"Your Mary didn"t think so."
"She did at first; but she couldn"t get used to it."
"She felt naked without the ring? And ashamed?"
"G.o.d help me," said Senhouse, "that"s true. The moment I realised what had happened, I gave in."
"And then she refused?"
"She neither accepted nor refused. She lived apart. We were in Germany at the time. I was naturalising plants for the Grand Duke of Baden--filling the rocks and glades in the Black Forest. She went into an hotel in Donaueschingen, and I went to see her every day. We were friends. Then we went to England, to London. She held to that way of life, and I did the best I could for myself. At any moment I would have taken her. I considered myself bound in every way. I could have been happy with her.
She had great charm for me--great physical charm, I mean--and sweet, affectionate ways. I could have made her a wife and a mother.
"I intended her the highest honour I could show to a woman. To make her your property by legal process and the sanction of custom seems to me like sacrilege. But, however--One day she told me that a former lover of hers wanted to marry her, and left it for me to judge. She wouldn"t say whether she wished it herself or not; but I knew that she did, for when I advised her to accept him she got up and put her arms round my neck and kissed both my cheeks. I was her elder brother, I perceived, and said so. She laughed, and owned to it. And yet she had loved me, you know. She had refused that same man for me. She was afraid of him, and gave me her hand before his face."
"That to me," Glyde said, "is proof positive that she loved him. Of course she feared him. It is obvious. My poor master!"
Senhouse serenely replied, "She"s happy, and I"ve done her no harm at all.
But it"s impossible for me to treat any living creature otherwise than as my better."
"I believe you," said Glyde, "and so it may be in a rarer world than this.
In this world, however, a man is the most cunning animal, and in that both are flesh he is the stronger of the s.e.xes. In this world the law is that the woman follows the man." He thought before he spoke, then added, "That applies all this world over. You will marry Sanchia."
Senhouse would not look up. He sat, nursing one leg. He bent his brows, and a hot flush made his skin shine in the firelight.
IV
The poet and his disciple continued their partnership through the sogging rains of Christmas, well into the chill opening of the new year. Then came the snow to fill up the valley in which stood the hut, and blur the outlines of the folded hills. Poetry and Sanchia drew together a pair who could have little in common.
But Glyde became the slave of the strange man who blended austerity with charitable judgment, and appeased his pa.s.sion by blood from his heart. He was not himself a mystic, but a sensitive youth whom the world"s rubs had taught the uses of a thick hide. Either you have that by nature, or you earn it by practice. Glyde had found out that the less you say to your maltreaters the less, in time, you have to say about it to yourself. He was conscious of his parts and all too ready to be arrogant. Senhouse"s G.o.ddess had been kind to him, and he had presumed upon that. Senhouse"s own method was to alternate extreme friendliness with torrential contempt.
He knocked Glyde down and picked him up again with the same hand. He treated him as his equal whenever he was not considering him a worm. There is no better way of gaining the confidence of a youth of his sort. At the end of a fortnight there was nothing Glyde would not have told him; at the end of six months he would have crossed Europe barefoot to serve him.
He was nothing of a mystic, and therefore had his own ideas of what seemed to afford his master so much satisfaction; he was enough of a poet to be sure that Senhouse"s romantic raptures were only a makeshift at best. To his mind here was a man aching for a woman. He thought that the poet sang to ease his bleeding heart. He came to picture the mating of these two-- Sanchia the salient, beautiful woman, and his master of the clear, long- enduring, searching eyes, and that strange look of second-sight upon him which those only have who live apart from men, under the sky. It is a look you can never mistake. Sailors have it, and shepherds, and dwellers in the desert. The eye sees through you--into you, and beyond you. It is almost impossible for any person to be either so arresting in himself or possessed of such utterance as will cause the weathered eye to check its scanning of distance and concentrate upon an immediate presence. To such an eye, communing with infinite and eternal things, no creature of time and s.p.a.ce can interpose solidly. Each must be vain and clear as bubbles of air. Behind it float spirits invisible to other men--essential forms, of whose company the seer into distance really is. He will neither heed you nor hear you; his conversation is other-where. And what then would Senhouse do confronted with Sanchia? Would he look beyond her, towards some horizon where she could never stand? Or would he not see in her blue eyes the goal of all his searching--the content of his own? What would he say but "You!" and take her? What she but sigh her content to be taken?
Appeas.e.m.e.nt is holiness, says Senhouse. And what of their holy life thereafter, breast to breast, fronting the dawn? Glyde"s heart, purged of his dishonesty, beat at the thought. He turned all his erotic over to the more generous emotion, and faced with glowing blood the picture of the woman he had coveted in the arms of the master he avowed.
When February began to show a hint of spring, in pairing plovers and breaking eglantine, Senhouse, in a temporary dejection, ceased work upon his poem, and Glyde said that he must know the news. All through the winter they had had little communication with the world beyond their gates. A shepherd homing from the folds, a sodden tinker and his drab, whom he touchingly cherished, a party of rabbit-shooters beating the furze bushes, had been all their hold upon a life where men meet and hoodwink each other. Once in a week one of them ploughed through the drifts to the cottage at the foot of the third valley, and got as he needed flour and candles, soap or matches. It had not yet occurred to either of them--to Senhouse it never did occur--to beg the sight of a newspaper. But Saint Valentine"s call stirred the deeps of Glyde, who now said that he must have news. He departed for Sarum, and stayed away until March was in.
He returned with certain information, absorbed by Senhouse with far- sighted patient eyes and in silence. The only indication he afforded was inscrutable. His cheek-bones twitched flickeringly, like summer lightning about the hills.
Sanchia, Glyde said, was well and in London. She was living in a street off Berkeley Square, with an old lady who wore side-curls and shawls, and drove out every afternoon in a barouche with two stout horses and two lean men-servants. Sanchia sometimes accompanied her, stiff and pliant at once, bright-eyed and faintly coloured. She was taken about to parties also, and to the opera--and very often there were parties at the old lady"s house-- carriage-company, and gentleman in furred coats, who came in hansom cabs.
He thought that she had suitors. There was a tall, thin man who came very often in the afternoons. He was sallow and melancholy, and wore a silk m.u.f.fler day and night. Glyde thought that he was a foreigner, perhaps a Hungarian or Pole.
He had seen Sanchia often, but she could not have caught a glimpse of him.
He admitted that he had haunted the house, had seen her come out and go in, knew when she dressed for dinner and when she went to bed. Long practice had acquainted him with the significance of light and darkness seen through c.h.i.n.ks in shutters. "I know her room," he said, "and the times of her lights. She looks out over the streets towards the Park twice every night--once when she is dressed, and once before she goes to bed. It is as if she is saying her prayers. She looks long to the west, very seriously. I think her lips move. I believe that she always does it."
Senhouse, who may have been listening, bowed his head to his knees, below his clasped hands.
"Twice she looked full at me without knowing me. Why should she know me now? Her pale and serious face, master, was as beautiful as the winter moon, as remote from us and our little affairs. No words of mine can express to you the outward splendour of her neck and bosom. She was uncovered for a party at the house. In the morning she came out to walk.
You know her way, how she glides rather than seems to move her feet--the soaring, even motion of a sea-bird. She walked across the Park, and I followed, praising G.o.d, whose image she is. On the further side the Pole met her in his furs, and she walked with him for an hour in the sun. She had no wrappage to hide her blissful shape. Close-fitted, erect, free- moving, gracious as a young birch-tree. Master, she is the Holy One."
"You played Peeping Tom, my ingenuous young friend," said Senhouse, who was fastidious in such matters.
But Clyde cried out, "G.o.d forbid! Are you prying when you look at the sun!
Master, you need not grudge the Pole. He is nothing."
"I grudge no man anything he can get of her," said Senhouse. "He will get precisely what lies within his scope."
"He has the eyes of a rat," Glyde said.
Senhouse answered, "Rats and men alike seek their meat of the earth. And the rats get rat-food, and the men man"s food. Despoina"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s are very large." He turned to his poem, folded his jelab about his middle, and went out over the downs. Glyde saw him no more that day, nor, indeed, till the next morning, when he found him squatted over a pipkin simmering on the fire.
The year went on its course, and windy March broke into a wet, warm April.
Glyde sat at the knees of his master, and imbibed learning and fundamental morality. But now and then he absented himself for a day at a time, and was understood to get news from Salisbury market. He came back one day with a newspaper. Senhouse read without falter or comment:
"A marriage is arranged, and will take place in July, between Nevile Ingram of Wanless Hall, Felsboro", Yorks, and Sanchia-Josepha, youngest daughter of Thomas Welbore Percival of--Great c.u.mberland Place, W., and The Poultry, E.G."
In that night, or very early in the morning, Glyde disappeared without word or sign left behind him.
BOOK IV
SANCHIA IN LONDON
I
London in mid-May, slogging at its pleasures under the pale sun, might read one morning of an affray in Yorkshire, of a magistrate a.s.saulted, or undergardener in arms, and forget it in half-an-hour; but to Sanchia, unaccustomed to cower, some such chance paragraph seemed one spot the more upon her vesture, which contact with the Fulham Road had smirched already.
She had never taken cover before--and how could one be in such a place but to hide in it? With contracted brows and bosom oppressed, she watched the drifting millions go by, and her heart sank. Was she become as one of these? Is not to be ashamed to be shameful? And had she not been put to shame? If she was to hold up the head and feel the mouth of the winged steed that she rode, she must stable him elsewhere.
She wished to forget Wanless. Let it be as if it was not, and had never been. But she found that Glyde and his outrageous act made that not possible. They brought her down to London"s level--her in her white robe out of stainless air; here she was still, as Glyde had made her there, just a woman for men to quarrel over, or a bone for dogs. Her heart surged hot against Wanless; she could not, if she would, forget it--least of all in the Fulham Road.
She felt spotted in Mrs. Benson"s spotless dwelling--largely because it was Mrs. Benson"s, partly because a smell of fried herrings drifted in daily from the street. She felt herself the chosen of a servant, one for whom a clown had held battle; and then she found herself resenting the phrases, growing hot over them. A servant--Mrs. Benson, that staunch protectress! A clown--Struan--his thin frame throbbing with fire, and his eyes of a hawk in a cage, fa.r.s.et, communing with invisible things! Why, when he was rapt in his work he never saw her at all. She was a speck at his feet! He had sent her away once. "I"m busy," he had said, without looking at her; and she had gone away on tiptoe. These things vexed her to remember, and she felt that Mrs. Benson"s dwelling could not be hers.
Mrs. Benson, too, it must be owned, had an inc.u.mbrance, which she kept as far as might be in the lower regions of her house, but which was now and again encountered on the stair--a shambling son, one Joe, mostly in shirt --sleeves, distilling familiarity and beer from every pore. He was a ne"er- do-well, whom it was his mother"s cross and crown to keep in complete idleness. He cast dreadful looks, as of an equal in snugness, a fellow- minion, at the chiselled profile of our G.o.ddess, and was not long before he tried for a full-faced effect. Sanchia"s eyes of clear amaze should have cut him down, but they did not. His "Morning, Miss," was daily reminder of a shared clay. Sanchia made herself inaccessible, and Mrs.
Benson agonised.
To apologise for her son had been as futile as to make excuses for death; but she tried it. "You"ll overlook the partiality of a mother, Miss Percival? What am I to do? It"s not that I want him to lap syrup from a spoon--far from that. Idleness leads to impiety, and impiety anywhere, from Tattersal"s to the public, we all know. But think of what stings me.
I can"t abide the thought that here am I, large Mrs. Benson, with money to spare, turning my back upon my fatherless child. Yet nothing short of that will do it." Sanchia readily excused her; and then she turned her own back upon the Fulham Road. Pimlico found her a lodging, at the gates of whose dingy mysteries were parks, Westminster, the sky and the river, eternal things, making for tranquillity.
It had been her first impulse, the moment she reached London, to go to her father, with whom alone she had corresponded during her years of exile.
There was Vicky Sinclair, to be sure, her sister next in age; but Vicky was married to a man she knew nothing of, and she found herself shy.