The Wood Nymph

by Mary Balogh

  “We shall have to put it to the test,” Elizabeth had said. “And it is fine for you to be standing here talking, Helen. You are still wearing your cloak. I am feeling decidedly chilly. Let us go up to the drawing room. I have been told that tea and scones await us there.”

  On the following day, when Elizabeth was in the sitting room writing a lengthy letter to Robert, Helen had come into the room carrying a roll of paper. Elizabeth had smiled at her.

  “I thought you might like to see one of my drawings,” she had said. “I did not bring any of my paintings. This one is not good. It is the only portrait I have ever attempted. And it does not really look like him. But I like the picture anyway.” She had unrolled the picture almost apologetically and turned it for Elizabeth to see.

  Elizabeth had been almost speechless, as she wrote to Robert afterward. “Oh, Helen,” she had said, “how' did you know? How could you know him so well? Yes, that is William; that is his very essence. I don’t think I even knew it myself until this moment.”

  Helen had looked doubtful. “But do you not think,” she had said, “that I should have sketched him with a serious expression? He is far more often serious than smiling.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Elizabeth, “but this is the real William. All his inner kindness and gentleness show through here. This is as he should look always, Helen. And this is how he was when you knew him?

  “Yes,” Helen had said, “but it is not a good portrait, after all. I was deceived. I loved him, you see.

  “And love him still,” Elizabeth had stated gently. “It will not do to deny the truth, you know, Helen. Do you carry this picture around with you only because it is a good work of art? I do not know the truth of last summer, but I do know William Mainwaring. For all the evidence to the contrary, I cannot believe him to be the heartless villain you consider him to be. Don’t suppress your bitterness. Face it and think about it. Perhaps you will find a different answer than the one you have accepted so far.”

  Helen had rolled the portrait in her hands. She had looked sullen again. “I want to forget,” she had said. “I want to think only of my child and how I can best prepare to give him a good life.”

  “I am sorry!” Elizabeth had leaned forward and placed a hand over one of Helen’s. “I do not mean to preach at you or be forever handing out unsolicited advice. I shall never refer to the matter again, Helen. Let us be friends and try to make each other happy here, shall we? I must finish writing to Robert and then I must visit John for a while—I have seen him only briefly this morning. After that, shall we go for a walk? It looks overcast and cold out there, but the fresh air will do us good. And the land around here is very picturesque. Perhaps you will get some ideas for painting again. If it is true that you have done none since leaving Yorkshire, I suspect that it is high time you got back to it.”

  And that is exactly what had happened, Elizabeth reflected rather ruefully a few days later. Helen had not actually done any painting yet, but she had made copious preparations. She had been hardly indoors, but had trudged around the grounds, sketchpad in hand, staring and touching, trying to get behind the outer surfaces to the reality within, she told a fascinated Elizabeth. The latter felt very much alone without her husband and without any companionship except that of her baby and the occasional meeting with her guest.

  But she was pleased, nevertheless. Helen was clearly not the insipid, moody little girl that she had expected. In fact, Elizabeth suspected that she was a highly intelligent and artistic girl, whose talents had never been either appreciated or encouraged. And the change of scene was obviously doing her a great deal of good. There was a new sparkle in her eyes, fresh color in her cheeks, and a welcome intensity in her expression. Elizabeth was beginning to like her and she was beginning to understand why William had fallen in love with her. She even felt she had a glimmering of understanding of how those two had come to flout convention to such a shocking degree as to have created a child outside marriage.

  She longed for the arrival of Robert at the end of the first week. She wanted to share her discoveries with him, and she wanted to discuss with him how they might best bring together again these two people who so clearly loved and needed each other.

  Helen had indeed become absorbed again in her painting, but not quite to the extent that Elizabeth believed. She was enchanted by the scenery of the Hetherington grounds. There were no formal gardens, and Helen was glad. She could admire formality, but she could not love it. It seemed almost sacrilegious to take nature and try to subdue it to man’s idea of beauty and symmetry. Nature was perfect in itself. Man could not improve on it. There seemed to her almost an absurdity about constructing little hedgerows, all carefully cut and shaped so that they lacked any spontaneity, and flower gardens, where flowers were given strict instructions to grow a uniform color and a uniform height.

  And marble statues of Greek gods or cherubs always seemed to her totally inappropriate in an English countryside. The rains and the temperate climate of England produced vegetation enough and color enough that it did not need embellishment. It was not that the Hetherington grounds were uncared for. She had discovered that the gardener had four helpers and that all five of them were constantly busy. But their efforts were used to aid nature rather than to distort it.

  At this time of the year most people would have found the gardens drab. Most of the trees were already bare. There were no flowers remaining. Only greens and browns, Helen noted with satisfaction. The shadings of those two colors were almost infinite. One could spend days noticing the contrasts, undistracted by the gaudier colors of summer. She wandered, drinking in the late-autumn beauty of it all, forgetting for long stretches of time the cold, her obligations to her hostess, her pregnancy, and the uncertainty of her future. Soon she would beg paper and paints from Elizabeth and try to paint some of her feelings out of herself. She was almost ready.

  But she was not always absorbed by such thoughts. Just as frequently, as she wandered over the lawns and among the trees, her eyes alone saw them. Her mind was wholly taken by the picture of a different landscape, of tall old trees and wild, untended undergrowth, of a dilapidated hut and a meandering stream. And of herself there, caught up in a dream world, unaware of the realities of life

  As she leaned against an oak tree in the Hetherington grounds, her hands tracing the contours of its trunk, in her mind she felt the old oak tree by the stream, its bark older and rougher. And she felt William’s hands above hers, William behind her. And in her imagination she turned to him as she had turned in reality several months before. She relived his kiss, his lovemaking. She relived each of their three meetings, remembering every look, word, and touch that had passed between them.

  For the first days she refused to recall what had followed. She had resolved when she came here to put the pain behind her. For the sake of her unborn child she needed to achieve some sort of tranquility, and brooding on the wrongs that she had done and those that had been done her was not a way to achieve that aim. She concentrated wholly on those three afternoons, when she had fallen in love and when she had given her love freely without a thought of the consequences.

  On one of those afternoons her child had been conceived. And for the first time Helen was fiercely glad that it had happened. Even if she had the choice now, she would not have things differently, she believed. For the rest of her life she would have her son or her daughter to remind her that at one time she had found her ideal. She had always wanted perfection in her life. Well, she had it once—a perfect love. She could never love William again as she had then, and she could certainly never trust him again, but once, for the space of a few days, she had loved. And she was glad that there would be a permanent and perfect memento of those days. What could be more perfect than a child? A child who would be part of him, who perhaps would look like him?

  The shining eyes and the glowing cheeks that so pleased Elizabeth were due as much to this acceptance of the past as they were to the renewal of her dete
rmination to paint.

  Although Helen sometimes forgot that she was a guest and that she should spend more time with her hostess, she did enjoy Elizabeth’s company when they were together. She had been grateful to her for the invitation to Hetherington, but she had not really expected to like her hostess. Despite what Elizabeth had said to her about her own sufferings, Helen had labeled her as one of the privileged in this life, as one who had not really been made to face the harshness of life as most other people had.

  She was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to find that Elizabeth had a warm personality and a keen intelligence. Her love for her husband and son were no affectation. She wrote to the marquess daily, though he was planning to come a week after their own arrival. She spent a large portion of each day with her son instead of abandoning his upbringing to the nurse. And her love was not confined to her own family. She told Helen about her brother John and his wife, Louise; and the affection she felt for them and their growing family—two children, soon to be three—was very obvious.

  She talked sometimes with enthusiasm and amusement about her come-out Season in London, when she had met the marquess and when his eccentric grandmother had aided and abetted their growing love and their eventual elopement. And she spoke of the people of the village of Granby where she had lived for the six years of her separation from her husband, as a governess and companion. There was no bitterness in any of these stories, but there was a great deal of affection for the people she had known. And, of course, Helen could never forget that the marchioness had saved her from a nightmare situation.

  Elizabeth could also talk intelligently about books and about art. She had a great deal more knowledge than Helen, in fact, and the younger girl learned eagerly from her. The marchioness understood too that art in all its forms was more than a pretty ornament to life. Helen was playing the pianoforte in the music room one evening while Elizabeth was upstairs putting the baby to sleep. When she finally emerged from her absorption in a Bach fugue, it was to find that her hostess was sitting quietly in a chair close to the door.

  “You have mastered the feeling of the music,” she said. “I have heard Bach played so many times as if he wrote merely that the pianist might exercise his fingers and impress his listeners. But I think you are a trifle heavy, Helen. Bach was meant to be played on a harpsichord, I believe. There should be a crispness and a brilliance about his music as well as emotion. Do try it again, but this time do not press so heavily on your fingers.”

  She stood behind Helen, every inch the teacher that she had been for five years. And Helen obediently played the piece again, trying to improve her technique according to the advice she had been given. It was good advice. It came obviously from someone who knew what she was talking about and who cared deeply for music.

  Before many days had passed Helen was beginning to like Elizabeth Denning very much indeed.

  She was also beginning to open her mind again to the events of the past few months. She had determined to avoid thinking about the painful things that had happened, but of course it is impossible to blank thoughts from the mind merely by the effort of will. When she eventually began to paint, taking all her equipment out-of-doors despite the coldness of the weather, she found she could no longer keep her feelings repressed. If she was to show feeling in her paints, she had to be willing to release all that was inside her. And the pain was with her again.

  Had she been totally unreasonable? she asked herself at last. She had refused even to listen to William when he had wanted to explain why he had left her in the summer. It seemed impossible, of course, that he could have a good reason for what he had done. But then surely it would seem to almost anyone that she could not have had a good reason for allowing herself to be violated before she was married. Papa had said as much, in fact. He refused to write to her, refused to acknowledge her as his daughter or have her name mentioned in his house, her mother reported in a letter. To him there could be no possible excuse for the disgrace she had brought on herself and on his family. Papa would relent, of course, but he would never understand her behavior, she knew.

  Was she being equally insensitive in refusing even to listen to William? Did she not at least owe him a hearing? After all, he was the father of the child inside her, and he had offered to do the honorable thing and marry her, even without knowing about the child’s existence. His words and behavior at Richmond had even suggested that he might still care for her in some way.

  What was it he had said? He had said that she behaved as if she were the only one allowed to err. She demanded perfection, he had said, and had not realized that perfection in another human being was impossible to find. Was she really being so unreasonable and so immature? She knew herself to be far from perfect. Her present condition was proof positive of that. And she had done him wrong. She had led him to believe that she was an uneducated girl of easy virtue. Certainly he had not raped her. He had, in fact, given her every opportunity to avoid his possession. She had deceived him. She should at least have told him who she was so that he could have made a free decision as she had. Was it time she admitted her guilt to someone other than just herself?

  By the time she had completed her first, unsatisfactory painting of the grove of trees at the foot of the lower lawn, Helen was seeing the past few weeks in a totally new perspective. And she was no longer satisfied with her own part in those events. She really had behaved like a spoiled brat who had to make everyone else suffer because life was not going her way. She must have upset her family with her sullen ways, and she had behaved with horribly bad manners to the Hetheringtons. Even her treatment of William had been inexcusable. She was equally guilty for the turn of events during the past summer, yet she had behaved as if she were the wronged angel and he the blackest villain.

  She finally came to these conclusions on the morning of the day when the Marquess of Hetherington was expected. Elizabeth had been bright with repressed excitement when Helen left with her easel and paints and paper. She must return to the house, she decided, and write a letter to William. It would be extremely difficult to write. She must apologize for her part in the predicament in which they found themselves and for her refusal to listen to his explanations. And Helen was not good at apologizing.

  But who was? she thought philosophically. She packed away her painting things with a sigh. The picture was terrible. It was neither pretty nor meaningful. She would have to write, Only then, perhaps, would her conscience be salved enough that she could produce the picture that she knew was somewhere inside her. She walked back to the house to join a restless Elizabeth for luncheon.

  They were in the drawing room later in the afternoon. Elizabeth was bent over her embroidery, though her mind was not really on what she was doing. It was a shame, she felt, that John had chosen to sleep longer than usual this afternoon. Playing with him would have been a distraction. Helen was seated at the farther end of the room at the escritoire, writing a letter. Whoever she was writing to, she was not finding the task easy. The surface of the desk was littered with papers that had been crumpled into little balls, and she seemed to be staring at the wall ahead of her, stroking her chin with the feather of her quill pen every time Elizabeth glanced at her.

  Finally, when she was beginning to convince herself with the greatest of good sense that Robert would not come today after all, but would surely come on the morrow, she heard the unmistakable sound of horses’ hooves on the cobbles outside the main doors. Embroidery was dumped unceremoniously beside her, and Elizabeth was on her feet in a moment.

  “That must be Robert,” she said. “I should wait here, should I not, Helen? The servants will think me a mistress of scant dignity if I rush to meet him. Anyway, it is only a week since I last saw him. Is my hair tidy? The water here is so much softer than that in London. My hair just refuses to keep its chignon.”

  Helen turned on her chair and smiled at her hostess. It was an unusual sight to see Elizabeth agitated. “There is not a hair out of place,” she
said, “and I think probably servants like to serve people who show affection for each other.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “Your encouragement is all I needed,” she said. “Helen, you are having a terrible influence on me.”

  And she was out of the room and flying down the staircase and across the wide hallway without a second thought to her dignity. An expressionless footman was already holding open the door at the approach of his master. Elizabeth went rushing past him and down the first six steps. Two arms reached out and lifted her over the remaining two and swung her in a wide circle.

  “Hoyden!” the Marquess of Hetherington said with a wide grin. “Are you not afraid of what the servants will think, Elizabeth?”

  And he was seeking out her mouth and kissing her thoroughly right there in front of the footman and the butler hovering in the background, and the groom who was holding his horse’s head, and William, who was standing on the cobbles still holding the reins of his own horse.

  She flushed and pushed at her husband’s shoulders. “William!” she said breathlessly. “You have come too? I am delighted to see you.” She held out a hand to him. “But I am not at all sure that you have done the right thing to come here. Helen will be upset, you know.”

  He accepted her hand and bowed over it unsmilingly. “I am afraid I invited myself quite unashamedly,” he said. “How is she, Elizabeth? I had to make one more attempt to speak to her. If I can see after a day or two that it is no good or that I upset her too much, I shall leave without having to be told to do so, I assure you.”

  “I did sound inhospitable, did I not?” she said contritely. She linked an arm through his and led him toward the door. “You must be tired if you have ridden all the way from London. Do come up and have some refreshment.”

  “It seems that having my wife rush from the house like a schoolboy was welcome enough for me,” Hetherington grumbled cheerfully, following them into the house and up the stairs to the drawing room.