Lucas Malet

“ It blotted out the sun, deadening all colour. The opaline haze, turned to a dull falling mist, closed down and in, covering the sand-hills and the dark mass of Stone Horse Head and even blurring the long straight lines of the sandbank and nearer shingle. The sea had risen, but noiselessly, creeping up and up towards her, no line of white marking the edge of its slothful oncoming.
Damaris stood up, pulling her white jersey—the surface of it already furred with moisture—low over her hips. For she felt shivery, and the air was thick and chill to breathe causing a tightness in her throat. ”

“ Half a mile ahead, pastel-tinted, green-shuttered houses—a village of a single straggling street—detached themselves in broken perspective from the purple of pine-crowned cliff and headland beyond. Behind them the western sky began to grow golden with the approach of sunset. The road lead straight towards that softly golden light—to St. Augustin. It led further, deeper into the gold, deeper, as one might fancy, into the heart of the coming sunset, namely to the world-famous seaport of Marseilles.
Damaris sought to stifle remembrance of this alluring fact, as soon as it occurred to her. ”

“ She felt the breath of high romance. Imagination played strange tricks with her. She could feel, she could picture, a drama of rare quality with those two figures as protagonists. It dazzled while wounding her. She remembered Faircloth's words, spoken on that evening of fateful disclosure when knowledge of things as they are first raped her happy ignorance, while the boat drifted through the shrouding darkness of rain upon the inky waters of the tide-river.—"They were young," he had said, "and mayn't we allow they were beautiful? They met and, God help them, they loved." ”

“ What, in heaven's name, could well be further from any wish of mine?" Faircloth broke out almost roughly, without raising his eyes. "Do you suppose when a man's gone thirsty many days, he is in haste to forego the first draught of pure water offered to him—and that after just putting his lips to the dear comfort of it?"
"Ah! you care too much," Damaris cried, smitten by swift shrinking and dread.
Faircloth lifted his head and looked at her, his face keen, brilliant with a far from ignoble emotion.
"It is not, and never will be possible—so I fancy"—he said, "to care too much about you." ”

“ André, the stout, middle-aged valet de chambre, hummed snatches of gay melody as he rubbed and polished the parquet flooring without. These noises, whether cheerful or the contrary, were at least ordinary enough. By degrees they gained Damaris' ear, drawing her mind from speculation regarding the nature, origin, prevalence and ethics of love. Soon Pauline, the chamber-maid, would bring her breakfast-tray, coffee and rolls, those pale wafer-like pats of butter which taste so good, and thin squares of beetroot sugar which are never half as sweet as one would like. ”

“ If this was what people commonly understand when they speak of love, if this was the love concerning which novelists write and poets sing—this riot of the blood and heady rapture, this conflict of shame and triumph in which the animal part of one has so loud a word to say—she didn't like it. It was upsetting, to the confines of what she supposed drunkenness must be. It spoilt things heretofore exquisite, by giving them too high a colour, too violent a flavour. No—she didn't like it. Neither did she like herself in relation to it—like this unknown, storm-swept Damaris. ”

“ Under these conditions, at once charming and insidious, Damaris Verity, resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees, found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts, perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her own much wondering soul.
For Sir Charles was away, staying with an old friend and former brother-in-arms, Colonel Carteret, for a week's partridge shooting over the Norfolk stubble-fields. Sport promised to be good, and Damaris had great faith in Colonel Carteret. ”

“ The dead black mass of the great ilex trees looked to touch the low hanging sky. A grey gleam, here and there, lit the surface of the swirling tide-river. The boom of the slow plunging waves came from the back of the Bar, and now and again wild-fowl cried, faint and distant, out on the mud-flats of the Haven.
"Listen," Damaris said. "It is mournful here. It tells you the same things over and over again. It sort of insists on them. The place seems so peaceful, but it never lets you alone, really. And now, after what happened, it never leaves him—the Commissioner Sahib—alone. ”

“ He looked her in the eyes, his own worshipful, ablaze at once with a great joy and a great anger; and then led her back, down the length of the aisle, through the west door into the liberty of the sunshine and the crisp northerly wind outside.
Standing here, the houses and trees of the village lay below them. The whole glinting expanse of the Haven was visible right up to the town of Marychurch gathered about its long-backed Abbey, whose tower, tall and in effect almost spectral, showed against the purple ridges of forest and moorland beyond. ”

“ Under ordinary circumstances I should never have dreamed of proposing myself. But I am going out to India for the first time—sailing in the Penang the day after to-morrow. And, as I should be so near here at Southampton, it was, I own, a great temptation to ask if I might come for a night. I felt—my father felt—what a privilege it would be for me, a really tremendous piece of luck, to meet Sir Charles before I started. Such a rare and memorable send off for me, you know!"
"We were very glad you should propose yourself," Damaris answered, still with her grave air of ceremony. ”

“ Taking stock of him thus, from the corner of the sofa, imagination, intelligence, affections alike actively in play, Damaris' colour rose, her pulse quickened, and her great eyes grew wide, finely and softly gay.
Faircloth moved. Turned his head. Met her eyes, and looking into them his face blanched perceptibly under its couche of sunburn.
"Damaris," he said, "Damaris, what has happened?—Stop though, you needn't tell me. I know. We've found one another—haven't we?—Found one another more in the silence than in the talking.—Queer, things should work that way! But it puts a seal on fact. ”

“ Damaris would be charming to her, she felt convinced.
Felicia Verity held the fronts of her long blue coat together, since the wind sported with them rather roughly, and went forward with her quick, wavering gait.
It was a pity Damaris did not marry she sometimes felt. Of course, Charles would miss her quite terribly. Their love for one another was so delightful, so really unique. On his account she was glad.—And yet—with a sigh, while the colour in her thin cheeks heightened a little—lacking marriage a woman's life is rather incomplete. ”

“ Away, above all, from Damaris—delivered from the enchantments and perturbations, both physical and moral, her delicious neighbourhood provoked.
But from that fond neighbourhood, as he suddenly became aware, he was in some sort delivered already. For she stopped dead, with a strange choking cry; and stood solitary, as it even seemed forsaken, upon the wide grey whiteness of the asphalt of the esplanade. Behind her a line of lamps—pale burning under the moonlight—curved, in perspective, with the curving of the bay right away to the lighthouse. ”

“ She negotiated the double encounter, as Carteret had noted, with admirable sang-froid; but not, as to the first one in any case, without considerably greater inward commotion than he gave her credit for. She was in fact keyed up by it, excited, taken out of herself to an unprecedented extent, her native optimism and egoism in singular disarray. Yet thereby, through that very excitement, she recaptured for the time being the physical loveliness of an earlier period. Beauty is very much a matter of circulation; and the blood cantered, not to say galloped, through Henrietta's veins. ”

“ She thought of her father and Darcy Faircloth and their entirely unsuspected relation. This dulled the edge of her enthusiasm. For wasn't it only too probably the same with them all? Loyalty compelled the question. Had not every man a secret, or secrets, only penetrable, both for his peace of mind and for your own, at considerable risk?
Damaris planted her elbows on the window-sill, her chin in the hollow of her hands. Her eyes were solemn, her face grave with thought.—Verily the increase of knowledge is the increase of perplexity, if not of actual sorrow. ”

“ With Sir Charles sometimes, but more often with her aunt, Miss Felicia—most enthusiastic, diligent and ingenuous of sightseers—she visited buildings of historic interest, galleries of statuary and of pictures. For here, too, in architecture, in marble god or hero, upon painted panel or canvas, she caught, at moments, some flickering shadow of the everlasting light, touched at moments both by its abiding terror and the ecstasy of its everlasting youth. But this appreciation of the height and grandeur of man's endeavour was new in her. To Nature she had from childhood, been curiously near. ”

“ Tall and spare in his grey and white sleeping-suit, Sir Charles Verity sauntered out, and stood, smoking, looking out to sea.
Earlier that night, downstairs in the sitting-room, he seemed a storm centre, generating much perplexity and disquiet. But now Tom welcomed his advent with a sense of almost absurd satisfaction. To see what was solidly, incontrovertibly, human could not but be, in itself, a mighty relief.—Things began to swing into their natural relation, man, living man, the centre, the dominant factor once more. He, Tom, could now shift all responsibility, moreover. ”

“ For beside him now walked a man so strangely resembling him in height, in bearing and in build that, but for the difference of clothing and the bearded face, it might be himself had the clock of his life been set back by thirty years.
Damaris' first instinct was of flight. Just as when, out on the Bar with her cousin, Tom Verity, now nearly a month ago, overcome by a foreboding of far-reaching danger she had—to the subsequent bitter wounding of her self-respect and pride—shown the white feather, ignominiously turned tail and run away, was she tempted to run away now. ”

“ As to the impending parochial invasion of Harchester—during the earlier stages of dinner Damaris hardly gave it a second thought, being still under the empire of impressions very far removed from anything in the nature of choir treats. She still beheld the fiery glare of an expiring sunset, and against the ensuing pallor of sea and sky a leaden-hued human, figure strangely, almost portentously evident. That it appeared noble in pose and in outline, even beautiful, she could not deny. But that somehow it frightened her, she could equally little deny. ”

“ She resented this open claiming of Carteret as a member of the elder generation. Still more resented her own relegation to the nullity of the prenatal state. Reminiscences, in which she had neither lot nor part, left her cold. Or, to be accurate, bred in her an intemperate heat, putting a match to jealousies which, till this instant, she had no knowledge of. Touched by that match they flared to the confusion of charity and reverence. Hence, impulsively, unscrupulously, yet with ingenious unkindness, she struck—her tongue a sword—to the wounding of poor Miss Felicia. ”

“ The dusty road, running alongside this last through the hamlets of Horny Cross and Lampit, grew hourly deeper in gritty mud. Beyond question summer and all its dear delights were departed and the chill mournfulness of autumn reigned in their stead.
With the surrounding mournfulness, Miss Verity's simple, yet devious, mind played not ungratefully. For it seemed to her to harmonize with the true inwardness of her mission, offering a sympathetic background to the news of her niece's indisposition and the signals of distress flown by her little protégée, Theresa Bilson. ”

“ He lifted his hand off Tom's shoulder. And the latter, looking round at him was struck—in mingled admiration and repulsion—by his likeness to some shapely bird of prey, with fierce hooked beak and russet-grey eyes, luminous, cruel perhaps, yet very sad.
"Above all be careful in the matter of your affections," Sir Charles went on, his voice deepening. "As you value your career, the pride of your intellect,—yes—and the pride of your manhood itself, let nothing feminine tempt you to be unfaithful to your choice. Tempt you to be of two minds, to turn aside, to turn back. ”

“ She ought to congratulate herself, ought to feel thankful. Only just now she didn't. On the contrary she was shaken—consciously and most uncomfortably shaken to the very deepest of such depths as her shallow soul could boast—sitting here, on a buff-painted chair in the shade of the pines and ilex trees, in company with Damaris, holding the girl's hand in both her own with a clinging, slightly insistent, pressure as it rested upon her lap. ”

“ Carteret comfortably told her, touched by the pathos of her self-reproach. For her sincerity was surely, just now, unimpeachable and she a rare creature indeed! Love, he could less than ever banish; but surely he might utterly banish distrust and fear?—"As frivolity goes, dear witch, and greed of pleasure, yours have been innocent enough both in amount and in quality, heaven knows!"
"I should like to believe so—but all that's relative, isn't it? The real wrongness of what you do, depends upon the level of rightness you start from, I mean." ”

“ For man is never actually master of people or of things; but master, at most, of his own attitude towards them. In this alone can he claim or exercise free-will.
Then—because general ideas, however inspiriting, are rather heavy diet for the young, immature minds growing quickly tired in the efforts to digest them—Damaris, having reached this happy, if partially erroneous, climax of emancipation, ceased to philosophize either consciously or unconsciously. The russet moorland and spacious landscape shut the door on her, had no more to tell her, no more to say. ”