Ainslee's Magazine/The Duchess in Pursuit/'Intermezzo'
III.—“Intermezzo.”
You have read how the elderly Duchess of Ashminster wakes up suddenly one fine spring day to the fact that she is being bored into premature old age by her sheltered, conventional life, and seizes a Heaven-sent opportunity to slip away from it all for a little taste of freedom. One of her first encounters is with a young woman of the underworld who takes her for a fugitive from justice and advises her to dye her lovely white hair, as a means of escaping detection. The duchess, carried away by the spirit of adventure, rashly accepts the advice, realizing too late that what's dyed cannot be undyed. Rather than face her conservative friends and acquaintances with coal-black locks, she resolves to continue her adventures incognito until the dye wears off.
IT was impossible to keep the affair secret.
The whole of the duchess' world, and a good part of the world which regards duchesses and their kind somewhat in the light of interesting national relics, rang with it for the proverbial nine days and even more. And it must be admitted that the conduct of an elderly duchess of irreproachable character who suddenly breaks her moorings and sets out on a sea of adventure without allowing the world so much as an explanatory interview is sufficiently startling to give rise to a crop o£ rumors.
The behavior of the duchess' daughter, the Lady Angela, made matters considerably worse, too. If the Lady Angela had only been at all what she should have been been, it is possible that her mother's escapade might have been sprinkled with decent oblivion, at any rate until her return to the fold. As it was, the Lady Angela kept the scandal alive by adding one of her own. In so doing, she surprised no one. Society had long since ceased to be surprised at anything the Lady Angela did, though it was unceasingly dismayed. A duchess' daughter who refuses to attend smart functions, who haunts art schools, associates with quite impossible people, and wears impossible clothes, smacks of red revolution and the guillotine.
The fact that she was just twenty and rather pretty and more than rather lovable added to the seriousness of her offense.
More than one earnest attempt had been made at reform. The duchess had tried, and now that she had gone—thereby seeming to offer a silent, but vivid explanation of Angela's amazingness—Sir John O'Neill, the Lady Angela's appointed guardian, supported by a series Of baffled chaperons, had attempted the task with even less success. The Lady Angela, with the bit well between her teeth, careered wildly along her chosen course.
Something like anarchy ensued. The solemn ducal residence in Park Lane, the scene of how many great historical gatherings, became a club for impossible people who dropped in at all hours of the day and night to partake of the perpetual picnic in the Georgian dining room and to discuss pre-Raphaelite futurism, or something that sounded like that, in the Louis XV. drawing-room, to the horror of James, the footman.
On her twentieth birthday, the Lady Angela gave a feast which was merely a larger, severer attack of the chronic picnic. The whole house swarmed like a hotel. In the remotest fastnesses, hungry, feverishly enthusiastic individuals could be found talking cubes and triangles over chicken-and-cress sandwiches. Strains of Debussy and other more jovial moderns issued from the state music room. It was a wonderful and terrible evening.
The Lady Angela and those dearest to her were assembled in the drawing-room. For all that she wore her oldest clothes, she looked exceedingly charming as she stood by the fire, ruffling her already curly hair with a restless hand as she quarreled with a Dante-visaged youth on the question of the function of art in the twentieth century. The rest of her guests were ranged about the room in various attitudes of picturesque ease. The male part of the population wore its hair long, and the womenfolk showed a tendency to wear it short, and they were all shabby. There was, indeed, a general suggestion that to be deliberately agreeable to the eye is an offense against art.
A young man stood at the Lady Angela's side. He did not join in the conversation nor was he apparently interested in the Dante-visaged youth. His whole attention was given to the Angela, whether she was talking or not. He had ruddy hair and a face that would have been quite objectionably beautiful had it not been for the strength and vigor and joy of life that were carved into every classic line and that burned in the fine blue eyes. His clothes were shabby and no doubt ready made, but he carried his lithe young body too well for them to look grotesque.
Presently he touched the Lady Angela's elbow.
“I want to show you something,” he said. “Do come!”
It was not a whisper, and it cut very rudely through the Dante-visaged youth's discourse, and it speaks well for the real character of the Lady Angela's friends that when she slipped her arm through the interrupter's arm and left the Dante-visaged youth and art's function in the twentieth century in mid-air, the former accepted the situation and went off in search of another sandwich with perfect good humor.
The Lady Angela and her companion, meantime, sought an untenanted corner in the great mansion. Some sort of understanding must have existed between them, for without discussion they made their way to the portrait gallery in the west wing where, as yet, the revelers had not penetrated. The place was softly lit by cunningly concealed electric lights which lifted the features of the Lady Angela's ancestors out of the fading backgrounds and made the jewels on the ladies' aristocratic hands sparkle and the martial accoutrements of the gentlemen glitter with living splendor.
Some of the Lady Angela's ancestors were handsome, and some of them, to be quite frank, were not. The Cromwellian under whom the modern couple came to rest had a dour look, as if he had been brought up on “Paradise Lost” and had never quite lost the taste of it. They gazed up at him for a moment, but without interest.
The young man put his hand into his pocket and drew out a piece of folded paper.
“That's what I wanted to give you,” he said. “I did that last night.”
She held the neatly written pages to the light and read in silence under his bright, watching eyes. She read very slowly, and when she had done, she looked up and their eyes met.
“Read it to me!” she said.
He obeyed without parley. It was a poem—a love lyric. Whether it was good o1 bad only the coldest of cold-blooded critics could have told. As well might you tear to pieces the dawn of a spring morning, or the song of a bird, as criticize those fiery, headlong verses. The young man read them in an impassioned undertone, his fine artist's hand clenched on the brass rail beside him, his head so close to the Lady Angela's that the gold and brown of their hair seemed to mingle. When he had finished, they were both silent for a breathless minute, looking at each other.
“That's the first poem you have ever read to me, Robert,” she said at last.
“I've written others,” he answered. “Every time I see you, a new one is born in me.”
“Then you must have written a great many.”
“Not nearly enough.”
Another silence in which the Cromwellian gentleman regarded them with an increased sourness. Robert Drake thrust the poem carelessly back into his pocket.
“Old Browne came round to the studio this morning,” he said abruptly. “He had promised to have a look at my 'Perseus,' but I didn't really expect him. Well, he stood in front of it—you know how he stands—a sort of waiting-to-pounce look—and then he just shrugged his shoulders and said, 'There's nothing I can tell you, Drake, but there are one or two things in that picture I'd be damned glad to have done.' And then he just stalked out.”
The Lady Angela's laugh was subdued and tremulous with a curious, suppressed excitement.
“How like him! But it's true. One day Rossetti's laurels will look faded, Robert.”
“If I had you always with me, I could write better verses and paint finer pictures than Rossetti ever dreamed of,” he answered, with youth's glorious sincerity. He covered her hand on the rail with his. “Marry me!” he said.
She looked straight at him.
“I want to,” she answered quite simply.
The Cromwellian grimaced, and a frivolous, befeathered gentleman of the Restoration Period stared. Such an exhibition of unblushing honesty was equally unknown to both of them. No doubt, disunited as they were on other matters, their blood boiled to the same temperature when their descendant and the unknown, badly dressed plebeian infolded each other in a second's joyous embrace. They were destined to receive worse shocks. Gently the Lady Angela disengaged herself and lifted a laughing, happy face to her companion's.
“So you will marry me, after all? And what about your principles? You remember what you said?”
“Yes, I do and I meant it.” He kept his arm over her shoulder and they leaned back against the brass rail and grew serious. “But if you were ten times a Lady Something-or-other, I'd marry you. Just because I love you, I'd have to save you. And besides, I've been thinking it over. One's got a duty toward the pool devils. One can't ignore them as if they didn't exist. Supposing we started a mission to the aristocracy—kind of rescue work, you know. Try to lift them up to our level, educate them—and all that.”
The Lady Angela nodded thoughtfully.
“We might have started on mother,” she considered, “but mother seems to have ideas of her own, and besides, we don't know where she is. But there's Sir John and Colonel Magree and Mrs. Cochrane—heaps of them. As Sir John's my guardian and we want to get married, I think we'd better rescue him first. It'll want some doing, Robert.”
“Why? You mean he'll make objections?” The young man threw back his head. “I'd like to see him!” he challenged.
“Well, dear, you probably will. And you mustn't be impatient with him. You see, he's old and has antediluvian ideas. And besides, the poor, dear old thing is in an awful state of mind just now about mother. He was madly in love with her when he was a boy and it sort of simmers on. It's quite pathetic”
“Rather ridiculous, I should say,” Robert Drake put in somewhat coldly.
“Oh, I don't know. Perhaps we shall feel like that when we're old.”
He looked down at her with a smiling tenderness.
“I can't imagine you old, sweetheart.”
“No, I can't imagine it, either. It must be perfectly horrid!”
“Beastly! Just as if one were half dead, with all one's faculties and emotions withered, and a regular nuisance to every one”
A cough, discreet, yet ironical, interrupted the poet artist's discourse on old age, and he turned with some annoyance to rebuke the intruder. A tall, slenderly built figure stood in the curtained doorway. Something in the cut of the faultless clothes, in the carriage of the fine head, even in the character of the clean-shaven aristocratic features was vaguely reminiscent of another century. For a moment the young man imagined that an ancestor had stepped down from his frame to challenge him. Then the Lady Angela uttered an exclamation of recognition and qualified pleasure.
“Why, guardian!” she said. “You're the very person we were talking about.”
“So I gathered,” Sir John O'Neill retorted. He adjusted his eyeglass and, while accepting the Lady Angela's kiss, regarded her companion with an unflattering interest. “I came here in the faint hope of finding you, Angela,” he continued. “Nobody seemed to know where you were, and the confusion is terrible. May I ask what, exactly, is happening?”
“It's my birthday feast,” she explained.
“Is it? I have read descriptions of a Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath which suggest comparisons. Personally, I have never encountered such an extraordinary assembly. I wonder, Angela, whether you ever consider what your mother would feel if she knew what you are doing?”
The Lady Angela chuckled.
“And I wonder if mother ever considers what I should feel if I knew what she was doing,” she retorted maliciously.
Sir John found no sufficiently apt answer and the conversation hung fire. Throughout, the two men had continued to stare at each other with an increasing animosity. Now the Lady Angela introduced them. Her guileless sincerity might have inspired admiration at a less painful moment.
“Robert dear, this is our first patient—Sir John O'Neill. Guardian, this is Robert Drake. It's so fortunate that you've come just now. It'll save my writing to you, and I do hate letters. Robert and I are going to be married.”
The young painter awaited an explosion with haughty indifference, but he miscalculated the aristocratic temperament. There was not a flicker of change on the primly composed face. The Cromwellian gentleman and the rake of the Restoration Period were not Sir John's ancestors, but he bore them an unmistakable resemblance in his imperturbable pride, his bearing, his “infernal superiority,” as the young painter dubbed it mentally with fast-increasing venom.
“And so,” said Sir John amicably, “you propose marrying my ward, Mr. Drake?”
“I do,” Mr. Drake returned without embellishment.
“May I ask who you are?”
“My name is already known to you.”
Sir John smiled faintly, ironically.
“I am afraid your name conveys very little to me. May I ask—what are you?”
“A man.”
“Indeed? The description is not very helpful, Mr. Drake. There are many men”
“Not so many as you would think,” was the bitter and significant answer.
As may be seen, the situation was not improving. The Lady Angela pressed her guardian's arm and frowned restrainingly at her lover.
“Robert is a poet and a painter, guardian,” she explained. “He's going to do ever so much for art”
“No doubt. In the meantime, what does he propose doing for you? I presume, sir, that you are in a position to support Lady Angela in a way becoming to her rank?”
Robert Drake's eyes blazed with the light of battle.
“I despise rank. I abhor your artificial distinctions. I refuse to recognize them. I am Angela's equal and she is mine. That's all I care about.”
“I can well believe it.” Sir John's manner grew suaver, more polished, in proportion as his opponent's became rude and heated. “But other people may not think quite as you do, Mr. Drake. They may think that Lady Angela should marry a man of her own world—of her own position.”
Robert Drake made a little satirical bow.
“It is my ardent wish to save her from such a hideous fate,” he said.
There was a bleak silence. Lady Angela looked half amused, half anxious, but neither of the two men seemed to remember her. They were very angry with each other and with themselves. They had both gone a great deal further than they had meant, Sir John because Drake was so young, so insolently young and ardent, Drake because Sir John was so much older, so self-controlled, so damnably in the right, and because, for all his genuine beliefs, that gallery of crushingly superior people whose painted features were riveted in a sneer at his expense made him feel awkward, plebeian, idiotic.
He stood there glowering sullenly, and it was Sir John who steadied to the attack.
“If you are asking my permission to marry Lady Angela, you are scarcely choosing the most tactful means to persuade me,” he began coldly.
“I am not asking your permission.”
“Believe me, then, an attempt to propitiate the duchess”
“Propitiate!” The word acted like the cut of a whip on an aching wound. The young man flung back his fine head. “I wouldn't propitiate her! I'd I'd rather cut off my hand than try! I wouldn't go near her except for Angela's sake! I don't approve of her. She's a member of a parasitic class of idle good-for-nothings”
“You are not respectful, sir!” Sir John blazed out.
“Why should I be respectful? How should I respect a person who's descended from an imbecile freak like that?” He indicated the outraged Cromwellian gentleman. “Or that!” And the insulting finger passed on to the bewigged and befeathered follower of the Gay Monarch, who scowled back impatiently.
Lady Angela gasped a little. Sir John's smile was wintry.
“I presume you include my ward in that general denunciation,” he remarked grimly.
The young man flashed around.
“I don't! Angela can't help being what she is. She would if she could, wouldn't you, Angela? She thinks as I do, don't you?”
He waited triumphantly. The Lady Angela crimsoned. She had just made the discovery that to say rude things about one's family is a privilege limited to its members.
“I—I don't think you ought to talk like that about my people, Robert,” she said. “I think you're—you're rather rude”
“But you said yourself they were a lot of old frumps.”
“Well, it wasn't nice of me, and anyhow they're not your people.”
He grew white to the lips—terribly, tragically calm.
“You must choose between them and me, Angela.”
“I can't. How ridiculous you are! My people are my people. I can't help having ancestors. You've got ancestors.”
“I haven't.”
“You have.”
Their eyes met in a blaze of wounded pride, of outraged and betrayed love. Very deliberately Robert Drake took the crumpled lyric and tore it across and across, scattering the pieces over the parquet flooring.
“Finished!” he said. “Finished!”
And he turned and strode headlong from the scene of disaster.
For a minute, neither the Lady Angela nor Sir John moved. The latter caught a glimpse of her profile, and with great wisdom made no attempt at reproof or consolation. He withdrew quietly to the corridor, to give his ward time to cry away her first grief.
But the Lady Angela did not cry, Instead, she stood in front of the Cromwellian ancestor and returned his disapproving stare with a malignant dislike that would have caused a more sensitive gentleman to fade miserably from the canvas.
II.
Quite a trivial, yet significant incident drew the duchess' attention to the fact that things could not go on as they were.
For six days she had dwelt in the refined seclusion of the Board Residence, No. — Brankenhill Square, Bloomsbury, and during that time she had not only rested from her recent adventures, but had, she firmly believed, escaped the sleuthhounds of the press, whose thirst for an authentic interview must have been literally bloodthirsty. Among her fellow boarders, there was not a soul who suspected the identity of Mrs. Elizabeth Montague—a very natural-sounding nom de guerre, the duchess flattered herself. If there was a suspicion anywhere, it lurked in the breast of Mrs. Tykes, the landlady, and it concerned the duchess' solvency rather than her character.
On the seventh morning, this suspicion came to a head. It demonstrated itself in a rather greasy envelope slipped underneath the door. The contents of the envelope indicated that prompt settlement would be acceptable, and there was an unpleasant tone about the whole document that reached even the duchess' unaccustomed ears.
Now the duchess had never had a bill in her own hands before, and for a moment she was quite pleasurably thrilled, much as a schoolboy is thrilled by his first watch. Subsequently, however, it occurred to her that bills expect to be paid and that all the money she had happened to have about her on her escape had since gone on the bare necessities of life—ridiculous things like toothbrushes, which might have grown on trees, so little had the duchess ever been concerned with their purchase.
She sat in front of her cracked looking-glass and considered herself and her position thoughtfully. She had set out on her adventures a white-haired, middle-aged lady, and the vision in the looking-glass was black-haired and absurdly, rather shockingly youthful looking.
“I could never go back like this,” she thought. “I must go away somewhere till the dye works off and I—I look respectable again. It's the only dignified thing to do.”
The postponed return gave her so much pleasure that she went down to breakfast in a very cheerful frame of mind, although the problem of the bill remained unsolved.
The hour was late, and the only other occupant of the table was a young man of lean and rather unwholesome appearance who, nevertheless, interested the duchess considerably. In the first place, she had never met anything like him before and, in the second, his conversation at dinner gave her to understand that what Edwin Mortimer didn't know about life wasn't worth knowing. Now the duchess knew nothing at all about life and was correspondingly impressed.
she entered the murky dining room, Mr. Mortimer, who was also something of a ladies' man and a perfect gentleman to boot, rose and bowed.
“Morning, Mrs. Montague.”
“Good morning,” the duchess returned pleasantly.
They both settled down to an attack on their old and dubious sausage, and it was while seeking out the least dubious portions that the bill reoccurred to the duchess. She looked up, impelled by a sudden inspiration.
“Mr. Mortimer,” she said, “you have some experience of the world, haven't you?”
Mr. Mortimer winked.
“Well, just a little,' he admitted modestly.
“I mean—no doubt unusual situations are not unfamiliar to you. I wonder if you have ever known any one who was temporarily financially embarrassed—owing for their board and lodging, for instance?”
Mr. Mortimer choked over his coffee.
“The situation is not unfamiliar, madam,” he said and patted himself significantly on the breast. “No—not at all unfamiliar, I should say.”
“Perhaps, then, you could advise me I mean what would you do if you were in such a position?”
“You mean what would I do if I were you?”
“Well—yes.”
Mr. Edwin Mortimer considered. His eye, lighting on the duchess' rings, brightened with inspiration.
“Pop 'em,” he said briefly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said—pop 'em.” The duchess looked blank. He explained. “Put 'em up the spout—your uncle—you know.”
The duchess sighed perplexedly.
“All my uncles are dead,” she objected.
Mr. Mortimer exploded
“Well, mine isn't dead, anyhow,” he said. “You come along with me and try him.”
An hour later, Elizabeth, Duchess of Ashminster, in company with a seedy youth, came out of a gloomy little doorway over which hung the significant symbol of dire need. The duchess was delicately flushed. She had never had so much money in her own hands before. It was a new, a ridiculously delightful sensation. If you can imagine any one with a house in Park Lane, two or three large domains, and a rent roll running into five figures, being excited over a hundred pounds, you know exactly how the duchess felt.
Mr. Edwin Mortimer regarded her with gloomy awe.
“Fancy one of them being worth all that!” he remarked. “Should never have known it. You can settle with our old skinflint and have a good bit over. Wish I could!”
“Why, do you owe her money, too?” the duchess asked.
“Do I? should just think I do!” He gazed vaguely heavenward. “I say, Mrs. Montague, s'pose you couldn't oblige a fellow with a fiver, could you? Give it you back in three days—honor bright!”
The duchess produced a bank note with a delighted eagerness quite unfamiliar to Mr. Mortimer. He accepted it, regretfully feeling that he had missed the chance of his life.
“Well, you're a good sort, Mrs. Montague, I must say. Anything else I can do for you on the same terms?”
The duchess reflected earnestly.
“I want a house,” she said at last. “A furnished house in some desolate spot where I shall never meet a soul. I want at once. If you can find me one, I shall be very, very grateful.”
Mr. Mortimer stared. But the bank note was genuine and his not to reason why.
“Done!” he exclaimed. “If you don't have that house before lunch time, my name's not Edwin. Follow me!”
The duchess followed obediently and trustfully.
The house agent to whom they found their way was at first surprised, then suspicious, ultimately respectful. Mr. Mortimer felt for him. A lady who wanted a furnished house to-morrow, who refused all references pointblank, who was prepared to pay cash down, and who never so much as inquired after the drains, was a phenomenon. In the end, the house agent accepted her for Mr. Mortimer's excellent reason—the bank notes were genuine—backed by his private knowledge that the house in question was a drug on the market. So a hurried contract was drawn up, and the duchess left the office the tenant of a cottage on the Cornish coast and poorer to the amount of fifty pounds.
Mr. Mortimer was almost abject with respect.
“Money doesn't seem to worry you much, anyhow,” he declared. “Might be made of it, the way you toss it about. Well, it's the jolliest morning I've had for a long time—quite the jolliest. Never enjoyed myself so much. Call me up any time. If you want to back a winner or buy a locomotive, I'm your man, and don't you forget it! You're a sport, Mrs. Montague, and when E, Mortimer says a thing, he means it. So long. Toot a-loo.”
“Toot-a-loo!” said the duchess, in a fit of sheer absent-mindedness.
So Mr. Edwin Mortimer set gallant sail for his favorite place of refreshment, and the duchess walked down Regent Street.
It sounds a very unremarkable proceeding, and yet the duchess' heart thumped with excitement. She had never walked down Regent Street or any other streets before. She had never looked into shop windows or rubbed shoulders with people who paid her no particular respect. She had always arrived in her victoria and swept through widely opened portals into a bowing, respectful world whose contents seemed created solely for her satisfaction. And now she was pushed and jostled like other mortals, and nobody seemed to care a jot whether she was satisfied or not. She caught a glimpse of her face in a jeweler's glass, and it was as glowing and happy as a girl's.
The shops had never seemed so pretty. It was springtime. All the gayest and freshest stuffs and dresses decked the windows like the new leaves budding out on the gray, somber tints of winter. There was a blouse which especially caught the duchess' eye. It was the most delicate muslin, sprigged with pink roses. The duchess sighed deeply.
“There were no blouses in my day,” she thought. “And now I am too old.”
Still, she went into the shop. The shopwalker who swept down upon her frightened her. He was so terribly superior. The duchess murmured something about the seaside and suitable clothes, and she was passed on to a smart young lady with a cheerful eye and a French accent.
“Madame, go to the seaside? Then madame will want somezing light and gay. A few pretty blouses to begin, They will be the very thing for madame.”
The duchess' heart literally jumped.
“Do you really think so? Well—perhaps if you have something suitable—something like that.”
She indicated a dull-gray silk of severe and elderly cut. The young lady with the gay eye laughed and shook her head.
“Ah, mais non, madame! C'est trop vieux! It is for a lady already a leetle old. Now if madame will wait, I 'ave something in sprigged muslin”
“I—I know,” said the duchess tremulously. “I saw it in the window, but it wouldn't do. It wouldn't be suitable. It's—it's too young.”
“Too young!” The saleswoman positively sparkled indignation and protest. “But madame is young! The muslin is the very thing. Permettez moi to show madame”
The duchess wavered. She thought how nice French people were—how understanding. The sprigged muslin danced before her eyes.
“Well—if you really think—if you're quite sure”
“Bien sûr, madame!”
“Well, then, perhaps—perhaps I'll just look at it,” said the duchess breathlessly.
III.
The haunts and the friends of Robert Drake knew him no more. He was twenty-three, a rival to Rossetti into the bargain, and he turned his back on life with the finality and bitterness of his kind. In the morning, he went down to the rocky coast destined to be the scene of his premature decease and painted pictures which he destroyed the same evening; in the evening, he wrote odes denouncing women and an effete aristocracy with withering satire, destroying them in the morning. He ate next to nothing, though he was often quite vulgarly hungry, and his clothes were artistically disreputable. There was only one other cottage on the bay, a ramshackle building whose notice, “To let furnished,” had a battered, weather-beaten appearance, as if it had stood there a good many years already and expected to stand there for a good many more. Drake regarded it with gloomy satisfaction on his return from his morning's work. When it disappeared, he was thoroughly aggrieved, though also slightly excited. It is a tedious, boring business, dying of a broken heart at the twenty-three. He caught himself wondering who the new tenant was, and to atone for such a sign of life, composed a vicious stanza on the unknown vulgarian who was to break in upon the sacred precincts of his grief. But for all that, he kept a watchful eye on the cottage.
On the third morning after the disappearance of the signboard, he saw her.
He himself was seated on a peculiarly dangerous rock, where the spray, lashed up by the wild Atlantic, flung itself joyously about him, and the wind, blowing through his ruddy hair, and his debonair collarless shirt, and his look of profound, yet defiant melancholy, combined to make of him a romantic, Byronic figure. As for her, she stood immediately above him. The thrift that covered the cliffs like a glorious pink carpet made a fairy background for her fragility. She wore her black hair loosely coiled like a girl, and a gay muslin dress, and carried a parasol to match over one shoulder.
Robert Drake could see that her lips moved, but the thunder of the seas drowned her voice, and he could hear nothing. He did not want to hear. He resented her presence. At the same time, it was obviously impossible to sit there in stoic indifference while a lady addressed him. To the last, one must be chivalrous even to a sex that deserves no good of anybody. So he scrambled up the rocks by the most obviously dangerous path and saluted her with as much dignity as one can muster in a stiff southwestern breeze.
“I only wanted to ask you not to sit just there,” she said. “I know it's interfering, but it's worried me for the last hour. It's not a bit safe, you know.”
“It's perfectly safe for me,” he returned grimly.
“Why?” she asked, and smiled. “Are you an immortal?”
“Perhaps.” He thought her flippant. At the same time, he was too much an artist not to notice the arched brows over the dark eyes and the beautifully cut nose. “Those whom the gods don't love don't die young,” he added with a little ironical bow, and stalked off homeward to mark his extreme displeasure.
He met her again the next morning. She had on a different dress and carried a different parasol. He responded to her now, but coldly. Evidently she was not rebuffed. On the second morning, she wore a smart serge skirt and a muslin blouse sprigged with roses. He noticed the blouse. After all, he considered, it was no use being angry with her. She could not possibly know that he was dying of a broken heart unless he told her, and it is not usual to thrust such information on a total stranger. So he decided on a more gracious bearing when they next met.
But the following morning provided a tempest, with lowering skies and a howling gale and a black sea and an empty cliff. He went home early that day. The little Cornish girl who brought him his provisions from the nearest farm told him, in answer to a casual question, that she cooked for the lady at the cottage. She added that this lady had trunks and trunks of clothes, which gave Drake a vicious satisfaction.
“Idiotic, flighty, soulless creature!” he commented mentally.
That afternoon the tempest rose in fury. Drake sat by the rain-swept window and gazed gloomily at the desolate cottage lying half hidden by the swelling sand dunes. What had brought such a butterfly of a woman to such a desolate spot? Some tragedy, perhaps. The thought gave him a curious thrill of pleasure—a glow of human pity. When darkness descended and shut out the narrowing vista of storm, he lit the lamp and, drawing the shabby curtains, sat down to write. It was a sonnet addressed to “The Unknown.”
In the midst of it, some one tapped at the door. Drake rose with a groan. He had barely lifted the latch when the door burst open and the wind whirled a drenched, disheveled, gasping figure into his arms. He righted the unexpected apparition, closed the door, and set his back against it. Then, in the flickering lamplight, he recognized the lady from the cottage.
She looked up at him with a breathless, half-frightened smile.
“I'm your neighbor, you know,” she said.
“And I am yours,” he answered, unexpectedly gallant, “and at your service.”
“I don't know what you will think of me, breaking in like this on you,” she went on in little jerks. “I—I interrupted before, and you were very angry. You must be raging this time.”
“I'm not,” he answered. “Last time was different.” Under one arm, she carried a round tin, which she now held out for inspection.
“It's this brought me,” she explained, not very lucidly. “It's the only thing I've got for supper. I began opening it last week, and the tin opener broke. I thought perhaps you would do it for me.”
Drake examined the tin. It had a jagged, battered look as if many strange implements had been employed on it. He sniffed suspiciously at the contents.
“Are you sure it was only a week ago?” he asked.
“Quite sure.”
“Well, anyway, I think it's beyond hope. I'll put it in the coal hole and it'll be safer there.”
Her face fell. If she was not a girl—and he saw not that she was not—she had strangely youthful eyes.
“But it's my supper!” she exclaimed hopelessly. “And I'm so hungry!”
“I've got an egg or two in the cupboard,” he volunteered. “I don't want them.”
“But my fire's gone out. I can't eat raw eggs, can I?
He considered her, running his hand over his untidy hair. After all, one couldn't be a selfish cad, even if one's heart were broken.
“You shan't eat raw eggs,” he said nobly. “I'll cook them for you over my fire.”
“Oh, but I couldn't”
“Why not? Please—I'd like to.”
Though it was mere politeness, the last words had a really genuine ring in them that seemed to touch her. Her dark, sparkling eyes met his gayly.
“And I'd like you to, too,” she declared. “I'm so dreadfully hungry. It's very good of you, Mr.”
“Drake,” he added, “Robert Drake.”
A distinct, an amazed change passed over her features. Her look of confusion, surprise, pleasure, he knew not what, puzzled—delighted him.
“Perhaps you've heard of me,” he suggested modestly. “I'm a sort of poet painter, you know.”
“Oh, yes—of course I know. I—I've heard so often of you.”
He warmed toward her. He brought up the only armchair and cleared away the disordered pile of sketches and melancholy odes.
“And I'm a cook, too,” he declared with an amazingly assumed light-heartedness. “Just watch!”
She obeyed literally. Robert Drake liked her unquestioning trust in him. He felt sure that she had read his poems. He had done with women, but still it was nice to meet an appreciative soul.
“Tell me,” she said suddenly, “why were you so cross the first time we met?”
Drake straightened his shoulders and looked gloomily at the butter.
“I came down here to be alone,” he explained. “I wanted to get away from humanity—from it's falsity and humbug—to be alone with nature. That was why.”
“I know,” she nodded. “That's why I am here—to escape from people. There are times”—she pushed the dark hair back from her forehead, and he noted the beauty of her hand—“there are times, Mr. Drake, when even our dearest friends are—are unbearable.”
“I knew you would understand,” he said. “I felt you were different from the rest. You see—poets have a sort of instinct where people are concerned. For instance, I feel I know you quite well. I know what you are. At any rate“—he attacked the bread with a sudden seriousness—“I know what you are not.”
“Oh?” she said thoughtfully. “You don't know my name, do you?”
“I don't want to.” He came over to inspect the eggs in the boiling water and then stood beside her, flushed, eager, and boyish. “You see, I have my own name for you.”
“Have you?”
“I call you 'The Unknown.'”
He fished the eggs out of the water, and she smiled.
“Perhaps—perhaps we'd better leave it at that,” she said.
“Yes—I'd rather. Knowledge brings disillusionment.” He put the eggs on the table. “Let us forget for a moment the griefs that have brought us here. Let us be simple human beings in this intermezzo—without names—without titles—just ourselves!”
“Intermezzo!” she echoed dreamily. “Without names—or titles. Yes, I like that!”
“Dinner is served!” he announced with a deep bow.
They sat opposite each other and cracked eggs solemnly.
The storm raged without, and they looked up and smiled. They were very happy. And for a poet with a broken heart, Mr. Robert Drake ate an amazing supper.
After that they met every morning. She sat beside him among the thrift, while he painted, or often he threw his brushes aside and lay full length and declaimed Keats and Shelley, and sometimes Robert Drake, to the blue sky.
He had taken to collars, and the acrimonious odes and sonnets had become triolets and rondos of an almost intoxicated gayety.
As for her, her stock of dresses—the last always prettier and daintier than its predecessor—seemed unending, and curiously enough aroused no fury in the democratic bosom of the poet. And she herself grew prettier. The color brightened in her cheeks, her eyes sparkled, she held herself straighter, and there was youth in her step. Sometimes she blushed. Of course he knew that she was not a girl or even a very young woman. What did he care? He had done with youth,
One evening, as they sat together and watched the red sun go down in a blaze of glory, he read her his sonnet to “The Unknown.” He could see at once that she was deeply moved. Her lips quivered, and there was a suspicious moisture on her long lashes.
“You shouldn't have written that, Robert,” she said. She called him Robert now quite simply and naturally. “I am an old woman, and poets don't write poems to old women.”
“You're not old!” he answered ardently. “What do the years matter? Your heart is young and fresh as the flowers. That's all that matters. The years are nothing. I know women in the world”—he jerked his head as if indicating another sphere, and his tone darkened—“girls with faces like angels, whose hearts are as withered and old as a mummy's. I know what their youth is worth, and I despise them! I have done with them!”
She was silent for a moment.
“Is that why you said the gods didn't love you?” she asked.
He nodded. “How well you understand! Yes, I loved a girl like that. She belonged to that wretched, effete race of good-for-nothings which we misname the aristocracy. But I thought she was different. I loved her—Heaven knows how I loved her!—and in the end, when the choice had to be made, she chose her own kind—her doddering old ancestors, her bigoted old mother, a senile guardian—the whole caste of half-witted imbeciles wrapped in their mummy clothes of pride and prejudice”
“Oh, Robert!”
He caught her hand and kissed it.
“Forgive me. I know I am violent—pitiless. But it was my whole life they blighted.”
“But perhaps they didn't mean to—perhaps they'd be glad to get out of their mummy clothes.”
“Pooh, I'd like to see one of them brave enough!”
She looked dreamily out to sea.
“If one of them did—if one of them were brave enough to set out on an adventure—would you forgive her for being what she was?”
“Rather!” he answered eagerly. “I'd love her for it!”
She smiled.
“How young you are, Robert!”
“Old in disappointment and pain!” he retorted with recovered gloom. He was tragically silent for a moment and then went on: “If you hadn't come, I should have made an end to everything. You saved my life. You were so true so honest. You made me feel I could carry on to the bitter end. Not that it matters to any one now”
“It matters to me,” she interrupted gravely.
“Does it?”
Her smile was half mocking, half wistful.
“You see, no one ever wrote poems to me before,” she said. “No one has ever given me what you have given me.”
He drew himself up.
“Tell me,” he said, “though there is so little worth having in me—though I am a cynic and bitter—and—and can never love again as I once did, do you think any one would have me now?”
“Why, of course.”
“Would you?”
She started as if waking from a dream. Her expression—so bewildered, so girlishly startled—went straight to the fragments of his broken heart.
“Marry me!” he whispered hoarsely.
Her lips quivered. She buried her face in her hands, and he could see by the tremor that shook her from time to time how deeply she was moved. Very gently he drew her hands into his. A last ray of clear light shone on her face and the evening wind lifted the ruffled hair from her forehead.
“You are so true, so good!” he murmured.
His burning glance, as if drawn by an irresistible fascination, released her eyes and followed the wayward fluttering of those dark curls.
Then it grew still—terribly still. She saw his horror-stricken pallor, and a little sound that might have been anything—a groan, a sob, even a laugh—escaped her lips.
She got up and began to walk homeward and he followed. Neither of them spoke. But at the door of her cottage, he held her hand a moment.
“I shall await your answer,” he said with grave, almost grim formality.
He went home like a man walking in a dream. The little Cornish girl who tidied for him muttered something about a young lady and a letter, but he pushed her aside and went into his own room and locked the door. A groan burst from his lips.
“Dyed!” he said under his breath, “Dyed! False—everything!”
Then he saw the letter lying on the table. He seized upon it and tore it open. It was a very brief little letter. The handwriting set his broken heart beating at the double.
“I came to tell you I don't care two pins about my silly old ancestors,” the Lady Angela had scrawled. “I couldn't bear it any more without you, and I ran away. I meant to marry you. But now I know that you have forgotten, that you never really cared, and I have gone home again. Good-by. Oh, if you only knew what you have done!”
There were tearstains and blots all over the paper. Drake staggered to the door and tore it open. The girl, who was clearing away the débris of the last picnic, answered his violent questions with unmoved brevity. Yes, a young lady had been there. She had gone down to the beach to look for him. Yes, she had come back and written the note. She had been crying. And then she had taken the village fly and driven to the station.
Drake slammed the door on the phlegmatic face. He went back to the table and picked up the crumpled letter. His eyelids burned. He felt as if he were being slowly choked.
“And I shall have to marry her!” he groaned. “I shall have to marry her!”
But it was not of the Lady Angela that he was thinking.
IV.
“It simply cannot be allowed! It must be stopped! Man, think of the scandal! Magree, I tell you—she—the whole thing must be stopped!”
Colonel Magree pursed his lips.
“You're right—absolutely right O'Neill,” he agreed. “It must be stopped. We—our whole set is being made ridiculous. Angela ought to have thought of our feelings. People in love never think of any one but themselves.”
“Disgusting! It's a disease. Thank Heaven, we grow out of it!”
The colonel coughed awkwardly, and O'Neill pulled a letter out of his pocket and read extracts from it in a tone of scathing contempt:
“Can't live without him. Wealth and position nothing. Ancestor worship idiotic and barbarian. Did you ever hear such impertinence?”
“Never,” said Colonel Magree and scowled prodigiously.
Sir John O'Neill continued to pace backward and forward. Since breakfast the previous day, when Lady Angela's note had been handed him with his coffee, he had scarcely slept and rarely sat down.
Suddenly the telephone rang violently. O'Neill and the colonel almost collided in their eagerness to reach it. The former, having the advantage in length of limb, arrived first and snatched off the receiver.
“What's that? Young couple answering description sailed for New York from Liverpool last night? Good heavens, did you hear that, Magree?”
“I did. That's pretty well finished us, hasn't it?”
“Wretched girl! And her poor mother! It will break her heart! Hullo, there! You're sure of your information? Yes—sounds conclusive, Yes—yes cable by all means.”
The receiver slipped from his powerless fingers. Warned by Magree's cough, he turned and saw the Lady Angela standing in the doorway. The two men, whose pent-up indignation might been expected to overflow, were perfectly silent. It was the Lady Angela who spoke first.
“You don't need to send that cable,” she said. “I haven't gone to New York. I'm here.”
“So—so I see.” Sir John hung up the receiver without further explanation. “Might I ask—where you have been?” he continued with ferocious suavity.
“I went down to Cornwall to marry Robert. I told you in my letter.”
“Thank you. I have that document here. And are you married?”
She came forward and sat down by the table as if she could no longer stand. Her pallor was pitiful.
“No—I am not married. And I never shall be now.”
“Indeed? And why not? Has Mr. Drake changed his mind?”
Sir John was having hard work to keep his temper at boiling point and the gibe was more brutal than he had intended—far more brutal than he felt. Angela turned her eyes to him with a listless directness.
“Yes, he has changed his mind.”
“I see. He told you so with his usual directness?”
“No, he didn't tell me. I saw.”
“Angela, be good enough to explain.”
She was silent a moment, as if too stunned and tired to marshal her thoughts, and then she answered with a dull accuracy.
“I went down to his cottage—I knew where it was—and the girl there told me where to find him. He was sitting on the cliff with a woman. He didn't see me—and he kissed her hand”
Suddenly she broke down. She cried heavily, without restraint or violence, her face buried in her arms. The two elderly gentlemen regarded her and then each other helplessly. Then a kindly, affectionate smile dawned on sir John's features. It said very clearly:
“Poor child! But it's all for the best—really a blessing in disguise. Poor child! The first youthful disillusion. We old fogies are past all that, thank Heaven! But still we can understand.”
He sat down at her side and laid his fine, aristocratic hand on her arm.
“Angela dear, I do indeed feel for you. I know how you suffer. But you can be thankful you're well rid of such an individual. No doubt he has shown good sense in accepting defeat—in recognizing the insurmountable barriers— Ah, yes, I know reason doesn't appeal to you now. Your pride is hurt—you are jealous. Jealousy is the passion of youth. When you are as old as I am”
She lifted her wet face.
“Her hair was dyed,” she said irrelevantly. “She had on a muslin dress. She looked like—like a girl of”
“I know, my dear—a very objectionable, common person, I've no doubt.”
“It was mother,” said the Lady Angela slowly and distinctly.
Sir John O'Neill rose to his feet as if he had been impelled by invisible force.
“Angela—are you mad?”
“Do you think I don't know my own mother?” she flared back.
“It's—it's monstrous!” He looked about him and, his eyes encountering Magree's purple face, he exploded: “Man, don't stand there like that! Is it nothing to you that—that a young girl's heart should be broken by a good-for-nothing puppy? Do you stand idly by while her most tender feelings—are—are outraged? By Gad, sir, I'm not of that stuff! He shall be called to account! He shall be horsewhipped within an inch of his life! If it were twenty years ago, he should answer to me for this at the sword's point!” He tugged ferociously the old-fashioned bell. “Yes, sir, there is still some chivalry in the world, though you may have forgotten it. Angela—that—young blackguard shall pay for his infernal impertinence—his infernal heartlessness! How dare he? Blake—a Bradshaw, and see that my valise is packed at once. Order round the car instantly.”
He was gone. Magree, who had remained discreetly stolid by the fireside, ventured to glance at the Lady Angela. But she was no longer crying. Something had begun to dawn behind her grief—something irrepressible, unconquerable.
“Colonel,” she said, a little huskily, “do you know how old one has to be before one stops being jealous?”
The colonel shook his head.
“Blessed if I do!”
Then he caught sight of the dawning something in her eyes and burst into a mighty roar of laughter.
V.
The village fly stood, heavily laden, in the sandy road outside. The duchess, in the little parlor, bade its shabby friendliness a wistful farewell. Last night she had laughed until she had cried, and now she felt that the process might be reversed. All that day she had been packing for her flight. Now a kind of flat weariness weighed down upon her. The intermezzo was over and the play was resuming its course. In the window of the little cottage farther up the hill, she could see a light burning. She thought of the broken-hearted, disillusioned poet with an odd, uncomfortable tugging at her own heart. He had been so touchingly in earnest—so chivalrous face to face with her deceit.
She was an old woman, and he had found her out.
And yet she had not felt old. She had caught fire from him—from his comradeship, his admiration. The gay dresses and the free life had had their share, but it had been his faith in her, his belief in her youth that had made her young.
Now it was over. Romance—love—everything—gone.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass. She saw the treacherous streak of yellowish-white hair amidst the raven black, and sighed.
The door opened. She turned calmly, expecting to find the caretaker, but it was a man's form that loomed up in the open doorway. A little gasp welcomed him. He came in and closed the door. His appearance, as much as his sudden advent, held her speechless. She had never conceived it possible that he should look like that. His picturesque white hair was tousled like a boy's. His neckcloth had a bias toward one ear. There was dust on his clothes, He bowed formally, but his whole personality seemed ablaze—seemed to shout violence, riot, and red revolution,
“I ventured to enter unannounced, duchess,” he said breathlessly. “I have just had a somewhat painful interview with Mr. Drake. I say painful, but it offered certain compensations. I had no idea that I remembered so much from my young days. Mr. Drake is a strong and fine-spirited young man, but he has no science. I doubt whether he will be able to wish you good-by as he had no doubt intended.”
“John—you frighten me! What has happened? Where is he?”
“I left him with his head under the pump.”
“What have you done?” she demanded.
He bowed again with the same subdued ferocity.
“I have chastised Mr. Drake for—for his impertinence.”
“What impertinence?”
“Angela has told me everything,” he answered. “She was down here. She saw you both together. He had the audacity to kiss your hand”
“It wasn't audacity. He often did it. I liked it.”
“Elizabeth!” His hands clenched themselves at his side. He strode across the narrow room as if intending further violence and then strode back again. “I—I am an old friend,” he stammered. “I intend saying what I think. You ought to be ashamed"
“Why?”
“You forget your—your age?”
“Why shouldn't I forget it?”
“You ought to have thought of Angela. You led that young man on. I know you did. Look at that dress. It's provocation itself.”
The duchess sat down. She felt suddenly quite light-hearted. Her eyes were full of calm and happy malice.
“Don't you like the dress?”
“Yes—yes—in a sort of way—but it's a trap—a deliberately laid-”
“It's nothing of the sort. I bought it because I liked it. I came down here in order to give my hair a chance to become gray again without any one knowing. I found this young man here. He was heartbroken about Angela, and very angry with the world in general and bigoted duchesses and senile guardians in particular. I endeavored to reconcile him to our existence. He fell temporarily in love. He asked me to marry him”
“The young scoundrel!”
“Why? It was a perfectly honorable proposition. We are neither of us married”
“I wish you were!”
“Do you? Well, anyhow, you can't blame me.”
“I don't know.” Sir John regarded her grimly. “I can't say that I blame him, anyhow.”
“I think that's the first compliment you've paid me for twenty years.”
“It isn't I mean—how the deuce was I to know that you liked that sort of thing? At our age”
“Please speak for yourself, John. Age has nothing to do with anything. Mr. Drake proved that to me. He was delightful. He wrote me charming poems. You never wrote me a poem in your life, did you?”
“I can't write poetry,” he growled back.
“Well, I don't know that he can, either, But it was charming, all the same. You see, John, he made me feel really, ridiculously young. That's something to be grateful for, isn't it?”
He made a great effort to master his voice,
“Elizabeth—do you—do you care for this young man?”
“John, what right have you to ask such a question?”
“I have a right. I'm Angela's guardian. It's my business”
“Oh, if you're thinking of Angela”
“I'm not,” he admitted sullenly.
She got up and began gathering up a few frivolous oddments from the table and hurrying them into a frivolous little wrist bag.
“Of course no one could help being very fond of him,” she said dreamily. “He's so young and handsome and ardent. I think we are very stupid about rank and position. Mr. Drake is as gallant a gentleman as”
“Elizabeth, do you care for him?”
His voice shook. It refused to be controlled. The duchess moved with dignity toward the door.
“I have told you I care for him.”
He barred her passage.
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere where my hair can turn white again in peace.” She looked up at him wistfully. “I suppose you think I look a terrible fright like this, don't you, John?”
“I—I didn't say so. I like your white hair best—but you're always beautiful, Elizabeth.”
“But I'm an old woman all the same. You said so.”
“I didn't. I don't think you'll ever be old.”
“And you, too—how young you must have felt to fight poor Robert!”
“Yes—like a boy. Elizabeth—do you call him Robert?”
He no longer blocked her passage. She opened the door and looked back at him inscrutably.
“Of course I do. I'm very fond of him.” She paused. “I think he'll make a charming son-in-law.”
She went out, closing the door softly behind her.