CHAPTER XXIII
There is a little village in North Devon, sheltered from the sea by a low range of sand-hills that stretches for miles on each side of it. The coast turns westward here, and no cliff breaks that line of billowy sand; northward and southward it goes, with the rhythmic monotony of the sea. The sand-hills are dotted with tufts of the long star-gra.s.s, where the rabbits sit; inland they are covered with fine blades bitten short by the sheep. Seaward lies the hard ribbed sand, glistening with salt, and fringed with the white surf of the Atlantic.
On the coast, about a mile from the village, there is a long one-storyed bungalow, built on the sand-hills. The sand is in the garden, where no flowers grow but sea-pinks and the wild horn-poppy; it lies in drifts about the verandah, and is whirled by the Atlantic storms on to the low thatched roof. The house stands alone but for a few fishermen"s huts beside it, huddled close together for neighbourhood.
Here, because it was the most man-forsaken spot she knew, Audrey had come, exchanging the roar of London for the roar of the Atlantic. She thought she would find consolation in the presence of Nature. London had become intolerable to her. Everywhere she turned she was reminded of the hateful Laura. Laura stood open in the window of every book-shop; Laura lay on every drawing-room table; there was no getting away from her. And yet Audrey"s notoriety had won her more friends than she had ever had before. Everywhere people were kind to her; they made much of her; they said it was "hard lines," it was "a shame," "execrable," "unpardonable,"
and they a.s.sured her that n.o.body thought a bit the worse of her for all that. Some even went so far as to declare that they saw not the remotest resemblance between her and the popular heroine. But it was no use.
Nothing could raise her in her own esteem. She fled. She longed to be alone with Nature. She took the bungalow for the winter; and once there, she wished she had never come.
She arrived in a storm that lasted some days. She thought she would have gone mad simply with hearing the mad wind and sea. It was the same whether she sat indoors listening to them, or she walked out, battling with the wreaths of whirling sand. After the storm came the dull, grey, heaving calm,--always the rolling clouds, the rolling sand-hills, and the rolling sea. That was infinitely worse. And to add to her depression, Audrey had never been so rigidly confined to the society of her chaperon; there was n.o.body else to see or hear, and the boundaries of the poor lady"s intellect were conspicuous in the melancholy waste.
There was no escape from her except into the cold monotony without.
Then February set in warm though grey. One morning Audrey was able to sit out in a sunny hollow of the sand-hills, where the rabbits had flattened a nest for her. Then she could think.
She was in the presence of Nature. Art was nothing to this. Art, in the time of her brief acquaintance with it, had baffled her, and given her a hint of her own feebleness; but Nature was the great Incomprehensible--and she was alone with it. Alone, in a lonely land, peopled mostly by the wild creatures of sea and sh.o.r.e, by peasants and fishermen, men and women who looked at her with strange eyes and spoke a strange language; whose ways were dark to her, and their thoughts unfathomable. She was face to face not only with primitive human beings, but with the primeval forces of the world--the stern, implacable will of the wind and sea. Not that she could feel these things thus, for they lay beyond the range of her emotions; but at the same time they tortured her. At first it was only by a dull sense of their presence, annihilating her own. Then, because they were things too great for her to grasp, they cruelly flung her back upon herself. They had no revelation for her. But left to herself, bit by bit her own character was revealed to her,--not as it had appeared to her before--not even as Wyndham had revealed it to her--but in the nothingness that was its being. It was stripped bare of all that had clothed it, and ruled it, and made it seem beautiful in her eyes. Left to herself, all the influences that had lent colour and consistency to this blank, unstable nature, had pa.s.sed out of her life. The men whose destiny she had tried to mould, who had ended by moulding hers, twisting it now into one shape, now into another, had done with it at last; they had flung it from them unshapen as before. There was no permanence even in destiny.
Vincent, whose will had dominated her own; Ted, whose boyish pa.s.sion had touched her heart and made her feel; Langley, whose intellect had kindled hers, and made her able to think,--they were all gone, and she was alone. That was Langley"s doing--Langley, whom alone of the three she had really loved--ah, she hated him for it now. And hating him, she remembered the many virtues of the two whom she had not loved well.
Vincent--that was a revelation of love--why had she shut her eyes to it?
Ted too, poor boy, he might have been hers still if she had chosen. She might have been moulding his destiny at this moment--instead of which, his destiny was doubtless moulding itself admirably without her.
Then her mood changed. She revolted against the cruelty of her lot. Her s.e.x was the original, the unpardonable injustice. If she had only been a man, she could have taken her life into her own hands, and shaped it according to her will. But woman, even modern woman, is the slave of circ.u.mstances and the fool of fate.
"Audrey, Audrey, my dear!" called a wind-blown voice across the sand-hills. Solitude had frightened Miss Craven out of the bungalow, and she was picking her way in and out among the rabbit holes.
North Devon was hateful to cousin Bella. She hated the wastes of sand and sea, the discomforts of the bungalow, the slow hours uncertainly measured by meal-times that seemed as if they would never come. Her brain was wild with unsatisfied curiosity. Yet she had tact in the presence of real suffering. She had forborne to question Audrey about the past, and their present life was not fruitful in topics. She did nothing but wonder. "I wonder when it will be tea-time? I wonder if there was anything between Audrey and her cousin? I wonder which of those three gentlemen it was? I wonder when it will be tea-time?" That was the monotonous rondo of her thoughts to which the sea kept time.
"Audrey, my dear, come in! I think it must be lunch-time," she wailed.
But no answer came from the hollow. She meekly turned, and picked her way back again across the sand-hills.
Audrey lay hidden till the forlorn little figure was out of sight; then she got up and looked around her. She shuddered. Her life was as bleak as the bleak landscape smitten by the salt wind--cold and grey and formless as the winter sea.
What was that black silhouette on the sands? She strained her eyes to see. Another figure was making its way towards her from the bungalow.
When it came near she recognised the unofficial rustic who brought telegrams from the nearest post-town. She waited. The man approached her with an inane smile on his face.
"Teleegram vur yu, Mizz," he drawled.
She tore open the cover, and read: "Come at once. Vincent dying. Wire what train you come by.--Katherine."
She crumpled the paper in her clenched hand. The landscape was blotted out; she saw nothing but the envelope lying at her feet, a dull orange patch against the greyish sand.
"Any awnzur, Mizz?"
"No." She shut her eyes and tried to realise it. "Yes--yes, there is!
Wait--I must look out my trains first."
She made out that by driving to Barnstaple, and catching the two-o"clock train, she would reach Waterloo about eight. She sent the man back with a telegram saying that she would be in Devon Street by nine that evening at the latest.
It was past one then, and she had yet to pack. It was hopeless--she could never catch that train. It did not matter; there was another to Paddington an hour later: it was a slow train, but she would be with Vincent by eleven.
But she was faint, and had to have some luncheon before she could do anything; and there was so much to do. She flew hither and thither, trying to collect her clothes and her thoughts. Her grey cloak and her bearskins--she would want them, it would be cold in the train. And her best hat--where was her best hat? Cousin Bella had hidden her best hat.
Ah! she _must_ think, or everything would go wrong. What was it all about? Vincent dying--dying? Audrey knew little about dying, except that it was a habit people had of plunging you suddenly into mourning when you had just ordered a new dress. Death was another of those things she could not understand.
By the time she had had luncheon, and decided what clothes she would take, and packed them; by the time the one old fly in the village had been ordered, and had made its way at a funereal pace to Barnstaple,--Audrey was just in time to see the three-o"clock train steaming out of the station. By taking the next train and travelling all night, she would only reach Paddington at four in the morning.
As she was at last borne on towards London, lying back on the cushions and trying to sleep, the facts became more clear to her. Vincent was dying; and he had sent for her. She was exalted once more in her own eyes.
It seemed to her then that her love for Vincent had been the one stable and enduring thing in her nature, the link that bound her to a transfigured past, that gave coherence to a life of episodes.
CHAPTER XXIV
Vincent had been ill for six weeks before Katherine sent off her telegram. For a month of that time he had been struggling with death.
Then, when the mild weather set in, he had taken a sudden turn for the better, and it seemed to himself and the Havilands that he had won the victory. Only the doctor and Mrs. Rogers looked grave,--the doctor because of his science, which taught him to be cautious in raising people"s hopes; Mrs. Rogers, because of a deep theological pessimism.
She unburdened herself to Katherine.
"I knew "ow it "ud be when "e gave up them "abits of "is, miss. "E"s been as good as gold for the last year. "E "yn"t given me no trouble nor anybody; a goin" about so soft, and bilin" of "is corffee in "is little Hetna. I said to _myself_ then, "e"s going to be took. It was the same with my pore "usban", miss."
"Don"t talk nonsense, Mrs. Rogers. Mr. Hardy hasn"t the least intention of dying; he"s getting better as fast as ever he can."
"Oh, miss! don"t you sy so! It gives me a turn to "ear anybody talk so presumptuous. Don"t you do it, m"m. If "e is a little better, it"s enuff to make the Almighty tyke "im, jest to "ear you, miss."
Katherine forgave Mrs. Rogers, for the affectionate woman had helped to nurse Vincent with a zeal out of all proportion to her knowledge.
Katherine had engaged a night-nurse during the crisis of his illness; after that, she and Ted nursed him themselves by turns--one sitting up all night, while the other slept on a bed made up in the sitting-room, to be within call. Katherine learned to know Ted better in those six weeks than in all his life before. The boy seemed to be possessed by a pa.s.sion of remorse. He was as quiet as Katherine in Vincent"s room, and could do anything that had to be done there with the gentleness and devotion of a woman. She would willingly have kept on the trained nurse, in order to give Vincent every advantage in the fight for recovery; but it was impossible.
For all three of them had come to the end of their resources at the same time. The Havilands were in debt at last. Vincent had sunk nearly all his capital in his British Columbian farm, where the agent, in whose integrity he had guilelessly trusted, worked the land for his own benefit, and cheated him out of the returns. His mother had left everything to her second husband. Worse than all was the reprehensible conduct of Sir Theophilus Parker. The old gentleman had died well within the term his nephew had given him, but had made no mention of him in his will, and "Lavernac and three thousand a-year" went to a kinsman of irreproachable morals, but a Radical, and many degrees more distant than Vincent from the blood of a Tory squire.
So, after the struggle with death, came the struggle with poverty. Work was impossible for hands busy with service in the sick-room, and young brains worn out with watching and anxiety. The most expensive luxuries were poor Vincent"s necessities; for everything depended now on keeping up his strength.
One morning, after a long night"s watching, instead of turning into the next room to sleep, Katherine put on her hat and cloak and went up to the deserted studio. She left the house with the "Witch of Atlas" under her cloak, and carried her to every picture-dealer in Piccadilly and New Bond Street. It was all in vain. Everywhere the Witch was p.r.o.nounced to be beautiful, but unsalable. She was bowed out of every shop-door with polite regret, expressed in one formula: "The demand for this kind of work is really so small that we could only offer you a nominal sum, madam." Finally, Katherine turned into a small shop in Westminster, only to receive the same answer. But this time she was desperate. "What do you call a nominal sum?" The dealer looked the picture up and down; he noted, too, the shabby cloak and worn face of the artist.
"Frame included, five guineas. Not a shilling more, miss."
"I"ll take that," she said, almost greedily. And the Witch was handed over the counter in exchange for the tenth part of her value.
But five guineas were a mere drop in the ocean of their necessities.
Two days later Katherine set out again, no longer alert and eager, but with a white face, a firm mouth, and a bearing so emphatically resolute that it suggested a previous agony of indecision. She took a "bus from Lupus Street to the City. Getting out at Leadenhall Street, she walked on till she came to a building where an arrow painted on the doorway guided her to the offices of Messrs. Pigott & Co., on the third floor.
On and on she went, up the broad stone stairs, with a sick heart and trembling knees, the steepest, weariest climb she had ever made in a life of climbing. When she reached the third floor she almost turned back at the sight of the closed door marked "Private." Then the thought of Vincent lying in his wretched room, a sudden blinding vision of his white face laid back on the pillows, overcame the last rebellion of her pride. She knocked; a well-regulated voice answered, "Who is there?" She brushed her eyelashes with her hand and walked in.
"It"s me, uncle."
Mr. Pigott almost started from his seat. "You, Katherine? Bless me! Dear me, dear me!" He put on his spectacles, and examined her as if she had been some curious animal. And he, too, noticed not only her frayed skirt and the worn edges of the fur about her cloak, but the sharp lines of her face and the black shadows under her eyes.
"Sit down, my dear."
She obeyed, putting her elbow on the office table and resting her head in her hand. She looked defiantly, almost fiercely, before her, and spoke in a cold, hard voice--