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THE
COTTAGE
ON THE
FELLS
Illustration: Decoration
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THE COTTAGE ON THE FELLS
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_By_
H. de VERE
STACPOOLE
AUTHOR OF
“THE CRIMSON AZALEAS,”
“THE BLUE LAGOON,”
etc., etc.
_Toronto_
HENRY FROWDE
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THE COTTAGE ON THE FELLS
CHAPTER I
“WELL,” said Comyns, “I can’t see for the life of me what makes you want
to linger on in this benighted hole.”
“There are a great many things in this world we can’t see,” replied
Hellier.
They were standing on the pier at Boulogne, the Folkstone boat was just
departing, the east wind was blowing, and over the cold, early spring
day the clouds drifted, grey as the cygnet’s feather.
Without wishing to paraphrase or parody a famous author, one may say
that if one goes over to Boulogne and stands long enough on the pier,
one will meet, most possibly, someone one knows—probably one’s tailor.
Hellier had come over to Boulogne a fortnight ago to recruit from an
attack of influenza; he was a briefless barrister, with two hundred and
fifty pounds a year of his own; his chambers were in Clifford’s Inn, and
he had a taste for that side of life which lends itself to romantic
literature.
The novels of Gaboriau, absorbed as a boy, had given him his first
impetus towards the law.
There is no manner of doubt in the world that housebreaking is the most
romantic of the professions; after housebreaking, the profession that
helps the housebreaker to escape the law.
A great criminal lawyer, with his armful of briefs, was the pictured
objective towards which Richard Hellier had set his face; he had been
called to the Bar eighteen months now, and his only client up to this
had been a dog thief (_item_, convicted).
“I suppose there are,” replied Comyns, “but there’s one thing I can, the
gangway is going, so long—”
He dashed down the gangway, the hawsers were cast off, and the screw
churned the steel grey waters of the harbour.
Hellier stood with his hands in his overcoat pockets, watching the boat
as she passed from sight, and wishing that he was Comyns.
Comyns was handsome, Comyns was wealthy. His father made bicycle lamps
and motor horns in Wolverhampton, his grandfather had been a platelayer.
He belonged to one of those families that go up in the world. Hellier
belonged to one of the families that go down. When Comyns’ grandfather
had been laying plate, Hellier’s had been eating off it. But the plate
of the Helliers’ had vanished as utterly as their past, and of all the
story there remained a single punch ladle, a speechless, yet eloquent
witness, to tell of the good times gone.
Hellier was a middle-sized man, and plain. Dark, clean-shaved,
pre-eminently a gentleman. Just as a rose is a rose, or a pansy a pansy.
Let the handsome and superficial Comyns walk with him down the street,
and out of a hundred and one women a hundred would have looked with
appreciation on the motor horn merchant’s son, but the hundred and first
would have looked with interest at Hellier.
He turned from contemplation of the harbour and came back down the pier
slowly, breathing the keen east wind and wishing he was Comyns.
He was in love for the first time in his life, and he was taking it
badly. He was only thirty-three years of age, yet he was already summing
up his life, looking back at his past, telling himself that had he not
fooled away his time in the by-ways of literature and stuck to the hard
high road of life, he might now have been well-to-do, like Comyns.
It is only when a man is really in love that he sees the defects in
himself and his position, sees them with a preternatural and startling
vividness—if he is a man.
So Hellier wished he was Comyns, utterly ignorant of the fact that if
some magician had converted him into the object of his admiration, the
woman he loved would not have looked at him twice.
He had only known her ten days. Her name was Mademoiselle Cécile
Lefarge, he had met her accidently at the Hotel des Bains, and had
fallen in love with her on sight.
When a man falls in love with a woman on sight, it is through his
desires that love comes to him. Her body takes possession of his mind.
This kind of love may fade away or endure for ever; as a rule it is
unfortunate, and fades; sometimes it becomes converted into hatred, when
the lover, after marriage, has discovered how the flesh has betrayed
him, what a base soul beauty has palmed off on him, wrapped in an
attractive wrapper.
A bad bargain in love. Those five words contain in them the plot and
essence of most of the tragedies in life.
Cécile Lefarge was twenty-eight, and looked, perhaps, twenty-six. Pale,
of medium height, voluptuously formed, dark, with blindish-looking
violet grey eyes, serious-looking as a priestess of Aphrodite, yet with
a nun-like spirituality, she was a woman to drive a sensualist mad with
desire, a woman to inspire the dreams of a poet or a saint.
This was the woman who had captured Hellier, heart, soul and body; and
the poignant, the terrible thing in his case, was the fact that he knew
his passion was partly returned, that he had awakened in this being,
that chance had caused to stray across his life, that something, that
magnetic response, that deep, vague interest, which in a woman’s mind
marks the beginning of love. That he had done this, but yet that
something stood in the way.
The girl was staying at the Hotel des Bains with her aunt, Madame de
Warens, a pale-faced, mild and most practicable old lady.
They had a suite of rooms, and were evidently very well-to-do people in
a worldly way. They had lived at the hotel for three years, they had no
relations in the visible universe, and what friendships they made were
chance friendships.
Hellier had not done badly, for he had gained the confidence of old
Madame de Warens, as well as the attention of her niece, and it was
mainly from the old lady’s rambling conversations that he had gained his
knowledge of their habits and their past. Also the hint of some
mysterious cloud in that past, whose shadow still hung over them, some
barrier that fate had slidden between them and society, causing them to
lead this aimless hotel life, divorced from friends and relations.
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