“There’s one thing about Heaven which everybody seems agreed upon,”- -she said— “It’s a place where we’re all expected to sing!”
“Not a doubt of it!” agreed Walden— “You will be quite in your element!”
“The idea of Heaven is remote — so very remote!” said Adderley— “But if such a place existed, and I were bound to essay a vocal effort there, I should transform it at once to Hell! The angels would never forgive me!”
They laughed.
“Let us go into the garden” — said Maryllia— “It is quite lovely just now, — there are such cool deep shadows on the lawn.”
Cicely at once ran out, beckoning Adderley to follow. Maryllia tied on her hat with its pink strings and its bunch of pink hyacinths tumbling against her small shell-like ear, and looked up from under its brim with an entrancing smile.
“Will you come, Mr. Walden?”
John murmured something politely inarticulate in assent. He was, as has already been stated, apt to be rather at a loss in the company of women, unless they were well-seasoned matrons and grandames, with whom he could converse on the most ordinary and commonplace topics, such as the curing of hams, the schooling of children, or the best remedies for rheumatism. A feminine creature who appeared to exist merely to fascinate the eye and attract the senses, moved him to a kind of mental confusion, which affected himself chiefly, as no one, save the most intimate of his friends, would ever have noticed it, or guessed that he was at any sort of pains to seem at ease. Just now, as he took his soft shovel-hat, and followed his fair hostess out on the lawn, his mind was more or less in a state of chaos, and the thoughts that kept coming and going were as difficult to put into consecutive order as a Chinese puzzle. One uncomfortable memory however sat prominently in a corner of his brain like the mocking phantasm of a mischievous Puck, pointing its jeering finger and reminding him of the fact, not to be denied, that but a short while ago, he had made up his mind to dislike, ay, even to detest, that mysterious composition of white and rose, blue eyes and chestnut- gold hair, called Maryllia Vancourt, — that he had resolved she would be an altogether objectionable personage in the village — HIS village — of St. Rest, — and that he had wished — Ah! what had he wished? Back, O teazing reminder of the grudging and suspicious spirit that had so lately animated the soul of a Christian cleric! Yet it had to be admitted, albeit now reluctantly, that he had actually wished the rightful mistress of Abbot’s Manor had never returned to it! Smitten with sorest compunction at the recollection of his former blind prejudice against the woman he had then never seen, he walked by her side over the warm soft grass, listening with a somewhat preoccupied air to the remarks she was making concerning Cicely Bourne, and the great hopes she entertained of the girl’s future brilliant career.
“Really,” she declared, “the only useful thing I have ever done in my life is to rescue Cicely from uncongenial surroundings, and provide her with all she needs for her musical studies. To help bring out a great genius gives ME some little sense of importance, you see! In myself I am such an utter nonentity.”
She laughed. Walden looked at her with an earnestness of which he was scarcely conscious. She coloured a little, and her eyes fell. Something in the sudden delicate flush of her cheeks and the quick droop of her eyelashes startled him, — he felt a curious sense of contrition, as though he had given her some indefinable, altogether shadowy cause for that brief discomposure. The idea that she seemed, even for a second, not quite so much at her ease, restored his own nerve and self-possession, and it was with an almost paternal gentleness that he said.
“Do you really consider yourself a nonentity, Miss Vancourt? I am sure the society you have left behind you in London does not think you so.”
She opened her sea-blue eyes full upon him.
“Society? Why do you speak of it? Its opinion of me or of anyone else, is surely the last thing a sensible man. or woman would care for, I imagine! One ‘season’ of it was enough for me. I have unfortunately had several ‘seasons,’ and they were all too many.”
Again Walden looked at her, but this time she did not seem to be aware of his scrutiny.
“Do you take me for a member of the ‘smart’ set, Mr. Walden?” she queried, gaily— “You are very much mistaken if you do! I have certainly mixed with it, and know all about it — much to my regret — but I don’t belong to it. Of course I like plenty of life and amusement, but ‘society’ as London and Paris and New York express it in their modes and manners and ‘functions,’ is to me the dullest form of entertainment in the world.”
Walden was silent. She gave him a quick side-glance of enquiry.
“I suppose you have been told something about me?” she said— “Something which represents me otherwise than as I represent myself. Have you?”
At this abrupt question John fairly started out of his semi- abstraction in good earnest.
“My dear Miss Vancourt!” he exclaimed, warmly— “How can you think of such a thing! I have never heard a word about you, except from good old Mrs. Spruce who knew you as a child, and who loves to recall these days, — and — er — and—”
He broke off, checking himself with a vexed gesture.
“And — er — and — er — who else?” said Maryllia, smiling— “Now don’t play tricks with ME, or I’ll play tricks with YOU!”
His eyes caught and reflected her smile.
“Well, — Sir Morton Pippitt spoke of you once in my hearing” — he said— “And a friend of his whom he brought to see the church, the Duke of Lumpton. Also a clergyman in this neighbourhood, a Mr. Leveson — rector at Badsworth — HE mentioned you, and presumed” — here John paused a moment,— “yes, I think I may say presumed — to know yon personally.”
“Did he really! I never heard of him!” And she laughed merrily. “Mr. Walden, if I were to tell you the number of people who profess to know ME whom I do not know and never WILL know, you would be surprised! I never spoke to Sir Morton Pippitt in my life till the other day, though he pretends he has met me,-but he hasn’t. He may have seen me perhaps by chance when I was a child in the nursery, but I don’t remember anything about him. My father never visited any of the people here, — we lived very much to ourselves. As for the Duke of Lumpton, — well! — nobody knows him that can possibly avoid it — and I have never even so much as seen him. Aunt Emily may possibly have spoken of me in these persons’ hearing — that’s quite likely, — but they know nothing of me at first hand.” She paused a moment, “Look at Cicely!” she said— “How quickly she makes friends! She and Mr. Adderley are chattering away like two magpies!”
Walden looked in the direction indicated, and saw the couple at some distance off, under the great cedar-tree which was the chief ornament of the lawn, — Cicely seated in a low basket-chair, and Adderley stretched on the grass at her feet. Both were talking eagerly, both were gesticulating excitedly, and both looked exactly what they were, two very eccentric specimens of humanity.
“They seem perfectly happy!” he said, smiling— “Adderley is a curious fellow, but I think he has a good heart. He puts on a mannerism, because he has seen the members of a certain literary ‘set’ in London put it on — but he’ll drop that in time, — when he is a little older and wiser. He has been in to see me once or twice since he took up his residence here for the summer. He tries to discuss religion with me — or rather, I should say. irreligion. His own special ‘cult’ is the easy paganism of Omar Kayyam.”
“Is he clever?”
“I think he is. He has a more or less original turn of mind. He read me some of his verses the other day.”
“Poor you!” laughed Maryllia.
“Well, I was inclined to pity myself when he first began” — said Walden, laughing also— “But I must confess I was agreeably surprised. Some of his fancies are quite charming.”
They had been walking slowly across the lawn, and were now within a few steps of the big cedar-tree.
“I must t
ake you into the rose-garden, Mr. Walden!” — and she raised her eyes to his with that childlike confiding look which was one of her special charms,— “The roses are just budding out, and I want you to see them before the summer gets more advanced. Though I daresay you know every rosebush in the place, don’t you?”
“I believe I do!” he admitted— “You see an old fogey like myself is bound to have hobbies, and my particular hobby is gardening. I love flowers, and I go everywhere I can, or may, to see them and watch their growth. So that for years I have visited your rose-garden, Miss Vancourt! I have been a regular and persistent trespasser, — but all the same, I have never plucked a rose.”
“Well, I wish you had!” said Maryllia, feeling somewhat impatient with him for calling himself an ‘old fogey,’ — why did he give himself away? — she thought,— “I wish you had plucked them all and handed them round in baskets to the villagers, especially to the old and sick persons. It would have been much better than to have had them sold at Riversford through Oliver Leach.”
“Did he sell them?” exclaimed John, quickly— “I am not surprised!”
“He sold everything, and put the money in his own pocket” — said Maryllia,— “But, after all, the loss is quite my own fault. I ought to have enquired into the management of the property myself. And I certainly ought not to have stayed away from home so many years. But it’s never too late to mend!” She smiled, and advancing a step or two called “Cicely!”
Cicely turned, looking up from beneath her spreading canopy of dark cedar boughs.
“Oh, Maryllia, we’re having such fun!” she exclaimed— “Mr. Adderley is talking words, and I’m talking music! We’ll show you how it goes presently!”
“Do, please!” laughed Maryllia; “It must be delightful! Mr. Walden and I are going into the rose-garden. We shall be back in a few minutes!”
She moved along, her white dress floating softly over the green turf, its delicate flounces and knots of rosy ribbon looking like a trail of living flowers. Walden, walking at her side, nodded smilingly as he passed close by Cicely and Julian, his tall athletic figure contrasting well with Maryllia’s fairy-like grace, — and presently, crossing from the lawn to what was called the ‘Cherry- Tree Walk,’ because the path led under an arched trellis work over which a couple of hundred cherry-trees were trained to form a long arbour or pergola, they turned down it, and drawing closer together in conversation, under the shower of white blossoms that shed fragrance above their heads, they disappeared. Cicely, struck by a certain picturesqueness, or what she would have called a ‘stage effect’ in the manner of their exit, stopped abruptly in the pianissimo humming of a tune with which she declared she had been suddenly inspired by some lines Adderley had just recited.
“Isn’t she pretty!” she said, indicating with a jerk of her ever gesticulating hand the last luminous glimmer of Maryllia’s vanishing gown— “She’s like Titania, — or Kilmeny in Fairyland. Why don’t you write something about HER, instead of about some girl you ‘imagine’ and never see?”
Adderley, lying at his ease on the grass, turned on his arm and likewise looked after the two figures that had just passed, as it seemed, into a paradise of snowy flowers.
“The girls I ‘imagine’ are always so much better than those I see,”- -he replied, with uncomplimentary candour.
“Thank you!” said Cicely— “You are quite rude, you know! But it doesn’t matter.”
He stared up at her in vague astonishment.
“Oh, I didn’t mean you!” he explained— “You’re not a girl.”
“No, really!” ejaculated Cicely— “Then what am I, pray?”
He looked at her critically, — at her thin sallow little face with the intense eyes burning like flame under her well-marked black eyebrows, — at her drooping angular arms and unformed figure, tapering into the scraggy, long black-stockinged legs which ended in a pair of large buckled shoes that covered feet of a decidedly flat- iron model, — then he smiled oddly.
“You are a goblin!” — he said— “An elf, — a pixie — a witch! You were born in a dark cave where the sea dashed in at high tide and made the rough stones roar with music. There were sea-gulls nesting above your cradle, and when the wind howled, and you cried, they called to you wildly in such a plaintive way that you stopped your tears to listen to them, and to watch their white wings circling round you! You are not a girl — no! — how can you be? For when you grew a little older, the invisible people of the air took you away into a great forest, and taught you to swing yourself on the boughs of the trees, while the stars twinkled at you through the thick green leaves, — and you heard the thrushes sing at morning and the nightingales at evening, till at last you learned the trill and warble and the little caught sob in the throat which almost breaks the heart of those who listen to it? And so you have become what you are, and what I say you always will be — a goblin — a witch! — not a girl, but a genius!”
He waved his hand with fantastic gesture and raked up his hair.
“That’s all very well and very pretty,” — said Cicely, showing her even white teeth in a flashing ‘goblin’ grin,— “But of course you don’t mean a word of it! It’s merely a way of talking, such as poets, or men that call themselves poets, affect when the ‘fit’ is on them. Just a string of words, — mere babble! You’d better write them down, though, — you musn’t waste them! Publishers pay for so many words I believe, whether they’re sense or nonsense, — please don’t lose any halfpence on my account! Do you know you are smiling up at the sky as if you were entirely mad? Ordinary people would say you were, — people to whom dinner is the dearest thing in life would suggest your being locked up. And me, too, I daresay! You haven’t answered my question, — why don’t you write something about Maryillia?”
“She, too, is not a girl,” — rejoined Adderley— “She is a woman. And she is absolutely unwritable!”
“Too lovely to find expression even in poetry,” — said Cicely, complacently.
“No no! — not that! Not that!” And Adderley gave a kind of serpentine writhe on the grass as he raised himself to a half-sitting posture— “Gentle Goblin, do not mistake me! When I say that Miss Vancourt is unwritable, I would fain point out that she is above and beyond the reach of my Muse. I cannot ‘experience’ her! Yes — that is so! What a poet needs most is the flesh model. The flesh model may be Susan, or Sarah, or Jane of the bar and tap-room, — but she must have lips to kiss, hair to touch, form to caress—”
“Saint Moses!” cried Cicely, with an excited wriggle of her long legs— “Must she?”
“She must!” declared Julian, with decision— “Because when you have kissed the lips, you have experienced a ‘sensation,’ and you can write— ‘Ah, how sweet the lips I love.’ You needn’t love them, of course, — you merely try them. She must be amenable and good-natured, and allow herself to be gazed at for an hour or so, till you decide the fateful colour of her eyes. If they are blue, you can paraphrase George Meredith on the ‘Blue is the sky, blue is thine eye’ system — if black, you can recall the ‘Lovely as the light of a dark eye in woman,’ of Byron. She must allow you to freely encircle her waist with an arm, so that having felt the emotion you can write— “How tenderly that yielding form, Thrills to my touch!’ And then, — even as a painter who pays so much per hour for studying from the life, — you can go away and forget her — or you can exaggerate her charms in rhyme, or ‘imagine’ that she is fairer than Endymion’s moon-goddess- -for so long as she serves you thus she is useful, — but once her uses are exhausted, the poet has done with her, and seeks a fresh sample. Hence, as I say, your friend Miss Vancourt is above my clamour for the Beautiful. I must content myself with some humbler type, and ‘imagine’ the rest!”
“Well, I should think you must, if that’s the way you go to work!” said Cicely, with eyes brimful of merriment and mischief— “Why you are worse than the artists of the Quartier Latin! If you must needs ‘experience’ your m
odels, I wonder that Susan, Sarah and Jane of the bar and tap-room are good enough for you!”
“Any human female suffices,” — murmured Julian, drowsily, “Provided she is amenable, — and is not the mother of a large family. At the spectacle of many olive branches, the Muse shrieks a wild farewell!” Cicely broke into a peal of laughter.
“You absurd creature!” she said— “You don’t mean half the nonsense you talk — you know you don’t!”
“Do I not? But then, what do I mean? Am I justified in assuming that I mean anything?” And he again ran his fingers through his ruddy locks abstractedly. “No, — I think not! Therefore, if I now make a suggestion, pray absolve me from any serious intentions underlying it — and yet—”
“‘And yet’ — what?” queried Cicely, looking at him with some curiosity.
“Ah! ‘And yet’! Such little words, ‘and yet’!” he murmured— “They are like the stepping-stones across a brook which divides one sweet woodland dell from another! ‘And yet’!” He sighed profoundly, and plucking a daisy from the turf, gazed into its golden heart meditatively. “What I would say, gentle Goblin, is this, — you call me Moon-calf, therefore there can be no objection to my calling you Goblin, I think?”
“Not the least in the world!” declared Cicely— “I rather like it!”
“So good of you! — so dear!” he said, softly— “Well!— ‘and yet’ — as I have observed, the Muse may, like the Delphic oracle, utter words without apparent signification, which only the skilled proficient at her altar may be able to unravel. Therefore, — in this precise manner, my suggestion may be wholly without point, — or it may not.”
“Please get on with it, whatever it is,” — urged Cicely, impatiently- -”You’re not going to propose to me, are you? Because, if so, it’s no use. I’m too young, and I only met you this morning!”
He threw the daisy he had just plucked at her laughing face.
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 615