Lucas Malet

“ At the foot of the shining, waxed, wooden staircase within the doorway at the corner of the courtyard, where, backed by her bodyguard of spindly planes and poplars, the lichen-stained nymph still poured the contents of her tilted pitcher into the shell-shaped basin below, Adrian left Madame St. Leger.
"No, I will not come farther, chère Madame et amie," he said, his air at once gallant and tender, standing before her, hat in hand. "It will perhaps be easier, in face of the pious fraud you propose to practise upon Madame, your mother, that you should meet her alone." ”

“ La belle Gabrielle shook her head gently, smiling.
"No, no," she answered. "Not under compulsion, not out of pity, mon ami; but because I find nature is too strong for me. Because I find I too love, and find—since you will have me lay bare my heart and tell you everything—it is you, precisely and solely you, whom I love."
And from the inner room—into which Anastasia Beauchamp had passed unperceived by her two guests during this, for them, momentous colloquy—came strains of heroic music, good for the soul. ”

“ Life is already over. I am already dead. So I am not afraid. I welcome the darkness of the everlasting night which is about to absorb me into itself.—I wear the white gown I wore the second time you kissed my hand.—I do not blame you, Adrian. It is just as natural that you should not love me as that I should have loved you. I understand that.
"And very soon now all my trouble will be over and passed. Soon I shall sleep in the arms of the lover who has never failed man or woman yet—in the arms of Death. JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE." ”

“ It recalled to him the superb and ill-fated drawing of her, uplifted amid the cruel and witty obscenities of poor René Dax's studio—the exalted Madonna of the Future, her child upon her arm, going forth from things habitual and familiar in obedience to the call of Modernity, of the new and tremendous age. Resemblance was there; yet as he looked a difference in her to-day's attitude soon disclosed itself to this analytic though ardent lover. For, assuredly, the sentiment of this second and living picture of her was less abstract, more warm and directly human? ”

“ He emerged from the confusion and lethargy which had oppressed him, quickened by that same outcry into newness and fullness of life. To him all this was as the drawing aside of some gloomy, jealously impenetrable curtain—the curtain of desolate gray mist, was it, blotting out the distance, the town, the great woods, and the noble freedom of the sea, when he walked in that ill-assorted funeral procession up the wet road behind Joanna's coffin?—a drawing of it aside and letting the glad and wholesome sunlight shine on him once more. He no longer felt a stranger to himself. ”

“ A woman doesn't openly affirm her regard for a man unless that regard is of purely platonic and innocuous character. And then, after all—excellent thought!—was it not he, Adrian Savage, who had been admitted even during the tragic hours of poor Horace's agony; who had watched by the corpse through a stifling summer night, a night too hot for sleep, restless with the continual sound of footsteps and voices, the smell of the asphalt and of the river? And, since then, was it not to him Gabrielle and her mother, Madame Vernois, had repeatedly turned for advice in matters of business? ”

“ The subtle unrest, the haunting ambitions and curiosities of her awakening womanhood stirred in her, while the disparity of age between herself and her suitor seemed, to her inexperience, a matter of indifference. The marriage took place in due course, and ostensibly all went well. Yet, looking back upon it now, sitting here alone in her bedchamber while the wind cried along the house-roofs and Paris cowered in the grip of the bitter frost, Gabrielle St. Leger knew that she had learned life, the actualities both of human nature and civilized society, in a hard enough school. ”

“ Gabrielle cried, a sudden yearning in her eyes, "still I cannot count her as altogether unfortunate, your poor cousin! For it is not given to many—it is the mark of a very strong, a very great nature, to be capable of such love. And when she had obtained this man's confession?"
"She decided to live no longer," Adrian replied hoarsely. "She had no religion, no faith in Almighty God or in the survival of human personality and consciousness, no hope of a hereafter, to restrain her from taking her own life. ”

“ He understood that to marry Joanna would be a crime against God-given instinct, against God-given love, against the God-given beauty of all wholesome and natural things. The sour, pedantic, man-imagined deity of some Protestant sect might demand such hideous, almost blasphemous sacrifice from its votaries; but never that supreme artist, Almighty God the Creator, maker of man's flesh as well as of his spirit, le bon Dieu of the divinely reasonable and divinely human Catholic Church. To marry Joanna would, in the end, constitute a blacker cruelty than to tell her the whole truth. ”

“ For the past week Paris had cowered, sunless, in the grip of a black frost. If those leaden heavens would only elect to unload themselves of their burden the weather might take up! To Adrian Savage, in excellent health and prosperous circumstances, the cold in itself mattered nothing—would, indeed, rather have acted as a stimulus to his chronic appreciation of the joy of living but for the fact that he had to-day been suddenly and unexpectedly called upon to leave Paris and bid farewell to one of its inhabitants eminently and even perplexingly dear to him. ”

“ And Margaret Smyrthwaite's attractions were of the highly seasoned order, the effect of her full-fleshed, slightly overdressed and overscented person presenting itself without any baffling reserve, frankly assailing and provoking the senses.—Oh! he'd treat her like a queen; work for her; buy her jewels, motor-cars, aeroplanes if she fancied them; pet, amuse, make Stourmouth bow down to, make himself a great man, for her!—Sir Joseph and Lady Challoner—a loftier flight than that—who could tell? ”

“ Her white skin was very clear, a faint scarlet tinge showing through it in the round of either cheek. But just now she was pale. And this, along with the framing black gauze scarf, developed the subtle likeness which—as Adrian held—she bore, in the proportions of her face and molding of it, to Leonardo's world-famous "Mona Lisa" in Salon Carré of the Louvre. The strange recondite quality of her beauty, and the challenge it offered, were peculiarly in evidence; thereby making, as he reflected, cruel, though unconscious, havoc of the juvenile pretensions of poor Anastasia. ”

“ He had been guilty of saying that fatal word "too little" against which dear Anastasia Beauchamp to-day fulminated. There he was to blame. There was his real error, his real mistake. It gnawed mercilessly at his conscience and his sensibility. It would continue so to gnaw, whatever the upshot of this disastrous business, as long as he lived. In the restrained and conventional intercourse of modern, civilized life, the difficulty of avoiding that fatal word "too little" is so constant and so great. His mind, spent with thought and emotion, dwelt with languid persistence upon this point. ”

“ Two low, wide divans upholstered in black brocade stood on either side of the deep outstanding chimney-breast; and upon the farther one, masked by a red-lacquer folding screen, amid a huddle of soft, black pillows, flat on its back, a human form reposed—but whether of living man or of cleverly disposed lay figure remained debatable, since it was shrouded from head to heel in a black silk resai, even the face being covered, and its immobility complete.
On taking leave of Anastasia Beauchamp, Adrian Savage had found himself in no humor either for work or for sleep. ”

“ From where he stood, looking inland, the surface of the vast, somber amphitheater of blue-black fir forest, variegated here and there by the purple-brown of a grove of bare, deciduous trees, or the pallor of a snow-dusted space of tussock-grass and heather, was unbroken by house-roof or other sign of human habitation. Looking seaward no shipping was visible. To Adrian the scene appeared arrestingly northern in character, the spirit of it questioning, introspective, coldly complex, yet primitive and elfin, reminding him of Grieg's Occasional Music to the haunting parable-poem of Peer Gynt. ”

“ Looking eastward, up the wind, the sea horizon, Stourmouth, its many buildings and its pier, and all the curving coastline away to Stonehorse Head—the dark mass of which guards the entrance to Marychurch Haven—showed through a film of fine gray mist. Westward, the colors of both land and sea, though opaque, were warmer. Across the golden gorse of the common in the immediate foreground Joanna saw the great amphitheater of the Baughurst Park Woods extending far inland, the rich blue-purple of the pines and firs pierced here and there by the living sunlight of a larch plantation. ”

“ On the Thursday evening of this wet week, Joanna Smyrthwaite went to her room immediately after dinner, and, lighting the candles, sat down at her bureau. The rain beat against the windows. She heard it drip with a continuous monotonous tapping off the edge of the balcony on to the glass and tile roof of the veranda below. She heard the intermittent sighing sweep of the wind through the near trees, and the wet sucking sob of it in the hinges and fastenings of the casements. Nature wept, now petulantly, now, as it seemed, with the resignation of despair ”

“ Adrian replied. "My cousin, of whom you may remember to have heard me speak—Joanna Smyrthwaite—"
He hesitated, and his companion, though stoutly resolved against all yielding and pity in his direction, could not but note the melancholy and extreme pallor of his handsome face.
"But certainly I remember," she returned rather hastily. "Is she ill, then, poor lady, one of those pensive abstractions whom it has been your interesting mission to materialize and rejuvenate?"
"She is no longer ill," he answered. "She is dead." ”

“ Anastasia, weary, but genial and amused, on capital terms with her fellow-creatures and with herself, stood in the embrasure of one of the windows in the second room of the suite. Behind her red and pink rambler roses and ferns, in pots, formed a living screen against the glass, pleasantly tempering the light. Ludovico Müller had just made his bow and exit, leaving the music-room empty; while in the first and largest room Madame St. Leger, who helped her to receive to-day, bade farewell to the guests as they passed on into the cool, lofty hall. ”

“ But I do permit myself—your own words have procured me the opportunity—both to declare its existence and to assert my profound assurance of its permanence. You may not smile upon it, dear Madame. You may even regard it as an impertinence, a nuisance. Yet it is there—there." Adrian drummed with his closed fist upon the region of his heart. "It has been there for a longer period than I care to mention. And it declines to be eradicated. While life remains, it remains, unalterable. It is idle, absolutely idle, believe me, to invite it to lessen or to depart." ”

“ At sunset the sky had cleared somewhat, and a scarlet glow touched the under side of the vast perspective of pale, folded cloud, and blazed on the upper south westward-facing windows of the Tower House as with a dazzle of fierce flame. Joseph Challoner, however, was unaware of these rather superb impressionist effects as, with his heavy, lunging step, he came out of the house on to the drive. The drawing-room had been hot, and he had gone through a somewhat emotional interview. A man at once hard and sentimental, just now sentiment was, so to speak, on the top. ”

“ A few minutes after Adrian left her, going out on to the gallery, which runs the length of the flat from the vestibule and studio at one end to the dining-room and offices at the other, she had been struck by the strangely cold, haggard light filling it. The ceiling stared, while details of pictures and china upon the walls, the graceful statuette of a slim, unclad boy carrying a hooded hawk on his wrist, and, farther on, a portrait bust of Horace St. Leger—each set on an antique porphyry column—started into peculiar and shadowless prominence. ”

“ So that now he no longer played simply to win a set at tennis from a harmless, lanky Busbridge boy and amazon-like Marion Chase; but to revenge himself for Adrian Savage's past distrust of him, detection and prevention of his shady little business tricks, played to revenge himself for the younger man's superiority in breeding, knowledge of the world, culture, talents, charm of manner and of looks. He gave himself to the paying off of old scores in that game of tennis, all his bullying instinct, his necessity to beat down and trample Opposition under foot, actively militant. ”

“ For one intolerable moment he questioned whether he could, whether he should, sacrifice himself, transmuting Joanna's besotted delusion into fact and truth. But reason, honor, love, the demands of his own rich vitality, his keen value of life and of the delights of living, his poetic and his artistic sense, the splendid call of all the coming years, his shrewdness, his caution, his English humor and his Gallic wit, arose in hot and clamorous rebellion, shouting refusal final and absolute. He couldn't do it. Death itself would be preferable. ”

“ If, in the twentieth century, a man is to subscribe to the constraints of marriage at all, let it at least be in some sort marriage by capture! And, as he told himself, what man worth the name, let alone what artist, what poet—vowed by his calling to confession of the transcendental, the eternally mystic and sacred in this apparently most primitive, even savage, of human relations—would choose to capture his exquisite prey amid the blatant materialism, the vulgar noise and chaffer of the modern social highway ”

“ The chatter of young women upon the gallery, accompanied by smothered laughter, not to say giggling. Joanna ceased writing, blotted the page, and returned the diary to its pigeonhole. She moved into the center of the room and stood anxiously listening. But to her relief no knock came at the door. The two voices grew faint along the corridor, and ceased. Joanna could not, however, immediately settle to her diary again. The giggling had brought her down, from high poetic regions to common earth, with a bump. Pride, cast out in one direction, pranced in another unrestrained—as is pride's wont. ”

“ Adrian said.
René Dax raised himself higher and looked long and searchingly at his friend from head to foot. The red lamp began to glow behind his somber eyes again.
"You do not possess one-tenth of my talent," he declared; "but you possess ten times my physique. Therefore you will obtain. You will prosper. You will lie soft. From the most fastidious to the vilest all women are the same. The Moslems are right. Women have neither soul nor intellect, only bodies, bodies, bodies. All they want in a man is physique." ”

“ Witnessing all which suggestive pantomime from his distant station, Adrian had much ado to maintain an attitude of circumspection and restraint. For was it conceivable that those two—Margaret and Challoner—in any degree shared, or affected to share, poor Joanna's infatuated delusion? Was ever man landed in so false a position! An atmosphere of intrigue surrounded him. He felt as though walking among treacherous quicksands, where every step spells danger of being sucked under and engulfed. ”

“ Challoner, praise to God! had mustered sufficient spunk to ascertain that.
All the same—and here callousness failed him a little—his and Margaret's honeymoon should be a long one, long enough to insure their being far away from Stourmouth when the foresters cut the bracken in November. Distance, travel, new scenes and new interests, are said to draw the sting of remembrance. And it was best, immeasurably best, not only for himself, but indirectly for Margaret also, that remembrance should be blunted, that he should—if he only could—forget. ”