"But supposing there were no such people and no houses, but just leagues and leagues of wild, free country, Mr. March. What would you do with it?"
She saw his head lift; he was startled.
"I think I would try and make a new world of it, madam. I would put my arms round it and wrestle with it until I had made it what I wanted."
She could see him doing it, clearing a great space about him, conquering his wild land, building a house which became a white mansion among trees. There would be people about him, servants, slaves, colonists who owned him as the master man and the leader, but none of them would come too near. She fancied that he would love solidity and silence, large rooms, large vistas, a certain aloofness from the smaller, chattering people. He would never be a man to shout and sing and drink his neighbours under the table, or to slap the backs of easy fools.
"That is your dream, Mr. March?" she asked, coming out of a long silence.
"Why, just a dream, madam. I suppose we all have our dreams."
"And sometimes they come true."
"Sometimes," he said, with the air of refusing to be tricked by dreams.
He told her more about himself before he left her, sketching a happy picture of Thomas and Mary Nando, of Spaniards Court, and of the great white-walled room, with its gallery, where he had learnt and taught the craft of the sword. She countered his confessions by telling him that she would like to see him fence, and he looked at her with happy surprise in his eyes.
"That can be easily arranged, madam. If you will honour us by coming to Nandos one day you shall have the whole of the gallery to yourself."
"I might bring Miss Stamford? She has a passion for seeing everything after all these years in the country."
"Bring whom you please, madam."
"And some day perhaps I may see the new house?"
"Why, yes," he said, with a little thoughtful smile. "I should like you to see the house."
When Jordan left her that night she sat a long while by the open window, realizing the man in him as she had never realized him before, and also the distance that he had set between her and himself. He had told her many things, but he had spoken like a man standing a little apart. It was as though he stood in the body of a church while she had her place somewhere above the altar. And she was touched by this devotional attitude of his. He was able to awaken in her passions and deep generous impulses such as no other man had been able to arouse. He was of such a bigness both within and without, so simple, so wise, so cleanly human.
She felt, too, that he had gone from her strangely happy, which was true. He had stood for a moment under her window, and then gone slowly down the street, his hat in his hand and the moonlight in his face. He walked with a large leisureliness, looking upwards, a faint smile in his eyes and on his mouth.
"I have told her everything," he thought, "and she was kind to me. It is very wonderful. I have nothing to regret."
He did not travel beyond her kindness; he was content with it that night, happy with it, proud of it. It was a perfume, a sense of warmth at the heart, a deep delight, a happy reverence. If it did not occur to him to wish to go beyond it, it was because she seemed so different from other women and affected him so differently, and because, in spirit, he looked up at her and felt the rightness of his looking up. She had not even whispered that word, "Climb—climb!" and no inward voice had spoken it in his heart. He remained looking up at her. It was enough.
So Jordan wandered home, while two other men sat at a window overlooking the Strand and bargained with each other. St. Croix, astride a chair, with his arms crossed on the back of it, stared at the windows of the house across the way, not as though he saw them, but as if he were looking at some picture of shame and beastliness and dirt. His sensitive nostrils expressed loathing and scorn. The stench of a debtor's prison, the dirt, the ugliness, the mark of the beast everywhere! He was afraid, and his attitude showed it, for he seemed to crouch as he sat, like a fugitive astride a broken horse. Beside him Mr. Stephen Marwick kept drawing a sheaf of papers between his fingers, as a card player makes the cards crackle before he deals. The act was meditative, and yet it was calculated to fray the nerves of the man who sat and stared.
Sometimes Mr. Marwick spoke in that quick voice of his, as though he were talking to himself and at the same time reminding St. Croix of what would happen or might happen.
"No, it is not a nice place. I would keep out of it. Easier to keep out than to get out. Besides, all that means an end of women and fine clothes and supper parties. I'd keep out of it, St. Croix."
"Damn you!" said the man astride the chair, with sudden fierceness.
Mr. Marwick moistened his lips.
"That does not help us, sir. Here are all these bills against you. What are we going to do about it? Now, as I hinted to you a little while ago——"
St. Croix made a rocking movement on his chair.
"I'll see you in hell first."
"My dear sir, this isn't a stage play. I shall see you in Newgate before you see me in Hades, if it pleases you to talk in that fashion. I informed you that I was a little bald on the crown, and that I have a perfectly honourable passion for red hair. What is there to prevent me from becoming your brother-in-law?"
The other man faced him. His mouth showed as a black circle in the dusk, as though it could have spouted a dozen reasons to Mr. Marwick's face. "You! You little black crab! You bit of inky leather! Give her to you!" But he said nothing.
St. Croix bent his head over the back of the chair and then began:
"So that's your bargain. I'm to help you to marry—her."
"My dear sir, and why not? Do you think I shall make a worse husband than you would do? The position is perfectly plain. The day I become joined to the family——"
"And should she refuse?"
Mr. Marwick crackled his papers.
"That is what I expect her to do—at first," he said.
XXVII
As a flower blossoms suddenly in the desert, so Mr. Stephen Marwick came to his flowering after all these years of dustiness and labour and calculation. Nothing is surprising if you follow back any event to its source, and trace all the changes through which it has come to its climax. Many men grow very amorous after forty, and Mr. Marwick had spent twenty years in ignoring all that human part of himself, or in keeping it locked up in his strong-box and neatly fastened with red tape. He was not a moral man, only an ambitious one; he had discovered very early in life that it is much easier to get a wife than to provide oneself with a career and a fortune. Of the two he had seen that the money was of far more importance than the woman, because there are many women who will make a man very comfortable provided that he has the money to do the same for them. Mr. Marwick had the money. He had waited twenty years for his romance, and when he entered upon it he did so with the same shrewdness and careful ferocity with which he had made his reputation in the City.
Hence a bottle-green coat, a white satin waistcoat flowered with red, silk hose, buckles to his shoes, a dandy wig and a scented stick. Hence, too, a solid and pleasant house ready prepared at Tottenham, and it was a fact that he had bought this house before he had set eyes on Maurice St. Croix's sister. He added a chaise and a couple of horses to his establishment, and put up a glasshouse to grow flowers. The shine of Douce's hair suddenly ripened his intentions, and brought a warmth into the ordering of the great affair.
He was quite determined to get Douce for himself, and he went about the getting of her with characteristic thoroughness. She piqued him in a dozen different ways. For about that time she had put on that bewitching and provoking bloom which comes to a young woman in the flush of her early summer. Her skin was like milk under her brilliant hair, and in this whiteness her eyes floated darkly. She flushed quickly and was easily confused. There were moments when she looked moody, sullen almost, inscrutably brooding over something. Her red mouth took on a sharpness of outline. It needed kisses to soften it. Through it all, too, ran a fine
structure of hardness, of obstinacy and of pride, and Mr. Marwick loved hardness and respected it. He was not averse from discovering a little hardness in his wife, for a woman with an edge to her beauty cuts life more cleanly than a flocculent, feather-bed fool. Such a woman understands the value of money and of all that money implies. She is not imposed on by servants; she realizes that there are more solid ways of impressing other people than by serving your carrots in a golden dish.
Mr. Marwick arrived. Douce was aware of him in the early stages as a neat little man who paid court to her father. He drove over twice a week in his chaise, and persuaded Mr. Sylvester to drive out with him and take the air. They got on very well together. Mr. Marwick always carried a Bible with him in his chaise, and he explained its presence to Mr. Sylvester by saying, "When I drive out into God's country, sir, and look upon His handiwork, it pleases me to open His Book—even as He opens the book of life to us." St. Croix thought Mr. Marwick an admirable person. Moreover, he talked flatteringly of Mr. Sylvester's son.
So it began. Mr. Marwick had given Douce no more than quick glances from his small bright eyes and a great deal of politeness; but about the time that the leaves of the elms turned yellow and fell fluttering into the lane Mr. Marwick became more personal. He bowed over her hand, and held it a little longer than was necessary. He began to insinuate little wedges of sympathy beneath the marble of her reserve.
"Believe me, Miss Douce, you do too much here. Pots and pans, needle and thread! At your age, too! I don't approve."
He presumed to make such remarks in Mr. Sylvester's presence, aiming them aslant at him, and doing it with impunity.
"Your daughter is too much the Martha, my dear sir. I say it with all circumspection."
Old St. Croix looked surprised, but Douce was still more surprised that he did not actively resent what Mr. Marwick said to him. Sylvester had spent his life in giving other people advice, and he had a habit of showing his long teeth at anyone who returned him the same coin.
Mr. Marwick, walking delicately, took to praising the daughter to the father, and sometimes he allowed her to hear him doing it. St. Croix took it very calmly. He had other uses for women than praising them, but if Mr. Marwick chose to be complaisant, well and good.
"I have tried to bring her up, sir, to fear God."
That was as far as his affection carried him, and translated into honest language the phrase meant that St. Croix had tried to bring Douce up to fear himself. With such cold fish "God" and "I" are synonymous.
Douce became aware of Mr. Marwick's gradual approach to her, and where another girl might have laughed or shown fear, she stood and watched with veiled composure. She shrank and yet refused to show her shrinking. She had locked a secret hope away; she was tempted to be bitter against herself and against men. She was in a convent mood, revolting from thoughts that burned to self-torture and merciless self-abasement. She turned upon her own emotions, stripped them, scourged them, shut them up in the dark on bread and water.
She had moments of black anger when she told herself that she would marry Stephen Marwick when he asked her.
She had other moments when she felt that she could kill him.
When Maurice came, and with a kind of spasmodic gaiety fell to putting Mr. Marwick on a triumphal horse, she listened and disbelieved him. But why, she asked herself, was this praise necessary? She was aware of something in her brother that set the same strings of bitterness vibrating in them both. He was playing a tune, and sometimes while he played it his nostrils were black with scorn. She noticed the brittle restlessness of his eyes, and once or twice she caught him looking at her with a most strange look, the look of a man who held a knife and loathed himself at the thought of using it. Maurice was not like his father. He had warm flesh on his bones.
Sometimes she had moments of weakness, of overmastering, childish emotion. She had these three men against her; she felt it, and was sure of it. She was such a little thing and so much alone. And one night she woke from some terrifying dream, crying aloud, "O, Jordan, Jordan, help!" But mostly she was able to subdue and to suppress her emotions, seeing that old Sylvester had made her life an affair of continuous suppression.
Winter came, and at Christmas Mr. Marwick gave a party at his house at Tottenham. He sent a coach for the St. Croix, and for Douce the drive on that December evening was full of vague and prophetic terrors. The day was misty and very still, a dead day. She was aware of her father beside her as something that was both alive and dead. He wore a woollen nightcap and had wrapped a white scarf round his mouth and throat, and sitting there very stiff and still he made her think of a dead body wrapped up in a sheet. He said nothing, did not speak a word to her the whole way, and she sat and watched the lights of the coach playing feebly on the fog. Once she had a fit of shivering, but her father did not appear to notice it, and if he did, he did not ask her if she felt cold.
But at Marwick's fires blazed. He came down to help them out, giving Douce his arm and pressing it gently.
"My dear little lady, you are cold."
Instantly she felt a thickness in her throat. She was so very lonely, so unhappy, and that he of all men should be the one to offer her sympathy came near overwhelming her with ironical emotion. She steadied herself but her composure was a thin crust of ice over fire.
"It is very raw to-night, Mr. Marwick."
"Come in, come in to the fire."
She found Maurice there and an ancient relative of Mr. Marwick's, a huge, flat-faced woman with dead eyes and a lipless mouth. She looked at Douce with hostility, but it was obvious that she had received orders to be kind. Marwick, indefatigable, put Douce in front of the fire and brought her a glass of wine.
"Thank you, I never take wine, sir."
His bright eyes glistened.
"But—in my house—on Christmas, please. It will comfort you, dear little lady."
She felt that something was to happen; she felt it all through the dinner. She saw it in Mr. Marwick's bright eyes, on Maurice's flushed and sullenly vivacious face, in the fat woman's bland hostility. There was a surface of merriment, but it covered deeps of sinister darkness. She shrank into herself and looked only at her plate.
How it all came about Douce never quite knew. Mr. Marwick was laughing and insisting on showing them over the house. He took a candlestick and Maurice another. They went out, all of them, like people moving purposefully off a stage. Maurice courtiered the fat lady; Sylvester shuffled along behind his son; Marwick had given his arm to Douce. And then she found herself alone with him in a little parlour where a fire crackled and leapt in a black grate. He was smiling; the door was shut. She could not hear the voices of the others; she was convinced that the whole play had been arranged.
Mr. Marwick put the candle on the table. She was aware of his smile, of his little glistening eyes. She sank down in a chair, and found him on one knee at her feet.
"Miss Douce," he said, "I want you to marry me."
She burst into tears. She could give no answer for the moment. She was aware of him as something menacing and kind and sly and horrible.
"I can't," she cried; "I'm so——"
Next moment he had her hand between his and was patting it. He made love like an old man.
"There, there, my dear; no one has ever been kind to you. But I shall be kind—O, very."
"I can't," she said. "I can't."
She was wet-eyed, sullen, miserable. She struggled with her own inarticulate emotions, and could blurt out nothing but five words.
"I don't love you—anybody."
And then, most surprisingly, Mr. Marwick came to her rescue. He patted her hand reassuringly.
"There, there; no hurry, no hurry. Supposing we leave it for a little while, a month or so. It has upset you, my dear. I know. I'm not a bad sort of man, and I tell you I will make you happy."
She was grateful to him, quite absurdly grateful for what appeared to be generous restraint.
"Thank you. But I am sur
e——"
"We will say no more about it to-night," he said, caressing her hand. "I can't bear to see tears. I want my little lady to be happy."
When the coach rolled them away into the fog, Douce lay huddled in her corner and tried to get a grip upon realities. Mr. Marwick wanted to marry her, and it seemed to her very obvious that both her father and her brother wished her to marry Mr. Marwick. The fact was like a hand in the darkness, clutching her bosom, and suddenly she cried out.
"Sir, do you wish it, do you wish it?"
Sylvester was dozing. He woke up, and in the dim light his long white face seemed to approach her like the face of a ghost.
"What's that? What's that?"
She pressed her hands together.
"Sir, do you wish me to marry Mr. Marwick?"
She caught a gleam of light in her father's eyes.
"Mr. Marwick will make an admirable husband."
She shrank away, realizing that he had been forewarned as to what would happen, and that he approved of it.
"I said 'no,'" she blurted. "He was very kind; but, sir, I cannot."
St. Croix answered her much as Marwick had done, save that he introduced and made use of the Deity.
"Ask God to guide you, my daughter. Pray that you may be taught to value what is excellent in a husband."
Maurice had stayed behind in front of Mr. Marwick's fire. The big lady was still with them, but Mr. Marwick got rid of her with male peremptoriness.
"Anna, go to bed."
Anna, being partly a pensioner of his, went to bed with assumed docility, and Mr. Marwick, after mixing himself a glass of strong waters, came and warmed himself at the fire. He looked sleek and pleased, and not in the least discouraged.
Maurice waited, with one upward glance of the eyes.
"Refused, my dear sir, refused," said the attorney.
St. Croix's lips seemed to grow thin.
"So it is finished?"
"Not at all. It has only just begun. She showed emotion; she wept, my dear sir. Now, I am not supposed to know anything about women, but I believe that to be a very good beginning."
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