perfectly conscious, but he stood by while Mrs. Loring bought her
hairpins, and Carnaby endeavoured to persuade her to invest in a few
"pin curls." "Not an hour before it is absolutely necessary, Middy
dear," she said; "then I shall bear it as bravely as I can. Come now,
carry the hairpins for me, and let me take Mr. Lavendar out of this
shop, or he will be tempted to buy more than he needs."
"Oh, no!" Lavendar remarked pointedly. "I have what I came for!"
"Don't forget your parcel," Carnaby exclaimed, darting after Lavendar
as they went into the street. "You've left it on the counter."
"How careless!" said Mark. "It was for my sister."
"You never told me you had a sister," said Robinette, as they walked
together, Lavendar wheeling his bicycle and Carnaby sulking behind
them.
"I am blessed with two; one married now; the other, my sister Amy,
lives at home."
"Well, you see, in spite of all our questions the first time we met,
we really know very little about each other," she went on lightly. "It
takes such a long time to get thoroughly acquainted in this country.
Do they ever count you a friend if you do not know all their aunts and
second cousins?"
Lavendar laughed. "Willingly would I introduce you to my aunts and my
uttermost cousins, and lay the map of my life before you, uneventful
as it has been, if that would further our acquaintance."
Even as he spoke a hateful memory darted into his thoughts, and he
reddened to his temples, until Mrs. Loring wondered if she had said
anything to annoy him.
Some fortunate accident at this point ordered that Carnaby should
meet a friend, another middy about his own age, and they set off
together in quest of a third boy who was supposed to be in the near
neighbourhood.
As soon as the lads were out of sight Lavendar found the jests they
had been bandying together die on his lips. "I'm going down deeper; I
shall be out of my depth very soon," he thought to himself, as he
walked in silence by Robinette's side.
"Let us come down to the beach again; we can't go to the station for
half an hour yet," she said. "I like to look out to sea, and realize
that if I sailed long enough I could step off that pier, and arrive in
America."
They stood by the sea-wall together with the fresh wind playing on
their faces. "Isn't it curious," said Robinette, "how instinctively
one always turns to look at the sea; inland may be ever so lovely, but
if the sea is there we generally look in that direction."
"Because it is unbounded, like the future," said Lavendar. He was
looking as he spoke at some children playing on the sands just
beside them. There was a gallant little boy among them with a bare
curly head, who refused help from older sisters and was toiling away
at his sand castle, his whole soul in his work; throwing up
spadefuls--tremendous ones for four years old--upon its ramparts,
as if certain they could resist the advancing tide.
"What a noble little fellow!" exclaimed Robinette, catching the
direction of Lavendar's glance. "Isn't he splendid? toiling like that;
stumping about on those fat brown legs!"
"How beautiful to have a child like that, of one's own!" thought
Lavendar as he looked. On the sands around them, there were numbers of
such children playing there in the sun. It seemed a happy world to him
at the moment.
Suddenly he saw his companion turn quickly aside; a nurse in uniform
came towards them pushing, not a happy crooning baby this time, but a
little emaciated wisp of a child lying back wearily in a wheel chair.
Something in Robinette's face, or perhaps the bit of fluttering lace
she wore upon her white dress, had attracted its notice, and it
stretched out two tiny skeleton hands towards her as it passed. With a
quick gesture, brushing tears away that in a moment had rushed to her
eyes, young Mrs. Loring stepped forward, and put her fingers into the
wasted hands that were held out to her. She hung above the child for a
moment, a radiant figure, her face shining with sympathy and a sort of
heavenly kindness; her eyes the sweeter for their tears.
"What is it, darling?" she asked. "Oh, it's the bright rose!" Then she
hurriedly unfastened the flower from her waist-belt and turned to
Lavendar. "Will you please take your penknife and scrape away all the
little thorns," she asked.
"The rose looked very charming where it was," he remarked, half
regretfully, as he did what she commanded.
"It will look better still, presently," she answered.
The child's hands were outstretched longingly to grasp the flower, its
eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette's
face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove's voice,
Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage
was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the
supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the
topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman's plum tree. "If one had to choose
between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard,"
she thought. "All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die
for love and pity if this suffering baby were mine!"
Lavendar had turned, and leaned on the wall with averted face. "Sweet
woman!" he was saying to himself. "It is more than a merry heart that
is able to give such sympathy; it's a sad old world after all where
such things can be; but a woman like that can bring good out of
evil."
Robinette had seated herself on a low wall beside him. Her little
embroidered futility of a handkerchief was in her hand once more. "A
rose and a smile! that's all we could give it," she said; "and we
would either of us share some of that burden if we only could." She
watched the merry, healthy children playing beside them, and added,
"After all let us comfort ourselves that brown cheeks and fat legs are
in the majority. Rightness somehow or other must be at the root of
things, or we shouldn't be a living world at all."
"Amen," said Lavendar, "but the sight of suffering innocents like
that, sometimes makes me wish I were dead."
"Dead!" she echoed. "Why, it makes me wish for a hundred lives, a
hundred hearts and hands to feel with and help with."
"Ah, some women are made that way. My stepmother, the only mother I've
known, was like that," Lavendar went on, dropping suddenly again into
personal talk, as they had done before. He and she, it seemed, could
not keep barriers between them very long; every hour they spent
together brought them more strangely into knowledge of each other's
past.
"She was a fine woman," he went on, "with a certain comfortable
breadth about her, of mind and body; and those large, warm, capable
hands that seem so fitted to lift burdens."
Lavendar was in an absent-minded mood, and never much given to noting
details at any time. He bent over on the low wall in retrospective
silence, looking at the blue sea before them.
Robinette, who was perched beside him, spread her two small hands on
her white serge knees and regarded them fixedly for a moment.
"I wonder if it's a matter of size," she said after a moment. "I
wonder! Let's be confidential. When I was a little girl we were not at
all well-to-do, and my hands were very busy. My father's success came
to him only two or three years before his death, when his reputation
began to grow and his plans for great public buildings began to be
accepted, so I was my mother's helper. We had but one servant, and I
learned to make beds, to dust, to wipe dishes, to make tea and coffee,
and to cook simple dishes. If Admiral de Tracy's sister had to work,
Admiral de Tracy's niece was certainly going to help! Later on came my
father's illness and death. We had plenty of servants then, but my
hands had learned to be busy. I gave him his medicines, I changed his
pillows, I opened his letters and answered such of them as were within
my powers, I fanned him, I stroked his aching head. The end came, and
mother and I had hardly begun to take hold of life again when her
health failed. I wasn't enough for her; she needed father and her face
was bent towards him. My hands were busy again for months, and they
held my mother's when she died. Time went on. Then I began again to
make a home out of a house; to use my strength and time as a good wife
should, for the comfort of her husband; but oh! so faultily, for I was
all too young and inexperienced. It was only for a few months, then
death came into my life for the third time, and I was less than
twenty. For the first time since I can remember, my hands are idle,
but it will not be for long. I want them to be busy always. I want
them to be full! I want them to be tired! I want them ready to do the
tasks my head and heart suggest."
Lavendar had a strong desire to take those same hands in his and kiss
them, but instead he rose and spread out his own long brown fingers on
the edge of the wall, a man's hands, fine and supple, but meant to
work.
"I seem to have done nothing," he exclaimed. "You look so young, so
irresponsible, so like a bird on a bough, that I cannot associate dull
care with you, yet you have lived more deeply than I. Life seems to
have touched me on the shoulder and passed me by; these hands of mine
have never done a real day's work, Mrs. Loring, for they've been the
servants of an unwilling brain. I hated my own work as a younger man,
and, though I hope I did not shirk it, I certainly did nothing that I
could avoid." He paused, and went on slowly, "I've thought sometimes,
of late I mean, that if life is to be worth much, if it is to be real
life, and not mere existence, one must put one's whole heart into it,
and that two people--" He stopped; he was silent with embarrassment,
conscious of having said too much.
"Can help each other. Indeed they can," Mrs. Loring went on serenely,
"if they have the same ideals. Hardly anyone, fortunately, is so alone
as I, and so I have to help myself! Your sisters, now; don't they
help?"
"Not a great deal," Lavendar confessed. "One would, but she's married
and in India, worse luck! The other is--well, she's a candid sister."
He laughed, and looked up. "If my best friend could hear my sister
Amy's view of me, just have a little sketch of me by Amy without fear
or favour, he, or she, would never have a very high opinion of me
again, and I am not sure but that I should agree with her."
"Nonsense! my dear friend," exclaimed Robinette in a maternal tone she
sometimes affected,--a tone fairly agonizing to Mark Lavendar; "we
should never belittle the stuff that's been put into us! My equipment
isn't particularly large, but I am going to squeeze every ounce of
power from it before I die."
"Life is extraordinarily interesting to you, isn't it?"
"Interesting? It is thrilling! So will it be to you when you make up
your mind to squeeze it," said Robinette, jumping off the wall. "There
is Carnaby signalling; it is time we went to the station."
"Life would thrill me considerably more if Carnaby were not eternally
in evidence," said Lavendar, but Robinette pretended not to hear.
XII
LOVE IN THE MUD
The next day Robinette was once more sitting in the boat opposite to
Lavendar as he rowed. They were going down the river this time, not
across it. Somehow they had managed that afternoon to get out by
themselves, which sounds very simple, but is a wonderfully difficult
thing to accomplish when there is no special reason for it, and when
there are several other people in the house.
Fortunately Mrs. de Tracy did not like to be alone, so that wherever
she went Miss Smeardon had to go too, and there happened to be a sale
of work at a neighbouring vicarage that afternoon where she considered
her presence a necessity. Robinette had vanished soon after luncheon
and the middy had been dull, so after loitering around for a while, he
too had disappeared upon some errand of his own. Lavendar walked very
slowly toward the avenue gateway, then he turned and came back. He
could scarcely believe his good fortune when he saw Mrs. Loring come
out of the house, and pause at the door as if uncertain of her next
movements. She looked uncommonly lovely in a white frock with touches
of blue, while the ribbon in her hair brought out all its gold. She
wore a flowery garden hat, and a pair of dainty most un-English shoes
peeped from beneath her short skirt.
"Are you going out, or can I take you on the river?" Lavendar asked,
trying without much success to conceal the eagerness that showed in
his voice and eyes.
Robinette stood for a moment looking at him (it seemed as if she read
him like a book) and then she said frankly, "Why yes, there is nothing
I should like so much, but where is Carnaby?"
"Hang Carnaby! I mean I don't know, or care. I've had too much of his
society to-day to be pining for it now."
"Well, he does chatter like a magpie, but I feel he must have such a
dull time here with no one anywhere near his own age. Elderly as I am,
I seem a bit nearer than Aunt de Tracy or Miss Smeardon. Aunt de
Tracy, all the same, will never understand my relations with that boy,
or with anyone else for that matter. I did try so hard," she went on,
"when I first arrived, just to strike the right note with her, and
I've missed it all the time, by that very fact, no doubt. I'm so
unused to trying--at home."
"You mean in America?"
"Yes, of course; I don't try there at all, and yet my friends seem to
understand me."
"Does it seem to you that you could ever call England 'home'?"
"I could not have believed that England would so sink into my heart,"
she said, sitting down in the doorway and arranging the flowers on her
hat. "During those first dull wet days when I was still a stranger,
and when I looked out all the time at the dripping cedars, and felt
whenever I opened my lips that I said the wrong thing, it seemed to me
I should never be gay for an hour in this country; but the last
enchanting sunny days have changed all that. I remember it's my
mother's country, and if only I could have found a little affection
waiting for me, all would have been perfect."
"You may find it yet." Lavendar could not for the life of him help
saying the words, but there was nothing in the tone in which he said
them to make Robinette conscious of his meaning.
"I'm afraid not," she sighed, thinking of Mrs. de Tracy's indifference.
"I'm much more American than English, much more my father's daughter
than the Admiral's niece; perhaps my aunt feels that instinctively. Now
I must slip upstairs and change if we are going boating."
"Never!" cried Lavendar. "If I don't snatch you this moment from the
devouring crowd I shall lose you! I will keep you safe and dry, never
fear, and we shall be back well before dark."
They went down the river after leaving the little pier, passing the
orchards heaped on the hillsides above Wittisham, and Lavendar wanted
to row out to sea, but Robinette preferred the river; so he rowed
nearer to the shore, where the current was less swift, and the boat
rocked and drifted with scarcely a touch of the oars. They had talked
for some time, and then a silence had fallen, which Robinette broke by
saying, "I half wish you'd forsake the law and follow lines of lesser
resistance, Mr. Lavendar. Do you know, you seem to me to be drifting,
not rowing! I've been thinking ever since of what you said to me on
the sands at Weston."
"Ungrateful woman!" he exclaimed, trying to evade the subject, "when
these two faithful arms have been at your service every day since we
first met! Think of the pennies you would have taken from that tiny
gold purse of yours for the public ferry! However, I know what you
mean; I never met anyone so plain-spoken as you, Mrs. Robin; I haven't
forgotten, I assure you!"
"How about the candid sister? Isn't she plain-spoken?"
"Oh, she attacks the outside of the cup and platter; you question
motive power and ideals. Well, I confess I have less of the former
than I ought, and more of the latter than I've ever used." Lavendar
had rested on his oars now and was looking down, so that the twinkle
of his eyes was lost. "I suppose I shall go on as I have done
hitherto, doing my work in a sort of a way, and getting a certain
amount of pleasure out of things,--unless--"
"Oh, but that's not living!" she exclaimed; "that's only existing.
Don't you remember:--
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make man better be.
It's really _living_ I mean, forgetting the things that are behind,
and going on and on to something ahead, whatever one's aim may be."
"What are you going to do with yourself, if I may ask?" said Lavendar.
"Don't be too philanthropic, will you? You're so delightfully
symmetrical now!"
"I shall have plenty to do," cried Robinette ardently. "I've told you
before, I have so much motive power that I don't know how to use it."
"How about sharing a little of it with a friend!"
Lavendar's voice was full of meaning, but Robinette refused to hear
it. She had succumbed as quickly to his charm as he to hers, but while
she still had command over her heart she did not intend parting with
it unless she could give it wholly. She knew enough of her own nature
to recognize that she longed for a rowing, not a drifting mate, and
that nothing else would content her; but her instinct urged that
Lavendar's indecisions and his uncertainties of aim were accidents
rather than temperamental weaknesses. She suspected that his
introspective moods and his occasional lack of spirits had a definite
cause unknown to her.
"I haven't a large income," she said, after a moment's silence,
changing the subject arbitrarily, and thereby reducing her companion
to a temporary state of silent rage.
"Yet no one would expect a woman like this to fall like a ripe plum
into a man's mouth," he thought presently; "she will drop only when
she has quite made up her mind, and the bough will need a good deal of
shaking!"
"I haven't a large income," repeated Robinette, while Lavendar was
silent, "only five thousand dollars a year, which is of course
microscopic from the American standpoint and cost of living; so I
can't build free libraries and swimming baths and playgrounds, or do
any big splendid things; but I can do dear little nice ones, left
undone by city governments and by the millionaires. I can sing, and
read, and study; I can travel; and there are always people needing
something wherever you are, if you have eyes to see them; one needn't
live a useless life even if one hasn't any responsibilities. But"--she
paused--"I've been talking all this time about my own plans and
ambitions, and I began by asking yours! Isn't it strange that the
moment one feels conscious of friendship, one begins to want to know
things?"
"My sister Amy would tell you I had no ambitions, except to buy as
many books as I wish, and not to have to work too hard," said Mark
smiling, "but I think that would not be quite true. I have some, of a
dull inferior kind, not beautiful ones like yours."
"Do tell me what they are."
He shook his head. "I couldn't; they're not for show; shabby things
like unsuccessful poor relations, who would rather not have too much
notice taken of them. In a few weeks I am going to drag them out of
their retreat, brighten them up, inject some poetry into their veins,
and then display them to your critical judgment."
They were almost at a standstill now and neither of them was noticing
it at all. As Mrs. Loring moved her seat the boat lurched somewhat to
one side. Mark, to steady her, placed his hand over hers as it rested
on the rail, and she did not withdraw it. Then he found the other hand
that lay upon her knee, and took it in his own, scarcely knowing what
he did. He looked into her face and found no anger there. "I wish to
tell you more about myself," he stammered, "something not altogether
creditable to me; but perhaps you will understand. Perhaps even if you
don't understand you will forgive."
She drew her hands gently away from his grasp. "I shall try to
understand, you may rely on that!" she said.
"I'm not going to trouble you with any very dreadful confessions," he
said, "only it's better to hear things directly from the people
concerned, and you are sure to hear a wrong version sooner or
later."--Then stopping suddenly he exclaimed, "Hullo! we're stuck, I
declare! look at that!"
Robinette turned and saw that their boat was now scarcely surrounded
with water at all. On every side, as if the flanks of some great whale
were upheaving from below, there appeared stretches of glistening mud.
Just in front of them, where there still was a channel of water, was
an upstanding rock. "Shall we row quickly there?" she cried. "Then
perhaps we can get out and pull the boat to the other side, where
there is more water. What has happened?"
"Oh, something not unusual," said Lavendar grimly, "that I'm a fool,
and the sea-tide has ebbed, as tides have been known to do before. I'm
afraid a man doesn't watch tides when he has a companion like you! Now
we're left high, but not at all dry, as you see, till the tide
turns."
By a swift stroke or two he managed to propel their craft as far as
the rock. They scrambled up on it, and then he tried to haul the boat
around the miniature islet; but the more he hauled, the quicker the
water seemed to run away, and the deeper the wretched thing stuck in
the mud. He jumped in again, and made an effort to push her off with
an oar; meanwhile Robinette nearly fell off the rock in her efforts to
get the head of the boat around towards the current again, and making
a frantic plunge into the ooze, sank above her ankles in an instant.
Lavendar caught hold of her and helped her to scramble back into the
boat. "It's all right; only my skirt wet, and one shoe gone!" she
panted. "Now, what are we to do?" She spread out her hands in dismay,
and looked down at her draggled mud-stained skirt, her little feet,
one shoeless and both covered with mud and slime. "What an object I
shall be to meet Aunt de Tracy's eye, when, if ever, it does light on
me again! Meanwhile it seems as if we might be here for some hours.
The boat is just settling herself into the mud bank, like a rather
tired fat old woman into an armchair, and pray, Mr. Lavendar, what do
you propose to do? as Talleyrand said to the lady who told him she
couldn't bear it."
Lavendar looked about them; the main bed of the river was fifty yards
away; between it and them was now only an expanse of mud.
"It's perfectly hopeless," he said, "the best thing we can do is to
beget some philosophy."
"Which at any moment we would exchange for a foot of water," she
interpolated.
"We must just sit here and wait for the tide. Shall it be in the boat
or on the rock?"
"I don't see much difference, do you? Except that the passing boats,
if there are any, might think it was a matter of choice to sit on a
damp rock for two hours, but no one could think we wanted to sit in a
boat in the mud."
They landed on the rock for the second time. "For my part it's no
great punishment," said Lavendar, when they settled themselves, "since
the place is big enough for two and you're one of them!"
"Wouldn't this be as good a stool of repentance from which to confess
your faults as any?" asked Robinette, as she tucked her shoeless foot
beneath her mud-stained skirt and made herself as comfortable as
possible. "I'll even offer a return of confidence upon my own
weaknesses, if I can find them, but at present only miles of virtue
stretch behind me. Ugh! How the mud smells; quite penitential! Now:--
"What have you sought you should have shunned,
And into what new follies run?"
"Oh, what a bad rhyme!" said Lavendar.
"It's Pythagoras, any way," she explained.
Then suddenly changing his tone, Lavendar went on. "This is not merely
a jest, Mrs. Loring. Before you admit me really amongst the number of
your friends I should like you to know that--to put it plainly--my
own little world would tell you at the moment that I am a heartless
jilt."
"That is a very ugly expression, Mr. Lavendar, and I shall choose not
to believe it, until you give me your own version of the story."
"In one way I can give you no other; except that I was just fool
enough to drift into an engagement with a woman whom I did not really
love, and just not enough of a fool to make both of us miserable for
life when I, all too late, found out my mistake."
There passed before him at that moment other foolish blithe little
loves, like faded flowers with the sweetness gone out of them. They
had been so innocent, so fragile, so free from blame; all but the
last; and this last it was that threatened to rise like a shadow
perhaps, and defeat his winning the only woman he could ever love.