.
Mr. Redmayne, R. A., had been voted into the chair. He was a
business-like looking little man, clean-shaven and precise in attire,
and he spoke in a dry, sharp way like a barrister. He announced to the
meeting what Roderick had heard some days before,--that Sir Decimus
Bland had died suddenly and had made no testamentary provision for the
Colony. They all had looked to him for the payment of the Director's
salary and for the guaranteeing of any pecuniary deficit that might
occur in working the concern. Their chief support gone, it was for the
meeting to decide whether the scheme should be continued or abandoned.
From a memorandum supplied by Roderick he read a statement of accounts.
Three thousand and twenty pounds at Mr. Usher's bankers; two thousand
promised. Was there any person or combination of persons willing to
fill Sir Decimus Bland's place? He sat down. No one responded. Lord
Eglington, a withered gentleman with a cracked voice, rose from the
committee table, and after expounding the aim of the Colony regretfully
proposed the entire abandonment of the scheme. Mr. Bevis Urquhart
seconded the resolution.
Roderick caught an appealing glance from Ella and sprang to his feet.
He pleaded eloquently. He had worked with heart and soul to organise the
Colony; was ready to devote his existence to it. The future of Art was
at stake. Here was the one glorious chance the century had offered
to free Art from the shackles that had degraded it and through its
inexorable influence had degraded modern life. Never had he felt such
pain as when he had heard Lord Eglington and Mr. Urquhart propose to
dismiss the scheme to that unutterable horror of desolation, the limbo
of forsaken ideals. He adjured them to weigh the vast responsibility
they had taken upon themselves. He urged those present to respond
generously to his appeal for funds to carry on the work.
“I speak as a man,” said he, “fighting for dear life, for all that is
sacred and holy to me in existence. I have pledged myself to bring this
boon upon the world, and I will do it ere I die.”
He sat down, flushed and excited. The company, moved by his enthusiasm,
applauded encouragingly. Ella rose.
“It will be a disgrace to us all if the motion is carried,” she said,
turning round to the general body. “Let us fill up a subscription list
now. I will head it with five thousand pounds.” She sat down. There was
a cold silence. Her heart sank with a feeling of shame at her outburst.
_Qui m'aime me suive_ is sometimes an excellent battle-cry. When no
one follows, it falls deadly flat. She realised that most of the people
there knew her personal interest in the affair, and her cheek grew
hotter. Roderick stepped boldly down to her, and whispered in her ear.
“You have the worshipping gratitude of all my life,” said he.
A man rose at the back of the room and began to speak. There was
a rustle of garments as every one turned to look at him. He was
a well-known journalist, the editor of a weekly paper that made a
specialty of diagnosing unsound institutions. Roderick tugged at his
Vandyke beard and watched him narrowly. He began in a light bantering
tone, described with delicate satiric touch the objects of the Colony.
Then he playfully analysed the idyllic conditions under which the
colonists would work. The meeting laughed. He sketched the boredom, the
universal hatred of the minor poet who insisted on reading his poems
aloud to the assembled Colony, the flirtations, imbroglios, jealousies,
the lady who paid nothing and went about declaring that the food was
not fit to eat. One by one he touched off the types. The meeting was
delighted. Then the speaker launched out into a trenchant indictment of
the whole scheme, disclosed its absurdity, its financial rottenness,
its infinite futility. He ended amid rounds of laughter and applause.
Ridicule had killed the scheme outright. There were cries that the
motion should be put. It was carried almost by acclamation. Thus ended
the great Walden Art Colony.
“I did think you would stand by it, Urquhart,” said Roderick to the
young semimillionaire.
The people were beginning to disperse, among much laughter and gossip.
Ella had lingered on an imploring sign from Roderick. Urquhart stifled a
yawn and buttoned his frock-coat.
“My dear fellow,” said he, from the heights of his superior culture,
“if you would only study Pradovitch,---- the one genius this century has
produced,--study him as I have done, you would not fail to be convinced
that Art is the leprosy of life.”
For once Roderick lost his temper. An evil look came into his face.
“What a God-forsaken fool you are!” he snarled out. And turning on his
heel he joined Ella.
The young man turned to Lord Eglington.
“That's the worst of having to do with such _canaille_,” he said
languidly. But in spite of his assumption of supercilious indifference,
his face wore a malignant expression as he watched Roderick and his
companion disappear through the doorway. At the door however, Roderick's
indignation evaporated. It is no doubt an immense satisfaction to tell
a posturing imbecile exactly what you, think of him, but when you have
misappropriated a couple of thousands of that imbecile's money without
any reasonable prospect of restoring it, the satisfaction is apt to be
short lived.
Roderick and Ella gained the street without saying a word. A cab
sauntered up.
“Will you--?” began Roderick.
“I would sooner walk part of the way. Do you mind?”
“Delighted,” said Roderick.
“The room was so hot,” she explained, “and it is a beautiful afternoon.”
They walked down Park Lane in silence, hanging dejected heads, a new
Adam and Eve driven from Eden. Now and then she glanced sideways at
him, to see his brow set and deep lines descending parallel with his
moustache and losing themselves in his beard. His defeat seemed to have
crushed him. Ella felt a pang of pity. She touched his arm lightly.
“You must not take it too much to heart,” she said.
“I must,” he replied, with a gesture of despair. “To think it should
have all gone down like a house of cards!”
They crossed the road and entered the Park. The grey mists of the early
December afternoon were beginning to gather among the trees. Far off a
great crimson blur announced the setting sun. To their right the statue
of Achilles loomed grimly on its deserted hillock. Roderick pointed to
it with his stick.
“Do you remember that Sunday afternoon six months ago, when all was hope
and sunshine?”
“Redmayne had just joined,” she remarked.
“And to-day he took the chair, so as to crush us. They had it all
arranged beforehand. A damnable conspiracy! And we were powerless. It
maddens me!”
His tones were those of intense feeling Ella was compelled to comfort.
“You fought splendidly,” she said. “A man can't do more.”
He stopped abruptly in the path and laid both hands on her wrists by her
muff. A belated nursery maid wheeling a perambulator eyed them dully.
“Bless you for the words! You cannot tell what your sympathy means to me
now.”
By a happy chance he had struck the right note. Tears came into the
girl's eyes. For the first time she was able to disassociate the man
from his work. She lost her own sense of disappointment in womanly pity
for the man who had been defeated while battling against great odds.
“And bless you for the tears standing in those eyes!” said Roderick.
They walked on. Somehow her hand found its way beneath his arm. They
spoke but little. Roderick's pulses fluttered with a new hope; but his
perceptions into the nature of women were too keen to allow him to force
an advantage. He wore his stricken air, yet subtly conveyed to her the
deep comfort of her sympathy. He pressed her hand against his side and
left her to work out the situation for herself under these excellent
conditions.
Ella had never felt so near him. The unity in their golden dreams had
not bound them so closely as this unity in catastrophe. For even when
the dreams were most golden, she had haunting misgivings that they were
but visions. Outraged by Sylvester's trampling on her heart, sickened
at herself by her years reckless follies, eager, with all a proud girl's
passion, to vindicate herself, to follow some noble standard, she had
caught at the first that flaunted by and compelled herself imperiously
to believe in it. This forced faith had been the strenuous labour of her
inner life. She had armed herself in triple brass against Lady Milmo's
shafts of flippant satire, against Matthew Lanyon's kindly wisdom,
against her own common sense. The Colony would be merely a paradise of
cranks. No serious artist would throw away his or her career in such a
Cloud-cuckoo-land.
She herself, at the best but a well-taught amateur painter in
water-colours, what was she doing in that galley? She set aside reason.
To believe in Roderick, she must believe in the Colony. To believe in
the Colony, she must believe in Roderick. The two were inextricably
interfused. Realisation of the dreams was her only justification for
marrying the man. The man's personality and enthusiasm for an ideal
had overpowered her. She would not think. She was young, inexperienced,
warm-natured, seeing things out of proportion. Flight from the self she
had deemed dishonoured was her only chance of salvation; and she mistook
the imaginary cries behind her, hounding her onward, for the voice of
inexorable necessity. If Roderick could accomplish it, the Colony was a
glorious thing. The Colony accomplished, Roderick was the conqueror to
whom she must yield. When the dreams were most golden she saw him such,
and they were near together.
But then had come the days of Roderick's loss of interest in the scheme.
He put her above the Colony, desired her above all things. She shivered
back. For himself alone she could not marry him. Why, she could not
tell. A girl with a mind pure and sweet does not speculate on that
which, traced logically to its source, is simply elemental sexual
repulsion. She clung fiercely to her point. Then Roderick returned
to the scheme with his old ardour. In her heart she believed him
passionately sincere. Misfortune had come with terrible unexpectedness.
He had fought and failed. He was a beaten man. The dream had been
brutally proved to have been the emptiest of hallucinations. She was
miserably cast down. Roderick seemed broken-hearted. They were at one
in an absolute cynical reality. Both had been pierced by the same shaft.
The doors of the cranks' Eden had clanged behind them, and they were
walking together in the grey, dreary expanse of Hyde Park, with an
unknown world of the most definite prose before them. They seemed alone,
to have nothing in common with the rest of society; to have in common
with each other this all-filling humiliation of defeat. So when he
spoke, the unreasoning woman leaped to comfort the man. She had never
felt so near him. A great and natural revulsion of feeling had lifted
her heart to consolation.
They quitted the Park at Hyde Park Corner, and paused by common impulse.
“I suppose you will take a cab now,” he said reluctantly.
“I suppose I must,” she said in the same tone. “I would ask you to come
with me, but it's auntie's day at home, and the place will be full of
chattering people.”
“I can't bear leaving you,” said he.
“Nor I you.”
“You look tired, poor child. Let me give you some tea. Will you?
I belong to a club in Piccadilly,--the Hyde Park, where ladies are
admitted to tea. It is the home of all the depressed outcasts of London,
and even they shun it. We are sure to be alone in the tea-room. Come.”
He hailed a hansom. Ella, in that strange mood of passivity which is
woman's fatalest, entered without remark. He followed, and they drove to
the Hyde Park Club.
As he had prophesied, the tea-room was empty, save for one dejected
member with his neck-tie riding over the back of his collar, who stared
at them for a moment and then passed out like a ghost. A blazing fire,
however, was burning in the grate, and the maroon leather chairs and
divans added a sense of warmth and comfort to the room. The despondent
ones took their seats in a little recess by the fireplace, and Roderick
ordered tea.
“It's a new club, and no two members are acquainted. It is the most
desolate place in London. A man comes here when he wants to work out his
suicide. There's no one to distract his thoughts. Then he goes out and
commits it.”
“Why did you join?” asked Ella, mechanically.
“Perhaps I foresaw this day. If your worshipped dearness had not waited
for me at Urquhart's, I should have come here--and God knows what
desperate remedies I should have brooded over. But I never foresaw
having you here to strengthen me. Thank Heaven I did join, so as to have
a haven of rest and quietude to bring you to.”
He passed his hand across his forehead wearily, and rested his elbow on
the little table in front of him.
“My God!” he said. “It has been a bitter day for me.”
The waiter brought a tray with tea and delicately baked scones. Ella
filled the cups and tried to cheer her companion, praising the tea and
the arrangements of the club. The warmth, the little sense of novelty,
working an unconscious influence, had brought back animation to her
face. She looked very fresh and winsome in the man's eyes. They fixed
themselves upon her despairingly. Ella suddenly broke off her trivial
chatter.
“Ah you must not,” she said, with a little choke to keep down the tears.
“There are so many great things left in the world to fight for--. Oh, I
wish I could help you!”
“Bless you!” he replied solemnly--and how much was acting, and how much
was genuine, the man's Maker alone could tell, for the man himself could
not; “there is only one way in which you could help me, and that must
not be. You are rich, I am poor. We are no longer working in the great
common cause in which all such differences could have been sunk. As a
man of honour I must release you from your engagement with me, for the
conditions on which our engagement was based have lapsed. You are quite
free, Ella, and I must go my way alone.”
He hid his face in his hands. Ella trifled with her tea-spoon.
“You are generous,” she said in a low voice. “But if your honour is at
stake, so is mine. I could not turn away from you in your hour of need.”
“I am a defeated man,” he replied brokenly. “You would despise me.”
The word pierced her like a knife. At that moment she was noble, with
the blind and piteous folly that is so often at the heart of woman's
nobility. She drew herself up proudly, then stretched her arm
impulsively across the table and closed her fresh young fingers on his
hand.
“I will marry you whenever you please, and we will face the world
together and begin a new life,” she said.
*****
“My poor dear child,” said Lady Milmo, kissing Ella affectionately, when
she came home, “I am so sorry for you. Lady Elstree came here straight
after the meeting and told us all about it. But it was bound to come to
smash, darling.”
“I suppose it was, auntie,” replied Ella, taking off her fur necklet.
She sat down on the fender stool and looked into the fire. Lady Milmo
came up and took one of her hands and petted it in her kindly fashion.
“I'm very glad it's all over,” she said. “As soon as it became serious,
I never liked it, you know, dear. And now we can start everything quite
fresh, can't we?”
“Yes, quite fresh,” assented Ella.
“You see now,” continued Lady Milmo, “how wise it was to make that
condition about your engagement. I don't want to say anything against
Roderick, but he's an impossible visionary, dear. I always hated the
idea of your marrying him. It is all broken off now, isn't it?”
To Lady Milmo's great astonishment, the girl suddenly burst into a fit
of miserable crying. She knelt by her and petted her comfortingly.
“It will be quite easy, my child. I will write him a kind little note
about it, and you can go down to Ayresford and take care of that dear
Uncle Matthew of yours.”
“Oh, auntie,” cried Ella at last, “you don't understand. I promised
Roderick this afternoon to marry him in a fortnight's time.”