Violet Hunt

“ Egidia laughed.
“No? Well, I must say I don’t care for pictures without any human interest at all.”
“Then you wouldn’t care for Edmund Rivers’ work, unless you could get your romance out of the scarred, weather-beaten face of an old windmill or a ruined castle! He leaves the human interest entirely out of his pictures.”
“And out of his life, too, it seems,” said the other, “and both suffer in consequence. Don’t tell me; there is something wrong about a man who doesn’t care for women! Some day one will awaken him. ”

“ Are you ashamed of your husband, Fibby? It’s my belief that you are ashamed of us all, and hankering after those London people and the ramshackle life they seem to lead. Gallant times they have, to be sure! Thinking only of themselves and their pleasures and making love to each other’s wives! And you are just savage because you aren’t there, too! Oh! I know you!”
Mrs. Elles had broken out into a stormy mazurka that nearly drowned Mrs. Poynder’s words, as possibly she intended it to do. “Ay! ay!” the latter remarked, “work it off that way—I advise you!”
“Don’t insult me, aunt!” ”

“ Egidia was going back to town; but, in the course of many and many a long talk, she had sown a plentiful crop of ideas in this wayward head—a seed whose harvest was to prove a very different one to that which she had expected.
Mortimer Elles was not seriously discomposed by his wife’s remark. “That’s a nice remark to make to a man!” was his not ungentle rejoinder. He had ceased to expect Phœbe to curb any expression of opinion out of respect to his feelings, and in return permitted himself his full measure of brutality towards her. ”

“ Elles’s first taste of London society. She had thought of it, dreamed of it,{216} yearned for it for years. Now it had come to her, like a draught of heady champagne, vivifying after the two nights of waking misery and anxiety she had undergone. Only two nights ago, she had stood, a shaking, quaking figure in the dark passage of the inn at Rokeby, hearing the clock tick, and the rustle of the heavy leaf screen against the pane outside the door of her lover’s room, whence no sound came—no voice of pardon. ”

“ Where are you staying? Let me introduce Mr. Edmund Rivers—Mrs. Mortimer Elles!”
Why should he not be calling on Egidia? It was the most natural thing. Mrs. Elles had never thought of this contingency, and yet she would not have had it not happen for the world. She was not a woman who would go out of her way to avoid situations. She bowed—he bowed; and then Egidia seeming by her manner to prescribe a greater intimacy, they shook hands. Oh! why was it so dark? She could not see his face.
“Will you ring the bell, Edmund, please, for another cup. Mrs. Elles, you must have some tea!” ”

“ Even the darksome yew grove—the haunt of the Lady of Mortham—had no terrors for her now. Love casts out fear; a woman in her state of mind has no horror of the supernatural.
One night, the most beautiful moonlight night of the whole year, she wandered far into the Park and along to the banks of the Greta, where it runs under the shadow of the cliffs crowned with fir trees, and the desolate tower of Mortham stands out against the sky behind them. ”

“ Her brilliant smile came out again. “To see—to have a glimpse of all those wonderful literary people in whose company your life is spent.”
“Well, I happen to know more of artists than I do of literary people,” said Egidia. “You see, my own ‘shop’ bores me. Do you collect—I am sure you do?” She had seen the unmistakable flame of the autograph-fever leap into Mrs. Elles’ eyes. “I can send you some, if you like. I have one in my pocket now that I can give you, from Edmund Rivers, the landscape painter.” ”

“ He was probably sitting brooding by the window in that chair she had sat in. He had omitted to put his drawing away,—presently she rose and tenderly put a sheet of tissue paper over it, as she had seen him do sometimes, when called away even for a moment. Then she sat down again. Her eyes fell on a Bradshaw on the mantelpiece; she thought of getting it and looking out a train to go home by to-morrow. She had no longer any thought of committing suicide, the idea of expiation of which she was now possessed did not admit of any selfish solution of that sort. ”

“ She saw that dim notions of Madame Récamier to be emulated and a salon to be held prevailed in the mind of the lady whom she had dubbed the Muse of Newcastle. Such culture, such an atmosphere of literary gossip as is current in many a second-class literary centre in London, flourished here, and Mrs. Elles led the inferior revels with aplomb and discrimination. She manœuvred her guests very cleverly, on the whole, and talked much and well—with the slight tendency to exaggerate which Egidia had already noticed in her. ”

“ It was a point of honour with her; but deep below her graceful reticence lay the point of vanity—she wanted people to think, if possible, that Mortimer, whom she had ceased to care for, was still desperately in love with her.
She had read many French novels, and she knew that, socially speaking, there was one modus vivendi to be adopted by a woman in her position. She might create for herself some outside interest—she might get up the harmless, necessary flirtation, by which women, circumstanced as she was, are apt to console themselves. ”

“ Elles went on sadly. “Only your opinion, but you have known him so very much longer than I have.” She would have been equal to the mental sacrifice of adding, “and so much more intimately,” but hardly dared, lest it was taken, not as a compliment but as an impertinence. “I only saw him for a month, and even in that time I could not help loving him—adoring him.... How could anyone help it? Could you?”
“No,” Egidia murmured under her breath, too much moved to resent the question.
“It is just those very silent men whom every one adores,” the other went on. “But he always preferred his art to me. ”

“ Poynder flung open the door of the room and stood aghast at the sight of Mrs. Elles. Then she banged her reticule, a strong, black, noticeably shabby one, down on the table, and Mrs. Elles’s eyes fastened on it.
“You got a bit start of me, Fibby!” she said grimly, “but no matter. The old woman will be a match for you before she’s done!”
Mrs. Elles slid her wrist out of Mortimer’s grasp, which tightened disagreeably when he gathered her intention of escape.
“No violence, please, Mortimer,” she said stagily. “I almost think I will leave you to discuss me with Aunt Poynder!” ”

“ Egidia rose to her feet, and Mrs. Elles perforce rose too.
“Have I done such a mischief?” she asked supplicatingly. “Stay! the lace of my dress has got caught in yours!”
She disentangled it, while Egidia stood, a prisoner, shivering with impatience, and some disgust.
“Surely,” Phœbe Elles went on, “you are very fond of each other? I always thought so, from the way he spoke—or rather did not speak of you. With some men reticence about a woman is the sure sign of their feeling keenly about her. ”

“ It was Nature he loved, and Nature only, with his full heart. The human interest was a purely secondary consideration with him. Not “in many mortal forms” did he seek “the shadow of that idol.” He was Alastor and she was the Lady. She must remember that. Alastor could doubtless have done quite well without the Lady. She represented the ever-restless Spirit of Humanity which Alastor had come into the wilderness to avoid. And, for his sake, for the sake of her valued privileges, she must learn to keep it in abeyance and suppress it as far as she could. She must love Nature too. ”

“ For in spite of Phœbe’s frivolity and Edmund’s asceticism, she could read through Phœbe’s admissions and falsifications, that for a brief space they had been lovers—the woman in her had been genuinely stirred, the man in him. It had not lasted, but it had been. But now it was winter, “the days dividing lover and lover, the light that loses, the night that wins,” the season when no man can paint, and loves that are ephemeral die down and are buried under the wrack of autumn. ”

“ They are literally my saviours. I quite sympathize with the heroine of a novel I read lately, who was kept from suicide by the sight of her favourite poets on her book-shelf! I make myself up a dream-life, don’t you know—the life I should like to live if I could choose. One dream-life, do I say?” Her eyes lightened and brightened: she was extraordinarily alert and vivid. “Two or three—a perfect orgy of dream-lives! They cost nothing. But I have always read a great deal. The classics I don’t neglect. I read Plato before I was fifteen—in Jowett’s translation, of course.”
Egidia smiled. ”

“ She spoke pettishly, like a child or a schoolgirl, but all the strength and sadness of renunciation was in her eyes. She evidently meant what she said. Egidia realised this, but the complication of her feelings about this little Helen kept her silent awhile. She took her hand, however, and held it, in sign of amity.
“I want, Phœbe,” she said presently, “to go out of town for two or three days. Do you think, if I did, that you could amuse yourself—and keep out of mischief?”
“You speak to me as if I was ten!” Mrs. Elles said. “I am not sure if I mind? What is mischief?” ”

“ That was all he had done; he had never flirted with her, Egidia felt sure. “Love plays the deuce with landscape!” he had once laughingly proclaimed, to excuse himself from marrying. No, he should not be forced, by the stain of the courts, the horrors of imputation, to take on himself the shackles of the marriage tie, with which the little woman who had played the part of his evil genius, would so carelessly invest him!
. . . . . . . .
“She kissed me, but all the while, she would like to scratch my eyes out,” Mrs. Elles in the silence of the spare room was saying to herself. ”

“ Tags of poetry, scraps of philosophy, queer mythological ideas, born of her miscellaneous reading, about the Earth Mother and the Earth Spirit, passed through her mind. What a terribly artificial life it was that she had been leading! Nature was the real thing after all!
And meantime, at home in smoky, sophisticated Newcastle, Mortimer and Mrs. Poynder and Charles would be sitting down to the substantial midday meal that their souls loved, and that she had carefully ordered for them before she left, as a valedictory service. ”

“ It was all very well: she stood there ostensibly her own mistress in that room, beside Dr. André, but the thread of her fate was hopelessly entangled with the fates of two other persons, her husband and her lover. The divorce hung imminent over their heads, the machinery of which they had set in motion, and which now could not be averted.
She turned to Dr. André, and looked mysterious.
“Shall I tell you what had always been one of my nightmares—a suicide manqué! If a person wishes to commit suicide, he should arrange to do it neatly and completely. ”

“ I married Mortimer like a blind puppy, not knowing, not seeing. I am nothing wonderful, but I do think I am too good for him! Why did I not see it then? Why is a girl such a fool? Why does nobody tell her? It is very hard. They say, as one has made one’s bed, so one must lie on it.... But suppose I decline to lie on it?”
She almost leaped in her bed with the shock of this crude presentment of a new idea. Then she rose, lit a candle and walked out of her room, and across a landing, and straight into Mortimer’s room. ”

“ His eye rested on her with the same searching and affectionate gaze with which it might linger on a “beautiful bit,” as the technical phrase runs; and the light in her eyes and the changes in her expression, as the varying moods flitted over her face, were to him as the cloud shadows chasing each other over Barningham Moor, or the sunlight glinting in the brown pools of the Greta where it was deepest. It was something, but not enough. A woman does not care to be looked at as if she were a landscape by the man whom she passionately loves. ”

“ If only Egidia would not be too{203} matter-of-fact,—would consent to stay in the picture, as it were! As a novelist she would be apt for irregular situations, and able to enjoy and employ them.
The parlour-maid mumbled her name, which she had mumbled to her. Egidia, in a red teagown, like a handsome velvet moth, rose from a low seat to receive her, and Mrs. Elles felt like a frivolous butterfly in the somewhat freakish, bizarre habiliments in which she elected to express her personality. ”

“ He allowed the usual empty threat of suicide to pass unheeded.
“I shall ask you to, at any rate,” he said, doggedly.
“Oh, yes, you will ask me!” She was playing so well that she almost enjoyed it. “Oh, yes, you will ask me, because you are a man of honour—and I shall refuse, because I am a woman of honour. I will not be behind Egidia, whom you respect, in that. You are right. She is strong and good. And she loves you.” ”

“ Elles thinking. Miss Giles, in her way, was attractive. It was not Mrs. Elles’ way, but Mrs. Elles had sufficient discernment to see merit in a style that was not her style at all. Miss Giles had no pose, unless it was that of bonhomie. The charm of her face lay in its nobility, touched with shrewdness; a certain modest mannishness as of a woman who had to look after herself, and who had cut out a way for herself, marked her appearance. Her dress was not in any way unfeminine, but Mrs. Elles decided that she would have looked well, dressed as a boy. ”

“ With a comical little twist of the mouth, she went on: “Some are born virtuous, some are—something or other—what is it?—and some have virtue thrust upon them! I know that I must defend this wretched case for the sake of other people, but I can’t help thinking that if Mortimer did win it and get his divorce, it would be the very thing for me!” ”

“ The stack of canvas umbrella covers, and packing cases, piled out of the way in all the four corners of the sitting-room, reminded the poor young woman only too painfully of the dies iræ, dies illa—when the autumn tints, beloved of amateurs, would begin to show and bear their indubitable message. ”