They entered the gate, and she felt that if she did not speak something would break in her.
"At what hour do you expect Mr. Marwick?"
"This afternoon. Maurice has gone to bring him here."
She picked the key out of the yew tree and unlocked the door.
"Father," she said, "I should like to ask you one question. Did you marry my mother as Mr. Marwick is marrying me?"
Sylvester looked over her head.
"God brought us together. Your mother was a very good woman."
"Poor mother!" said the daughter to herself.
She went to her room and took off her things, for she wanted to be alone for a little while, to feel, and to think. Sylvester paralysed her. And as she sat on the edge of her bed she looked round her as though some miraculous writing on the whitewashed walls would speak of comfort and hope, a luminous finger tracing the words, "You shall not marry without love." Of course it was obvious that she could refuse to marry Mr. Marwick. She could oppose obstinacy to her father's tyranny. She could go out of his house and try and earn a living for herself, and it might be she, and not her father, who would profit by the quarrel. But that was not all. At the back of her mind something was forming like a picture in a crystal, the conviction that Maurice was at Mr. Marwick's mercy, and that the whole business was a bargain, her body against Marwick's money. Women are quick at getting behind the nicely painted scenery of men's ethics, especially when men are trying to fool a woman in whom the strongest of all the instincts has been aroused. St. Croix may have thought his daughter little more than a dummy, or a child whom you ordered to the altar as you ordered her to school. The child would have gone to school. It might have whimpered a little and loitered on the way, but it would not have had that in it with which to rebel. But a woman who knows what love is does not behave like a child.
At three o'clock that afternoon Mr. Marwick came, and Douce heard the wheels of his chaise in the lane. He was alone. She had a glimpse of him from her window, and expecting to see her brother with him she was puzzled to find the little man alone. The thing displeased her. Surely, Maurice, the man, the son, the saved one, should have been ready to show his face? Was he ashamed of it all? Was that sinister suspicion of hers to be reflected in the mirror of reality? Were these three men all against her, three men against a girl?
Douce heard the murmur of men's voices below, but she made no movement to go down to them. Her father should come for her, and presently she heard the opening of a door and his voice calling to her.
"Mr. Marwick is here."
She did not answer, but remained seated on her bed, for she had decided that something was due to her, some reasonable explanation, and that she should be allowed to share in the family secret as a woman who could think and feel. She was determined that her father should come up to her and speak, and in due course she heard him climbing the stairs.
"Douce."
"Yes?"
"Mr. Marwick is here."
He tried her door, but it was bolted on the inside, and she resented his attempt to open it.
"I think you have something to tell me, sir," she said.
He stood there, frowning and looking down.
"It is my wish that you come down and give your promise to Mr. Marwick."
"But before I do that I must know what our debt is to him."
She remained there until he told her something of the tale that she had heard that morning, and then she emerged and went down with him without offering any opinion of her own. She found Marwick standing by the fire, sleekly and modestly expectant, half lover, half family friend. He bowed to her. She sat down.
And then she realized that her father had followed her into the room and had closed the door. He moved to his armchair and seated himself with the air of a man who considered that he had every right to be present at a family affair. He was to preside over it like the deity. But this paternal presence outraged all her instincts. It was not fair; it was abominable.
She looked at Marwick, and the little man was quick to discover his opportunity. He cleared his throat and turned to her father.
"You will excuse me, sir, but what I have to say to your daughter I wish to say in private."
Sylvester stared at him.
"Surely, my dear Mr. Marwick——"
"Sir, I take it that Miss St. Croix is a responsible person. She has a right to hear and judge in a matter that concerns her so shrewdly. I must insist on seeing her alone."
St. Croix got up. He looked a little surprised, a little offended, but he shuffled out of the room, leaving Marwick and Douce together.
"Thank you, sir," said she; "there are some things that my father does not understand."
He gave her a bow.
"My dear, I hope that you and I will understand each other better. It is my wish that you should be happy."
And so, for the second time, he made his proposal for marriage. He said not a word of her brother and his affairs, and for this she was grateful, and ready to like him the better for it. He offered her just what he had to give, the devotion of a dry little man in the forties, a very comfortable home, her freedom—so far as any woman can be free—a solid settlement in case of his death. His proposal was as exact as legal document, but all the while he looked at her with bright and hungry eyes.
At the end of it she went and stood at the window, and remained there very still, looking out into the garden.
"Mr. Marwick," she said, "this is a very serious matter for me and for you. I wish to consider it. Will you give me three days?"
"My dear, most certainly. I applaud your seriousness."
"Then will you call my father and tell him what we have decided?"
Sylvester was called in and made to understand for the first time in his life that another man stood firmly between him and his daughter. Mr. Marwick had made an advance. Never had he seemed so likeable to Douce as on that Sunday afternoon when he put himself between her and the fires of the family Jehovah.
Douce had asked for three days' grace, but her decision came to her in the night. She held it to her bosom like a mother clasping a newly born child, for it was feeble and weak, and such a little thing to cling to, and yet it gave her hope, the courage to go on fighting. All that evening her father had sat before the fire in damning silence, and his silence had been like a hand pushing her into Marwick's arms.
The weather changed in the night, and a frost set in, and about two o'clock on the following afternoon a man who was melting some tar in a bucket over a fire beside the watchman's box inside the gateway of Mr. March's new house, heard the crackle of broken ice in the puddles. He turned about and saw a young woman wrapped up in a black cloak, and a young woman whose face looked white below the redness of her hair.
"Has Mr. March been here to-day, workman?"
Her voice was the voice of a lady, and she spoke like one in authority.
"No, miss."
"Do you expect him here?"
"I don't know, miss. But I did hear him say to the foreman on Saturday that he might not be here till Tuesday."
Douce thanked him and walked away. The disappointment made no difference to her decision; indeed, she was conscious of a sense of relief, for she wished to see Mrs. Mary before anything was said to Jordan. She was very sure that Mrs. Mary would be kind to her, and that a woman who had married for love would be ready to help a girl—and that girl her god-daughter—who refused to marry without it.
The sun hung all big and yellow in the west, and when Douce reached the first houses that were scattered beside the road she kept passing from shadow into sunlight, and from sunlight into shadow. She walked quickly. She was afraid of a certain vacillation in her self, and of something which kept getting between her and her purpose just as these houses came between her and the sun. She began to feel agitated, and her agitation increased as she drew nearer to Spaniards Court. She felt that people were looking at her, into her, and that they must see things in her eyes. She
felt ashamed of her own emotion, though why she should feel ashamed of it she did not know. All these years she had made herself wear a veil of reticence, and now it was being torn aside. She shivered and felt naked.
Outside the gateway leading into Spaniards Court Douce found a coach waiting, but a coach was no unfamiliar sight here, for many of the gentry drove to Thomas Nando's. But she did not notice a black man in livery beside the coachman on the box, and when she raised the ring of Thomas Nando's knocker, the knocker-plate reminded her of the black man's face.
She stood tense and still, waiting.
Meg came to the door, a Meg who smiled on her, for being a big and swarthy old woman, Meg was always taken with Douce's pretty littleness.
"Why, miss, come right in."
"Is Mrs. Mary at home, Meg?"
"No, but she should be back in no time, and Mr. Jordan is in the fencing-school."
Douce stepped in, and suddenly old Meg looked sly.
"Why, now, let's go and take a peep at Mr. Jordan at his work. I do love watching of him, my dear, and we can see it all through a crack in the door."
Douce would have hung back, but she was overpersuaded and carried away by the larger vitality of the other woman, and in this moment of stress and of suspense she let herself float on the current of big Meg's kindness. Meg took her along the passage to the door which connected the fencing-school with the house. It hung slightly open, and through the gap between the doorpost and the door Douce had a view of the big, white room, the smooth boards of the floor running like the planks in the deck of a ship, the chairs and benches round the walls, the oak posts of the gallery at the further end. Douce could not see the gallery itself, nor did it concern her. Her eyes were on Jordan in his white, close-fitting coat. He had his back to her and was fencing with a young man with very black hair and a sallow face. The great room was empty save for these two, and quite silent but for the tingling of the foils and the movement of the two men's feet.
Douce stood there watching the movements of the man she loved, and as Meg had said, he was good to watch. There was no swagger about him, no jerkiness. His movements flowed; they had a large grace, a satisfying completeness, as though every part of him moved just as it should. Even his feet were good to watch, for they were like the feet of a dancer.
And then Douce began to notice something else. She gathered that Jordan and the other man were practising, but it struck her that they were unnaturally solemn and silent over it. She gathered, too, that Jordan was far too strong for the other man, and that he touched him often. They would stand for a moment with lowered foils, as though resting. Jordan's back was turned towards Douce, but she noticed that during these pauses he would throw his head back as though he were glancing quickly at people in the gallery.
The explanation seemed to her very simple. The room might be empty but no doubt there were silent and interested watchers up above. She remembered the coach, and, turning with the idea of asking Meg to tell her who the coach belonged to, she found that Meg was no longer beside her. The woman's disappearance did not disturb Douce, for it was probable that Meg had work to do.
But it did occur to Douce to wonder who was up there in the gallery. By stooping she could bring it into her line of vision, but what she saw was not what she had thought to see. The gallery was empty save for a single figure, the figure of a woman.
Douce saw her very vividly, for the woman was sitting just where a great ray of sunlight from the sinking sun poured in at one of the high windows. She wore a cloak of furs, and under it some rich red stuff that had the colour of blood. She sat there quite motionless, absorbed, strangely brilliant and vivid in the yellow light, looking down at the two men below. Her face, her eyes were unforgettable. There was something mysterious and inscrutable about her. She seemed to burn before Douce's eyes, to inflict a slow and scorching pain.
Douce sank on one knee. She could not take her eyes off the figure of the woman in the gallery. She felt that she hated her, feared her, recognized in her a disastrous beauty that left her kneeling helplessly in the shadow. Once she saw the woman smile, and that smile hurt Douce. Then, she was aware of the woman rising slowly and drawing her dark furs about her. The fencing was over. The sallow, black-haired man was walking away with the two foils, and Jordan was going towards the foot of the staircase leading to the gallery.
Douce saw the woman descend. She seemed to linger on the last step, while Jordan bowed to her and then stood very straight and still. The woman smiled and spoke.
"I understand now why people come here to see you fence."
Her voice seemed to bring a darkness over Douce's eyes. She felt cold, piteously angry, strangely ashamed. A deep, wild feeling of self-abasement choked her. She got up. She slipped almost furtively along the passage, opened the door, and without troubling to close it, fled away across Spaniards Court. No one saw her go, and when Mrs. Mary came in a few minutes after Douce had left, she was met by Meg, who told her that Miss St. Croix was in the house.
But though there was no Douce to be found in the parlour, Meg said that she might be found in the fencing-school, for they had been watching Mr. Jordan fence.
"We just took a peep of him through the crack of the door. I left Miss Douce there playing Peeping Beauty."
Mrs. Mary went to the fencing-room, and at first she thought that it was empty, but on casting her eyes upwards she saw Jordan sitting in the gallery at a spot where the last rays of the sun came in at the window. Mrs. Mary thought it rather strange that he should be sitting there alone. She called to him.
"Have you seen Douce, Jordan?"
He rose like a man who has been disturbed in the midst of deep thought.
"Douce? No. Is she here?"
"She was here."
Neither Meg nor Mrs. Mary knew that Mrs. Mariana Merris had been sitting in the gallery, for she had entered and left by the school doorway, and Jordan did not tell his mother that Mrs. Merris had come to watch him handle a sword.
That evening two shadows met in Sylvester St. Croix's garden, unhappy shadows who came together by chance in the winter dusk. They met by the tree into which Maurice had once thrown Douce's doll.
"Douce!"
She stood looking at her brother, and he could see her face only as a patch of pallor, and the two eyes like the eyeholes in a mask.
"I want to ask you a question," she said.
The words came to her lips suddenly, and yet to Maurice her voice sounded calm and toneless. He had been walking with his own cowardice in the greyness of the garden, afraid to go in, afraid of what he might hear. His cowardice was with him still.
"Yes."
"I want you to tell me something. I want to be sure."
"What is it, Douce?"
"This. If I refuse to marry Mr. Marwick he will let you go to prison?"
They stood face to face in the dusk, but the only answer he could give her was a miserable lowering of his head.
"Then I will marry Mr. Marwick."
She saw his white face raised to her.
"Douce, God bless you."
He caught at her arm, but she flung him off with a sudden fierce movement.
"Don't touch me, don't touch me."
XXIX
Those weekly visits of Jordan's to the house in Garter Street had been interrupted, and it was he who had broken the chain of them, but about this time Mrs. Merris made an effort to bring the snapped links together. She might be one of the women of the moment, the "Goddess of Garter Street," as Sfex called her, but she was not resigned to losing the one man who interested her, while she was playing with the many. She was not in love with Jordan—at least—she felt quite sure that she was not in love with him, but her interest in him was not without colour. Most men are so obvious, and most of the men who paid court to her had ceased to grow, and were stuffed complacently into clothes that were nicely final. They would grow a little fatter in the head and body; that was all. But Jordan had not ceased to grow. He was like a new
country, big and undiscovered, lying beyond the prettily ordered streets of a conventional town. Most women clung to the conventions, to a comfortable security, cushions, coaches, the polite paraphernalia of a protected life, but Mrs. Mariana had in her some of the blood of the first Stamford who had fought his way into the wilderness. Her southern indolence was coloured with the flush of adventure. She was not, and never would be, the Lady with the Lap-dog. Had not her grandmother handled a gun and shot down Indians from behind a rough stockade?
Jordan appealed to her, but in her maturity she wished to be very sure of the appeal. The eternal woman in her waited to hear the inevitable and unrefusable cry. She was not a girl tremulous behind her window curtains; she was in no haste; she would rather have the man climbing to her with difficulty and pain. For then she would be sure, and not selfishly sure, for when love comes to its maturity its thoughts are doubled.
Mrs. Mariana did not know that Jordan had watched her windows. She should have inferred it—perhaps, and looked at her windows with his eyes and from his place against some sheltering wall. He was out there in the darkness. He saw the coaches and chairs come to her door, saw the great world enter, the lights in the window, and sometimes the bowing assiduous figures of the gentlemen who made love to her. Some men would have been provoked by it. "I'll have her in spite of them!" Three years before Jordan might have been fired to such an adventure, but Jordan was different from the Jordan of three years ago. Mrs. Mariana was not Lady Bacchus, nor was she Miss Nancy Sweethaws. Rather, she seemed to him like the full moon in a clear summer sky. If he could not cut her out of the sky, what was the use of crying? If there was no miraculous ladder by which he could climb up to her, what did it avail him to stamp his feet in the mud? Surely a strong man would be wiser to light a lamp in his own window, and leave moonladies to the stars!
Apples of Gold Page 24