"No, indeed, I do not," said Althea, shaking her head.
"You mean you think it cruel?"
"Very cruel."
"Yet where would we be without it?" said Gerald. "And where would the foxes be? After all, while they live, their lives are particularly pleasant."
"With possible intervals of torture? Don"t you think that, if they could choose, they would rather not live at all?"
"Oh, a canny old fox doesn"t mind the run so much, you know--enjoys it after a fashion, no doubt."
"Don"t salve your conscience by that sophism, Gerald; the fox is canny because he has been terrified so often," said Helen. "Let us own that it is barbarous, but such glorious sport that one tries to forget the fox."
It required some effort for Althea to testify against her and Mr. Digby, but she felt so strongly on the subject of animals, foxes in particular, that her courage did not fail her. "I think it is when we forget, that the dreadful things in life, the sins and cruelties, happen," she said.
Gerald"s gay eyes were cogitatingly fixed on her, and Helen continued to look out of the window; but she thought that they both liked her the better for her frankness, and she felt in the little ensuing silence that it had brought them nearer--bright, alien creatures that they were.
Her first view of Merriston House hardly confirmed her hopes of it, though she would not have owned to herself that this was so. It was neither so beautiful nor so imposing as she had expected; it was even, perhaps, rather commonplace; but in a moment she was able to overcome this slight disloyalty and to love it the more for its unpretentiousness. A short, winding avenue of limes led to it, and it stood high among lawns that fell away to lower shrubberies and woods. It was a square stone house, covered with creepers, a white rose cl.u.s.tering over the doorway and a group of trees over-topping its chimneys.
Inside, where the housekeeper welcomed them and tea waited for them, was the same homely brightness. Hunting prints hung in the hall; rows of mediocre, though pleasing, family portraits in the dining-room. The long drawing-room at the back of the house, overlooking the lawns and a far prospect, was a much inhabited room, cheerful and shabby. There were old-fashioned water-colour landscapes, porcelain in cabinets and on shelves, and many tables crowded with ivory and silver bric-a-brac; things from India and things from China, that Digbys in the Army and Digbys in the Navy had brought home.
"What a Philistine room it is," said Gerald, smiling as he looked around him; "but I must say I like it just as it is. It has never made an aesthetic effort."
Gerald"s smile irradiated the whole house for Althea, and lit up, in especial, the big, sunny school-room where he and Helen found most memories of all. "The same old table, Helen," he said, "and other children have spilled ink on it and scratched their initials just as we used to; here are yours and mine. Do you remember the day we did them under Fraulein"s very nose? And here are all our old books, too. Look, Helen, the Roman history with your wicked drawings on the fly-leaves: Tullia driving over her poor old father, and Cornelia--ironic little wretch you were even then--what a prig she is with her jewels! And what splendid b.u.t.ter-scotch you used to make over the fire on winter evenings."
Helen remembered everything, smiling as she followed Gerald about the room and looked at ruthless Tullia; and Althea, watching them, was touched--for them, and then, with a little counter-stroke of memory, for herself. She remembered her old home too--the dignified old house in steep Chestnut Street, and the little house on the blue Ma.s.sachusetts coast where she had often pa.s.sed long days playing by herself, for she had been an only child. She loved it here, for it was like a home, peaceful and sheltering; but where in all the world had she really a home? Where in all the world did she belong? The thought brought tears to her eyes as she looked out of the schoolroom window and listened to Gerald and Helen. It had ended, of course, for of course it had really begun, in Althea"s decision to take Merriston House. It was quite fixed now, and on the way back she had made her new friends promise to be often together with her in the home of their youth. She had made them promise this so prettily and with such gentle warmth that it was very natural that Gerald, in talking over the event with Helen that evening, should say, strolling round Helen"s little sitting-room, "She"s rather a dear, that little friend of yours."
Helen was tired and lay extended on the divan in the grey dress she had not had time to change. She had doffed her hat and, thrusting its hatpins through it, had laid it on her knees, so that, as Gerald had remarked, she looked rather like Brunhilde on her rocky couch. But, unlike Brunhilde, her hands were clasped behind her neck, and she looked up at the ceiling. "A perfect little dear," she a.s.sented.
"Did you notice her eyes when she was talking about the foxes? They were as sorrowful and piteous as a Mater Dolorosa"s. She is definite enough about some things, isn"t she? Things like right and wrong, I mean, as she sees them."
"Yes; she is clear about outside things, like right and wrong."
"It"s a good deal to be clear about, isn"t it?"
"I suppose so," Helen reflected. "I don"t feel that I really understand Althea. People who aren"t clear about themselves are difficult to understand, I think."
"It"s that that really gives them a mystery. I feel that she really is a little mysterious," said Gerald. "One wonders what she would do in certain cases, and feel in certain situations, and one can"t remotely imagine. She is a sealed book."
"_She_ wonders," said Helen.
"And you suspect that her pages are empty?"
Helen reflected, but nothing seemed to come. She closed her eyes, smiling, and said, "Be off, please. I"m getting too sleepy to have suspicions. We have plenty of time to find out whether anything is written on Althea"s pages."
CHAPTER VIII.
But, when Gerald was gone, Helen found that she was no longer sleepy.
She lay, her eyes closed, straight and still, like an effigy on a tomb, and she thought, intently and quietly. It was more a series of pictures than a linking of ideas with which her mind was occupied--pictures of her childhood and girlhood in Scotland and at Merriston House. It was dispa.s.sionately that she watched the little figure, lonely, violent, walking over the moors, hiding in the thickets of the garden, choking with tears of fury, clenching teeth over fierce resentments. She almost smiled at the sight of her. What constant resentments, what frequent furies! They centred, of course, about the figure of her mother, lovely, vindictive, and stony-hearted, as she had been and was. Helen"s life had dawned in the consciousness of love for this beautiful mother, whom she had worshipped with the ardent humility of a little dog. Afterwards, with a vehemence as great, she had grown to hate her. All her girlhood had been filled with struggles against her mother. Sometimes for weeks they had not spoken to each other, epochs during which, completely indifferent though she was, Mrs. Buchanan had given herself the satisfaction of smartly boxing her daughter"s ears when her mute, hostile presence too much exasperated her. There had been no refuge for Helen with her father, a gloomy man, immersed in sport and study, nor in her brother Nigel, gay and pleasant though he was. When once Nigel got away to school and college, he spent as little time at home as possible.
Helen was as solitary as a sea-bird, blown far inland and snared. Then came the visits to Merriston House--the cheerful, chattering houseful of happy girls, the kind father and mother, and Gerald. Gerald! From the time that he came into her life all the pictures were full of him, so full that she hardly saw herself any longer; she was only some one who watched and felt.
Her violent nature, undisciplined except by its own pride, did not submit easily to the taming processes of a wholesome family life; she dominated the girl cousins, and they only counted as chorus in the drama of her youth. It was Gerald who counted, at once, counted for everything else. She cared so much for him that, feeling her independence slipping from her, she at first quarrelled with him constantly, as far as he would let her quarrel with him. Her brooding bitterness amazed and amused him. While she stormed, he would laugh at her, gaily and ironically, and tell her that she was an absurd little savage. And, after she had burst into a frenzy of tears and fled from him, he would seek her out, find her hidden in some corner of the garden or shrubberies, and, grieved and alarmed, put his arms around her, kiss her and say: "Look here, I"m awfully sorry. I can"t bear to have you take things like this. Please make up."
He could not bear to see her suffering, ludicrous though he thought her suffering to be. And it was this sweetness, this comprehension and tenderness, like sunlight flooding her gloomy and petrified young heart, that filled Helen with astonished bliss. She was tamed at last to the extent of laughing with Gerald at herself; and, though the force of her nature led him, the sweetness of his nature controlled her. They became the dearest of friends.
Yes, so it had always been; so it had always looked--to all the rest of the world, and to Gerald. Helen, lying on her divan, saw the pictures of comradeship filling the years. It was her consciousness of what the real meaning of the pictures was that supplied something else, something hidden and desperate that pulsed in them all. How she remembered the first time that she had drawn away when Gerald kissed her, putting up between them the shield of a lightly yet decisively accepted conventionality. They were "growing up"; this was her justification. How she remembered what it had cost her to keep up the lightness of her smile so that he should not guess what lay beneath. Her nature was all pa.s.sion, and enclosing this pa.s.sion, like a steady hand held round a flame, was a fierce purity, a fierce pride. Gerald had never guessed. No one had ever guessed. It seemed to Helen that the pain of it had broken her heart in the very spring of her years; that it was only a maimed and cautious creature that the world had ever known.
She lay, and drew long quiet breaths in looking at it all. The day of reawakened memories had been like a sword in her heart, and now she seemed to draw it out slowly, and let the blood come with a sense of peace. She could even, as often, lend to the contemplation of her tragedy the bitter little grimace of mockery with which she met so much of life. She could tell herself, as often, that she had never outgrown love-sick girlhood, and that she was merely in love with Gerald"s smile.
Yet Gerald was all in his smile; and Gerald, it seemed, was made to be loved, all of him, helplessly and hopelessly, by unfortunate her. She felt her love as a misfortune; it was too strong and too unsatisfied to be felt in any sense as joy, though it strung her nature to a painful appreciation of joy. She saw life with a cold, appraising eye; it was like a landscape robbed of all sunlight, and, so robbed, so bleak, and so bereft, it was easy to appraise it, to see, since one could have no warmth or light, what were the next best things to have. She had missed the next best things again and again, when the moment had come for taking them; she had drawn back sick, blanched, shaken with the throes of desperate hope. Only in these last years, when next best things were no longer so plentiful, had hope really died. Her heart still beat, but it seemed to beat thinly, among all the heaped-up ashes of dead hopes.
She was free to go forth into the sunless world and choose what place should be hers. She did not care much for anything that world had to give her. But she intended to choose carefully and calmly. She was aware in herself of firm, well-knit faculty, of tastes, sharp and sensitive, demanding only an opportunity to express themselves in significant and finished forms of life; and though Helen did not think of it in these terms, saying merely to herself that she wanted money and power, the background of her intention was a consciousness of capacity for power.
Reflecting on this power, and on the paths to its realisation, she was led far, indeed, from any thought of Althea; and Althea was not at all in her mind as, sleepy at last, and very weary, she remembered Gerald"s last words. It was the thought of Gerald that brought the thought of Althea, and of Althea"s pages. Fair and empty they were, she felt sure, adorned only here and there with careful and becoming maxims. She smiled a little, not untenderly, as she thought of Althea. But, just before sinking to deeper drowsiness, and deciding that she must rouse herself and go upstairs to bed, a further consciousness came to her. The sunny day at Merriston had not, in her thoughts, brought them near to one another--Gerald, and Althea, and her; yet something significant ran through her sudden memory of it. She had moments of her race"s sense of second-sight, and it never came without making her aware of a pause--a strange, forced pause--where she had to look at something, touch something, in the dark, as it were. It was there as she roused herself from her half-somnolent state; it was there in the consciousness of a turning-point in her life--in Gerald"s, in Althea"s. "We may write something on Althea"s pages," was the thought with which, smiling over its inappropriateness, she went upstairs. And the fancy faded from her memory, as if it had been a bird"s wing that brushed her cheek in the darkness.
CHAPTER IX.
Althea went down to Merriston House in the middle of July. Helen accompanied her to see her safely installed and to set the very torpid social ball rolling. There were not many neighbours, but Helen a.s.sembled them all. She herself could stay only a few days. She was bound, until the middle of August, in a rush of engagements, and meanwhile Althea, rather ruefully, was forced to fall back on Miss Buckston for companionship. She had always, till now, found Miss Buckston"s cheerful dogmatism fortifying, and, even when it irritated her, instructive; but she had now new standards of interest, and new sources of refreshment, and, shut up with Miss Buckston for a rainy week, she felt as never before the defects of this excellent person"s many qualities.
She had fires lighted, much to Miss Buckston"s amus.e.m.e.nt, and sat a good deal by the blaze in the drawing-room, controlling her displeasure when Miss Buckston, dressed in muddy tweed and with a tweed cap pulled down over her brows, came striding in from a ten-mile tramp and said, pulling open all the windows, "You are frightfully frusty in here."
It was not "frusty." Althea had a scientific regard for ventilation, and a damp breeze from the garden blew in at the furthest window. She had quite enough air.
Miss Buckston was also very critical of Merriston House, and pointed out the shabbiness of the chintz and faded carpets. The garden, she said, was shamefully neglected, and she could not conceive how people could bear to let a decent place like this go to ruin. "But he"s a slack creature, Gerald Digby, I"ve heard."
Althea coldly explained that Mr. Digby was too poor to live at Merriston and to keep it up. She did not herself in the least mind the shabbiness.
"Oh, I don"t mind it," said Miss Buckston. "I only think he"s done himself very well in getting you to take the place in this condition.
How much do you give for it?"
Althea, more coldly, named the sum. It was moderate; Miss Buckston had to grant that, though but half-satisfied that there was no intention to "do" her friend. "When once you get into the hands of hard-up fashionable folk," she said, "it"s as well to look sharp."
Althea did not quite know what to say to this. She had never in the past opposed Miss Buckston, and it would be difficult to tell her now that she took too much upon herself. At a hint of hesitancy, she knew, Miss Buckston would pa.s.s to and fro over her like a steam-roller, nearly as noisy, and to her own mind as composedly efficient. Hesitancy or contradiction she flattened and left behind her.
She had an air of owning Bach that became peculiarly vexatious to Althea, who, in silence, but armed with new standards, was a.s.sembling her own forces and observed, in casting an eye over them, that she had heard five times as much music as Miss Buckston and might be granted the right of an opinion on it. She took satisfaction in a memory of Miss Buckston"s face singing in the Bach choir--even at the time it had struck her as funny--at a concert to which Althea had gone with her some years ago in London. It was to see, for her own private delectation, a weak point in Miss Buckston"s iron-clad personality to remember how very funny she could look. Among the serried ranks of singing heads hers had stood out with its rubicund energy, its air of mastery, the shining of its eye-gla.s.ses and of its large white teeth; and while she sang Miss Buckston had jerked her head rhythmically to one side and beaten time with her hand as if to encourage and direct her less competent companions. Sometimes, now, she looked almost as funny, when she sat down to the piano and gave forth a recitative.
After Bach, Woman"s Suffrage was Miss Buckston"s special theme, and, suspecting a new hint of uncertainty in Althea, whose conviction she had always taken for granted, she attacked her frequently and mercilessly.
"Pooh, my dear," she would say, "don"t quote your frothy American women to me. Americans have no social conscience. That"s the trouble with you all; rank individualists, every one of you. When the political att.i.tude of the average citizen is that of the ostrich keeping his head in the sand so that he shan"t see what the country"s coming to, what can you expect of the women? Your arguments don"t affect the suffrage question, they merely dismiss America. I shall lose my temper if you trot them out to me." Miss Buckston never lost her temper, however; other people"s opinions counted too little with her for that.
At the end of the first week Althea felt distinctly that though the country, even under these dismal climatic conditions, might be delightful if shared with some people, it was not delightful shared with Miss Buckston. She did not like walking in the rain; she was a creature of houses, cabs and carriages. The sober beauty of blotted silhouettes, and misty, rolling hills at evening when the clouds lifted over the sunset, did not appeal to her. She wished that she had stayed in London; she wished that Helen and Mr. Digby were with her; she was even glad that Aunt Julia and the girls were coming.
There was a welcome diversion afforded for her, when Aunt Julia came, by the prompt hostility that declared itself between her and Miss Buckston.