John Mainwaring had prepared his studio for the visit of Mrs. Wardour
and Silvia next day with the utmost dramatic completeness, employing for
their reception the scenery and the setting which suggested itself as
being most likely to impress and astound. With this end in view he had
littered the room with all possible properties, bringing down from the
attics stacks of his own pictures, which he disposed in careless
profusion round the walls. Sketch books and paint boxes littered the
tables, lay figures peeped from behind easels, robes trailed over
sofa-backs, and he, when his visitors were announced, had designed that
he himself should be found, in his oldest velveteen coat and morocco
slippers, at the top of the step-ladder which he had put into position
again in front of the great canvas representing Satan odiously
whispering to the German Emperor. There, absorbed in his inspired
labours, he was to be giving the last, the crowning, the positively
final terrific touch to it as his visitors (and, as he hoped, his
victims) entered.
Since the work had actually been finished at least a month ago, and on
that occasion had been toasted in glasses of port wine by himself, his
wife and Peter, he had thought it prudent to inform her that more last
touches were to be applied to it again to-day. Visitors, he had added,
were dropping in that afternoon, and she would, no doubt, be sitting
upstairs in the drawing-room when they arrived, with tea prepared for
their refreshment. When the time came he would yodel for her, and she
would come down, be presented to Mrs. Wardour and her daughter, and
would scold him for keeping these ladies looking at his stupid pictures
instead of bringing them up to tea....
Such was the general idea of the opening of a manœuvre from which he,
with a quite incurable optimism, expected very gratifying results. Peter
had already alluded to the surprising dawn of Mrs. Wardour on the town,
and he himself, at the play the night before, had paved the way for a
commission to execute a portrait of Silvia. He had no idea whether or
not Mrs. Wardour inserted any of these golden tentacles with which, like
an octopus, she appeared to be enveloping London, into the domain of
art, but it was worth while hoping that her sense of completion would
not be satisfied unless she had Silvia’s portrait painted. That, so he
had ascertained, had not been done, and he had, so to speak, left a card
“soliciting the favour of a call.” The call certainly was to be made
that afternoon, and his imagination now, bit in teeth and wildly
galloping, foresaw another possible commission in the portrait of Mrs.
Wardour herself. Perhaps--here was the rosiest of the summits yet in
view--he might profitably dispose of that great cartoon which Mrs.
Wardour would so soon be privileged to see receiving its finishing
touches. Farther than that his vision did not definitely project itself,
but in sunlit and shining mists he could vaguely see himself working for
all he was worth (and for much of what Mrs. Wardour was worth) at more
of these stupendous canvases, and berthing each, as soon as possible, in
the same remunerative harbourage.
The ring at the bell of the street door warned him to scamper up his
step-ladder, and absorb himself in finishing touches at the top of the
thundercloud of war. In due time the studio door opened and Burrows,
announcing his visitors, had to raise her voice to the pitch of a vendor
of street-wares and recite the names again before she was so fortunate
as to attract his attention. Then Mr. Mainwaring turned slowly round
with a dazed expression and, shading his eyes, perceived the expected
presences. Then with brush in one hand and palette in the other, he gave
an ecstatic cry of welcome (not to be confused with the yodelling
summons for his wife), and came bounding down the step-ladder. Divesting
himself of his palette and brush, he held out both hands.
“Ah, my dear friends,” he said, “but this is charming. I am ashamed of
myself to be found in such dishevelment, but--well, we artists are like
that, silly donkeys as we are, and I had forgotten, for the moment I had
forgotten the advent of my delightful visitors.”
He held a hand of each of them for a moment, with pressure and
expression, and then withdrew his left hand, holding it to his forehead.
“A finishing touch,” he said. “I was at that very moment putting the
last touch of paint on to my canvas. Let me forget that: give me a
moment to forget it. You are here, that is the great point.”
He made a splendid obeisance, and as he recovered thrust back his hair,
and embarked on a period.
“You find me, dear Mrs. Wardour,” he said, “in a moment of triumph, of
jubilation even. Little as that can possibly mean to others, this is one
of my red letter days. A moment ago my brush touched my canvas for the
last time. My picture is done, all but for the obscure initials, which,
in vermilion, I shall humbly inscribe in the corner. Would it, by
chance, be of the smallest interest to you to see that little rite
performed? I take my brush then, I squeeze out a morsel of paint, I
trace those obscure initials.”
No inspiration could have been happier. Mrs. Wardour’s eye was already
travelling over the huge canvas with rapture and astonishment, and it
was thrilling that she should have come just in time to see the artist
testify in vermilion that this great thing was of his own creation.
Naturally she could not be expected to know that if she had arrived half
an hour ago, or had not arrived for half an hour to come, she would have
been just in time for this ceremony. She turned to Silvia.
“Well, if _that_ isn’t interesting, Silvia,” she said (as if Silvia had
denied it). “Weren’t we saying to each other as we came along that
perhaps we should find Mr. Mainwaring painting? And what a work of art
too! My!”
John Mainwaring having recorded himself as creator, became showman and
spectator in one, and moved the step-ladder aside so that he should both
get and give an uninterrupted view. Then, losing himself once more as
spectator, he propped his chin on his hand and gazed at the work.
“Finished! Finished!” he said with a magnificent detachment. “Now let us
see what we think of it.”
Mrs. Wardour gazed too, and the more she gazed the more powerful--that
was exactly the word she would have used--appeared the significance of
this tremendous presentment. She had no great taste for pictures, but if
you were in pursuit of pictures (and pictures had certainly been the
objective of this expedition), here was what she meant by a picture. Not
long before his death her husband had bought what he called “a picture
or two,” destined to adorn the walls of the gallery which was so great a
feature in the castellated residence which he had built on the ridge of
Ashdown Forest. It ran the whole length of the house, and when complete
as to embellishment, was to be a lane of pictures from end to end hung
on red Spanish brocade. To her mind, no less than his, real pictures,
true pictures, pictures worth looking at, were brightly (or sombrely)
coloured illustrations of famous personages, of well-known places, or
told a story; best of all were those that told a story. A few such had
already been plucked and gathered there; there was a very splendid
record of the coronation of Queen Victoria, the rock of Gibraltar, with
a P. and O. steamer to the left and a sunset to the right, an execution
of Mary, Queen of Scots, and, in lighter mood, a delicious immensity
called “Knights of the Bath,” in which a small boy and a large puppy
shared a sponging-tin. Here then and now the image of the walls of the
great picture-gallery, at present insufficiently clad, and crying out
for covering, like a bather who has lost his clothes, flashed into her
mind. The image was not sufficiently clearly realized to admit of a
definite association of ideas between it and the allegory at which they
were all gazing, but certainly as she looked at the size--particularly
the size--of Mr. Mainwaring’s masterpiece, the gallery at Howes occurred
to her. If there were to be pictures, here or elsewhere, she liked to
know what such pictures were “about,” and she instantly perceived what
this one was about. Now that the war was won, and the German Emperor,
for all practical purposes, annihilated (he had served his turn because
the destruction of ships by his submarines had brought her so excessive
a fortune), she could, perceiving the message of the picture,
unreservedly gloat over the realism of it.
“If that isn’t the German Emperor,” she loudly enunciated, “and if that
isn’t Satan whispering to him about the war. Satan’s saying that he
would help, and, to be sure, he tried to. I do call that a picture. And
there’s the war coming up behind, like a thunderstorm. There’s a subject
for a picture, and how beautifully you’ve done it, Mr. Mainwaring.”
He leaned his chin still more heavily against his hand.
“Ah, you think so?” he asked. “I wish I thought so!”
“But what is there to want?” asked Mrs. Wardour. “It’s all as clear as
day. We saw nothing so striking at the Royal Academy, did we, Silvia,
even at the Private View.”
“The Academy? The Academy?” murmured Mr. Mainwaring, as if he wondered
whether he had heard that name before. Then he shook his head gently, as
if abandoning the attempt to remember what the Academy was.
“And I see lots of guns and bayonets underneath the thundercloud,” said
Mrs. Wardour unerringly. “They’re coming up.”
The artist still gazed, and, smoothing his chin with his hand, he
repeated:
“Yes; they’re coming up, coming up.”...
He gave a great start, and seemed to shake himself like a big retriever
emerging from the water, where he had brought some thrown token to
land. He did not know of the great gallery at Howes, which starved for
decoration; but even if he had, he would have bounded out of the water
just like that.
“_Basta! Basta!_” he cried. “I am boring you, dear ladies, I am wearying
you, I am making myself a most unutterable tedium for you. Where is my
wife? Why is she not here to tap me on the shoulder and say ‘Tea’?”
He gave the preconcerted signal of a yodel, and opening the door of the
studio, repeated it. A faint cry from upstairs answered him, and on the
heels of that cry Mrs. Mainwaring came downstairs. The introductions
were floridly effected, and she shook her finger at her husband, and
explained her reproof to her visitors.
“I always tell him that when he is at his painting he never knows the
time,” she said. “John, it is very wrong of you to have kept Mrs.
Wardour and Miss Wardour down here.”
She turned to Mrs. Wardour, as her husband vented himself in contrition
and apology to Silvia.
“Of course I’m no judge,” she said, “for I always think that everything
my husband does is so striking. But is not that a wonderful thing? The
Emperor, Satan. Yes. Such expressive faces! Now I must insist on your
coming to have a cup of tea. I always have to drive my husband away from
his easel. Look at him in his old coat, too. John, I’m ashamed of you!
Go and put on something more tidy.”
Silvia felt somehow, as Mrs. Mainwaring gave this skilful rendering of
the general hints that she had received, as if she was listening to some
automaton wound up to emit through a mask-like face certain words,
certain sentences that formed its accomplishment. That was the immediate
effect, but immediately afterwards followed the conjecture that it was
not a mere automaton that spoke. It said, so she seemed to gather, what
it had been told (or thereabouts) to say, but probably Mrs. Mainwaring
was capable of saying and doing things for herself. Though she had been
pulled through the funnel of Mr. Mainwaring’s personality, she had not
lost her own individual self. But what that individual self was she
could form no conjecture. It was as if a voice came from inside a window
over which a blind had been completely drawn. She could arrive at no
perception of _who_ it was who talked behind the blind, nor was the room
lit within so that, at the least, there came a shadow on the blind,
suggesting features. All this was no more than the details of the first
impression made by a new acquaintance, her instinctive valuation of her
hostess, something to work upon provisionally. Mrs. Mainwaring was only
repeating her lessons, which she seemed to know so excellently well; she
gave at present no indication of what she was like when her lessons were
over. But that she existed Silvia had no doubt whatever. There were
people like that, people who had an aloof, sequestered life of their
own. Then, without being conscious of the transition, she knew that she
was thinking of Mrs. Mainwaring no longer, but of Peter.
More yodelling proclaimed that the artist had put on his tidy coat, and
he pranced back, and led the way upstairs with Mrs. Wardour, saying that
he was as hungry as a hunter, and hoping that his wife had provided them
with a good tea. Mrs. Mainwaring, on the other hand, seemed a little to
be detaining Silvia; she pointed out other of the works of art that so
plentifully bestrewed the room, and this struck the girl, somehow, as
being part of a manœuvre in no way connected with the lesson she had so
faultlessly repeated. The blind had been ever so slightly pushed aside;
someone was looking out.
“Yes, there’s a picture my husband painted of my son last year,” she
said. “I think you’ve met Peter, haven’t you, Miss Wardour? That was
considered to be very like him. I hope he will be home for tea; he said
he thought he could get away from the Foreign Office early to-day. Very
interesting for him to be in the Foreign Office.”
Silvia said something amiable about the portrait, which was quite
recognizable.
“So pleased you think it like,” continued Mrs. Mainwaring. “Yes, Peter
is at the Foreign Office all day, and he is generally out in the
evening. I do not go out very much. I sit at home mostly in the evening
and read.”
Silvia welcomed a new topic. Though the blind had been distinctly
twitched aside she could not see in; she was only conscious of being
observed. But this seemed an encouraging opportunity of getting a
glimpse.
“What do you read most?” she asked. “Novels? Memoirs?”
“No, what I like reading about is places I have never been to,” said
Mrs. Mainwaring. “I wonder, when I read, what life is like in those
places, and how I should enjoy it.”
If that was a glimpse for the girl it was a very momentary one, lit, so
to speak, not by any clear illumination, but rather by some vague dim
phosphorescence. Silvia, by some whimsical association of ideas, found
herself thinking of a phosphorescent match-box; if you felt for it in
the dark, you might find matches there which would produce something
more illuminating.
“Ah, I, too, love new places,” she said. “I love waking in a new place,
where I have arrived after dark, and wondering what it is going to be
like.”
The glimpse grew a little more definite.
“I should like that, too,” said Mrs. Mainwaring. “But my husband’s work
keeps him in London, and I do not get away very often. Shall we go
upstairs to tea?”
As they turned, Mrs. Mainwaring cast one glance at the great cartoon.
For the moment, infinitesimal in duration, her neat smooth porcelain
face grew hostile and malevolent.
No sooner did Silvia appear in the doorway of the little drawing-room
facing the street, than Mr. Mainwaring, to her immense surprise, bounded
from his seat, chasséed across the room to her, and fell on his knees
before her.
“Behold me in an attitude of abject entreaty!” he said. “Your mother,
subject to your acquiescence, dear Miss Silvia, has asked me to attempt
to use my best endeavours, feeble as they may be, to render you the
eager homage of an artist’s skill. She has asked me, subject to your
consent, I repeat, to paint your portrait for her.”
Even as he spoke there came the quick light step on the stairs, the
identity of which Silvia, seldom as she had heard it, knew with a
certainty that surprised her, and Peter came in.
“Kneel, Peter, my dear,” said his father, enjoying himself tremendously
and putting up hands of supplication. “Maria, my angel, I beseech you to
kneel too. We are entreating Miss Silvia; we are urging the sacred
claims of Art.”
Silvia gave a laugh of sheer amusement at this ludicrous situation.
Amusement was the only possible solvent for it.
“Oh please, let nobody kneel!” she said. “And you, Mr. Mainwaring,
please get up. Yes, of course, if my mother wishes it, and if Mr.
Mainwaring will be very patient and tell me what to do----”
He bounded up again, ecstatic at the granting of his petition.
“To do?” he asked. “Dear young lady, you have only got to be. Be! Be
just as you are now.”
Again he supported his head on his hand, as when he gazed at the
cartoon, and with the other shaded his eyes, staring at her in an
embarrassing manner. He gave a gay yodelling cry.
“I see it--I see it!” he announced. “My superb picture is already
flaming in my brain. Madam”--he turned to Mrs. Wardour--“you shall have
a masterpiece, and I, John Mainwaring, will have created it.”
He took his hand from his forehead, and made a movement as if to cast
something away.
“Enough!” he said. “Let us descend to earth again. My angel, give us our
tea. We are exhausted by our adventures.”
Peter, so Silvia noticed, was looking at his father with eyebrows ever
so little raised, as if in contemplation of some phenomenon that,
however familiar, was still remarkable, and his lips were faintly
smiling. When he turned to Silvia, as he now did, that expression still
remained there, and she felt that, wordlessly, he had somehow taken her
into his confidence. Certainly his father amused him; his raised
eyebrows and half-smiling mouth told her that. And was there a touch of
indulgent contempt in it?
John Mainwaring continued to claim the attention of the little party in
a boisterous rollicking fashion; it was like being out in a high wind,
where shouting was the only means of communication. He assuaged the
hunger which he confessed was prodigious, with incredible quantities of
tea-cakes; he ate cherries backwards, beginning with the stem. He roared
with laughter at his own jokes, he apologized for his boyishness, and
whispered to Mrs. Wardour that he was “in for” a scolding afterwards
from his wife for making such a noise.... And there, all the time, far
more potently vital was Peter blowing off no steam like his father, but
quietly, self-containedly reserving it. There was something inscrutable
about that smooth handsome face, though now and then, as their eyes
casually met, Silvia felt that she was looking into clear dark beckoning
water, and if her eyes could not fathom it, that was no fault of his
transparence, but only of her own purblind penetration....
Mr. Mainwaring was, just now, launched on a story, the very recollection
of which made him laugh in anticipation of what was coming, and Silvia
could let her eyes roam at will. She looked at her mother, at the
narrator, at Mrs. Mainwaring, all in turn, in order, for the purposes of
strict impartiality, to look at Peter as well. Mrs. Mainwaring with
wifely and domestic devotion had managed to attach to her face some
faint semblance of interest in the story, as if it were new to her. Then
came Peter’s turn, and that handsome inscrutability suddenly seemed to
Silvia to be like a reflecting surface, which, when you looked at it,
showed you not itself, but presented your own image. She saw not at all
how he stood to her, but how she stood to him. Her own subjective
relation, the image of herself regarding him was flashed back at her.
Looking at him, in some mysterious way, she saw herself. His dark clear
water gave back to her her own soul.... She whisked her eyes away,
forgetting the impartiality of her rotation, and found herself met by
Mrs. Mainwaring. And there, so it seemed, she found comprehension of
this bewildering impression. As regards Mrs. Mainwaring herself, the
blind was still drawn, but from behind the blind Silvia heard inwardly
and unmistakably that quiet, precise voice saying, “The girl’s in love
with my Peter.” Mrs. Mainwaring, by some divination as mysterious as
herself, was in possession of that; she and Silvia shared the secret
knowledge. And then, before the girl’s eyes could shift themselves to
Mr. Mainwaring, who, it seemed clear, from his thumping with his fist on
the tea-table, was now at the climax of his narrative, there peeped out
from his wife’s face that same secret malevolence, with which, as they
left the studio, she had looked at the great work of art that hung
there, while she admitted that her husband’s work kept him and her in
London.
The point of Mr. Mainwaring’s story entailed the use of the falsetto
voice, and Peter at its conclusion got up on the pretext of handing
cigarettes, and reseated himself next Silvia.
“It is good of you,” he said.
That was fragmentary enough, undetached from any context, but Silvia
found herself understanding him perfectly.
“My mother and Mr. Mainwaring arranged it,” she said. “I couldn’t very
well say no, could I? Not that I wanted to; I don’t mean that.”
“My father’s delighted,” said Peter.
He paused a moment.
“He’s in great form,” he added. “You’ve delighted him. Aren’t we a weird
family?”
There seemed no direct reply possible to this. Silvia could not imagine
herself assenting, and it seemed banal as well as untrue to say, “No,
you’re quite ordinary.” But she found herself not wanting and not even
needing to reply at all. She wanted, and for that matter she needed no
more than to have Peter there and be wonderfully happy. He shifted
himself a little in his very low chair as he turned to get a match for
his cigarette, and she again just found herself noticing little things
about him. His fingers were very long and smooth, the nails very neatly
sheathed in the skin that held them: they grew beautifully. Best of all
was the short, closely-clipped hair which, when he bent his head forward
towards the match, stopped just above his collar.
“You needn’t answer that,” he said. “Tell me, instead, what you thought
of the play last night. Are people sentimental--girls particularly--like
that when they are really moved? I should have thought that emotion
killed sentimentality. But it may be different in Scotland.”
Peter, at the conclusion of this ridiculous speech, suddenly found
himself in the dilemma of talking nonsense without the co-operation and
backing of the person whom he was talking nonsense to. Silvia, at any
rate, did not contribute any soap-bubbles of her own, and, quick to
perceive that, he turned to his mother.
“What sort of hotels are there in Scotland, mother?” he asked. “Oh, I
must explain to Miss Wardour. My mother loves reading the advertisements
of hotels in Bradshaw. It gives her the sense of travel, doesn’t it,
mother?”
He paused no more than infinitesimally and went on again in the same
breath.
“I love the sense of travel, too, and I got it by going to the Foreign
Office. Guatemala has been my _après-midi_.”
Silvia triumphantly applauded his quickness. She had seen on Mrs.
Mainwaring’s face a protest at the invasion of her privacy; but Peter
had done more than merely see it, he had slammed the door again with
allusions to himself and Guatemala. That, somehow, a perception as quick
as intuition, seemed to her extraordinarily characteristic of him. There
was no stumbling, no hesitation, where she would have drawn attention to
a similar mistake by a bungling silence. His mind was like the hair on
his neck--abrupt and crisp.
The ball was with Peter again.
“I nearly fell asleep over Guatemala,” he said. “Surely Guatemala is
very remote; there are many things more immediately interesting.
Nellie’s wedding, by the way. It’s less than a week ahead, and every
young man I know is buying new pocket-handkerchiefs to weep into. I’ve
bought an extremely large one. There’ll be room for you to cry into one
half of it, Miss Silvia, while I cry into the other. They promised to
send it round on a hand trolley, like a sack of coals.”
Silvia laughed.
“Ah, I shall want some of that handkerchief,” she said, “but not to cry
into, only to wave. She is going to be tremendously happy, isn’t she?
What’s he like? I hardly know him.”
Peter considered this.
“He’s like--he’s like a very tidy room,” he said. “Solid furniture and
not a speck of dust.”
“And the person who sits in it?” asked the girl.
“Nobody sits in it. At least I never found anyone there. Philip is the
room. There’s _The Times_ warmed and folded; there’s letter-paper, big
and little, and envelopes, big and little. Perhaps Nellie has found
someone there. Philip may get under the sofa when anybody else comes
in.”
“And she’s very much in love with him?” asked Silvia.
“You ought to know. She takes you out to Richmond Park and sits on the
grass with you all afternoon.”
Silvia wrinkled up her eyes as if she were focusing that afternoon.
“Nellie dazzles me,” she said. “She’s like the sun on water. I expect
she’ll make his room, that tidy room, look lovely. But I shall never
understand what Nellie does. I shall only understand the effect of what
she has done. She has a spell. She makes you see what she has seen.”
She was conscious now of receiving from Peter a more direct answer of
eyes than she had ever done before. She knew they were talking about the
same things now. They might, each of them, though they were talking of
Nellie (superficially the same thing), have been regarding her, have
been framing their remarks about her from different angles. Given that,
as Silvia had said, she was a dazzle of sunlight as well, one of them,
owing to the prismatic process, might have been seeing blue, another
seeing yellow. But Peter’s answer convinced her that they were both
seeing Nellie from the same standpoint.
“That’s hit her,” he said. “Nellie says and does nothing trivial; one is
continually discovering that. She waves her fingers, and she mutters,
and then, afterwards, you find she has been making a spell. Isn’t she
uncanny? Or she tells you something about yourself that you didn’t know,
or scarcely knew, and you find that it is quite solidly true. Is she a
witch, do you think?”
Silvia leaned forward towards him. It was impossible not to “close up”
with this.
“That’s just what I said to her once,” she said. “I said that she was a
witch. She told me something about myself that I never had known. It was
true; it had been true all the time. But, literally, I had never had the
smallest notion of it till she told me.”
Indeed, as Silvia acknowledged to herself, the truth of what Nellie had
said on that occasion was receiving a firm endorsement at this moment.
Etched and bitten-in to her consciousness from the moment of that
prophetic babbling had been the image of herself in love, singing, so
Nellie had said, in a boy’s key; eager to be allowed to give homage
rather than receive it; eager to be allowed to love rather than
permitting love with whatever ardency of welcome. And here was Peter
repeating on general grounds exactly what she had found, and in especial
was finding now, to be magically true.
“Since we both agree she is a witch,” said he, “we ought surely to
collect evidence against her. What was it she said to you, that
something unknown to you, which you found to be true when she said it? I
have evidence also; she said something to me last night which I didn’t
know, but which----”
What went through his brain at that moment, with the sureness of a
surgeon’s incision, was just that which Nellie had said when he told her
that he was intending to ask Silvia to marry him. He had hedged that
with the reservation that he would do so when he thought that he had a
chance of success, and witch-like, with swift incontinent prophecy, she
had told him that it was rather late already as regards to-night. The
prophecy had been encouraging at the time, but not convincing. Now he
suddenly felt himself convinced. Why or how--their conversation had only
been about Nellie--he did not know. But it seemed that Nellie had
penetrated where he had not....
There was his father sitting on the sofa beside Mrs. Wardour; there was
his mother veiled and shrouded from him as she had ever been, doing
something with a teapot, doing something with crumbs left on plates, for
which she made some concoction, placed in the balcony outside, for
birds.... Had he been alone with Silvia, he would have proposed to her,
fortified with Nellie’s encouragement, fortified even more by his
present sense of its reliability, then and there. But unless he knelt on
the floor to her, as he had found his father doing when he came in....
“Oh, what did Nellie say to you last night?” asked the girl. “Let’s
collect evidence, as you say.”
“And have her burned outside St. Margaret’s, instead of letting her
marry Philip inside?” suggested Peter.
Silvia gave a parenthetic gasp.
“I suggested that she ought to be burned, too,” she said. “More
evidence, please.”
Peter found her entrancing at that moment. There was some keen boyish
kind of frank enthusiasm about her that attacked and challenged instead
of merely provoking. She asked for no effort: you only had to allow
yourself to be caught up.
“But it’s your turn,” he said. “You first suggested that Nellie told you
things you didn’t know.”
“No; it was you who said that.”
“It may have been; but it was you who suggested the witch-like quality.
You said that she makes you see what she has seen. You know you did.”
Silvia, ever so slightly, withdrew herself.
“Did I?” she asked.
“Of course you did. Now do be fair. You began, and therefore it’s your
turn to bring out the first piece of evidence. It was in Richmond Park,
you know, and she told you something about yourself which you didn’t
know.”
Peter put his hand in some judicial manner through that short crisp hair
above his neck.
“I am prepared to hear your evidence,” he said. “You’re on oath. Get on,
Miss Silvia. Don’t keep the court waiting.”
Silvia shot a chance arrow.
“If I promise to tell you,” she said, “will you promise to tell me your
evidence?”
Peter laughed.
“I think we’re both better at cross-examination than at confession,” he
remarked.
“Oh, but that’s no answer,” she said.
“I know it isn’t. It wasn’t meant to be.”
“Then be serious. Will you tell me your evidence against Nellie in her
character of a witch?”
Peter, quite clearly, let his eyes rest on the other occupants of the
room. One by one he looked at them.
“No!” he said. “I suppose the trial is adjourned owing to the
inexplicable coyness of the witnesses. So there we are. Nellie will
marry her Philip without a stain on her blessed character.”
In his glance round the room Peter had observed that Mrs. Wardour was
trying to catch Silvia’s eyes. She would certainly succeed in doing so
before long, and then, as her custom was, she would make some faint
little clucking noises, like a hen that mildly wants to be let out. She
was incapable of going away, however much she wanted to do so, unless
Silvia took the initiative. She clucked, and then Silvia said that it
was time to go....
But Peter did not want Silvia to go just yet; on the other hand, if they
were all to sit here until the clucking became perceptible to Silvia,
their visitors might just as well, for any practical purpose, go away at
once. Besides, it was impossible to forget that Nellie last night had
prophesied, and it had struck another as well as himself, that she was a
reliable seer.
He got up rather slowly, rather tentatively, and fixed in his mind was
the idea that Silvia would make some sort of initial step. It seemed to
him that they were both hand in hand: it was just a question of who
lifted a foot first....
Silvia did not turn her head to look at her mother. If she had, she
would have been bound to attend to the cluckings; but what she wanted,
more precisely what she needed, was to get away from a masked fire of
elderly eyes and, with Peter of course, just to be natural. There was
smouldering in this room some ember of supervision; she felt herself
(and him) under a magnifying glass being looked at, being noted, being
examined. It would answer her need perfectly well to go with him on to
the balcony outside the room, to see if the evening was likely to be
fine, to be sure that the motor was waiting.... Here, there was Mr.
Mainwaring visualizing her portrait; worse than that, here was the more
gimlet-like attention of his wife, who, ostensibly, was making a sloppy
saucer of food for the London sparrows. Certainly she would sooner go
out on the balcony alone than remain here, but when she thought of that
it did not in the least satisfy her. After all, she did not want to “sit
out” alone. What girl would want that? But she wanted to sit out....
There was no sort of embarrassment in her voice when she spoke to Peter.
“May we go down to your father’s studio again?” she asked. “I haven’t
seen all I wanted to.”
Surely his glance met hers with a comprehension that seemed immeasurably
marvellous.
“Yes; do come down,” he said.
The clucking became inarticulate.
“We ought to be going, Silvia,” said her mother.
Peter took this up.
“Oh, you must give Miss Silvia five minutes, Mrs. Wardour,” he said.
“It’s only fair that she should know the sort of thing that father’s
going to make of her.”
Mr. Mainwaring gave a great shout of laughter.
“The impertinence of youth!” he cried. “Peter, I disown you. I would cut
you off with a shilling if I had one!”
The two went down the stairs in silence. In silence also they came into
the studio. The huge cartoon filled up one end of it; on the other three
sides was the stacked débris from the attics; landscapes and portraits
and sketches littered the tables.
“That’s rather jolly,” said Peter, pointing to one at random. “And, O
Lord, my father has brought out a thing he did of me last year. Rather
like a hair-dresser.”
“Not a bit,” said Silvia. “But it’s very like you.”
Peter wheeled about and faced her.
“Evidence!” he said. “Do you know what Nellie said to me last night? Of
course you don’t, but I’ll tell you now. We were talking about you. She
said--she encouraged me to think I had a chance----”
Silvia stood stock still, every fibre of her stiff and arrested.
“About you. A chance,” said Peter again. “Is it true? Was she right? Was
she being a witch?”
Silvia had been looking at him when this spell of stillness struck her.
Now her eyelids fluttered and drooped, then once more she looked at him
as steadily as before.
“All true,” she said. “And Nellie told me something. She said that when
I loved anybody, I--I should love just as I love now. Just as I love
now, Peter.”