"The house parties there have the reputation of being amusing," I suggested.
She shook her head.
"It was not that. Can you make no better guess?"
"I am a dunce at riddles," I admitted.
"You are a dunce at many things," she replied. "The reason I came was because I knew that you were living in these parts, and I had a fancy to see you again."
"You are very good," I remarked.
She looked at me critically.
"You have not changed," she said slowly. "One would almost say that the life of a recluse agrees with you. You have by no means the white and wasted look which I expected. Is it fame which you have found so potent a tonic?"
I laughed lightly.
"Don"t call it fame," I answered. "Success, if you will. My profession is so much of a lottery. A whiff of public opinion, a criticism which hits the popular fancy, and the bubble is floated. I"m not pretending that I don"t appreciate it, but it was a stroke of luck all the same."
She was silent for a few moments. From outside we could hear the jingling of harness as Mrs. Jerningham"s fat bays resented the onslaught of officious flies. Nearer at hand there was only the lazy humming of bees to break the stillness of the summer afternoon. Lady Delahaye sighed.
"You are talking nonsense, and you know it," she said. "I do not want to flatter you. Any man who has the trick of the pen, and chooses to give himself wholly and utterly away, can write a powerful story."
"I am afraid that I do not understand you," I protested.
"Yes, you do. You cut open your own heart, and you offered the world a magnifying gla.s.s to study its wounds. You wrote your own story. You told the tale of your own suffering. Of course it was strong, of course it rang with all the truth of genius. So you loved that child, Arnold! You, a man of the world, not a callow schoolboy. You loved her magnificently.
Did she know?"
"She did not know," I answered. "She never will know."
"She may read the book!"
"She may read it, and yet not know," I answered.
"It is true," she murmured. "Unless she loved herself she might not understand."
Again we were silent for a while. The perfume of the cedars floated upon the hot breathless air. Lady Delahaye half closed her eyes and leaned back.
"You read the newspapers, Sir Hermit?"
"Sometimes."
"You have heard the news from Waldenburg?"
"I read of the King"s death."
"And of the betrothal of the Princess Isobel?"
"Yes. I have read also of that."
"The cousins will both be the consorts of reigning sovereigns, small though their kingdoms may be. One reads great things of Adelaide. Her people call her already "the well-beloved.""
A swift rush of thought carried me back to the dark stormy crossing, when the rain had beaten in our faces, and the wind came booming down the Channel. Adelaide stood once more by my side. I heard the quiet, bitter words, the low, pa.s.sionate cry of her troubled heart. "The well-beloved" of her people! After all, race tells.
"I spoke but twice alone to the Princess Adelaide," I said. "I learnt enough of her, however, to be sure that in any position she would do the thing that was right and gracious."
"And so will Isobel," Lady Delahaye said. "I know the race well. The men are degenerates, but the women have nerve to rule and courage to hold their own against the world. Isobel"s future may well be the more brilliant of the two. Can you realize, I wonder, that Isobel of Waldenburg was once the child who filled your brain with such strange fancies?"
"I never think," I answered, "of Isobel of Waldenburg."
"You are wise," she answered. "She is as surely separated from us eternally as though she had made that little journey from which one does not return. Yet you--you are going to hug your wounds all your life. Is that wise, my friend?"
I laughed softly.
"You are mistaken," I a.s.sured her. "I have no wounds--not even regrets.
I believe that there are few men happier. Look at my home!"
"It is beautiful," she admitted.
"My gardens, my flowers, my cedar-tree and my books," I said. "These are all a joy to me. What more can a man want? Friends have moods, and they pa.s.s away out of one"s life. The friends who smile from my study wall are patient and always ready. There is one to fit every hour. They do not change. They are always ready to show me the way into the world beautiful, to cheer me when I am sad, to laugh with me when I am gay.
You must not waste any sympathy on me, Lady Delahaye. The man who has learnt to live alone is the man who has learnt the greatest lesson life has to teach. He is the man for whom the sun shines always, who carries with him for ever the magic key."
Lady Delahaye disturbed the smoothness of my turf with the point of her parasol.
"Are there no times," she asked in a low tone, "when these things fail you? No times when like calls for like, when the human part of you finds the comfort of ashes a dead thing? You and your books and your flowers!"
she cried scornfully, raising her head and looking at me with heightened colour. "Bah! You are a man, are you not, like the others? How long will these content you? How long will you stop your ears and forget that life has pa.s.sions and joys which these dead things can never yield to you?"
"Until," I answered, "the magician comes who can make me believe it. And I am afraid, Lady Delahaye, that he has pa.s.sed me by."
She rose to her feet.
"I am answered," she said. "I promise you that I will not intrude again into this Paradise of wood and stone. Give me a cigarette to keep off these flies, and take me down to the carriage. Thanks! If one might venture upon a prophecy, my dear Arnold, I think that I can see your fate very clearly written. I do not even need your hand to read it."
"Would the spell," I asked, "be broken if I shared the knowledge?"
"Not in the least," she answered, with a hard little laugh. "You will become one of those half-mad sort of creatures whom people call cranks, or you will marry your housekeeper. In either case you will deserve your fate."
So Lady Delahaye drove away down the white dusty road, and I walked back to the study from whence her coming had brought me. As I sat down to my interrupted work I smiled. How little she understood!
I wrote till seven o"clock. Punctually at that hour there was a discreet knock at the door, and my servant reminded me that it was time to change. At a quarter before eight I strolled into the garden and selected a piece of heliotrope for the b.u.t.tonhole of my dinner coat. A few minutes later my dinner was served.
My table was a small round one set in front of the open French windows.
Looking a little to the right I could see the extent of my domain--a low laurel hedge, a sloping field beyond, in which my two Alderneys were standing almost knee-deep amongst the b.u.t.tercups; a ring fence, a paddock, and, beyond, the road. To the left were my gardens, the sweetness of which came stealing through the window with the very faintest breath of the slowly moving air, bordered by that ancient red brick wall, mellowed and crumbling with the sun and west winds of generations, and in front of me my lawn and the cedar-tree under which Lady Delahaye had sat an hour or so ago and prophesied evil things. My lips parted into a smile as I thought of her words. Did she indeed think me a creature so weak as to pile gloom on the top of sorrow, to shut my eyes to all the joys of life, because supreme happiness was denied me, to play skittles with my self-respect, and--marry a kitchen-maid? I, who had turned over great pages in the book of life! I, who had known Feurgeres! Wallace had left the room for a moment, and I raised my gla.s.s full of clear amber wine, and drank silently my evening toast. I drank to the memory of the greatest love I had ever known, to the man whose strong and beautiful life had taught me how to fashion my own. Perhaps my thoughts flashed a little further afield. It was so always when I thought of Feurgeres, but it was to the joyous and wonderful memory of those earlier days, to Isobel the child I drank. Isobel of Waldenburg had pa.s.sed away into the world of shadows. I courted no heartaches by vain thoughts of her. I pored over no papers to find mention of her name. I was content with what had gone before.
I morbid! Lady Delahaye had judged me wrongly indeed. I, before whom two great worlds stretched themselves continually, full of countless treasures, always changing, yet always beautiful. Only yesterday I had seen the sun rise. I had seen the still slumbering world break into quivering life. I had seen the curtain roll up on a new act of this most wonderful of all plays to the music of an orchestra hidden indeed in my grove of chestnuts, but sweeter, more joyous, more full of the promise of perfect things than ever a violin touched by human fingers. Then the thrushes had hopped out on to my dew-spangled lawn, where before the hot sun the grey, gossamer-like mist was vanishing like breath from a mirror; my roses raised their heads, and the breeze from the west--a lazy, fluttering breeze--borrowed their sweetness; my peaches cracked through their full skins upon the wall, and the bees commenced their eternal lullaby of murmuring sounds. Then at night--such a night as this, too, promised to be--I had watched the shadows come creeping over the land when the sun had set and the moon had barely risen; a new order of things had come. The fire of the day was replaced by the infinite peace of night. Beyond the confines of my little domain the whole world lay hushed and hidden. There were few stars as yet to mock with their pa.s.sionless serenity the toilers of the earth, worn out with the long day"s struggle. Only a great quiet--a great, peaceful quiet--and the shadows of dim things!
I morbid, with eyes to see these things, with a whole room full of waiting friends, ready at a touch of my fingers, the turning of a page, to take me by the hand and lead into even other worlds as beautiful as this, to scale with me the mountains, or to wander along the flower-strewn valleys. Lady Delahaye was a very foolish woman. She had seen nothing of my well-ordered household, of the ease, the luxury--simple, yet almost Sybaritic--with which I had surrounded myself. She did not understand life from my point of view--life as Feurgeres had lived it. The life sentimental, but not pa.s.sionate; the life to be evolved by will from the tangle of bruised hopes and hot desires. The life----
I set down my gla.s.s empty. The last drop had tasted like vinegar. Always one has to fight, and for a while I sat in silence before my table piled now with dishes of fruit. My hands gripped the sides of my chair, my eyes were fixed upon a twinkling light which had shot out from the distant hillside. Always one has to fight for the things worth having--and the pain soon pa.s.ses.