If it be true that everything is in the eye of the beholder, then
Joyselle's and Brigit Mead's eyes must have been full of beauties that
day.
For to them Hampstead Heath was the most marvellously lovely place on
earth.
His light-heartedness, chiefly due to his faculty for ignoring
side-issues and enjoying the present, was of course magnified as well by
the fact that it followed close on the heels of one of his despairing
black fits. Yesterday he had been, because of an unsatisfactory
morning's work in Chelsea, in the very depths, honestly despising
himself as an artist, sincerely loathing his incorrigible love of
amusement and consequent wasting of time.
So this sunny, rather windy morning, Brigit by his side, and his newly
awakened conscience stilled for the moment, was to him as near Paradise
as anything he could imagine.
They lunched somewhere--neither of them could ever remember where--on
very tough cold ham and insufficiently cooled beer, but they were both
too happy to mind, or even to observe the faults of the _menu_. And as
neither of them had ever before set eyes on the Heath, it was full of
surprises, as well as of beauties. Yielding to some unexplained
instinct, they both took off their hats (what is it that induces people
to uncover their heads in high places?), and the warm sun shone down on
their hair.
"Your hair must be very long, Brigitte?" observed Joyselle once, as he
looked at her silky plaits that covered her crown in disregard of the
laws of fashion.
"It is. Comes to my knees. Oh, look!"
Two people, a man and a girl, sat in the shade of an isolated tree only
a few yards below the place where they stood. They were evidently
enjoying an unlawful holiday, for they were workers--factory hands,
probably, and they were as palpably rejoicing in their freedom.
The girl, whose brilliant red hair was pulled out at the sides until her
head was as big as a bushel basket, wore a pink blouse and a green
skirt. The youth, stunted and pale, was gorgeous only as to tie, but
quite evidently she considered him her complement. For they were busy
drinking beer from a bottle, turn about, and kissing each other
delightedly between swallows. Joyselle started, drawing a deep breath,
and Brigit, without moving her head, looked at him sideways, as the
so-called Fornarina looks in the Uffizi, in Florence.
"They are cheery, aren't they?" she asked hastily, and he, nodding,
turned away. For a few moments he was silent, and then he began to talk
rather loudly about nothing in particular, and in a few moments was
himself--the Joyselle of that particular day. Brigit realised that their
stronghold of reserves and lies had been dangerously threatened by his
mounting emotion. If he had broken down in his _rôle_--and she knew
that the playing of any kind of a _rôle_ was foreign to his nature, and
therefore perilous--she would have lost him.
His mind, of course, except in certain moments when it all unconsciously
was subjugated by her will, was a closed book to her.
For he was not only a man (and no woman can ever wholly understand any
man's mind), but he was nearly twenty years older than she, and he was a
Norman--a race very complicated, in its mixture of shrewd cunning and
simplicity, and difficult for even other French people to comprehend.
But groping in the dark though she was, the girl had grasped two
essential facts: if Joyselle learned that she loved him, he would go
away if it killed him; and if, though remaining in ignorance of her
love, he was led to betray his, the result would be the same.
So her aim must be to keep him well under his own control, and to avoid
betraying her personal feelings in the very least degree.
It was easy that first day. He was still more or less dazed and taken up
with his discovery that he loved her, and therefore not so shrewd as
usual. The future, she knew, would be harder.
But that one day was a delight to them both. He told her about his
youth--as truthful an account as his wife's, but oh, how infinitely more
picturesque and interesting.
His acquisition of the Amati was recounted with a wealth of detail that
enchanted her, and she closed her eyes the better to see the little
dark shop on the _quai_ at Rouen, and the old man who would not sell his
treasure, even for a good price, until he had heard the would-be
purchaser play on it. "And then, my dear, I tuned it, and played. It was
a bit from Tschaikovsky's Pathetic Symphony--the adagio movement. It was
dark in the shop, with the velvety darkness old places get on a sunny
day, and on the other side of the street lay the sunshine like gold. He
sat, _le vieux_, in his chair away from the light, for his eyes were
bad, and listened. And I played well, for I was playing for the greatest
price I had ever commanded!"
"And then?" she asked softly, stroking her cheek with some young
beech-leaves.
"And then he kissed me, and--I took out my cheque-book," returned
Joyselle simply.
It was after four, and the wind had gone down, freeing the common from
the beautiful cloud-streams that had chased over it earlier in the day.
The red-headed girl and her young man had disappeared, and from where
they sat Joyselle and Brigit saw no signs of life.
"To-morrow it will be crowded with odious people," Brigit sighed.
"Why odious?"
"Well, I mean vulgar, noisy people."
He shook his head in a way that ruffled his halo of silver hair, and
laughed.
"You should not be a snob," he teased. "After all, you are marrying the
son of peasants."
"Peasants are different," she insisted, a little sulkily.
"Peasants are picturesque only in books, my dear. As for me, I like
happy people, and even your English 'noisy and vulgar' ones are happy, I
suppose, when they come up here on Sunday. Some day you and I will come
again. And bring Théo," he added suddenly.
Then he rose. "Come, we had better start to walk back." She obeyed in
silence.
"If I had not had genius," he continued as they reached the bottom of
the slope and turned homewards, "I should be now--what? A Norman peasant
in a black blouse driving, probably, a char-à-bancs to sell my fruit--or
my corn. I could never have been a gamekeeper like my father, for I
cannot kill. And if you, then, had come to Falaise and gone to the
market, you might have bought a pennyworth of cherries of me. And all
this might have been if I had not, one day, heard an old half-witted
blind man play a cracked fiddle on the high road, thirty years ago!"
She frowned, for she hated this kind of talk. It was too true, and it
hurt her baser pride, even while her nobler pride rejoiced in the very
humbleness of his origin because it emphasised his present greatness.
"But--you are you, and I am only--me," she returned, ungrammatical but
proudly humble.
He turned, his face flushing brilliantly. "Then you are proud of me?" he
cried.
Danger again. After a long pause, which visibly hurt him, she returned
with a smile, "Of course I am. Who would not be proud of such a
father-in-law?"
Half an hour later it was all over, the wonderful day was finished, and
to Brigit's amazement she was more than a little glad. It had been
delightful, but it had been full of danger.
In time Joyselle would learn to evade these pitfalls, with which their
future seemed to bristle, but as yet he was so unused to avoiding things
in his path that it was almost a miracle that she had, as she put it
with a half-whimsical, half-despairing smile, got him safely home
without an outburst.
She was, had been from the first, fairly sure of herself, but she was
wise enough to acknowledge that her strength depended largely on his. If
he had broken down, she knew that the odds were largely against her
being able, in her inevitable despair over his certain-to-follow
good-bye, to continue to hide her own feelings. And after that, she
believed, he would never see her again.
So it was with a strong feeling of relief that she said good-bye to him,
half-way home, and went on alone.
As the hansom started again she turned and looked back. Joyselle stood,
hat in hand, where she had left him, his face, now that he believed
himself to be unseen by her, black with thought. Then, with the so
familiar jerk of his head, he put on his hat, smiled, and marched off
down the street.