Moth and Rust; Together with Geoffrey's Wife and The Pitfall. Mary Cholmondeley

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      "Yes," said Janet, not knowing to what she said "yes," but vaguely assenting to him in everything. And they leaned together by the sun-dial, soft cheek against tanned cheek, soft hand in hard hand.

      Could anything in life be more commonplace than two lovers and a rose? Have we not seen such groups portrayed on lozenge-boxes, and on the wrappers of French plums?

      And yet, what remains commonplace if Love but touch it as he passes?

      Let Memory open her worn picture-book, where it opens of itself, and make answer.

      Anne saw the lovers, but they did not see her, as she ran down the steps cut in the turf to the little bridge across the trout stream. She had left Mrs. Trefusis composed into a resigned nap, and she felt at liberty to carry her aching spirit to seek comfort and patience by the brook.

      Anne, the restrained, disciplined, dignified woman of the world, threw herself down on her face in the short, sun-warm grass.

      Is the heart ever really tamed? As the years pass we learn to keep it behind bolts and bars. We marshal it forth on set occasions, to work manacled under our eyes, and then goad it back to its cell again. But is it ever anything but a caged Arab of the desert, a wild fierce prisoner in chains, a captive Samson with shorn locks which grow again, who may one day snap his fetters, and pull down the house over our heads.

      Anne set her teeth. Her passionate heart beat hard against the kind bosom of the earth. How we return to her, our Mother Earth, when life is too difficult or too beautiful for us! How we fling ourselves upon her breast, upon her solitude, finding courage to encounter joy, insight to bear sorrow. First faint foreshadowing of the time when we, "short-lived as fire, and fading as the dew," shall go back to her entirely.

      Anne lay very still. She did not cry. She knew better than that. Tears are for the young. She hid her convulsed face in her hands, and shuddered violently from time to time.

      How long was she to bear it? How long was she to drag herself by sheer force through the days, endless hour by hour? How long was she to hate the dawn? How long was she to endure this intermittent agony, which released her only to return? Was there to be no reprieve from the invasion of this one thought? Was there no escape from this man? Was not her old friend the robin on his side? The meadowsweet feathered the hedgerow. The white clover was in the grass, together with the little purple orchid. Were they not all his confederates? Had he bribed the robin to sing of him, and the scent in the white clover against her cheek to goad her back to acute remembrance of him, and the pine-trees to speak continually of him?

      "He is rich enough," said poor Anne to herself, with something between a laugh and a sob.

      But he had not bribed the brook. Tormented spirits ere now have walked in dry places, seeking rest and finding none. But has any outcast from happiness sought rest by running water, and found it not?

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

      "I have not sinned against the God of Love."

      —Edmund Gosse.

      When Anne returned to the house an hour or two later she heard an alien voice and strident laugh through the open door of the drawing-room as she crossed the hall, and she crept noiselessly upstairs towards her own room. She felt as if she were quite unable to bear so soon again the strain of that small family party. But halfway up the stairs her conscience pricked her. Was all well in the drawing-room? She sighed, and went slowly downstairs again.

      All was not well there.

      Mrs. Trefusis was sitting frozen upright in her high-backed chair, listening with congealed civility to the would-be-easy conversation, streaked with nervous laughter, of a young man. Anne saw at a glance that he must be Janet's brother, and she instinctively divined that, on the strength of his sister's engagement, he was now making, unasked, his first call on Mrs. Trefusis.

      Fred Black was a tall, sufficiently handsome man seen apart from Janet. He could look quite distinguished striding about in well-made breeches among a group of farmers and dealers on market-day. But taken away from his appropriate setting, and inserted suddenly into the Easthope drawing-room, in Janet's proximity, he changed like a chameleon, and appeared dilapidated, in spite of being over-dressed, irretrievably second-rate, and unwholesome-looking. He was so like his sister that a certain indefinable commonness, not of breeding but of character, and a suggestion of cunning and insolence observable in him, were thrown into high relief by the strong superficial resemblance of feature between them.

      Janet was sitting motionless and embarrassed before the tea-table, waiting for the tea to become of brandied strength. Mrs. Trefusis, possibly mindful of Anne's appeal, had evidently asked her future daughter-in-law to pour out tea for her. And Janet, to the instant annoyance of the elder woman, had carefully poured cream into each empty cup as a preliminary measure.

      George was standing in sullen silence by the tea-table, vaguely aware that something was wrong, and wishing that Fred had not called.

      The strain relaxed as Anne entered.

      Anne came in quickly, with a gentle expectancy of pleasure in her grave face. She gave the impression of one who has hastened back to congenial society.

      If this be hypocrisy, Anne was certainly a hypocrite. There are some natures, simple and patient, who quickly perceive and gladly meet the small occasions of life. Anne had come into the world willing to serve, and she did not mind whom she served. She did gracefully, even gaily, the things that others did not think worth while. This was, of course, no credit to her. She was made so. Just as some of us are so fastidiously, so artistically constituted as to make the poor souls who have to live with us old before their time.

      Mrs. Trefusis' face became less knotted. Janet gave a sigh of relief. George said: "Hi, Ponto! How are ye?" and affably stirred up his sleeping retriever with his foot.

      Anne sat down by Janet, advised her that Mrs. Trefusis did not like cream, and then, while she swallowed a cup of tea sweetened to nausea, devoted herself to Fred.

      His nervous laugh became less strident, his conversation less pendulous between a paralysed constraint and a galvanized familiarity. Anne loved horses, but she did not talk of them to Fred, though, from his appearance, it seemed as if no other subject had ever occupied his attention.

      Why is it that a passion for horses writes itself as plainly as a craving for alcohol on the faces of the men and women who live for them?

      Anne spoke of the Boer war in its most obvious aspects, mentioned a few of its best-known incidents, of which even he could not be ignorant. Janet glanced with fond pride at her brother, as he declaimed against the Government for its refusal to buy thousands of hypothetical Kaffir ponies, and as he posted Anne in the private workings of the mind of her cousin, the Prime Minister. Fred had even heard of certain scandals respecting the hospitals for the wounded, and opined with decision that war could not be conducted on rose-water principles, with a bottle of eau-de-Cologne at each man's pillow.

      "Fine woman that!" said Fred to Janet afterwards, as she walked a few steps with him on his homeward way. "Woman of the world. Knows her way about. And how she holds herself! A little thin perhaps, and not much colour, but shows her breeding. Who is she?"

      "Lady СКАЧАТЬ