"The intrusion, madam, has been on our part. And with just that excuse--that we come from so far away."
Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on my friend as he stood silent beneath Sir Joshua"s portrait. The housekeeper, agitated and mystified, fairly let herself go. "Heaven preserve us, Miss! It"s your great-uncle"s picture come to life."
"I"m not mistaken then," said Miss Searle--"we must be distantly related." She had the air of the shyest of women, for whom it was almost anguish to make an advance without help. Searle eyed her with gentle wonder from head to foot, and I could easily read his thoughts. This then was his maiden-cousin, prospective mistress of these hereditary treasures. She was of some thirty-five years of age, taller than was then common and perhaps stouter than is now enjoined. She had small kind grey eyes, a considerable quant.i.ty of very light-brown hair and a smiling well-formed mouth. She was dressed in a l.u.s.treless black satin gown with a short train. Disposed about her neck was a blue handkerchief, and over this handkerchief, in many convolutions, a string of amber beads. Her appearance was singular; she was large yet somehow vague, mature yet undeveloped. Her manner of addressing us spoke of all sorts of deep diffidences. Searle, I think, had prefigured to himself some proud cold beauty of five-and-twenty; he was relieved at finding the lady timid and not obtrusively fair. He at once had an excellent tone.
"We"re distant cousins, I believe. I"m happy to claim a relationship which you"re so good as to remember. I hadn"t counted on your knowing anything about me."
"Perhaps I"ve done wrong." And Miss Searle blushed and smiled anew. "But I"ve always known of there being people of our blood in America, and have often wondered and asked about them--without ever learning much.
To-day, when this card was brought me and I understood a Clement Searle to be under our roof as a stranger, I felt I ought to do something. But, you know, I hardly knew what. My brother"s in London. I"ve done what I think he would have done. Welcome as a cousin." And with a resolution that ceased to be awkward she put out her hand.
"I"m welcome indeed if he would have done it half so graciously!" Again Searle, taking her hand, acquitted himself beautifully.
"You"ve seen what there is, I think," Miss Searle went on. "Perhaps now you"ll have luncheon." We followed her into a small breakfast-room where a deep bay window opened on the mossy flags of a terrace. Here, for some moments, she remained dumb and abashed, as if resting from a measurable effort. Searle too had ceased to overflow, so that I had to relieve the silence. It was of course easy to descant on the beauties of park and mansion, and as I did so I observed our hostess. She had no arts, no impulses nor graces--scarce even any manners; she was queerly, almost frowsily dressed; yet she pleased me well. She had an antique sweetness, a homely fragrance of old traditions. To be so simple, among those complicated treasures, so pampered and yet so fresh, so modest and yet so placid, told of just the s.p.a.cious leisure in which Searle and I had imagined human life to be steeped in such places as that. This figure was to the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood what a fact is to a fairy-tale, an interpretation to a myth. We, on our side, were to our hostess subjects of a curiosity not cunningly veiled.
"I should like so to go abroad!" she exclaimed suddenly, as if she meant us to take the speech for an expression of interest in ourselves.
"Have you never been?" one of us asked.
"Only once. Three years ago my brother took me to Switzerland. We thought it extremely beautiful. Except for that journey I"ve always lived here. I was born in this house. It"s a dear old place indeed, and I know it well. Sometimes one wants a change." And on my asking her how she spent her time and what society she saw, "Of course it"s very quiet," she went on, proceeding by short steps and simple statements, in the manner of a person called upon for the first time to a.n.a.lyse to that extent her situation. "We see very few people. I don"t think there are many nice ones hereabouts. At least we don"t know them. Our own family"s very small. My brother cares for nothing but riding and books. He had a great sorrow ten years ago. He lost his wife and his only son, a dear little boy, who of course would have had everything. Do you know that that makes me the heir, as they"ve done something--I don"t quite know what--to the entail? Poor old me! Since his loss my brother has preferred to be quite alone. I"m sorry he"s away. But you must wait till he comes back. I expect him in a day or two." She talked more and more, as if our very strangeness led her on, about her circ.u.mstances, her solitude, her bad eyes, so that she couldn"t read, her flowers, her ferns, her dogs, and the vicar, recently presented to the living by her brother and warranted quite safe, who had lately begun to light his altar candles; pausing every now and then to gasp in self-surprise, yet, in the quaintest way in the world, keeping up her story as if it were a slow rather awkward old-time dance, a difficult pas seul in which she would have been better with more practice, but of which she must complete the figure. Of all the old things I had seen in England this exhibited mind of Miss Searle"s seemed to me the oldest, the most handed down and taken for granted; fenced and protected as it was by convention and precedent and usage, thoroughly acquainted with its subordinate place. I felt as if I were talking with the heroine of a last-century novel. As she talked she rested her dull eyes on her kinsman with wondering kindness. At last she put it to him: "Did you mean to go away without asking for us?"
"I had thought it over, Miss Searle, and had determined not to trouble you. You"ve shown me how unfriendly I should have been."
"But you knew of the place being ours, and of our relationship?"
"Just so. It was because of these things that I came down here--because of them almost that I came to England. I"ve always liked to think of them," said my companion.
"You merely wished to look then? We don"t pretend to be much to look at."
He waited; her words were too strange. "You don"t know what you are, Miss Searle."
"You like the old place then?"
Searle looked at her again in silence. "If I could only tell you!" he said at last.
"Do tell me. You must come and stay with us."
It moved him to an oddity of mirth. "Take care, take care--I should surprise you! I"m afraid I should bore you. I should never leave you."
"Oh you"d get homesick--for your real home!"
At this he was still more amused. "By the way, tell Miss Searle about our real home," he said to me. And he stepped, through the window, out upon the terrace, followed by two beautiful dogs, a setter and a young stag-hound who from the moment we came in had established the fondest relation with him. Miss Searle looked at him, while he went, as if she vaguely yearned over him; it began to be plain that she was interested in her exotic cousin. I suddenly recalled the last words I had heard spoken by my friend"s adviser in London and which, in a very crude form, had reference to his making a match with this lady. If only Miss Searle could be induced to think of that, and if one had but the tact to put it in a light to her! Something a.s.sured me that her heart was virgin-soil, that the flower of romantic affection had never bloomed there. If I might just sow the seed! There seemed to shape itself within her the perfect image of one of the patient wives of old.
"He has lost his heart to England," I said. "He ought to have been born here."
"And yet he doesn"t look in the least an Englishman," she still rather guardedly prosed.
"Oh it isn"t his looks, poor fellow."
"Of course looks aren"t everything. I never talked with a foreigner before; but he talks as I have fancied foreigners."
"Yes, he"s foreign enough."
"Is he married?"
"His wife"s dead and he"s all alone in the world."
"Has he much property?"
"None to speak of."
"But he has means to travel."
I meditated. "He has not expected to travel far," I said at last. "You know, he"s in very poor health."
"Poor gentleman! So I supposed."
"But there"s more of him to go on with than he thinks. He came here because he wanted to see your place before he dies."
"Dear me--kind man!" And I imagined in the quiet eyes the hint of a possible tear. "And he was going away without my seeing him?"
"He"s very modest, you see."
"He"s very much the gentleman."
I couldn"t but smile. "He"s ALL--"
At this moment we heard on the terrace a loud harsh cry. "It"s the great peac.o.c.k!" said Miss Searle, stepping to the window and pa.s.sing out while I followed her. Below us, leaning on the parapet, stood our appreciative friend with his arm round the neck of the setter. Before him on the grand walk strutted the familiar fowl of gardens--a splendid specimen--with ruffled neck and expanded tail. The other dog had apparently indulged in a momentary attempt to abash the gorgeous biped, but at Searle"s summons had bounded back to the terrace and leaped upon the ledge, where he now stood licking his new friend"s face. The scene had a beautiful old-time air: the peac.o.c.k flaunting in the foreground like the genius of stately places; the broad terrace, which flattered an innate taste of mine for all deserted walks where people may have sat after heavy dinners to drink coffee in old Sevres and where the stiff brocade of women"s dresses may have rustled over gra.s.s or gravel; and far around us, with one leafy circle melting into another, the timbered acres of the park. "The very beasts have made him welcome," I noted as we rejoined our companion.
"The peac.o.c.k has done for you, Mr. Searle," said his cousin, "what he does only for very great people. A year ago there came here a great person--a grand old lady--to see my brother. I don"t think that since then he has spread his tail as wide for any one else--not by a dozen feathers."
"It"s not alone the peac.o.c.k," said Searle. "Just now there came slipping across my path a little green lizard, the first I ever saw, the lizard of literature! And if you"ve a ghost, broad daylight though it be, I expect to see him here. Do you know the annals of your house, Miss Searle?"
"Oh dear, no! You must ask my brother for all those things."
"You ought to have a collection of legends and traditions. You ought to have loves and murders and mysteries by the roomful. I shall be ashamed of you if you haven"t."
"Oh Mr. Searle! We"ve always been a very well-behaved family," she quite seriously pleaded. "Nothing out of the way has ever happened, I think."
"Nothing out of the way? Oh that won"t do! We"ve managed better than that in America. Why I myself!"--and he looked at her ruefully enough, but enjoying too his idea that he might embody the social scandal or point to the darkest drama of the Searles. "Suppose I should turn out a better Searle than you--better than you nursed here in romance and extravagance? Come, don"t disappoint me. You"ve some history among you all, you"ve some poetry, you"ve some acc.u.mulation of legend. I"ve been famished all my days for these things. Don"t you understand? Ah you can"t understand! Tell me," he rambled on, "something tremendous. When I think of what must have happened here; of the lovers who must have strolled on this terrace and wandered under the beeches, of all the figures and pa.s.sions and purposes that must have haunted these walls!
When I think of the births and deaths, the joys and sufferings, the young hopes and the old regrets, the rich experience of life--!" He faltered a moment with the increase of his agitation. His humour of dismay at a threat of the commonplace in the history he felt about him had turned to a deeper reaction. I began to fear however that he was really losing his head. He went on with a wilder play. "To see it all called up there before me, if the Devil alone could do it I"d make a bargain with the Devil! Ah Miss Searle," he cried, "I"m a most unhappy man!"
"Oh dear, oh dear!" she almost wailed while I turned half away.
"Look at that window, that dear little window!" I turned back to see him point to a small protruding oriel, above us, relieved against the purple brickwork, framed in chiselled stone and curtained with ivy.
"It"s my little room," she said.
"Of course it"s a woman"s room. Think of all the dear faces--all of them so mild and yet so proud--that have looked out of that lattice, and of all the old-time women"s lives whose princ.i.p.al view of the world has been this quiet park! Every one of them was a cousin of mine. And you, dear lady, you"re one of them yet." With which he marched toward her and took her large white hand. She surrendered it, blushing to her eyes and pressing her other hand to her breast. "You"re a woman of the past.
You"re n.o.bly simple. It has been a romance to see you. It doesn"t matter what I say to you. You didn"t know me yesterday, you"ll not know me to-morrow. Let me to-day do a mad sweet thing. Let me imagine in you the spirit of all the dead women who have trod the terrace-flags that lie here like sepulchral tablets in the pavement of a church. Let me say I delight in you!"--he raised her hand to his lips. She gently withdrew it and for a moment averted her face. Meeting her eyes the next instant I saw the tears had come. The Sleeping Beauty was awake.