Extracted from Century magazine, 1917: Vol 93, pp. 801-812; Vol 94, pp. 101-116, 225-244. Accompanying illustrations by Norman Price may be omitted.
The Derelict
By PHYLLIS BOTTOME
Author of "The Dark Tower," etc.
Illustrations by Norman Price
Part I. Chapter I
GEOFFREY AMBERLEY was at an age when it did not strike him as surprising that everything should happen exactly as he wanted it to happen. Probably other things, too, he thought to himself, would go on happening in the same satisfactory way, though he doubted if he should ever feel again quite the same high pitch of satisfaction and ecstasy.
It was n't only that he was happy. Other young men had been fairly well off and engaged to be married to girls with whom they were in love; but what distinguished Geoffrey's happiness was that what pleased Geoffrey should, for the first time in his life, please the rest of his family.
It is an isolating thing in a world of average intelligence to be stupid; but it is a far more isolated position—it is even a hostile one—to be cleverer than your own family. Families are tolerant of their fools; they may be proud of, but they always resent, an intellectual superior in their bosom. Not that the Amberleys were in the least proud of Geoffrey; they merely resented him. They might have been proud of him if he had done well the things that they cared to do, but the things Geoffrey did well were the things no Amberley cared to do at all. He painted pictures; and no real Amberley would have so taken to heart the absence of approval of other Amberleys. They simply went their way; and if anybody got into it, they knocked him down.
But Geoffrey cared intensely what his family thought of him, and the things that got into Geoffrey's way could n't be knocked down. They were awkward, intangible things that stuck into his heart of hearts forever.
What he did n't like was to see anything ugly; what he did like with an embarrassing delight was to see things that were beautiful. The rest of his family did n't know what was beautiful and what was not. They had a simpler standard. If one liked pork, one killed pigs, and there was an end of it. This indelibility of fact seemed to Geoffrey sublime, but he never reached it. He continued to like pork and to try to prevent pigs being killed. It was an attitude that made the whole of his family suspicious of him. Lady Amberley had a private theory that Geoffrey was not so strong as the others, and always urged him to take second helpings at meals; but Sir Thomas, with sterner insight, felt that Geoffrey was morally unsound.
"Mark my words," he said to his wife, with an unaccountable flight of imagery, "one of these days Geoffrey will put his foot into it."
It was at Oxford that his foot first presented itself as off the proper course. He took a very good second, but he could no longer keep it a secret that he knew successfully how to draw. A magazine actually took some of his illustrations.
The Amberleys bore it extremely well from the moment they saw it was going to pay, but they never liked it. There is all the difference in the world between a peculiarity that takes things off your shoulders and a peculiarity that is likely to put them on; still, even the less noxious kind of peculiarity is a peculiarity.
Geoffrey's earnings took him to Paris, and kept him there for two years with very little assistance from a belated allowance. Sir Thomas was n't stingy, but he declined to see any necessity for Geoffrey's going to Paris when there were plenty of subjects to draw in England.
When he found that Geoffrey was really getting on, he gave him an extra hundred a year. Geoffrey did n't need it then, and there had been earlier times when he had needed it; but he wrote a suitable letter of thanks, and returned to England a few months later with a picture that had won the much-coveted Salon prize.
Sir Thomas inspected his son's work in London; he disliked it very much, but he at once bought two of the least objectionable and quietest pictures, and gave them as wedding presents to his nieces. They had to have something.
Sir Thomas understood both his other sons, Tom, who helped him with the estate and kept hounds, and Billy, who was the fast one of the family. There had always been a fast Amberley. Billy spent too much money, drank too much whisky, and liked driving unchaperoned young ladies with big hats and uncertain hair upon the front seat of a four-in-hand. Sir Thomas knew there was no harm in Billy, but a son who neither kept hounds nor caused scandals might be up to any trick.
Sir Thomas did not understand his daughters, because it is not necessary to understand girls,—they get on all right without it,—but he was very generous to them, and allowed each of them to keep a dog.
Now Geoffrey looked forward to his interview with his father for the first time in his life. Sir Thomas might not approve of French prizes or Post-impressionist art, but he would be quite certain to approve of Emily Dering. The whole family approved of Emily. His mother considered her a distinguished young woman, and Lady Amberley did not easily distinguish young women. She lumped them generally into two classes, the kind that are all right and nobody ever looks at, and the kind that everybody looks at and who are not very good for one's boys.
Emily, on the contrary, was both pleasant to the eye and yet could be desired to make one's boys wiser. Geoffrey's sisters idolized her. She chose their Mudie books for them and lived in London, and yet when she came to stay with them she walked miles and played an excellent game of tennis. She had had four hundred a year left her by her grandmother, and would be an heiress when her parents died. They were rather young and very pleasant parents, and great personal friends of Sir Thomas and Lady Amberley's; still, there was no harm in remembering that their death would set loose an indefinite supply of remarkably good investments.
The point that filled Geoffrey with surprise as well as with delight was that he himself liked the marriage, liked with ardor, for the first time he could remember, what all his family would accept with satisfaction.
He adored Emily. She was clever and charming, and yet never gave him the impression of yesterday's cigarette ashes and insufficiently combed hair, which he had supposed were the necessary accompaniments of intellectual women. Still less did she remind him of those awful hours, under mulberry-trees, at garden parties, with some of his sisters' less enlightened friends. These young women had looked beautifully clean, but their innumerable baths had apparently washed the color out of their minds.
Emily was quite as clean, but she had retained her color. She had golden-bronze hair, blue eyes so far apart that they gave to her bright young face an air of noble benevolence, and a complexion which was made up of sun and air and very faint rose color. She would n't have fitted into Geoffrey's idea for a portrait; he preferred less prosperous and more curious types. Emily was like one of his father's favorite works of art—a very round, very ripe peach lying in a sunbeam.
"That," Sir Thomas had said to his son on one occasion, brandishing his stick within an inch of this satisfactory canvas, "is my idea of a picture."
It had n't been Geoffrey's idea of a picture, but it had very soon become his idea of a wife. He had asked his father for an interview at his club, and Sir Thomas had come up for the occasion.
"This time," Sir Thomas had said to his wife, "there's sure to be trouble; if it was n't trouble, he would say what it was."
Sir Thomas had prepared for trouble by a solid lunch and by reading three even more solid leaders in the "Times." He was still immersed in this guide to human knowledge when he saw Geoffrey bursting into the room. Geoffrey always came into a room as if he wanted to get there, and all the rest of the family came into rooms as if they did n't.
"Ah," said Sir Thomas, "I was expecting you." Sir Thomas liked to say he was expecting people when they kept an appointment which they had previously made. It crystallized the transaction.
Geoffrey should have replied:
"Yes, it is three o'clock." Instead of which he said: "It's the jolliest day in the world; all the trees are out in the park. Don't you want the window open?"
Sir Thomas looked pained. Trees were naturally out in the park,—where else, should they be?—and he was an open-air man who very much disliked any of it getting into houses. He felt that Geoffrey should have known that if he had wanted the window open it would be open.
"Well," he said a little briskly, shaking his head toward the window, "I hope nothing is wrong. You'd better sit down and tell me all about it. Your letter asked for an interview, but you gave me no idea what it was you wanted. You know I am not fond of surprises."
Geoffrey did n't sit down. He moved about the room. He was aware of his father's pale-blue eyes following him with disapproval. Sir Thomas never moved about a room unless he wished to put something down or pick something up.
"It's not bad," Geoffrey asserted slowly. "On the whole, I am quite sure you 'll like it. It's simply Emily."
Sir Thomas cleared his throat.
"Simply Emily," he repeated. "I don't quite follow. Are you alluding to a musical comedy which you wish me to attend?"
Geoffrey sighed impatiently. That was the worst of the Amberleys. If you were perfectly succinct and to the point, they did n't understand what you meant, and if you gave a subject the right amount of expression, they understood it still less.
"I mean," he said, "that there's nothing in the world I want as much as Emily, and that I 've got her. I can't explain what she sees in me, but I suppose she sees something. Anyhow, she's taken me on. It only happened yesterday—by the Serpentine in the gardens—the wonderful bit by the bridge."
Sir Thomas gazed solemnly into the space between two leather arm-chairs.
"Has Emily Dering consented to marry you?" he asked.
Geoffrey did n't like to explain that he and Emily had never mentioned marriage. The understanding at which they had arrived had glided grotesquely over details, and had taken the form of their simply seeing themselves always together, somewhere near the Serpentine, under the trees. Geoffrey felt instinctively that this view of an engagement would hardly appeal to Sir Thomas.
"Yes, it's all right, sir," he explained; "and what seems to me awfully jolly is that you 'll like it yourself."
Geoffrey regarded his father a little anxiously. Delighted people seldom look so solemnly at leather arm-chairs.
"I think you extremely fortunate," said Sir Thomas, gravely, "to have won the affection of so charming and sensible a person. One can only hope you will retain it. You have made a very wise choice, but one can hardly expect the Derings to feel the same. I shall, however, assist them to do so, as far as it lies in my power, by settling two hundred a year upon Emily when the marriage takes place. This, with what I already give you and your own earnings, added to what Emily herself possesses, will bring your income up to a thousand a year. It is not very much, but many people have begun married life successfully upon even less. When is the marriage to take place?"
"Oh, sometime, or other, I suppose," said Geoffrey, restlessly. Of course he wanted to be married, but he did n't like the idea of a marriage taking place; it made him think of an appointment at the dentist's.
"I should settle the date as soon as possible if I were you," said Sir Thomas. "This is the last of April; June is an excellent month for a wedding. Emily will of course fix her own date, but she will not do so unless you urge it upon her. I disapprove of long engagements. She will be married from Campden Hill, of course; probably, I should suppose, at St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington."
"Oh, damn St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington!" exclaimed Geoffrey,, unexpectedly. Quite apart from the fact that it sounded like a line of poetry, no Amberey would have dreamed of damning a church. They damned dogs, boot-laces, or butlers.
Sir Thomas was seriously annoyed.
"If you are going to approach your marriage in this tone," he said severely, "I shall doubt its ever taking place."
"I can't think why you always do doubt me," said Geoffrey, impetuously kicking at a footstool. "It's jolly unfair. You seem to suppose I don't know my own mind; and yet I always have known it, and done what I wanted with it as well."
"This is the first time," said Sir Thomas, dryly, "that I have ever known you wish to do a really sensible thing; you cannot, therefore, be surprised if I am anxious as to whether you will succeed in doing it or not."
"If Emily were sensible, I dare say I should n't do it," said Geoffrey, recklessly. "Fortunately, she's adorable."
Sir Thomas folded the "Times" carefully and laid it on the nearest table.
"You will find," he said, "in after life that Emily is even more sensible than she is adorable."
"Oh, damn after life!" said Geoffrey, even more recklessly.
CHAPTER II
Emily's house was n't in the least like other London houses. It was half-way up Campden Hill, and had a little red door in the wall. If you opened the door, there was a garden, a real lawn, with velvety green turf and with trees at an agreeable distance from the windows. A bigger house in a row would have been considerably cheaper, but big houses in rows have an air of five meals a day, family prayers, and heavy balances in banks. Emily's house never reminded any one of an income or lent itself to the congregational use of prayer. You were quite safe as to meals,—the cook was French and excellent,—but they came upon you unawares, without the menace of a gong.
The house was full of flowers and light. There was very little furniture, and what there was, was unexpectedly comfortable. It would have been incredible if the house had not contained a good and beautiful woman. Strictly speaking, perhaps, Emily was not beautiful, but no one was ever strict in the appreciation of Emily; her goodness was undeniable. She was neither tall nor short, and it must be confessed once and for all that she was not slim. She paid eight guineas a pair for her stays, and was wise to do so. She had wonderfully fine hair, which managed never to appear brassy; her nose and her mouth were not good and never mattered.
But to whatever you attributed Emily's charm, it was there with all the force, and with none of the inconveniences, of an avalanche. Her radiance penetrated the house, which seemed like an advance-guard of Emily's; it hung about her clothes, which she bought with industry and inspiration once every year in Paris. They were the kind of clothes possible only to people who have command of a restrained taste and an extravagant expenditure.
Emily thought it a woman's duty to look as well as she could, and she did it thoroughly, as she did everything she thought was right. Human nature was her particular hobby; but it was noticeable that she generally preferred unhappy people, for whom much could be done, to happy people, who like to be left alone. The unhappy people who prefer to be left alone Emily had never had the misfortune to meet, or if she had, she had mercifully overlooked them. She had sufficient vitality to face the victims of an earthquake, but one could imagine her losing very quickly her interest in the earlier stages of the garden of Eden. When Emily was sympathetic, and she was almost always sympathetic, nothing could stop her, not even the object of her sympathy.
Falling in love had not stopped her; it had simply signaled to her as a mission the needs of less happy lovers. She would carry her personal happiness like a torch into dark places, and Geoffrey would carry his with her.
She took an enormous interest in Geoffrey's work; when he was n't carrying a torch she expected him to be a great artist. In the back of her mind (but Emily did not often visit the back of her mind) she felt that great artistic success and torches always came from very comfortable homes. She was a little hurt with Geoffrey for coming to her on the second evening of their engagement and saying that he wanted to be married at once. She felt that marriage had nothing to do with the first principles of their future life, and that he ought to have wanted to lay a triumph at her feet. The Salon prize was a triumph, but she felt, like Sir Thomas, that she would have preferred something more noticeable in London. Geoffrey told her that he had n't any principles and that he wanted to start living.
"I can't, you see," he explained, "live without you. I want you always, all the time, and now."
"I see, I see," Emily murmured, gazing with her benevolent eyes into the vista of a redeeming future. Geoffrey, speechless with satisfaction, watched her. It was wonderful to be going to marry a woman who "saw."
She was n't only all beauty; she was all wisdom, a kind of divine, omnipotent olive-branch spread out over angry floods of ordinary people to encourage them with the hope that one day the floods would subside and they would all cease to be ordinary. Geoffrey explained to her how she would help him with his family.
"You 'll put me right," he said with enthusiasm. "They 'll believe in me then, and if they believe in me, I think I can get on with them better. I tried foot-ball because I had a feeling that if I did well at footer I should understand more what they wanted me to be like at home. However, it did n't do any good. I might as well have read Shelley."
"Darling!" said Emily, with a warmth that involved a close embrace; but when this had finished, Emily did not go on with the discussion about marriage.
"I shall love making them believe in you," she said. "It's too stupid of them not to. They 're dear, wonderful people, but they 're not intelligent; they 're simply figures in the landscape. One can't imagine Amberley without them, but still less can one imagine Sir Thomas without Amberley. I suppose Amberley goes to Tom?"
"Mercifully," said Geoffrey. "I should hate to have a place. When will you marry me?"
Emily sighed.
"I think," she said, "we must wait a little. After all, I'm an only child; you will be in London, and we shall have such beautiful times together. I shall help you work this first critical year in London. I sha'n't be in your way; I shall stand by you and watch you succeed."
Geoffrey looked uneasy. He was n't quite sure that success followed in the wake of being watched, and he was quite sure it did n't follow in a year.
"And you 'll help me," Emily went on, "about my work, won't you? I have n't told you much about it yet,—we 've had so little time really to talk,—but I have a work. I try—I try to help people a little."
Geoffrey nodded. Of course she helped people. Her existence without effort must have simplified the lives of every one she knew. He told her this; Emily laughed at him. She had a distinct sense of humor when she remembered about it; but the intensity with which she brought it to mind sometimes took the edge off her fun.
"Oh, it's not me!" she exclaimed. "It's the things I have. I try to share—and now this new, this greatest thing, love! That's my idea of life—to use all that comes for others. If we all did it,—don't you see?—half the poverty and misery of the world would be healed. I want you to help me heal it."
Geoffrey looked vaguely puzzled.
"That sounds such a tall order, Emily," he said—"the whole world! And shall we ever get any time together?"
"We shall be always together," said Emily, firmly. "It seems to me the only way of being always together."
"Oh, then you can count me in," said Geoffrey, decisively. "But you 'll have to give me tips. I 've never healed anything yet. You ought to talk to Marcel Dupin,—he's my sculptor friend, the one I lived with in Paris,—but he would n't have agreed with you. He had quite the opposite idea; he thought you had to keep fit, and tow your line. He used always to say to me I did n't tow it enough. He wanted me to have experiences—all kinds of funny ones—and use 'em in my work. I believe he'd have been hanged, to learn how you feel about it, if he could have come back and had a go at it afterward. I 've never had theories. You 'll have to teach me a lot."
"What I should like most," said Emily, "is to find those who have been betrayed and lost and ruined by human love,—love gone wrong,—and lift them up again."
"Oh, don't!" said Geoffrey. "I mean, must you? People like that are such a confounded nuisance; and then, you know, when they 've got as far as that, it seems to me you may as well let 'em rip. I don't see how you can work them in afterward."
"It is that attitude," said Emily, gravely, "which makes it impossible. You must have faith, Geoff, Human nature has wonderful recuperative powers; the very force with which it goes wrong can be turned to set it right. I have seen it happen not once, but many times, with drunkards and the poor girls on the streets. They can be brought back and retrieved and made whole again; but only by two forces, faith and love."
Geoffrey bowed his head. He was very much touched and concerned. He was touched because he thought it was beautiful for Emily to feel in such a way toward the unfortunate, and he was concerned because he knew that getting mixed up with the unfortunate is very rarely safe. It is not even safe for the unfortunate. He would have seemed a brute if he said this, but he was n't sure that Emily understood that unfortunate circumstances do not always make unfortunate people, and that a certain type of person will make any circumstance, however redemptive, strikingly unfortunate. Mrs. Dering came into the room and relieved him from the necessity of stating this belief.
Geoffrey knew the Derings well, but he had never given much thought to either of them before. They were a pleasant, well-bred, middle-aged pair who seemed equally happy together or apart.
Mrs. Dering was n't in the least like Emily; she had no charm, and she kept remarkably still. She did not attempt to congratulate or embrace her future son-in-law; she simply gave him her hand, and remarked with a faintly amused, but kindly, smile:
"Fancy, you and Emily!"
CHAPTER III
If there was a side of Emily's nature which Geoffrey admired more than he appreciated, it was her wonderful instinct for assistance. Philanthropy with Geoffrey had never taken up much time; it had been an affair of furtive half-crowns. But Emily went into the question of lame dogs with the eye and hand of the reformer. She was at direct variance with the psalmist, who suggests with cynical emphasis that it costs too much to redeem a soul, and that one should leave this particular adventure alone forever.
Emily had an undoubted faculty for making people stand on their own feet, and it was Geoffrey's fault if he did n't care to meet them in this ameliorated attitude. He thought that Emily's protégées had had too many disasters. He could have stood one or two, though his hours with Emily had been curtailed on several occasions by the time it took to relate them; but Geoffrey felt as if people who insisted on so many troubles had made a habit of misfortune. He was therefore more annoyed than interested when Emily rang him up one afternoon to tell him of a fresh discovery.
"I 've found her," she said through the telephone. "O Geoff, I 've found her! It's too pitiful; I never dreamed there could be such lonely misery. It's very strange, too, for I was hoping that just now I might find some one we were specially meant to help together, and I am sure it is Fanny. She has simply been sent to us."
"What for?" asked Geoffrey, nervously. "I mean—who is Fanny?"
"She's just a girl," Emily said softly, "who has been cut to pieces by life. I found her in a hospital—the one I always visit. She's had a terrible operation, but when I came across her she was just going to be sent out, with no home or friends to be sent to, and no money. Is n't civilization awful? She's almost a lady. I feel as if that made it so much worse, don't you?"
Geoffrey said he did. Generally, when they were n't ladies, Emily saw them in the housekeeper's room, and he had only to hear about them afterward.
"Poor thing," Emily went on, "she's been literally at death's door. She wants to give up her old way of life now and start quite afresh. It's been so wonderful watching the new light dawn!"
"What was her way of life?" Geoffrey asked a little suspiciously. Emily's voice became vague.
"Oh, did n't I tell you?" she explained. "She's not been—respectable, you know. It's all been very dreadful, but I do wish you'd come and see her; we might think of something together. I can't quite make her out. She's strangely reticent."
Geoffrey gave a sigh of relief. Fanny's reticence seemed the one palliating fact in the situation.
"Could n't your mother take up Fanny, if she's got to be taken up?" he feebly suggested.
Emily's voice sounded as if something cold and wet had been suddenly dropped upon it.
"I think not, dear," she said patiently. "The modern mind can deal at such a different angle with stories like poor Fanny's. Besides, mother would n't like it at all. She's been a little difficult as it is. She won't let me have her to stay in the house because of the servants. Fanny is here now, but only in the dining-room till tea. You will come, won't you?"
Geoffrey agreed instantly to come, but he secretly approved of the dining-room.
Emily was very particular about Geoffrey's work in the mornings. She never interrupted him, but she thought his work would naturally be over by two o'clock in the afternoon. She always rang him up then to find out, and if Geoff could see Emily, his work always was over at two o'clock.
He hastened to the Derings', and was immediately shown up into the dining-room. Mrs. Dering was cutting out children's underclothes upon the dining-room table. It was an old oak table, charmingly narrow and gate-legged, which, though a little uncomfortable at meals, was obviously four hundred years old. It reminded Geoff of early Renaissance pictures of the last supper, and did very well for cutting out.
Emily was sitting near the open window smoking a cigarette, a thing she did only to put other people at their ease, for she rather disliked smoking. She gave Geoffrey a radiant, confident look—the look of a woman who has received nothing but happiness and security from the hand of the man she loves.
Fanny was not smoking, but when Geoffrey's condemnatory eyes rested upon her, he could not have supposed that she was otherwise than easy. Her attitude seemed to imply that it was a great thing to be sitting in a comfortable arm-chair for half an hour, and no use bothering much about what was going to happen afterward.
She did n't appeal to Geoffrey as a flower that had been caught in a storm,—this was the way Emily described her to him afterward,—she looked like a damaged poster.
Fanny had a peculiar and rather sinister resemblance to the Sistine Madonna. Her eyes and the long curved lashes which swept her cheeks were like a fawn's, except that they looked incapable of being startled. Her features were singularly beautiful; her mouth, a little spoiled by its slash of carmine, was curved with the tilt of wings under a very short upper lip. She had dark lines beneath her eyes, and her cheeks were hollow and colorless, except for the usual patches of not very misleading rouge. Her hair rose over her forehead in thick, purple-black waves. It was altogether too glorious a covering to sustain a battered scarlet straw hat trailing an inevitable feather.
From her neck to her feet she was covered by an olive-green opera-cloak. It must once have been a handsome garment, but it had now the peculiar unattractiveness of stained and crumpled velvet. She wore no gloves, and her shoes, which had very high heels, were shabby.
She looked at Geoffrey as women look who have had men as the material of their daily bread. It was a swift, apprising look, and it enraged Geoffrey. He was not a cruel man, but he wanted to take Fanny by the shoulders and turn her out into the street, where she belonged. In a world dedicated to Emilys there was no place for Fanny.
What had put her out of her place could be blamed, if necessary, afterward. Geoffrey had taken no part in any such destruction. He was in a position to cast a stone, and in so far as his mind went he cast it. Emily's happiness was safe in his hands, and Fanny's had nothing whatever to do with him.
Perhaps Fanny herself came to this conclusion, for her eyes rapidly left him and returned to the tip of her shabby brown shoes, which she was pushing into the deep carpet just to see how far they would go.
"This is the friend I told you about, Fanny," said Emily in her charming, encouraging voice. "I thought perhaps he could help us to think of a profession. Men know so much about work, don't they?"
Fanny's eyes lifted themselves again to Geoffrey.
"Some do," she admitted; but she did not look as if she thought Geoffrey was one of them.
"Poor Fanny," Emily went on gently, "has been so very ill! We don't want to rush her into anything, Geoffrey; we only want to talk things over. Before we really settle anything, I want her to have a fortnight at the seaside. We ought to be able to manage it."
Fanny looked at Emily this time.
"How?" she asked laconically. She was so monosyllabic that it was difficult to discover how much education she had had. Her voice was low, and she did not speak with any accent; but it might be worse when she was stronger.
Mrs. Dering took no part in the conversation; she looked as if the only important things in the room were the scissors and an expanse of thick, white calico. Still, Geoffrey was glad that she was there.
"Oh, a nice convalescent home," said Emily. "I had rather thought you might like Folkestone."
"The usual kind won't do for me," said Fanny; "they told me so at the hospital. They would n't take me."
There was a moment's pause. Emily smoked harder; Geoffrey looked at his boots.
"I am sure we could manage something," Emily said gently. "There are religious sisterhoods—"
Fanny interrupted her.
"I had better tell you first as last," she said resolutely, "that I can't stick religion. I don't want to be nasty about it, but I can't stick it at any price; that's the way I'm made. Besides, I 've had it. Lots."
Emily flushed.
"Oh," she said, "I would n't dream of thrusting religion upon you. It's one of my strongest theories that it must come of itself, along the line of each person's nature—"
"That's all right, then," said Fanny, cheerfully. "I thought I'd better just mention it in case you had it up your sleeve. Most people who want to help you have. I don't suppose you 'll find any religion along the lines of my nature, but you 're welcome to look for it, provided you don't want me to go to church half a dozen times a day and bark out prayers."
Mrs. Dering paused in her cutting out.
"I think she'd better go into lodgings," she said—"nice, comfortable, quiet lodgings. Perhaps she has some girl friend she knows who'd go with her."
"That," said Fanny, alert with eagerness, "would be nice." Then she sank into her former listlessness. "No," she said regretfully, "I don't think it would do, after all. She would n't be quiet. It's different for me. You see, I 've been ill."
"I know, I know," said Emily, soothingly. "It's a new life you want. I have a little cottage in the country, not by the sea; but you might go there for a fortnight. I have a nice caretaker in it who would look after you, and there is plenty to read, and a cat and a dog to play with. I'd come down for the week-ends and see you myself."
Fanny said:
"You 're very kind, Miss Dering. I like animals; they leave you alone. I dare say I could stand the country for a fortnight."
A faint frown showed between Emily's arched eyebrows; her cottage was the final privilege of the redeemed. She was using it up rather early on Fanny. She turned a little less eagerly than usual to the question of a profession. Geoffrey, helped by the sound of rending calico, suggested dressmaking.
"I could n't do that," said Fanny, "for two reasons. One is, I never could sew; another is, there'd surely be trouble."
"What kind of trouble?" Emily asked a little impatiently.
"Oh, just trouble," said Fanny, vaguely.
Mrs. Dering intervened again.
"She could n't earn her living as a dressmaker," she objected, "unless she knows how, and it would take two or three years before she could be properly taught."
"Fancy!" said Fanny, conversationally. "And by that time we might all be dead. You never know your luck, do you?"
Emily had one of her swift and tender inspirations.
"My dear," she exclaimed, "how stupid of me! I know the very thing. My mother and I are interested in a little orphanage for crippled children; you might help us with them."
Fanny drew back as if Emily had struck her.
"Oh, I could n't do that!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "It's bad enough for them to be orphans; they don't want a girl like me to look after them. You don't understand. Miss Dering; except for ladies who want servants cheap and laundries there is n't much work I could do. I'm not strong enough for factories."
"Oh, no, no!" said Emily. "But, my dear Fanny, you must be wrong. You are educated; surely we can find something more suitable."
Fanny shook her head.
"No, I'm not," she said, "not properly. We were too poor for that. I 've got just about as much education as a London sparrow; about the same kind, too, I should think! If I could get somewhere and rest for a fortnight I'd be awfully grateful; heaps of people can't. I 'll be all right afterward. I can look out for myself then. When I was ill and you came to see me it was jolly talking about a different life. It helped me awfully then; it made me think I wanted to get better. But, you see, it's the same life when you do get well again, is n't it? Don't you bother about it. Your friend he thinks the same as I do; he thinks it's just about what I'm good for. What's the use of thinking you can get out of things? And if you did, how do you know you'd like it? What you 've had you 're used to, and what you have n't had you might n't like. So there you are."
"You shall never go back to that life," said Emily, with intensity. "You quite misunderstand Mr. Amberley. Does n't she, Geoffrey?"
Geoffrey cleared his throat. He was n't going to admit how unmistakably Fanny had understood him.
"Have n't you any ideas yourself?" he suggested, addressing Fanny for the first time. "Is n't there anything you'd like to do,—lighter work than you mention,—bookbinding or leather work, which you could do more or less independently?"
Fanny considered this question.
"Well," she said at length, "there is something I have thought of. There's a girl I used to know once; she was a model,—for the figure, you know,—and she said it was n't bad; tiring, of course, but a good deal of variety and fun in between. It would be easier for me to stick to a job if there was a little fun in between."
"Oh!" said Emily and Geoffrey, simultaneously; but Geoffrey said it because he could n't say "Damn!"
Mrs. Dering ripped some more calico; it made a sound like the sudden breaking of a squall at sea.
Then Emily said slowly:
"I do believe you could be a model, Fanny, if Mr. Amberley can tell us of any nice artists, and the right kind of pictures for you to sit for."
"If I'm to earn my living," said Fanny, inexorably, "I shall have to sit to all kinds of artists and for whatever pictures they have in their heads. When you can start picking and choosing it's because you don't need money."
Emily evaded this iron truth.
"There must," she said, appealing to Geoffrey, "be a great many women artists now, are n't there, Geoffrey?"
"Oh, heaps," said Geoffrey, eagerly. "I can make a list of them, and send you a few introductions."
"And, then," said Emily, with another inspiration, "you can paint her yourself."
"I thought," said Mrs. Dering, "that you told me, Emily, artists had always to choose their own subjects?"
"I have a feeling," said Emily, earnestly, "that Geoffrey could paint Fanny. Could n't you, Geoffrey?"
Quite apart from hating to resist Emily's feelings, Geoffrey knew that he could.
He had seen it, solidly seen it, from the moment he came into the room. It was n't her beauty,—he would almost rather she had been plain,—it was simply that she could be almost anything you liked, and always with that look of life in her, so indelibly stained and marred.
All her lines were histories; in the depths of her mysterious, hardened eyes were crushed and drowned a hundred secrets. She had not been easily bad; there was in her none of the dullness of the path of least resistance. She had resisted; perhaps she was still capable of resistance. Life had made her what she was, and in return had left in her firm, perfect lips, in the chiseling of her delicate, strong chin, some hint of her power to mold others. She had a terrible power.
"Is he an artist?" Fanny asked indifferently. "Well, you never can tell, of course. I should have thought he was just an ordinary man."
(To be continued)
Synopsis of Chapters I-III—Geoffrey Amberley had irritated his family by becoming a painter; even becoming a successful painter had left them indifferent: but his engagement to Emily Dering delighted them. Emily was beautiful, lovable, and wealthy; but she also had a mission to make people—fallen people—stand on their own feet, and it was in the pursuit of this aim that she called in the unwilling Geoffrey to assist her in making Fanny stand on her own feet. Fanny was beautiful, too, but, as Emily vaguely explained, "had been cut to pieces by life."
Part II. Chapter IV
IF Geoffrey had been a true Amberley, he would have known precisely what he meant to do about painting Fanny. If it had been fun to paint Fanny, he would have painted her; if not, he would have planted his refusal firmly upon all fours.
Bill would have said: "Hang it all! my dear Emily, I'd do anything to please you, but a fellow can't go round painting stray women. 'Pon my word, you'd better not ask it. Don't you get mixed up with queer starts. If she's down on her luck, give her a check for a fiver and let her rip." Tom would have contented himself with even less expression of sentiment. He would have said, "Not my line," and even Emily would have rested upon that finality. Dislike with an Amberley was backbone; but it did nothing to relieve Geoffrey from the wobblings of a jellyfish.
There were times when he was n't even sure that he would dislike to paint Fanny. But something in him was less undecided than his mind; his vision of Fanny was perfectly clear. He made a water-color sketch of her from memory, and hid it behind a row of the portraits of Emily's friends. He was n't sure that he meant to do anything with it; but he knew that he could never have painted from memory any of Emily's friends.
Upon his inconclusiveness burst the incisive splendor of Marcel Dupin. Marcel was Geoffrey's greatest friend; he was also an extremely able young French sculptor. He prided himself upon two things: seeing all that there was to see, and the dexterity with which he transferred vision into practice. His dexterity was as sharp as a razor, and his vision as keen as a hawk's. Half of his feeling for Geoffrey was pity, the other half was the respect of a fellow-artist. He believed in Geoffrey's talent, but he was uneasy as to the use he would make of it.
"I have come," he announced, "to see how you are getting on. Your letter announcing your engagement excited me; it is true that for six months I have not answered it, but during that time the excitement mounted. Do you mean to tell me you are still engaged? What a wonderful people the English are, so precisely described by their beautiful proverb, 'We turn forever down a long lane'! Non. If I had been in your place, for instance, I should have been prepared for you to produce a christening-mug!"
"I dare say I shall be prepared for that by and by," said Geoffrey, without annoyance, "but over here we don't arrange things so much beforehand. As a matter of fact, I did n't arrange my marriage at all; it was as inevitable and as unmanageable as a summer day."
"You should not have summer days that are unmanageable," said Marcel. "I admit that many of them appear to have that defect; but I am on fire to meet the English fiancée, and meanwhile you must show me your work. That is to say, if you have any work; for all I know an English engagement may be in itself a profession. It has one of the qualities of a profession,—duration,—but I am not quite so certain that it pays."
"You can look round you," said Geoffrey, a little nervously; "but don't expect much. I 've been, on the whole, more industrious than satisfactory. Emily has been wonderfully clever at getting hold of people for me to paint, and I 've been, as you see, hard at it; but I confess that people of one class, with five meals a day and the same ideas, look incredibly alike. I'm not sure one would n't get as much variety out of sheep—or Chinamen."
"Ah, my dear fellow," Marcel murmured, "do me one really good Chinaman!" He flitted to and fro about the studio, dragging out canvases and turning them to the light, spinning them aside with the hasty judgment of a man who knows what he is looking for and where he is certain not to find it. Meanwhile Geoffrey watched him with increasing discomfort.
"You 're thinking," he said, "that I 've been wasting my time running about on the surface? They wanted representations,—people do, you know,—and I 've represented them. I suppose you think I ought n't to have given 'em what they wanted? Well, I promise you I won't once I'm married. I 'll have a line of my own then and stick to it."
Marcel looked gloomily across the studio at him.
"But where is it," he demanded, "this line of your own? What you have here, my poor friend, is n't a line at all; it's an abyss. You should have sent mademoiselle's amiable friends to the photographer. There are such good ones now, too. They should be allowed to take a little something off our shoulders."
Then Marcel unearthed Fanny. He gave a long, low whistle as he drew the sketch out into the light. It was Fanny, just as she had sat in the old cloak and the battered, scarlet straw hat, digging her toes into the carpet.
"Mon Dieu!" murmured Marcel. "This time you have not been making money. Vous y êtes! Work this up. For the rest,—forgive me if I say,—love has disagreed with you. Perhaps by the time you painted this you had got over it?"
Geoffrey frowned.
"You can't get over the kind of feeling I have for Emily," he explained. "I dare say it has made my work go to pieces temporarily, but what you fellows don't understand is that to love one woman tremendously and all the time is worth what you have to pay for it."
"My dear, to whom do you say it?" laughed Marcel, perching himself on the window-sill and flicking an imaginary speck of dust from his blue silk socks. "If the love of one woman is like that, figure to yourself the love of dozens! Did I not tell you in Paris that the hearts of women are the school of men? But you have no imagination; your eyebrows rise at the word dozens. I should recommend to your notice the progress of the spring. Is the violet out of place because of the daffodil, and have you no room for the tulip when it rises simultaneously with your little milk-faced primrose? And I assure you, if you judge of the value of love by the price, it is far more expensive to pay for dozens than for one."
"No; there you 're wrong," said Geoffrey. "It is less expensive, for you don't pay with yourself."
"But never, never, never," cried Marcel, vehemently. "That is the last and the most clumsy of human errors. I implore you, and a little in vain I am afraid, having looked at your pictures, to keep yourself out of it! The secret of passion is self-preservation. You have not preserved yourself. If you had, you would not have perpetrated these types. They are so many pieces of your lost soul."
"I beg your pardon," said a laughing voice from the door, "but how has Geoffrey lost his soul?"
The two men sprang to their feet; both looked equally guilty. Emily stood in the open doorway, her arms full of early spring roses.
"I knocked, and you never heard," she said to Geoffrey; "but I sha'n't apologize. I 've been shopping, and I thought of tea; but Monsieur—Faust, is it?—has n't yet answered me."
"Ah, Mademoiselle," said Marcel, "I forget what happened to the soul of Endymion; but I know that he loved the moon. That was always some excuse. I recognize now the excuse of Geoffrey."
"I am not sure," said Emily, holding out her hand to him, "that that is not the most invidious compliment I ever received; but I forgive you in advance, for I have guessed you are Geoffrey's friend Marcel Dupin, and I am Emily."
She could n't perhaps have done it better, except that Marcel thought her graciousness a trifle too matronly. Marcel had very distinct ideas about women. He respected mothers, but he did not wish to meet the maternal aspect in any woman under forty.
Geoffrey left them to go out to buy cakes for tea. He thought that they were the two most wonderful people in the world, and he rejoiced in the certainty of how they would get on together. They got on together as well as the two most wonderful people in the world would be likely to get on together.
"I'm so glad to see you for a few minutes alone," Emily said, with her ready eagerness, "for now you can tell me what I want most to know about Geoffrey's work. He has made me feel as if you were an oracle. Has n't he made a great advance?"
Emily was quite sure that Geoffrey's work had improved; she liked his pictures better herself. A certain queerness in them had evaporated lately, something which made them unlike the pictures of anybody else; and, besides, he had had the great incentive of her love. She smiled reassuringly upon Marcel Dupin. It is a mistake to imagine that Frenchmen flatter upon a question of fact; it is only in the region of fancy that they allow themselves to evade the rigor of perfect accuracy.
Marcel's light eyes fixed themselves with a certain hardness upon Emily's vague, gray ones.
"No, Mademoiselle," he said firmly, "I regret to say he has not. It was of this subject that we spoke as you entered. You have been engaged for six months, have you not? Well, forgive me, but to be in love with a very beautiful woman like yourself, who may at any moment appear, in your perfect English freedom, at his studio door, is very bad for a man's art."
Emily stared a little.
"Oh," she said, "but, you see, I never come near him in the mornings."
"I can understand how that must make him dislike that time of day," said Marcel, remorselessly; "but the lure remains the same."
"The what?" exclaimed Emily, coloring to her forehead. She was n't only astonished; she was annoyed. She wondered if Marcel meant something French.
"It is a little difficult to explain, Mademoiselle," said Marcel, hesitating. "If you were his wife—well—then he would have arrived, would he not? And if there were some other arrangement, in that also there would be a point of decision; but an engagement that is very free and continuous and does not arrive, one wonders a little if the imagination is capable of leaving it enough to do good work. Personally I should say, looking about me at Geoffrey's attempts, no. He is wool-gathering, the poor child. These ladies and gentlemen,—pardon me,—but do you not think they have a resemblance to wool?"
"I don't think I quite know what you mean," said Emily, a little awefully. Emily always knew exactly what people meant unless she was seriously annoyed with them. "Must n't an artist paint the types he has orders from?"
Marcel shrugged his shoulders.
"I would rather model a suet-pudding than starve," he agreed, "but short of a constriction around the stomach I should avoid modeling too many suet-puddings. Geoffrey has been doing what does not inspire him. That is always possible, it is sometimes a necessity; but to make a rule of it is bad. None of these canvases bear the look of people; they are casts. Oh, but I make a mistake,"—he drew Fanny out with a certain flourish,—"this one is alive. For her Geoffrey has had an idea. He has not said to himself: 'I am a young man who wants very much to be married. Therefore I will earn twenty-five pounds.'"
Emily's benevolent eyes turned suddenly hostile. She disliked Marcel Dupin thoroughly. He spoke of marriage and twenty-five pounds as if they were the same thing.
When Geoffrey returned he felt as if a cold wind had got into the room.
"I did not know," said Emily, pouring out tea, "that you had begun to paint Fanny."
"Oh, that," said Geoffrey, hastily, "is just a sketch from memory, you know; it came into my head. I did n't bother you with it because I rather thought that if I did seriously study her I'd work it up."
"But, of course," said Marcel, flying forward for his tea, "you must seriously study her. You have an idea, an idea like that, and you talk of playing with it! The English are surely the lightest race under the sun! As light as gnats! If this puritan conscience of yours, mon cher, we are told so much about worked where there is a convenience for conscience, mademoiselle and I would share the felicity of your arrival somewhere. But if you do not seriously study your ideas, allow me to assure you—you will arrive nowhere."
"Conscience," said Emily, "is an inner spirit, Monsieur Dupin; it deals with everything either in art or in life. I have no fear that Geoffrey will not listen to it."
"Comment?" demanded Marcel, nibbling without appreciation an English rock cake. "A bonne à tout faire? What a rôle you provide her with, Mademoiselle! Are you not afraid the poor little one will become unwholesomely fatigued?"
Geoffrey intervened hastily; he was watching Emily's foot on the floor. It tapped, and he had never seen her tap her foot before.
"Don't you worry, Marcel, old boy," he said, putting the sketch of Fanny back against the wall. "I 'll work up as hard as I can at any tail-end of an inspiration that comes my way; I dare say my conscience can stand it."
"But this Fanny, where is she?" demanded Marcel, giving up the rock cake in despair. "I am very intrigué; may I not share her with Geoffrey? I think I could do a little with her here in London. One sees she has good bones."
"I am afraid not," said Emily, decisively, drawing on her gloves. "Fanny is not an ordinary model."
"No, no; of course not," said Marcel, with cordiality. "One sees what she is,—how shall I put it?—one of the more unconventional ladies? But for all that, Mademoiselle, she is a model in a million; and if you allow the good Geoffrey to benefit by her, you must not mind exposing me. As far as that goes, I may frankly say that exposure is one of my habits."
"There are serious reasons against it," said Emily, moving toward the door.
"Reasons," Marcel murmured as he held the door open for her, "have such a way in this country of being serious! They seem also to be oftenest upon the side that says 'No.' Repudiate it, Mademoiselle, this side that says 'No.' It is like a lady that has lived too long without a husband."
Emily ignored this appeal, but she turned to him with a certain grave sweetness before she left the studio.
"I shall remember," she said, "what you have told me about Geoffrey's work, Monsieur Dupin."
Geoffrey followed Emily down-stairs. Marcel returned to the picture of Fanny. He eyed it with a certain sympathy.
"Women," he said to himself, "should never be treated well. The result is so unsatisfactory."
CHAPTER V
Emily could do what she disliked better than most people can. For one thing, she very seldom did it, because she was almost always sure that what she disliked was wrong. On the rare occasions when she accepted a challenge to her will she did it with a force which overrode not only her own dislike, but the dislike of everybody else who was involved in it.
It was in one of these infrequent moments that she accepted Marcel Dupin's criticism. It broke against her most cherished faith that her love was helping Geoffrey to paint. She could hardly bear to believe it possible that she hindered him. How could love, the redemptive, assuaging passion, be a thing to stab your artistic toe against? It did not make her think less of Geoffrey, she was too fond of him for that, but it made her think rather less of men. She said to Mrs. Dering, in a flash of impatience:
"I can't understand men. There is a certain coarseness—" She left her sentence vague.
"There ought to be," said Mrs. Dering, mysteriously.
Emily left this cryptic remark alone; she did not wish to have to think her mother coarse.
Emily, like everybody else, knew that what she wanted was truth; it had n't occurred to her that what she did n't want was truth as well. She made a new plan, and sent for Geoffrey. He came with an eagerness which set her heart at rest.
They sat hand in hand on the sofa in Emily's studio. Emily wore a cloudy blue dress embroidered with silver lilies.
"I 've thought of something wonderful," she explained—"something I want you to do for me. Will you, Geoffrey?"
"Blind?" asked Geoffrey. He took her in his arms and kissed her.
He knew that he would probably do it blind even if she gave him explanations. Emily was unaware that she loaded her dice before she played them; she never meant to be unfair.
"Of course I 'll tell you first," she said, returning his embrace. "Only you must be good and listen. After you left us yesterday Marcel Dupin told me something which I'm horribly afraid was true. He said you were n't painting as well as you did, and that it was my fault."
Emily paused. She rather hoped, after all, that Geoff would laugh at the idea, and that it would n't be her duty to do what she did n't like; but he sat with his eyes lowered and said nothing.
"He said all kinds of strange things," Emily went on a little hurriedly,—she was trying not to be disappointed in Geoffrey,—"and I thought them all over afterward, Geoffrey darling. For a little while I want you to go away from me."
Geoffrey said:
"Where?" Any other Amberley would have said "Damn!" and "Damn!" would have been better than "Where?"
"I think it had better be St. Ives," Emily said firmly, "because mother would like us to take a cottage there this summer, and you could find one for us in your spare time. And it's full of the most wonderful bits to paint."
Geoffrey cleared his throat. He had never been able to make Emily understand how totally useless other people's wonders are in the field of art.
"It's too far away for week-ends," Emily went on, "so that it would be a real separation. And you must take Fanny there and paint her."
"I must do what!" cried Geoffrey. "Good God, Emily, you 're mad! Why, in Heaven's name, saddle me with that girl!"
Emily had expected a little resistance, but she was startled at the vehemence of Geoffrey's exclamation. It seemed almost a pity to have to make him do what he resented. Still, she knew she would have to make him do it.
"It must be Fanny," she explained patiently. "Of course you can do St. Ives, too. But I saw what Marcel Dupin meant. You really are a portrait-painter, and you must have, at any rate, to start with a subject that perfectly appeals to you. Fanny does appeal to you. I saw how good she was for your work from the sketch you did of her."
"Well, let me wait till I come back," Geoffrey urged. "Fanny 'll keep. I don't want that girl on my hands; she might fall into all sorts of mischief. And how the deuce am I to manage her? I can't do it; honestly, I can't, Emily!"
Emily smiled gently.
"You don't know how wonderful you are, dearest," she said inexorably. "Fanny came back from the country this morning; she is n't really strong yet. The whole thing will fit in perfectly; besides, I don't want Marcel Dupin to see her. He is just the kind of man who might be bad for Fanny. I want her taken out of his way. You will help her far more than you know. The quiet companionship of a man who respects women will be like another life to her. You realize, dearest, how utterly I trust you?"
Geoffrey groaned; he realized it.
"Look here," he said, "I 'll agree to any plan you like, Timbuctoo, the Scilly Isles, Clapham Junction, but, for Heaven's sake, Emily, come with me! Marry me! Don't send me away alone, not now."
Emily was tenderness itself, but she was quite inflexible. She was secretly a little relieved to see how much Geoffrey disliked her plan. What they both disliked so much must be very good for them. She bound the sacrifice with chains to the horns of the altar. It is very difficult to see that no one has the least right to this form of sacrifice unless the only victim is oneself.
Emily did not see it; she knew she was going to miss Geoffrey, and she cried a little, pleasantly, against his shoulder. Geoffrey did n't cry; he urged and implored her to change her mind. And Emily kissed him through her tears, and said how glad they would always be that they had n't been impatient and studied personal happiness at the expense of saving a soul alive. Together they would see Fanny through. Geoffrey's pictures would convince the world and the Amberleys of his genius, and then they would have plenty of time to get the house properly furnished and the wedding arranged.
A hurried wedding sullied an ideal.
"Because we know the highest, truest type of human love," she explained, "we have a great responsibility to show it to the world, with all its dignity and loveliness fresh upon it; and then even more I feel we have deep responsibility to Fanny."
A responsibility to the downtrodden Fanny was far plainer than a responsibility to the upright Geoffrey. It was plainer even to Geoffrey. He gave up argument and fell back upon simple invective.
"I won't be good to her," he asserted. "I hate her. I always did hate that kind of woman and I'm not likely to like her any better for having her palmed off on me to paint when I want to be with you."
Emily explained how bad hatred was for such a woman. She said several wise and generous things about her unfortunate sisters, but she had come up against something quite immutable in Geoffrey. He disliked the whole subject and said so. He'd go to St. Ives and paint Fanny if he must, but he'd be hanged if he'd help her.
Emily had to be contented with this. She wondered that men's hearts could be so hard, and had no idea that her safety depended upon Geoffrey's ability to keep his heart hard enough. She kindled the intensity of his love for her, and then sent him away.
On the steps outside he met Fanny coming in, and scowled at her. Afterward he thought of that look as the wickedest act he had ever committed. Fanny gave him in return a bold, unwavering stare; but she had flushed before she stared.
Emily had spent a most satisfactory week-end with Fanny. They had taken walks in the woods, and she had opened her heart to Fanny. Fanny had followed her almost like a dog, and listened as if she were drinking in Emily's words. She had cried suddenly and noiselessly when Emily went away. She had n't, it is true, made any answering confidences to Emily; but Emily thought that on the whole it was better for Fanny not to look back upon the past, but forward into the future.
Fanny quite agreed with that. She said she never had been one to brood.
Physically she was much better. Her eyes had more light in them, and her cheeks the faintest natural color. She wore some of Emily's old clothes. They had to be taken in for her; but she looked very lovely in them, and taller than Emily. She took a large arm-chair opposite Emily and asked if she might smoke.
"If we 're to talk," she explained, "I'd be better with something between my teeth. I never was much of a talker."
"Dear Fanny, do just as you like," Emily murmured. "I want you always to feel perfectly comfortable with me."
"Well, you can hardly expect me to be comfortable, can you, when you 've been so good to me?" Fanny remarked unexpectedly. "It's no use pretending I can talk to you as if you were a man, is it?"
Emily was not quite sure how Fanny talked to men, so she let the subject drop.
"You really do feel better?" she asked tenderly.
"I feel all right," Fanny said; "I could do all sorts of things now."
"Well, then," said Emily, gaily, "I feel sure you can do what I particularly want. I don't think you are fit for London just yet, but my great friend Mr. Amberley is going to St. Ives, and I should like you to go there, too, so that you can act as a model for him. I have found a nice, comfortable room for you at Carbis Bay, and you can walk over to St. Ives and sit for him whenever he wants you. I know you would like to feel you are earning money and helping me at the same time."
"Will you be at Carbis Bay," Fanny asked, "or at St. Ives?" She did not seem to see any other alternative.
"I shall stay here," said Emily; "but you 'll be all right at Carbis Bay. The landlady is an old friend of mine and has children."
"Look here," said Fanny, suddenly leaning forward and touching Emily's knee with her hand, "don't you do that! You 're making a big mistake. You don't want to send Mr. Amberley away like that! you're going to marry him, are n't you?"
Emily's arched eyebrows rose a trifle ominously.
"Yes, my dear," she said. "Certainly I am going to marry him; next spring or summer, probably."
"Well, why not now?" asked Fanny, looking about her. "It can't be money."
"It is n't altogether money," Emily explained, "though Mr. Amberley would like, I think, to be earning more. It is one of my theories, dear Fanny, not to marry too prematurely, but to grow into each other's ways and ideas. I think that perfect community of tastes before marriage makes for much greater happiness afterward."
"Still, what's a theory," asked Fanny, "compared to flesh and blood?"
Emily frowned. She did n't like talking about flesh and blood.
"I don't suppose, Fanny," she said, "that you know what the love of a good man is. It is far higher and finer and more disinterested than you can imagine. Mr. Amberley loves me in an ideal way. He only wants what is best for us both; he knows that in the deepest sense of all I am his forever."
"Of course a man 'll do what you want," Fanny agreed, "while he's keen about you; that's where you get them. Still, what I say is, live and let live. No matter how funny his ideas are, a man's a man, is n't he? You can't get away from that. Besides, I should think you'd want him yourself."
Emily colored with annoyance; then she reminded herself of how little opportunity poor Fanny had had to understand any ideal relationship. No wonder her imagination had been tainted by the dingy falsities of her experience.
"My dear," Emily said patiently, "one day perhaps you will realize as you cannot do now how true men and women love. I don't blame you in the least, but will you do what I ask you meanwhile, and go down to St. Ives for a month and let Mr. Amberley paint you?"
"Oh, I 'll do what you ask me right enough," said Fanny. "Just look at the money you 've spent on me!"
That was not what Emily wanted Fanny to look at, but it was what sent Fanny to St. Ives.
CHAPTER VI
They traveled to St. Ives separately. Geoffrey spent the journey in smoking interminable cigarettes and thinking of Emily. Fanny spent it in not thinking at all. She wondered idly from time to time what would happen if she made eyes at a young man in the opposite corner. Ultimately they went into the dining-car together, and he said grace before his lunch. Still, Fanny was not sure how much that would have helped him. She had known piety crumble more easily than savoir-faire. Savoir-faire was more elastic. However, she was n't going to try, of course.
Geoffrey took a studio the day before Fanny arrived. It was not exactly what he wanted. No studio has ever been exactly what any artist wanted, but he saw that he could work in it. It seemed to grow upward out of a gray rock.
The lower part of St. Ives has a strange affinity to rocks, and the houses hang and cling together, up the short, uneven streets, like a heap of shells.
Above it are reared the stately biscuit-boxes, designed for lodgings, readily found in all English watering-places; and around the village, in a wide half-circle, stretches the murmurous blue bay.
Carbis Bay is to the right of St. Ives, hidden by sandy alps and hideously spotted by bungalows and residences. On the left of St. Ives a small green flap of land runs out into the sea. It is known as the Island, and beyond it the coast spreads, bleak and wild, free of bungalows and railway lines, a land of elfin enchantment, meager and rock-strewn, the haunt of old secrets, a dumb, close-lipped companion of the sea.
Geoffrey had chosen his studio in one of the narrow, cliff-like streets overlooking the Island. He told Fanny by a post-card when he expected her, and when she came he painted her. He was the type of man who, in being agreeable to one woman, is likely to be disagreeable to all the rest. He did not set out to be disagreeable; he simply did not notice them.
He painted Fanny with an absorption which was not so much hostile as unhuman; he hardly spoke to her, except to order her poses, for three days.
Fanny sat there listlessly, with her hands in her lap. She had a formidable capacity for sitting still; through the studio window she could watch the emerald-green Island and the fishermen spreading their delicate nets on the grass.
Sometimes the Island would blaze up with all the colors under the sun: light-red table-cloths, sky-blue overalls, pink garments of singular shapes and sizes, blew and unfurled themselves before her watching eyes. This was on washing-day, and only if the sun was lenient.
"I'm having a good rest, anyhow," Fanny thought to herself.
Then Geoffrey woke up. Perhaps you cannot paint any human being for long with understanding, and remain permanently unsympathetic toward her, and Fanny's face had been responsive to life. It was not a brilliant mask, or the face of a lovely china doll, all surface and no depth. It had the quality of incandescence; a light shone through her from her inner self, a curious, fitful light. On the third day Geoffrey said to her in a friendly voice the only words he had yet addressed to her which were not perfunctory or practical.
"You 're the best model," he said, throwing down his brush and giving a sigh of satisfaction, "I ever had, bar none."
"Well, that's something, is n't it?" said Fanny.
She took him where she found him. There was no resentment in her voice, and no irony; only a certain inconsequent friendliness.
It occurred to Geoffrey that he had n't been very pleasant to Fanny. He had never asked her if she was comfortable in her lodgings or how she was or whether she liked St. Ives. He had determined from the first only to use her as a model, but he might have been more civil. The way of transgressors is hard, but the virtuous sometimes make their pathways harder still.
"I dare say you 're tired," he said kindly. "You can rest now; there's a spirit-lamp somewhere about if you care to make yourself a cup of tea."
"You would n't think just sitting still would tire you, would you?" Fanny asked, obediently rising to her full height and lifting her arms above her head with a splendid long movement of relief. "It's having to, I suppose. Funny what a lot of starch that puts into things, is n't it?"
Geoffrey did not answer; he saw no reason why he should discuss the disabilities of the moral law with Fanny.
After they had had tea, he asked her how she liked St. Ives. Fanny stood at the window looking out over the bay.
"Oh, I like it all right," she said at last. "I 've always liked the sea: it keeps going all the time. Funny these roofs are; they look for all the world like the sea-gulls' wings."
Geoffrey joined her. A catch had just come in; the bay was filled with the swooping, swirling lightning of the sea-gulls' wings, and the little fisher houses, crowding down to the brim of the bay. their roofs aslant, and silvery with rain-washed slate, seemed on the verge of joining in the flight.
"Curious I had n't noticed it before," Geoffrey murmured. "They do shape like wings; I must paint them. I 'll take a gray day; it 'll bring it out more. Thank you for the idea, Miss Fanny."
Then he asked her if she was comfortable where she was and feeling stronger.
Fanny stared at him, but it was not the bold, unwavering stare she had given him in London. It had a different quality, a little startled and pathetic, as if she was surprised that any one should care to know how she was or whether she was comfortable or not.
"Thanks," she said a little uncertainly; "I'm all right." Then she added, with a sudden spark of pleasure in her eyes, "They gave me lots of cream; I sent some to Miss Emily this morning."
Geoffrey was touched. He had not thought of sending cream to Emily; he had thought of nothing but his work.
Of course he wrote to Emily every day, and Emily wrote to him, beautiful, long letters, full of her demonstrative tenderness. They kept him up.
He wondered a little what kept Fanny up. He thought he would try things pleasanter for Fanny.
He did make things very much pleasanter. After the work of the day was over they explored the coast together.
Fanny, hatless and gloveless, trod the yellow sands with a new, happy freedom. She laughed often, and sang sometimes, little, tuneless melodies that sounded like the rise and fall of the sea. The color filled her cheeks; the haggard lines vanished from her face, and the hollows from under her eyes. Her laughter was good to listen to; it had no ring of silliness or coarseness. It was the easy laughter of a child.
Her speech was very infrequent and plain; she did not want to talk much, but she liked Geoffrey's companionship. She strode along beside him, with her head up and the wind in her hair, as unaware as a boy and as unprovocative as a blade of grass.
She was quite friendly to Geoffrey now, but it was a more impersonal friendliness even than his own. It struck Geoffrey as odd how little Fanny could have known of friendliness. She seemed to have no language for it, and no small exchange of little kindlinesses.
He asked her once:
"Have n't you made any friends down here—besides me?"
Fanny shook her head.
"No," she said. "They would n't like it if they knew what I was, and I would n't like it if they did n't; so there you are."
Geoffrey was brought up curiously short by this reply. He had quite forgotten what Fanny was. He had believed that his only safeguard was a cold imperviousness to her presence.
Now he discovered that her presence itself was the most impervious substance he had ever come across.
Thrown with her day by day for many hours, there were a hundred opportunities for the obtrusion of little intimacies. He could n't, however cold he was, have prevented their arising; but they did n't arise.
When he became more friendly and more communicative, Fanny dealt with his friendliness exactly as she had dealt with his coldness, as something in the atmosphere which could n't be helped and must be accepted. If it was cold, you put on wraps and shivered; if the sun came out, you sat in it and enjoyed yourself.
It was as if her whole attitude toward life was without condemnation or personal recognition. She had learned that her place in the universe was small.
Geoffrey became first less guarded and then frankly incredulous. He could have sworn she was innocent—innocent not, perhaps, of experience, but of all contamination from experience. He was not right: she was contaminated; but for the moment he was right, for she had forgotten her contamination.
It was he himself who brought it back to her.
"I'm damned if I can see," he exclaimed suddenly, "how it ever happened. Hang it all! you don't look the kind of person,—after all, I 've seen lots of them,—who goes under or stays under. I can't make you out, Fanny."
They were sitting on the gray rocks, between the violent bushes of flowering gorse. The sea lay far below them, a long, blue line. Geoffrey had been painting Fanny in a circle of gray rocks. She wore a blue linen frock of Emily's, the shade of a gentian. The light had altered too much for Geoffrey to go on painting. He stopped, and moved abruptly so that he could face her.
"I can't understand it," he repeated savagely. "It must have been a beastly shame. You are n't like that! I could swear it was n't any fault of yours."
The color went out of Fanny's face; her mouth grew sullen.
"You don't know what I'm like," she said in a low voice. "What's the use of talking about it, anyway?"
"Are n't we friends?" demanded Geoffrey. "I'm not so cold-blooded as all that. I'd like to know your story. I would n't have at first; rather not. But then I did n't know what a good sort you were. Why, you 're no end of a chap! We 've had three weeks together now, and we 've got on like anything; so I think you might trust me."
"That's where trouble begins," said Fanny, coldly, "trusting people. No. I don't mean my troubles this time; anybody's troubles. You want to steer clear of confidence tricks if you mean to keep on the right side of things. It's true we 've had a good time, but the less said about it the better. Have you finished what you 've been doing?"
"Oh, all right, all right," said Geoffrey, stiffly. "Yes, I 've finished for to-day, thanks. Perhaps you'd like to go home?"
Fanny's heavy lids lifted slowly. She looked at Geoffrey. It was a look that drove the blood to his face. Her lips parted in a curious, ironic smile.
"Good Lord!" she said, "what fools men are! If I were Miss Dering, I would n't let you out of my sight for a gold-mine. And you think it's you I'm not trusting! You cut along home; I'm all right—by myself."
And Geoffrey left her. He wanted to believe he left her out of sheer temper, she had been exasperatingly rude and off the point, or out of chivalry at the appeal of her defenselessness; but he knew that he had left her from fear.
He felt his weakness. He thought he had been guarding against it, he thought Emily's beautiful letters were preventives; in a flash he had seen he had no protection whatever except the singular absence of all attack from Fanny.
Her look had been an attack, and the only way he had been able to stand out against it was by precipitate flight. He ran down the hill as if he were pursued by the Furies. There were no Furies pursuing him. They remained behind with Fanny, and Fanny never looked at him like that again. She settled with the Furies.
She appeared in the studio toward supper-time with a basket packed with mushrooms, a lettuce, and a cream cheese. She stewed the mushrooms in milk, mixed the salad, and laid the table, while Geoffrey, pretending not to notice her, wrote to Emily. For once Emily did not notice something wrong, and yet there was something wrong in Geoffrey's letter. It was the defensive letter of a good man in a bad temper.
Then Fanny walked over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder.
"Come along now," she said gently, "and eat the mushrooms while they 're hot." Her tone was that of an indulgent mother to a wayward child; but it was a safe tone, and Geoffrey ate his mushrooms comfortably.
After supper, when Fanny had washed up and cleared away, she sat in the open doorway, at the top of the high, narrow street.
"You can come here, Mr. Amberley," she said. "I thought it over up there—what you said, you know. I'd forgotten about it at the time, and it made me cross to have to think of it again. But I don't mind you knowing—all there is to know. Fetch the kitchen chair up, so I don't have to shout. I don't want to astonish the natives. Have you your cigarettes? Well, give me one, then, and you won't tell Miss Dering, will you? It's no use ladies knowing the way things are. It only upsets them. What they like to think is we 're just weak or wicked. 'Unfortunate sisters,' Miss Emilv calls us; love and the world well lost, that's their idea. It's lost all right, and I dare say it's love sometimes; but with nine out of ten of us it is n't love. It's what it was with me, I expect, being too much pinched to stand it. I had an offer of twelve pounds a year, all found, as a nursery governess when I was seventeen. There were eight of us in the family. My father was a clergyman, a bit too fond of cider; my mother was a farmer's daughter. He met her at the farm he'd first started drinking in, and as soon as I could get out I had to get out. He had a hundred and twenty pounds a year, so you can figure what that meant, can't you?"
Geoffrey sat there figuring what it meant. He had n't the slightest inclination to tell Fanny's story to Emily, but, strangely enough, it was not to spare Emily. He felt as if he wanted to spare Fanny Emily's knowledge of it. Emily would go down to the root of things, and the roots of things are unpleasant places to be taken down to.
Fanny spoke without the slightest effort or self-pity. She simply stated facts; that made it easier for Geoffrey to listen. He smoked hard, looking over the top of Fanny's head out to sea.
Fanny did n't see the sea; while she talked she watched two very stout fishermen urging a donkey and cart up the narrow street. It was a difficult operation, and it interested her very much.
"There were lots of things we needed at home," she continued. "I had a brother next to me. I wanted him to go to a good school; he was a clever little chap. Then there was my sister with a bad back; she ought to have been taken up to London for proper treatment. And boots—we all of us were always wanting boots. I never had a decent dress in my life, and we were n't supposed to play with the village children, and any other children would n't play with us.
"There was the squire's family, and young Henry—he was the squire's son—stared his silly eyes out at me in church. I thought a lot about that. Once or twice when I went to do the marketing he met me coming back through the fields. He was n't much to look at, but he had a lot of money. Henry promised me a good lot of money for Jimmy's school and Hetty's back and the boots, and he gave it to me, too, directly we got to London, and father sent the money back to me, with, written on a paper round the check, 'The wages of sin is death.' That was all right, of course; but I did n't have eight children, and spend on cider what ought to have kept them, did I?
"When you come to think of it, it must be a lot easier to slop out a text than keep it. You can't blame religious people that they prefer slopping out; only it's apt to put you off religion.
"Henry promised to settle some money on me, and I dare say he would have done it, only he got killed in the South African war before he'd arranged it.
"I dare say you wonder why I came to pieces so suddenly at my age. I'm twenty-two, you know, two years younger than Miss Emily. But I got ill; that did me in. I had to sell some of my jewelry to get back to England; I was in Paris at the time. I hung about in London selling things, and living on what I got for them for a while before I got really bad.
"I had friends, you know, but I was too seedy to look them up; besides, they were n't people you could go to if you were seedy. Finally, I had to take to lodgings. The hotels I was used to were too expensive, and then I got quite laid up with pain, and light-headed, and finally the doctor that the landlady called in got me taken off in an ambulance to the hospital. So that's all there is to it."
"You did n't like that kind of life," said Geoffrey, in a low, moved voice; "you did n't like it, Fanny?"
Fanny got up. She always went back to Carbis Bay before nine, and she heard the church clock striking.
"Well," she said consideringly, "I don't suppose most people like their lives, do they? I did what we all have to do: I lumped it."
(To be concluded)
Part III. Chapter VII
FANNY had learned to perfection the art of letting sleeping dogs lie; she was so delighted to have them asleep that she never even went in their direction.
It is an unusual art with women, and Geoffrey profited by it. There were no more uncomfortable moments between him and Fanny. Day after day they worked and chatted together. They talked about Geoffrey's pictures and Fanny's future profession, and they discussed inexhaustibly the question of Emily's cottage.
Fanny was, to begin with, the more practical of the two. She ruled off the narrow, climbing streets; they were certainly picturesque, but there was Mr. Dering's stiff knee, which would be sure to resent cobbles. She forced Geoffrey to see that Mrs. Dering would prefer a good kitchen range to a high north light, and hot water to the whole of the Atlantic out of a bedroom window.
They must remember, too, that Miss Emily would not like the smell of fish, which might n't all be fish, but some of it drains from the lower town, despite the county council.
It would probably be better to have a house outside the town. Carbis Bay was the obvious direction, but Emily had pleaded not to have the railway line anywhere near. She said she wanted to forget the existence of railways, though, of course, they would have to be near enough to get things down from town.
And then Fanny lost her head completely: she fell in love with a cottage. It was, as Geoffrey saw at a glance, hopelessly out of the question.
It was on the way to Clodgy Point, quite beyond everything else, a little silvery-roofed, forbidding cottage—a cottage which knew its way about in a storm and had dealt pitifully and hopelessly with an abandoned garden. What it did n't know about the north wind hardly needed teaching, but it had no water-supply of any kind, hot or cold, and depended on a pump in the garden.
Fanny would n't admit the failure of hope; she pointed out the growth of a blossoming apple-tree in a sheltered angle behind the cottage, and the presence of wall-flowers, against all scriptural authority, thriving permanently upon stony ground.
At the foot of the cottage were rocks and the open sea, and behind it, and not part of the garden, as Fanny tried to make out, was a group of gorse-bushes so compact and flaming as to account, perhaps, for the turning of Fanny's usually level head.
Inside—they got in quite easily through an unlatched window—was a kitchen where the inhabitants had always lived. It was black with venerable age and smoke and generous sheltering. It was just the kind of kitchen Fanny liked. It shared the floor with a small, stiff, chilly parlor, a dreadful place of wool mats, china dogs, and angular, unnatural shells. A revised form of step-ladder led to an upper story.
There were three rooms ("It's quite a large cottage!" Fanny exclaimed triumphantly), a double room, the size of the Derings' bath-room; and one that Geoffrey mistook for a cupboard. "I could sleep there easily," Fanny explained hurriedly, "and work for Miss Emily. You know, I really can cook, and you never saw me tidy a house. I have n't for years, of course, but I always used to at home."
There was also a room which Fanny hailed with delight as "perfect for Miss Emily."
Geoffrey eyed it doubtfully over Fanny's shoulder. It would have suited St. Ursula. There was room for an angel by the door, and her small slippers and a lily by the bedside. It was doubtful if there was room for the large American trunk that Emily always took about with her. American trunks take up more space than angels.
It had a rather large window looking over the rocks and the sea. The noise of the waves ran through the house resoundingly, as if it were a shell.
"Won't she love it!" cried Fanny, exultantly. "And I 'll work and do everything, and bring them up early tea. Don't you understand,—" she almost stammered in her eagerness,—"it 'll be my way of paying her back for all she's done for me?"
Geoffrey had never before seen Fanny excited. It was like seeing the sleeping Fury wake up and smile at you. This would be a disconcerting impression, but no one would want to stop her smiling.
Geoffrey temporized basely.
"Well," he said, "let's tell her all about it. But don't exaggerate, or she 'll be disappointed."
"She 'll never be that," said Fanny, confidently, as she descended the chicken ladder backward, "and it won't be exaggerating to say there are two flowering-currant-bushes outside the door, will it?"
There was nothing else in the garden but something which looked like a disappointed potato and an uncongenial sardine tin.
"We 're to ask at the lighthouse about it," Fanny said, reading a notice on a broken board at the gate. "I'm sure it 'll be almost nothing. I shall write to Miss Emily to-night."
Geoffrey had n't the heart to tell her that he had in his pocket, sent to him that morning by Emily herself, the address of a "desirable summer cottage at Lelant." He went to see it secretly next day. The door was opened by a butler. The house stood in a garden dramatically laid out with scarlet tulips, exactly the same distance apart, and when the tulips were over, there would be roses and dwarf sweet-peas. There were three sitting-rooms and six bedrooms, with a kitchen somewhere out of the way at the back.
The front door opened on a hall, with an old clock and a good oak settle. In fact, it was just the kind of cottage the Derings would be sure to like. It was called "The Nest." He told himself savagely as he banged the gate on the scarlet tulips that it would be too ridiculous to expect the Derlngs to take Fanny's absurd cottage. Why on earth should they? This, of course, was what he was being savage about, not because he knew they would n't.
Emily was to come down in June to settle the matter. She would stay at a hotel on the hill above St. Ives, a beautiful hotel, once a private house. There was a wood on the grounds which was, in the spring, like romance itself. Hart's-tongue ferns were there, as green as cumbers, and bluebells like dark flames, and above them elm and ash and oak, birch and pine, weaved gold and silver leaves together. Convenient seats were placed at intervals.
Geoffrey met Emily by the five o'clock train. He was to take her to tea at his studio. Fanny had prepared it with great care, and it included bluebells, Cornish cream, splits, raspberry jam, and an unpleasant cake with icing on it from the grandest of the small confectioners.
As soon as it was ready Fanny hurried away to Carbis. She wanted them to have it all to themselves, though she would have loved to see Emily meet the bluebells. She went away as completely as she could; but on every wall in the studio, and piled up to the roof, Fanny remained.
There was the picture of Fanny, in the blue dress, against the gray rocks; and an interior, with a pot of geraniums behind her head; and a curious full-length one of her, rather dark, with a shadow across her face. Fanny had never liked it. She thought shadows were silly when you could have sunshine. And there was the one Fanny liked best, of the cottage itself, with her standing under the apple-tree; only she had scolded Geoffrey for not having put in the pump.
There was something in all those pictures which Emily had never seen in Geoffrey's work before—a certain ruggedness and virility that was n't at all pretty.
"You have n't made her half as beautiful or half as sad as she really is," Emily complained as she ate the splits and cream. "I don't mean the pictures are n't wonderful; but somehow I 've always seen Fanny differently. This one with the gorse and the gray rocks has such a curious look, as if she'd been beaten down into the rocks, and yet was not at all sad."
"I don't see Fanny as sad," Geoffrey explained briefly.
"Oh, don't you?" asked Emily. "But you can't be beaten without being sad, can you?"
Geoffrey frowned. He did n't want to talk about Fanny being beaten.
Emily, however, did talk about it; she almost went on about it. They had n't seen each other for five weeks, and Geoffrey did n't really want to talk about anything. He felt like a dried rock, with the tide returning to it; but as long as Emily ate splits and talked, it would n't quite return. He found himself wishing that Emily would n't drink so much tea.
The next day Emily insisted on taking Fanny with them to see the cottage. Emily had gathered from Geoffrey's letters that Fanny loved her discovery, and though Geoffrey was afraid it would n't do, Fanny seemed to have set her heart upon it.
Emily had privately wished that if the cottage was unsuitable, Geoffrey would take Fanny's heart off it; but he obviously had n't done so, and probably the operation needed tact. Emily had come provided with quantities of exquisite tact. A good deal of it had to be used on the way to the cottage. Fanny said nothing at all, but looked persistently out to sea. Geoffrey, singularly clumsy and nervous, stuck his hands into his pockets, kicked at small pebbles, and whistled.
Fortunately, Emily was full of gaiety, and swept them both along toward the cottage as if she were a laughing wave and they were two pieces of rather passive sea-weed. She gave a charming little cry of pleasure at the sight of the little silvery, obstinate cottage set above the rocks.
"But what a dear little place this is!" she exclaimed. She looked a little surprised when Geoffrey explained it was actually the cottage they had come to see. She had apparently thought it something thrown in on the way. She lent herself to the blossoming apple-tree and the flowering-currants, but her eyes were doubtful over the pump. She thought it might make rather a charming sketch. When they let her in,—they'd brought the key this time from the coast-guard,—she looked round her with laughing eyes and said: "But, my dears, where is the dining-room?"
Of course this really settled it. Still, she went up-stairs, and heard the sea whisper and withdraw and whisper again through the little house. She sat on one of the rickety beds. It had lumps in it even for the casual sitter.
She got up and down the chicken ladder with Geoffrey's aid, and sniffed a little before she pointed out a black beetle in the kitchen. She put her hand on Fanny's shoulder and made her sit down beside her on the kitchen table, while Geoffrey went to the window and turned his back; and then Emily explained.
It seemed to Geoffrey that she explained too much, it went on so long, and was so reasonable and thoughtful and kindly; also some of the explanations repeated themselves as if they were too good to be used only once.
Geoffrey wished Emily could have said, "It won't do, Fanny, my dear; it won't do," and left it at that. But Emily never left things until she had altered them.
What she wanted to do now was to make Fanny see, ever so gently and kindly, that the cottage was a mistake; and it was unnecessary because Fanny had seen from the moment Emily had asked where the dining-room was that the cottage was a mistake. Only she loved her mistake, and Emily could not alter that.
Geoffrey said, "Come on; let's go," once or twice, but neither of them paid any attention to Geoffrey.
"You see, dear," Emily wound up, "it's a dear, little, funny, pretty cottage, and I simply love to have seen it,—we might even come out and have tea here one day, might n't we, Geoff, if we brought a thermos-flask?—but it would n't do to live in. You do see that now, don't you, Fanny?"
"Oh, yes, I see that now all right," said Fanny. "May I stay and lock up, and you and Mr. Amberley go on?"
"Well, it won't take you very long to turn a key in a door, will it?" asked Emily, playfully.
She was afraid that Fanny might be sulky. Her voice had sounded reluctant and uncertain, and Emily thought she ought to break up sulkiness. But Geoffrey seized her suddenly by the arm.
"Come on, Emily," he said, almost dragging her out into the garden. "Leave Fanny to lock up."
The next day Geoffrey and Emily went over to Lelant and took "The Nest."
It was exactly what the Derings wanted, but Fanny did n't offer to work for them; it would n't have done in a large house with three other servants. Fanny saw that for herself; there was no need to point it out to her. It went with the cottage.
CHAPTER VIII
The catastrophe would never have taken place if Emily had not seen a new and exquisite duty, and performed it. It may have been the wood with the hart's-tongue ferns and bluebells that decided her, or the hunger in Geoffrey's eyes, or the fact that there was no doubting the power he had got into Fanny's portraits; but whatever the pressure that unlocked Emily's heart, she let St. Mary Abbott's go, she let her triumph over the Amberleys go, she agreed to an almost immediate marriage with Geoffrey.
They would be married in the little wind-blown Cornish church on the downs of Lelant, facing the golden sands; and meanwhile, despite the increasing fullness of the days of preparation, Emily never forgot Fanny.
That was probably where the mistake came. Fanny, forgotten, would have looked after herself and found her own level.
But Emily was far too thoughtful to forget Fanny, and she found an American sculptor, an enthusiastic and energetic lady, to whom she committed her.
Miss Adelaide P. Loomis seized upon Fanny with rapture.
"You have given me Venus, you have given me the Madonna!" she said to Emily, a figure of speech likely to displease both her famous companions. To Fanny she said, "My dear, you are Helen of Troy."
Fanny said she was n't. Her name was Fanny and she came from London.
She sat to Miss Loomis for three hours every morning, and in the afternoon she played with the landlady's children.
One of Emily's ways of keeping Fanny in her circle of happiness was to describe to her the life that she and Geoffrey purposed to lead in London. It was to be a broad, full life, lived, if possible, in an oak-paneled house in Chelsea, and it was to include Fanny.
Fanny listened with an absorbed attention, especially to Emily's description of the house. It was wonderful to Fanny to imagine a place where you could really stay and have your things to yourself, and not have first one man and then another, and servants who knew you were married. Fanny had often had maids who knew she was n't.
And then Emily spoke of the great sanctity of marriage and motherhood, and Fanny thought of the landlady's children.
Fanny herself could never have a child. She said this once to Emily, who changed the subject; but she came back to it again later because she wanted Fanny to realize the dedication of marriage. She thought that for Fanny to have this ideal in her heart might preserve her from any baser feelings. She told Fanny this, and Fanny said that she was n't sure that having things in your heart was much of a help. Still, Emily could see that Fanny was improving. Her mind seemed to dwell upon higher things. The next evening Fanny walked across the sands to meet Emily. She had not done this before; she had always waited for Emily to come to her.
They talked about Emily's wedding-dress. After Emily had described it—it was being made in London—Fanny gave a deep sigh. Then she said:
"That's a thing I used to think a lot about, being in white and orange-blossoms and so on. You would n't believe what a time it took before it got out of my head."
Emily urged upon Fanny the deeper things, which need never leave her, and then Fanny said:
"Miss Emily, what would you do if you were sick of life?"
It was a curious question, and Fanny asked it curiously, drawing in her breath a little and digging her fingers into the sand while she waited for an answer.
Emily gazed out tenderly over the still sea. The waves hardly broke; they seemed to lift and sink as quietly as the heart of a child asleep.
"Dear Fanny, I should seek a new one," she answered softly. "Newness of life—that's the most beautiful phrase I know."
"Yes, it does sound nice," agreed Fanny.
When she left her that evening Emily kissed Fanny, and Fanny strangely clung to her. Emily had often kissed Fanny before, but she had never known Fanny to cling.
It was this new softness in Fanny that made Emily agree to Geoffrey's request. She felt that Fanny was developing a moral sense, and when Geoffrey urged that Marcel Dupin should at last be allowed to join them, she looked to Fanny's moral sense to preserve the situation.
"It's difficult to keep on putting him off," Geoffrey pleaded, "and I don't see that it matters very much even if he does run across Fanny now, do you?"
Emily considered thoughtfully, then she said:
"I don't like their being much together; but Fanny is so busy just now with Miss Loomis, and so wonderfully improved and deepened, that I should think it would be safe. I 'll talk to him a little, myself. If he knows her story and is, on his honor, I think we can confide in the chivalry of a Frenchman."
"Oh, Marcel 'll be all right," Geoffrey agreed hurriedly. He had a dislike he could n't quite understand to any talk about Fanny as if she needed safeguarding.
He could n't have explained quite what he felt just now about Fanny, but he did not really like to talk about her at all. Whenever he thought of her or her name was mentioned, he felt as if he had trod on a thorn.
The next day a storm came up. The sea was gloriously wild, and Geoffrey and Emily spent a morning watching the breaking of the waves at Clodgy Point.
After lunch Geoffrey went back alone. The wind was still strong, and the water thundered and pummeled at the rocks, with an intermittent, gigantic sound. Geoffrey pushed on beyond Fanny's cottage to the desolate expanse of headland, where there was nothing but the wild gorse, the black rocks, and the enraged and foaming sea.
There is probably no coast in Cornwall so safe as the coast of St. Ives, but if you walk far enough you can come to danger. There is a point where a group of rocks run out into the sea. At the rise of the tide they are cut off from the shore, and at the tide's height they are completely engulfed. It was too windy to paint, but Geoffrey felt as if he could watch forever the oncoming of the waves; he loved the feathered flight of them, as the tops seemed to bend above the solid green and then drew back, and were swallowed up, only to fringe it once more in a wild, breaking whiteness as they roared past the black rocks and flung themselves in heaps upon the shore. He passed the point, and saw the rocks were virtually cut off. A few feet off, foaming water separated them from the shore; the thunder of the breaking waves and the high shriek of the gulls filled the noisy air with glee. Far out on the farthest rock was a figure, oblivious in the tumultuous sound, watching the oncoming hosts, with her back turned to the side rush of the tide.
Geoffrey knew in an instant whose the figure was. She had sat to him in the same position, her elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand. He had a strange flash of wondering what her eyes were like, facing the terrible seas.
He flung off his coat and boots; he would have liked to forget the pull of his great happiness, but he could not forget it. He cursed Fanny under his breath as the waters caught him, bitter and cold, with their thrusting, vicious force. There were only a few yards of sea between him and the rocks on which Fanny sat. He held his breath for the struggle. Twice he clutched at the nearest rock, and twice he was washed from his hold and dashed heavily against the precipitous, high sides. The third time the wave receded he flung himself upward into safety. Then he shouted. Fanny turned at the sound of his voice. Her eyes were all terror, but she never looked at the sea; her terror was only for him.
"O Mr. Amberley!" she cried, "why did you come! Go back! Go back!"
"If you don't do what I tell you, Fanny," he shouted, "I 'll drown!"
He wondered afterward why he had n't said, "you 'll drown!" At the time he knew why he said it.
"I "ll do whatever you tell me," said Fanny.
"Put your hands on my shoulders and get to one side of me," Geoffrey said. "Don't hang round my neck,—d' you understand?—and if you let go, I 'll go to—I'm not going back without you." He was quite sure he hated Fanny, but he knew he was n't going back without her.
"All right, Mr. Amberley," said Fanny; "I won't let go."
He was back into the water as he spoke, dragging her after him. It was only up to his knees, but the undercurrent dragged at them with a blind and awful force; then the waves rushed in, half a dozen of them, one after the other. They were off their feet in a moment, and Geoffrey was fighting his way up then, and diving down beneath their death-like fringes. Once the surf caught them, they would have no further chance.
The weight of Fanny was appalling and intolerable. She eased it by holding on to only one shoulder and attempting to swim beside him.
They went down together under the green waves three times. Geoffrey dared not look at the shore. The tide was settling in toward it, and the current was with them, but the current set to a more distant point of shore, and it was no use attempting to fight against it.
Geoffrey weakened slowly; his stroke grew uneven and jerky. The weight of Fanny was heavier; probably she could no longer attempt to swim. Suddenly he heard her voice.
"We 're very near in; can't you stand, Mr. Amberley?"
He tried to gain his footing; then suddenly he failed to ride the oncoming green wave. It broke above them, the surf caught them, smothering over their heads with a deafening roar. His struggle stopped.
When he opened his eyes he found they had been thrown over and over on the beach, and as if by a miracle on the only piece of sand along the rock-strewn shore.
Fanny was bending over him, but when she saw his eyes open, she lurched face downward on the sands beside him. He saw her hands clench and unclench like the hands of the dying. He could not see her face. He thought he heard her say:
"Then that's that!" and "O God! O God!"
They lay there for a long time, beaten and breathless. Then a wave ran up and licked their feet; that galvanized them into life. They got up stiffly, and, leaning on each other, reached the cliff path. They took shelter in a coast-guard's hut, and Geoffrey told their story, while Fanny, wrapped in blankets, lay on a horsehair sofa, her great eyes fixed on him.
When Geoffrey told her to drink hot brandy and water she drank it, but she said nothing, not even when he said:
"Now, Fanny, you 're not to worry about this. Neither of us has been drowned, and I must cut along and tell Miss Emily, or it 'll be all over the place."
Her eyes still followed him to the door. He came back, and stood looking down at her a little awkwardly.
"It's all right, Fanny, is n't it?" he said. He spoke as a man speaks who has been found out very much in the wrong. It was as if he ought to be rather ashamed of himself for having saved her life.
"I did n't know you'd be there," Fanny whispered.
"No, of course not," said Geoffrey, reassuringly, "or the Atlantic, for that matter."
She shut her eyes as if she agreed with him about not knowing that the Atlantic would be there.
Emily was extraordinarily sweet over the whole business. She went to see Fanny later in the evening, and the only thing she said to her which could possibly be construed into a reproach was:
"And you 'll never, dear Fanny, go out on to those rocks again, will you?"
"No," said Fanny, slowly, "I won't do that again. I have n't got the nerve, and that's a fact."
CHAPTER IX
At St. Ives, Marcel Dupin made a charming second impression. He took the story of Fanny from half a word, and prevented Emily from feeling any awkwardness in telling it.
"You have touched me profoundly," he assured her. "Englishwomen are a race apart; they trust the men they love and are kind to other women. It is an astonishing combination. I shall never forget it."
To Geoffrey he was a trifle less sympathetic.
"I hear," he said, "that I am to treat a young lady who is not innocent as though she were innocent. When am I to begin?"
"You won't find her in the least like that," said Geoffrey, but he omitted to say how Marcel would find her. Marcel was not long in discovering Fanny's portraits.
"Now, mon vieux," he said, "you have consoled me for the sharpness of the blow you gave me in London. After all, I was right when I said in Paris, 'There is a certain little Englishman who will make our cleverness look like an old shoe.' I do homage to these pictures; but again you are careless. You do not take advantage of opportunity. You should have let that model drown. Then no one else could have touched her; and who knows but what would have been good for your art might not also be of use in your life? I have, as you know, received the interesting confidence of mademoiselle your betrothed upon the history of Fanny. Certainly I should have let her drown. You have spoiled your situation, which was superb. Now you must beware of an anticlimax."
Geoffrey frowned. He did not like to talk of Fanny as a model or as an anticlimax, and he did not wish to talk of his situation at all. He did not want to think he had a situation.
He could not understand his feelings about Fanny, for it still seemed to him as if he were guilty of drowning Fanny instead of the hero he was held to be for having saved her life.
There was only one thing which really gave him any satisfaction: Fanny had never thanked him. He felt that no one understood Fanny except himself, and as if he wanted to forget how well he understood her. There was no room whatever in his new life for the Fanny he had understood.
Emily would no doubt make room for her, but it would be Emily's Fanny she would make room for, not the Fanny Geoffrey had known.
The Fanny he knew had not survived Emily, and he had taken part in killing her, the coward's part of standing aside and simply letting her die. It was true that she had made it easy for him to stand aside; she had allowed herself to be killed without a gesture and without a sound. He did not blame Emily, of course, for this transformation. It would have been impossible to keep Fanny in his life as she had been in it before, but it took the taste out of his happiness.
"Yes, your pictures are delightful," Dupin continued. "They give me a feeling that I should like to show you what could be done with her in other ways. Come, since we have Mademoiselle Emily's permission, let us proceed to the original."
"I dare say we shall find her," Geoffrey admitted a trifle grudgingly, "in Miss Loomis's studio. Miss Loomis is an American sculptor with a great deal of conversation and some talent."
"In that case," agreed Marcel, "let us hope she will give us the conversation rather than the talent. Talents, I know, speak for themselves; but I can do without that type of conversation, and the speech of the American always delights me. They have so much to say, those charming people, and no background at all from which to say it. They must have been brought up in paradise, with an enormous quantity of fig-leaves and no knowledge of good and evil."
Marcel slipped his arm into Geoffrey's and took him rapidly in the direction of Miss Loomis's studio.
Miss Loomis's studio was close to the sea. It looked out on the smallest of the beaches, a low, gray hutch with a silvery roof. She welcomed both young men with enthusiasm.
"Well, Mr. Amberley," she said, "it's the oddest thing how you 've been keeping away from me; any one would think you were jealous of my model. Not that I'd blame you if you had lost her, for I never knew any one who led one on so; there does n't seem any end to what you can do with her. And this is Monsieur Dupin, the famous young Parisian sculptor! I am delighted to receive you, Monsieur Dupin. I adore Paris. There is n't a thing I don't know about it, and there is n't a thing I don't love. There's a confession for you. When people ask what my country is, I just say, 'I live in Paris.' That's my address, and in a sense it's my nation."
"Madame," said Dupin, "let me congratulate Paris upon your nativity. You have some beautiful things here. May I ask which of them are your own creations?"
"Yes, indeed," Miss Loomis replied cordially. "I am always proud to show a fellow-artist my work. I don't carry my things round with me, but that child's head over there is mine, and I'm working on a young Englishwoman just now from the nude. I spoke to your fiancée about it, Mr. Amberley. She seemed to feel so responsible for Fanny, and I understand this is the first time she has sat for the figure. Miss Dering felt just as I do about it, and just the way all artists' wives should feel: she accepts the sanctity of the nude. I know all Americans don't feel that way, and I'm very sorry, but we 'll come to it in time. We 're a new country, and the moral sense has got to get used to itself before it takes on tags. I don't want to speak as if I had a low estimate of art. Monsieur Dupin, but compared with the Puritan conscience, and as looked upon from the point of view of America, I guess art is a tag, all the same. Now, in Paris, it's the other way round, Mr. Amberley. Art comes first, and as far as possible nothing else after it."
"But what should come after it?" murmured Marcel Dupin, "but more and better art? Allow me, Madame." He stepped forward, and drew off the sheet which covered the half-finished figure. Geoffrey drew back. He was surprised to find himself angry. Why had Emily never told him Fanny was sitting for the figure? Of course there was no reason in the world why she should n't. If he had thought about it before, he would have known she would have to sit for it sooner or later. But he had n't thought about it before, and thinking about it in front of the statue, with Dupin's exclamations of delight sounding in his ears, was curiously annoying. It did not seem to him the way in which Fanny ought to be treated.
The statue was, on the whole, a clever piece of work, but it was not the work itself that so delighted Dupin. He could see from it that the model was one to inspire a great sculptor. Every line of the figure was gracious, and every curve of it was delicate and fine.
"I was right," Dupin murmured, "a thousand times I was right: we sculptors have an opportunity you painters miss—we have the roundness of life."
Geoffrey lifted his unwilling eyes and saw the statue, and beyond it, in the open doorway, stood Fanny.
She stood quite still, looking at Geoffrey. He never forgot her eyes. They did not judge him, but they were the eyes of some one who has been hurt by a friend. Geoffrey thought then, and he thought more strongly afterward, that he had never seen such unprotected eyes.
Miss Loomis gave an exclamation of annoyance; she pulled the cloth hastily over the figure again. It was an awkward moment. Dupin began:
"But why—" and then, looking up, he, too, saw Fanny. "La voilà—la petite!" he exclaimed softly.
Fanny was the first to recover herself. She said to Miss Loomis:
"I came to make the tea. I don't think there are enough cups."
"Well, you can give me a glass, Russian fashion," said Miss Loomis, good-humoredly, "and you must n't mind having your statue looked at, Fanny. This gentleman is a sculptor. As a matter of fact, he's a very famous French sculptor, and it 'll be a very good thing for you to meet him."
"I don't mind him looking at that statue," said Fanny, calmly. "Do they want cream with their tea?"
"Oh, that's all right, Fanny," said Geoffrey, quickly. "Don't bother about us; we 'll take anything you 've got."
Fanny neither met his eyes nor answered him.
"Well, I guess there is some, Fanny," said Miss Loomis, consideringly. "You go into the kitchen and see. I generally have some around. It's such wonderful stuff, Monsieur Dupin, this Cornish cream. You have no idea, but I dare n't take too much of it; there is n't any doubt it's a great flesh-producer. Now what do you think of my Fanny?"
"Ah, Madame," said Dupin, "if she is your Fanny, what would I not give to make her mine! She is a model in a century; yes, yes. Your statue,—I shall not forget it,—there is in it a—je ne sais quoi. You have, you Americans, a certain flair. I said to Amberley as we came along,—did I not, mon cher?—'Explain to me why are the Americans as clever as sin without the disadvantage of a drop from virtue. It is not the Venus of the Medici this one,—I have seen her on the boulevards,—nor ours of Milo. I mean no disrespect to her, but I can always imagine her in an English nursery. This one you have here, this Fanny, she is like the Venus of the Terme in Rome. You know her perhaps, headless, alas! but with an expression of the body as soft as a south wind. You remember her, Geoffrey?"
"Oh, yes, I remember her all right," said Geoffrey, crossly. "Let's leave the damned thing alone and come and have tea. I beg your pardon, Miss Loomis! It's not that I don't admire your work; it's—it's—"
"It's that you admire the work of nature more?" laughed Dupin. "Be careful, my good friend. Nature has already supplied you with what to admire."
Geoffrey gave him a glance so furious that Dupin stood still and stared; but Miss Loomis saved the situation by not seeing that there was any.
"Why, you can swear just as much as ever you like, Mr. Amberley," she said kindly. "I know just how you feel. He's got a St. Ives appetite, Monsieur Dupin, and he wants his tea. I never saw such people as the English are for their tea."
Fanny gave them their tea. There were plenty of cups because she did not take any herself. When she left, she said, "Good-by, Mr. Amberley." It was the only thing she did say to him, so that Geoffrey remembered it.
CHAPTER X
Marcel Dupin sat and smoked in the flower garden of the hotel. In front of him were three round beds of forget-me-nots picked out with pink tulips, and three square beds of white stocks intercepted by scarlet tulips. Behind the flower garden the rooks cawed with the peculiar mixture of abandon and vulgarity common to rooks; otherwise it was a serene and perfect June day. Nevertheless, as Marcel smoked his morning cigarette he frowned.
To-night he was to return to Paris, and he wished to leave with his mind made up about the situation he was leaving behind him. His mind was very clear, and he put before it in order, as they came, certain salient facts.
Something was the matter with Geoffrey; nothing was the matter with his work. Emily was perfectly satisfied. Geoffrey did not know what was the matter with himself, and Emily had no idea that there was anything the matter with him.
And Fanny? Well, Fanny did not act according to her type. Marcel had been exceedingly discreet, but he had studied Fanny. Studying Fanny had indeed been part of his discretion. She had shown him nothing, she had put no obstacles to his study of her, but she made no response to his delicate, tentative advances. She might have been innocent or simply perfectly stupid,—great beauty has occasionally this preservative,—or else she was submerged, absorbed in some secret passion; but she had no time to expend upon a passion, for she sat patiently to Miss Loomis all the morning, and in Miss Loomis's studio she had allowed Marcel to model a small bust of her in the afternoons. At night the landlady at Carbis Bay would obviously account for her to Emily.
Emily was charmingly at her ease and extraordinarily conciliating to Marcel. Marcel perfectly understood Emily. She wanted Geoffrey's friends to find her admirable, and to conciliate Marcel was also to act as a screen for Fanny.
Marcel reviewed her processes with imperturbable clarity. He had not fallen a victim to Emily's charm; he resented a woman who manipulated virtue. Nevertheless, he was perfectly fair to her. She wanted to serve Geoffrey, and she would serve him at the cost of any personal sacrifice; the difficulty that remained was that the only personal sacrifice really required of her was one that it would never occur to her to make. She could only serve him by leaving him alone.
In all probability the matter with Geoffrey was that, owing to an appalling blunder on Emily's part, she had sent him away for five weeks with a woman who could leave him alone.
He was still in love with Emily, but he was suffering from the contrast, and what was Fanny doing? It seemed to Marcel that Fanny was letting Geoffrey go; she was letting him go to a tune that Emily never heard. Marcel heard it clearly enough, and he knew that you do not let a man go unless you have already held him.
All these delightful, blind English people sat round Fanny in a ring. Mrs. Dering, with her gift of irony and her habit of toleration, which evaded rather than overcame obstacles; Mr. Dering, daintily stepping over facts as if they were mud to be kept from shining boots; Emily, a watchful redeemer, invariably watching the wrong things; Geoffrey, priding himself on his shaken bliss—all of them under the impression that they were guarding and protecting this lost sheep among them. And Fanny sat there silent and intensely anxious, protecting them. She held danger like a lamp in her hand, but she would not let it shine upon them.
It was a charming picture, and God knew what would become of it if it continued beyond a certain point.
Marcel smoked in the bright summer sunshine and reconstructed the telling of it to his Paris friends.
"Whatever happens, it will make an extremely chic little conte," he pronounced to himself; then he shot suddenly to his feet. Fanny stood before him. She wore Emily's blue linen dress and a shady hat. Her eyes were very grave, and her voice sounded uneven as she said:
"May I talk to you a little?"
"With all the pleasure in the world, Mademoiselle," exclaimed Marcel, with the slightly exaggerated respect he always showed to Fanny. "Permit me to bring you a chair. Do you not find this little garden charming?"
Fanny's eyes considered the forget-me-nots and the pink tulips lingeringly, but she had not come to talk about gardens.
"I heard," she said, "that you were going back to Paris to-night. Miss Emily told me."
"Hèlas! yes," murmured Marcel. "I am too sadly dragged away before the wedding. It is what always happens to me when a wedding is in the air. Let us hope it will not become a habit and take place before my own."
"I want to go away, too," said Fanny. "Will you take me with you back to Paris?"
Marcel's figure strung itself into sudden alertness; his mind stiffened with attention; and when Marcel became visibly alert, he became also strangely sharp.
"Why, Mademoiselle?" he asked her, fixing her with a gaze that was like the drawing of a weapon.
"I want to go away," said Fanny, moistening her lips. "I must go away," She was not afraid of his eyes. He saw in a moment that she had come to that point of human endurance which goes beyond personal fear.
She expected anything of fate for herself except kindness.
"But, Mademoiselle," said Marcel, quickly, "I am not here to consider your wants. I am the friend of Geoffrey Amberley and in a sense of Miss Dering. I should be committing an infamy if I took you away from their protection."
"Ah!" she said, drawing in her breath, "it's for them, for them!"
Marcel regarded her curiously.
"You must forgive me," he said more gently, "if I annoy you by my questions; but you will understand that I must have very good, clear reasons to act against their wishes. You are not satisfied, then, with being a model?" he asked her. "It is fair to tell you that I think you could earn a living by it."
"I was satisfied with being his," said Fanny, fiercely. Then she said more quietly: "Miss Emily did n't understand. People who have got everything, and always have had everything, never understand—that you must have something, too—something of your own, I mean. I could get on all right as long as I cooked for them, either of them. I'm like that, and I enjoyed it. That's something for yourself—working for people. I loved getting his meals and one thing or another. I wanted to do it for Miss Emily, too; I'd have done anything. I did black his boots, but he did n't know it, of course. Down here the sea takes the polish off; so you have to know how, and take trouble to get a shine on them. I wanted to take a cottage and work for Miss Emily, but she would n't let me. She never saw how you want to do things back."
"But Geoffrey—he saw that?" Marcel asked. He had let his cigarette go out, and was watching Fanny with an unhurried intensity.
"He did n't see anything," Fanny said softly. "He was just a friend. Miss Emily was good to me because I was bad, but Mr. Amberley is n't that sort; he just—well, he liked me. I'd never been liked by a man before. You know what I mean. There'd always been the other thing, and that puts you off."
"Pardon," Marcel interrupted her; "it puts you off what?"
"It puts you off liking them," said Fanny, simply.
"Ah, that is a pity!" said Marcel. "This life that you want to return to is evidently not your métier."
"I don't know what that means," said Fanny, "but there is n't anything else to go back to. I can't be a model and not have anything, like they think, and see it all going on—the things they 've got and their life together. I thought I could, but I can't. That's why I want to go to Paris. I could start afresh there. I know Paris, but I have n't any money; so I thought I'd just see if you would take me."
Marcel spread out his hands.
"And do you, may I ask," he demanded, "admire her, then, this Miss Emily?"
"Oh, I admire her all right," said Fanny, quickly; "don't make any mistake about that. She's good; she's so good she does n't see what things mean. There's lots of ways I know him better than she does. She should n't have sent him down here with me that way. She did n't know, though I tried to tell her; but I was afraid to say too much. You are with good people; they get such ideas in their heads; they think things worse than they are. Besides, I did n't know him then. I thought he was just an ordinary man."
"You interest me, Mademoiselle," said Marcel, "quite extraordinarily. But what makes you think Geoffrey is not an ordinary man?"
Fanny swallowed nervously.
"Well," she said, "as far as that goes, I suppose I may as well tell you. I tried him, and even after that he was good to me just the same, not because I was—what I was, but because I was me. I'd never let him down after that, never!" Fanny paused; then she said, with a quick glance at Marcel, "I could, though, quite easily."
"And that's why you want to go away?" Marcel asked.
"Yes," said Fanny.
"But you say always," Marcel objected, "that he only liked you. One gathers that he retained his love for his betrothed. Why, now then that his marriage is approaching, is he not safer still?"
Fanny frowned.
"I let him be safe then," she said, "because I was all right myself; I was doing things for him. It's funny how that makes you feel. I could have gone on always like that, but when that stopped, I got frightened; I could n't keep my mind off him."
"But, Mademoiselle,—forgive me,—" said Marcel, "do you realize at all that what you say implies that you care very much for my friend, and that this emotion will make a return to your former existence extremely difficult? Have you considered this point?"
Fanny gave a sudden laugh.
"That's why I went on those rocks," she said, "considering it. I could n't do it again; the water felt so cold. But you can't say I have n't tried to get out of it, can you?"
"No, Mademoiselle," said Marcel, gently; "you have been very faithful to your friends."
"Well, you see, I never had any before," Fanny explained. "If you think I 've behaved all right, will this make you take me to Paris?"
Marcel's softness disappeared.
"About that," he said, "we must be practical."
"All I want is for you to take me over there; then I 'll find my feet. I never have been helped much by people."
"Very well, then," said Marcel, slowly; "I will do this thing. It will be a very grave scandal, but to break a marriage, that, I take it, is worse. We will say farewell now, Mademoiselle. I take the five-thirty from St. Ives. You will be kind enough to go by an earlier train to the little junction beyond, at which my train arrives at six. There I shall find you."
Fanny rose. She looked relieved.
Marcel did not offer to shake hands; he did not even smile. He regarded her very gravely, and taking off his hat he bowed, holding it in his hand.
"Allow me to say, Mademoiselle," he said, "that I very much respect you for what you are about to do."
Fanny stared. It was the bold, unswerving, stupid stare of her class. Without a word she turned and left him.
"Mon Dieu!" said Marcel, going back to the tulips and opening his paper, "that is a derelict—one of those boats that sink, but never sink enough, on which the unwary strike! For the unwary I have always had pity, but this is the first time that I have found myself pitying the derelict! Personally, I am a little on edge with the affair. I do not like women who are not in love with me, but one must make sacrifices upon the altar of friendship. Also, when she arrives in Paris, she shall sit to me for the figure. That will repay me for a good deal. Le bon Dieu knew perfectly how to make her, though He seems to have overlooked the necessity for taking any precautions afterward. It seems a great pity."
Before Marcel caught the evening train he wrote a short letter to Geoffrey:
Mon cher, what I am about to do appears singularly base. I wonder if you will know that it is not. We have lived together, worked together, understood each other as far as in this imperfect world it is possible for two beings to understand each other. I know that you do not pick pockets or lie, it is possible that you also know the same of me. But women finish these things, in men's hearts, where they wish to find only room for themselves and their conveniences. I do not say all women, not even all good women, but many good women—they make what is called a clean sweep. Think what on the whole is easiest of me, then; Miss Emily will guide you. But remember this: I am a man who has never respected women, but I respect Mademoiselle Fanny; do not, therefore, respect her less than I. When you have been married five years come alone to Paris, and I will explain the reason for our action. In the meantime accept my strongest felicitations for your happiness and for that of the charming Mademoiselle Emily, who will never forgive me.
Emily never did.
CHAPTER XI
Geoffrey took Marcel's note to "The Nest." It was all he could do, but he did n't want to do it.
There was a high wind blowing; the scarlet tulips were over, and there was nothing left of their glory but their rather unsightly sticks. The sweet-peas and the roses had n't yet come out.
It was early in the morning, and Geoffrey refused to go in. He did n't want to see them all sitting round the breakfast-table being shocked at Fanny.
He was n't shocked himself; he was completely bewildered and stunned. He did n't see the point of it, but it had already occurred to him that the point of it was n't being shocked. It seemed to him that to see Emily in the garden alone would be quite enough.
There are some women whom high winds suit; they look their best with their hair blown about their eyes, their clothes flowing, and their color heightened. Geoffrey had thought that Fanny in a wind was like the figure in the Naples Museum called "A Girl Hastening." But Emily was not slim enough to hasten, and moral indignation and a high wind proved very unbecoming to her. She came down the garden path as if she were being pushed from behind. Geoffrey saw that she had already heard from Fanny.
"Look," Emily said, "at this!" She held between her finger and thumb, at some little distance from her, a note from Fanny. Fanny had written:
Dear Miss Emily: I know you won't like and I'm very sorry, but I had to get away. I have gone with Monsieur Dupin to Paris. It was n't his fault. I made him take me.
Fanny.
"Is n't it incredible! Is n't it utterly loathsome and base!" Emily almost shrieked at Geoffrey as they entered a small summer-house together. They had to get somewhere out of the wind.
"I can't understand it," Geoffrey muttered helplessly.
"Understand it!" cried Emily. "What is there to understand? The man is a cad, simply an unscrupulous French roué; and Fanny—I see that now; I trusted her too much—Fanny is really bad. I never knew human nature could be so utterly vile. Think, Geoffrey, think what I 've done for her!"
Geoffrey thought. Emily had spent very nearly twenty pounds on Fanny. She had lent her her cottage for a fortnight, she had given her some old clothes and a great deal of good advice. He remembered what Fanny had wanted to do for Emily, and he looked away from the flushed, indignant face before him.
Fanny would n't have got angry if Emily had done something wrong; she would have wanted to cover it up. Emily was uncovering Fanny.
"I had safeguarded everything as far as I could," she went on. "I never gave her money. I always managed to have it paid for her. It is always safer not to let a person like that deal with money direct. She could n't have paid for her railway-ticket if that wretched man had n't taken her."
"Good God!" cried Geoffrey, "what on earth became of that check I gave you for her, for the sittings?"
"Oh. I never gave her that," said Emily, calmly. "I arranged with her that it was to help with her expenses. I thought it better not. Why do you look as if you were angry, Geoffrey? Surely I had a right to do what I thought best for her?"
"I don't see that you had any right," said Geoffrey, hotly, "to keep money from her that she had earned. If I had dreamed of such a thing, I should have insisted upon her being paid. Can't you see that she could n't get away without taking his money? You forced her to go with Dupin!"
"What perfect nonsense, Geoffrey!" said Emily, impatiently. "Besides, why on earth should she want to go away unless she was thoroughly bad? If she did, she could have said so. Do be sensible about it. I think you are forgetting how I found Fanny and what I have done for her. I have spent a great deal more than that on her, and I would have gladly spent twice as much to save her; but I don't know why we are talking about money. This is n't a question of money; it is simply a question of moral evil. How could they be so base?"
"How do you know they are base?" asked Geoffrey. "Everything one can't understand is n't necessarily base."
Emily had never heard Geoffrey speak like this before. His voice had a hard, cutting quality, and he eyed her completely without adoration; besides, he spoke as if he was on the side of Fanny and Marcel.
"Surely, surely," said Emily, "you don't condone what they have done?"
"My dear girl," said Geoffrey, "I don't condone or condemn anything that I can't make head or tail of. Here is Marcel's letter. Read it for yourself. You will see there they had some extraordinary reason for what they did. That's what bothers me; I can't make it out."
Emily hurled back her hair, and read what Marcel had written. Of course she did n't believe a word of it.
"Do you mean seriously to tell me," she asked, "that you 're taken in by this stuff? My dear Geoffrey, a child would see that Monsieur Dupin has just concocted this to get out of an awkward situation. All that about respecting Fanny is simply the most disgusting hypocrisy. You don't take girls whom you respect to Paris."
"You might," said Geoffrey, perversely; "you might take people anywhere if you respected them."
Emily saw for the first time what the Amberleys meant about Geoffrey. He was incalculable. He might get under the ten commandments or do something silly. She took a deep breath before she answered him; then she said with kindly patience:
"Come, Geoffrey, do you really mean to say that you think Monsieur Dupin has taken Fanny to Paris to treat her like a sister?"
Geoffrey swore under his breath. She had him there. He knew quite well Marcel would not treat Fanny like a sister.
He felt as if the summer-house was extremely small and as if he could n't get out of it. Emily filled it; she filled everything, and she was being more sensible than she was adorable.
"Men always stick up for each other in the most absurd way," she said after a pause. "Now, I was really fond of Fanny, and yet I don't pretend to make excuses for her."
"I think you ought to," said Geoffrey, stiffly. "I mean—I don't see why you say you were fond of Fanny. Why don't you say you are? She's the same Fanny."
"Oh, no, dear, she is not," said Emily, inexorably. "She deceived me. I went at once to Miss Loomis before breakfast this morning and to Fanny's landlady. Neither of them had the slightest suspicion. Mrs. Cadge said no gentleman had ever been near the place, or she would have seen him. They must have met secretly."
Geoffrey winced. He wondered why privacy should be called secrecy.
"And Miss Loomis," Emily went on, "declared that at my special request she had made a point of being present at all Monsieur Dupin's sittings. She says she was never out of the room and that nothing passed between them whatever. Sometimes Monsieur Dupin spoke to Fanny, the simplest civilities, but generally he talked to Miss Loomis herself. Fanny never looked at him. Think how sly she must have been! The whole thing makes me perfectly sick."
"I do wish," said Geoffrey, fiercely, "that you would stop talking as if they were a couple of deceitful conspirators. Even if they did go off together to be as immoral as you like, as far as I can see they are under no obligation to either of us to advertise the fact. There was no reason why they should consult us. I admit it's disappointing for you about Fanny, but nothing you did for her gave you the slightest right to dictate her course of action. She did n't hoodwink you. As long as she could live the kind of life you had urged upon her she did it, and when for some reason best known to herself she decided against it, she gives you the straight tip and walks off. I'm hanged if I can see what you want to tear the roof off for about Fanny. As for Marcel, I know him like the back of my hand. He's absolutely truthful. If he'd carried Fanny off for the fun of the thing, he'd have said so. If he says he did n't, I'm willing to take his word for it. I came up here prepared to apologize for him, but you 've taken the wind out of my sails. You accuse him of too much."
"Geoffrey," said Emily, quietly, "I do not think you are quite yourself this morning. Don't you see, can't you understand, that something really dreadful has happened? It can't even be hushed up. People know all about it. It's been most disagreeable for mother and father! Oh, I never dreamed I should have to urge you to see how horrible it all is! It's immoral; it's impossible to accept such things as the end of civilization."
"As far as I am concerned," said Geoffrey, bitterly, "civilization can end to-morrow."
He was thinking of what civilization had contributed toward Fanny. Perhaps Emily had done rather better out of it; at any rate she sat down and covered her face with her hands.
Geoffrey stood with his back to her at the door of the summer-house. Every now and then his eyes wandered over "The Nest." It was an extremely comfortable, well-built house.
"Geoffrey," she said at last. He turned at the sound of her voice and looked at her.
"I was n't going to tell you," said Emily, slowly, "but I think I must now. What do you suppose Miss Loomis said when I told her about Fanny?"
"I don't know," said Geoffrey in a bored voice. "I don't see why you told her anything."
"She said," Emily went on, fixing him with strange, watchful eyes, "'Well, if Fanny had a fancy, I should have thought it was for your Mr. Amberley.'"
Geoffrey walked down the steps of the summer-house and began kicking at the gravel.
"I hate American women," he said shortly, without looking up.
"Of course," said Emily, steadily, "I told her there had never been anything, not the least little thing to make us think that. There never has been, has there, Geoffrey?"
"I suppose," said Geoffrey, "you think you have a right to ask me a question like that? Well, you have n't. You have a right to ask me if I cared about her, and I 'll answer you. I'm hanged if I know whether I did or not."
He ought n't to have put it like that; he knew he ought n't. What had upset him, what had made him angrier and angrier and less and less a lover, was that Emily only seemed sorry for herself. He kept waiting and hoping that she'd say, "Don't you see it's because I mind so horribly about Fanny?" But she did n't seem to mind it for Fanny. She never seemed to have seen the real Fanny at all, either the Fanny who could do it or the Fanny who would mind it. Geoffrey had seen them both, and stronger than his sense of bewilderment was the sense of how Fanny did n't like it, did n't like this life to which she had suddenly turned back without a reason, without a farewell.
He heard Emily's voice behind him, a little faint as to tone, but quite steady and rather like a gimlet.
"I suppose you know what this means, Geoffrey?" she said. "It means the end of our engagement."
Geoffrey pulled himself together with difficulty.
"That's for you to decide, Emily," he said. "I am at your service. I will do whatever you like, but I can't give up caring for Marcel and Fanny."
Emily rose slowly and came out of the summer-house.
"If you care for what is bad," she asked, standing beside him, "how am I to believe you really have cared for what is good?"
She separated the two quite easily, and he saw that in her own eyes she stood for what was good. The Amberleys, of course, would have agreed with her.
"My dear," said Geoffrey, "is n't the good—what there is of it—big enough for all of us? Have we got to be always picking and choosing in other people's lives?"
"Ah," said Emily, bitterly, "you make it worse. You do condone it. I know why now: it's simply because you like her."
She hesitated for a moment, but Geoffrey said nothing more. He was n't, at this time of day, going to deny that he liked Fanny.
He did not watch Emily leave him, blown between the tattered tulips toward the house. He was still wondering what on earth Fanny had done it for? Could it have been just to avoid what had already taken place, the breaking of their engagement? If she had, how sickening to have had to let her sacrifice be wasted! And yet, was it wasted? For he knew now that if it had n't been broken, things more sickening would have happened still. Fanny had broken their happiness, but could she have broken anything that was n't so fragile as to be a standing danger to life?
It was n't Fanny's fault or Fanny's flight; it was the way that Emily had taken it that had torn the heart out of his devotion for her.
Still, it was rather hard on Emily. Geoffrey continued to think it was rather hard on Emily, and everybody else agreed with him. The Amberleys were furious. They were furious for two years, at the end of which time civilization recuperated, and Emily married Tom.
FINIS
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