"My dear mother," said the girl, "you know Mary is having her supper."
The bewildered Selborne presently found himself seated at the white-spread, silver-sparkling table, served with food and drink by this Hebe with the honest eyes. He exerted himself to talk with the mother--not of the difference between a lodger and a tenant, but of music, art, and the life of the great world.
It was the girl who brought the conversation down from the gossip of Courts and concert-rooms to the tenant"s immediate needs.
"If you mean to stay, you could have a woman in from the village," said she.
"But wouldn"t you rather I went?" he said.
"Why should we? We want to let the cottage, or we shouldn"t have advertised it. I"ll get you some one to-morrow. Mrs Bates would be the very thing, mother. And you"ll like her, Mr Selwyn. She"s a great dear----"
Sure enough, the next morning brought a gentle, middle-aged woman to "do for" Mr Selwyn. And she did excellently. And three slow days pa.s.sed. He got a boat and pulled up and down the green willow-fringed river. He tried to fish; he read somewhat, and he thought more. And he went in and out of his cottage, which had its own private path debouching on the highway. Many times a day he went in and out, but he saw no more the red hair, the round face, and the honest eyes.
On the fourth day he had nursed his interest in the girl to a strong, well-grown sentiment of curiosity and attraction. Coming in at his own gate, he saw the mother leaving hers, with sunshade and cardcase--an afternoon of calls evidently setting in.
Now or never! The swift impulse took him, and before he had time to recall the terms of that advertis.e.m.e.nt, he had pa.s.sed the green fence of division, and his feet were on the wandering ways of the shrubbery. He felt, as he went, a glow of grat.i.tude to the fate which was rewarding his care of his brother"s future with an interest like this. The adventuress?--the tobacconist"s a.s.sistant?--he could deal with her later.
Through the garden"s green a gleam of white guided--even, it seemed, beckoned.
He found the girl with the red hair and the honest eyes in a hammock swung between two cedars.
"Have pity on me," he said abruptly.
She raised her eyes from her book.
"Oh, it"s you!" she said. "I am so glad. Get a chair from under the weeping ash, and sit down and talk."
"This turf is good enough for me," said he; "but are you sure I"m not trespa.s.sing?"
"You mean the advertis.e.m.e.nt? Oh, that was just because we had some rather awful people last year, and we couldn"t get away from them, and mother wanted to be quite safe; but, of course, you"re different. We like you very much, what we"ve seen of you." This straightforward compliment somehow pleased him less than it might have done. "The other people were--well, he was a b.u.t.terman. I believe he called himself an artist."
"Do you mean that you do not like persons who are in trade," he asked, thinking of the tobacconist"s a.s.sistant.
"Of course I don"t mean that," she said; "why, I"m a Socialist!
b.u.t.terman just means a person without manners or ideals. But I do like working people better than shoppy people, though I know it"s wrong."
"How can an involuntary liking or disliking be wrong?" he asked.
"It"s sn.o.bbish, don"t you think? We ought to like people for what they are, not for what they have, or what they work at."
"If you weren"t so pretty, and hadn"t that delightful air of having just embraced the Social Gospel, you"d be a prig," he said to himself. To her he said: "Roughly speaking, don"t you think the conventional cla.s.sifications correspond fairly well with the real ones?"
"No," she answered roundly.
And when the mother returned, weary from her calls, she found her tenant and her daughter still discussing the problems of good and evil, of heredity and environment, of social inequalities and the injustice of the world. The girl fought for her views, and she fought fairly, if fiercely. It was the first of many such fights. When he had gone the mother protested.
"Dearest," said the girl, "I can"t help it! I must live my own life, as people say in plays. After all, I"m twenty-six. I"ve always talked to people if I liked them--even strangers in railway carriages. And people aren"t wild beasts, you know: everything is always all right. And this man can talk; he knows about things. And he"s a gentleman. That ought to satisfy you--that and his references. Don"t worry, there"s a darling.
Just be nice to him yourself. He"s simply a G.o.dsend in a place like this."
"He"ll fall in love with you, Celia," said the mother warningly.
"Not he!" said the daughter. But the mother was right.
Living alone in the queer little cottage, the world, his accustomed life, the Brydges woman, all seemed very far away. Miss Sheepmarsh was very near. Her frank enjoyment of his talk, her gay acceptance of their now almost constant companionship, were things new in his experience of women, and might have warned him that she at least was heart-whole. They would have done had he ever faced the fact that his own heart had caught fire. He bicycled with her along the pleasant Kentish lanes; he rowed with her on the little river of dreams; he read to her in the quiet of the August garden; he gave himself up wholly to the pleasure of those hours that flew like moments--those days that pa.s.sed like hours. They talked of books and of the heart of books--and inevitably they talked of themselves. He talked of himself less than most men, but he learned much of her life. She was an ardent social reformer; had lived in an Art-and-Culture-for-the-People settlement in Whitechapel; had studied at the London School of Economics. Now she had come back to be with her mother, who needed her. She and her mother were almost alone in the world; there was enough to live on, but not too much. The letting of the little house had been Celia"s idea: its rent was merely for "luxuries."
He found out from the mother, when she came to tolerate him, that the "luxuries" were Celia"s--the luxuries of helping the unfortunate, feeding the hungry, and clothing little shivering children in winter time.
And all this while he had not heard a word of sister or cousin--of any one whom he might identify as the tobacconist"s a.s.sistant.
It was on an evening when the level sunbeams turned the meadows by the riverside to fine gold, and the willows and alders to trees of Paradise, that he spoke suddenly, leaning forward on his sculls. "Have you," he asked, looking into her face, "any relation who is in a shop?"
"No," said she; "why?"
"I only wondered," said he coldly.
"But what an extraordinary thing to wonder!" she said. "Do tell me what made you think of it."
"Very well," he said, "I will. The person who told me that your mother had lodgings, also told me that your mother had a daughter who served in a shop."
"Never!" she cried. "What a hateful idea!"
"A tobacconist"s shop," he persisted; "and her name was Susannah Sheepmarsh."
"Oh," she answered, "that was me." She spoke instantly and frankly, but she blushed crimson.
"And you"re ashamed of it,--Socialist?" he asked with a sneer, and his eyes were fierce on her burning face.
"I"m not! Row home, please. Or I"ll take the sculls if you"re tired, or your shoulder hurts. I don"t want to talk to you any more. You tried to trap me into telling a lie. You don"t understand anything at all. And I"ll never forgive you."
"Yes, you will," he said to himself again and again through the silence in which they plashed down the river. But when he was alone in his cottage, the truth flew at him and grappled him with teeth and claws. He loved her. She loved, or had loved--or might have loved--or might love--his brother. He must go: and the next morning he went without a word. He left a note for Mrs Sheepmarsh, and a cheque in lieu of notice; and letter and cheque were signed with his name in full.
He went back to the old life, but the taste of it all was gone. Shooting parties, house parties, the Brydges woman even, prettier than ever, and surer of all things: how could these charm one whose fancy, whose heart indeed, wandered for ever in a green garden or by a quiet river with a young woman who had served in a tobacconist"s shop, and who would be some day his brother"s wife?
The days were long, the weeks seemed interminable. And all the time there was the white house, as it had been; there were mother and daughter living the same dainty, dignified, charming life to which he had come so near. Why had he ever gone there? Why had he ever interfered? He had meant to ensnare her heart just to free his brother from an adventuress. An adventuress! He groaned aloud.
"Oh, fool! But you are punished!" he said; "she"s angry now--angrier even than that evening on the river, for she knows now that even the name you gave her to call you by was not the one your own people use.
This comes of trying to act like an a.s.s in a book."
The months went on. The Brydges woman rallied him on his absent air. She spoke of dairymaids. He wondered how he could ever have found her amusing, and whether her vulgarity was a growth, or had been merely hidden.
And all the time Celia and the white house were dragging at his heart-strings. Enough was left of the fool that he constantly reproached himself for having been, to make him sure that had he had no brother, had he met her with no duty to the absent to stand between them she would have loved him.
Then one day came the South African mail, and it brought a letter from his brother, the lad who had had the sense to find a jewel behind a tobacconist"s counter, and had trusted it to him.
The letter was long and ineffective. It was the postscript that was vital.
"I say, I wonder whether you"ve seen anything of Susannah? What a young fool I was ever to think I could be happy with a girl out of a shop. I"ve met the real and only one now--she"s a nurse; her father was a clergyman in Northumberland. She"s such a bright little thing, and she"s never cared for any one before me. Wish me luck."
John Selborne almost tore his hair.