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Herbert Cook - "Giorgione"

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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

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Then, wearily, Damaris made a return upon herself. Yes--she was glad,
although it might seem ungrateful, disloyal, the man with the blue eyes
had gone away. For his going put off the necessity of knowing her own
mind, excused her from making out exactly how she regarded him, thus
relegating the day of fateful decision to a dim distance. Henrietta
accused him of being a sieve.--Damaris grew heated in strenuous denial.
That was a calumny which she didn't and wouldn't credit. Still you could
never be quite sure about men--so she went back on the old, sad,
disquieting lesson. Their way of looking at things, their angle of
admitted obligation is so bewilderingly different!--Oh! how thankful she
was Aunt Felicia would soon be here. Everything would grow simpler,
easier to understand and to manage, more as it used to be, with dear Aunt
Felicia here on the spot.

At this point she realized that Mrs. Frayling was finishing a sentence to
the beginning of which she had not paid the smallest attention. That was
disgracefully rude.

"So I am to go home then, dearest child, and break it to Marshall that he
stands no chance--my poor Marshall, who has no delightful presents with
which to plead his cause!"

"Mr. Wace?--Plead his cause? What cause? I am so sorry,
Henrietta--forgive me. It's too dreadful, but I am afraid I wasn't quite
listening"--this with most engaging confusion.

"Yes--his cause. I should have supposed his state of mind had been
transparently evident for many a long day."

"But indeed--Henrietta, you must be mistaken. I don't know what you
mean"--the other interposed smitten by the liveliest distress and alarm.

The elder lady waved aside her outcry with admirable playfulness and
determination.

"Oh! I quite realize how crazy it must appear on his part, poor dear
fellow, seeing he has so little to offer from the worldly and commercial
standpoint. As he himself says--'the desire of the moth for the star, of
the night for the morrow.' Still money and position are not everything
in life, are they? Talent is an asset and so, I humbly believe, is the
pure devotion of a good man's heart. These count for something, or used
to do so when I was your age. But then the women of my generation were
educated in a less sophisticated school. You modern young persons are
wiser than we were no doubt, in that you are less romantic, less easily
touched.--I have not ventured to give Marshall much encouragement. It
would have been on my conscience to foster hopes which might be dashed.
And yet I own, darling child, your manner not once nor twice, during our
happy meetings at the Pavilion, when he read aloud to us or sang, gave me
the impression you were not entirely indifferent. He, I know, has thought
so too--for I have not been able to resist letting him pour out his hopes
and fears to me now and then. I could not refuse either him or myself
that indulgence, because"--

Mrs. Frayling rose, and, bending over our much tried and now positively
flabbergasted damsel, brushed her hair with a butterfly kiss.

"Because my own hopes were also not a little engaged," she said. "Your
manner to my poor Marshall, your willingness to let him so often be with
you made me--perhaps foolishly--believe not only that his sad life might
be crowned by a signal blessing, but you might be given to me some day as
a daughter of whom I could be intensely proud. I have grown to look upon
Marshall in the light of a son, and his wife would"--

Damaris had risen also. She stood at bay, white, strained, her lips
quivering.

"Do--do you mean that I have behaved badly to Mr. Wace, Henrietta? That I
have flirted with him?"

Mrs. Frayling drew her mouth into a naughty little knot. There were
awkward corners to be negotiated in these questions. She avoided them by
boldly striking for the open.

"Oh! it is natural, perfectly natural at your rather thoughtless time of
life. Only Marshall's admiration for you is very deep. He has the poetic
temperament which makes for suffering, for despair as well as for
rapture. And his disillusionments, poor boy, have been so grievously
many.--But Colonel Carteret--yes--dearest child, I do quite follow.--It's
an old story. He has always had _des bonnes fortunes_."

Since her return to Europe, Mrs. Frayling had become much addicted to
embellishing her conversation with such foreign tags, not invariably, it
may be added, quite correctly applied or quoted.

"Women could never resist him in former days in India. They went down
before his charms like a row of ninepins before a ball. I don't deny a
passing _tendresse_ for him myself, though I was married and very happily
married. So I can well comprehend how he may take a girl's fancy by
storm. _Sans peur et sans reproche_, he must seem to her.--And so in the
main, I dare say, he is. At worst a little easy-going, owing to his
cultivation of the universally benevolent attitude. Charity has a habit
of beginning at home, you know; and a man usually views his own
delinquencies at least as leniently as he views those of others. But that
leniency is part of his charm--which I admit is great.--Heaven forbid, I
should undermine your faith in it, if there is anything settled between
you and him."

"But there isn't, there isn't," Damaris broke in, distressed beyond all
calmness of demeanour. "You go too fast, Henrietta. You assume too
much. Nothing is settled of--of that sort. Nothing of that sort has
ever been said."

Mrs. Frayling raised her eyebrows, cast down her eyes, and fingered the
bunch of trinkets hanging from her gold chain in silence for a few
seconds. The ring of sincerity was unquestionable--only where did that
land her? Had not she, in point of fact, very really gone too fast? In
defeat Henrietta became unscrupulous.

"Merely another flirtation, Damaris?" she said. "Darling child, I am just
a wee bit disappointed in you."

Which, among her many fibs, may rank amongst her most impudent and
full-fed, though by no means her last.

Here, the door opened behind her. Henrietta turned alertly, hailing any
interruption which--her bolt being shot--might facilitate her retreat
from a now most embarrassing situation. After all she had planted more
than one seed, which might fruitfully grow, so at that she could leave
matters.--The interruption, however, took a form for which she was
unprepared. To her intense disgust her nerves played her false. She gave
the oddest little stifled squeak as she met Charles Verity's glance,
fixed upon her in cool, slightly ironic scrutiny.

Some persons very sensibly bring their mental atmosphere along with them.
You are compelled to breathe it whether you like or not. The atmosphere
Charles Verity brought with him, at this juncture, was too masculine,
intellectually too abstract yet too keenly critical, for comfortable
absorption by Henrietta's lungs. Her self-complacency shrivelled in it.
She felt but a mean and pitiful creature, especially in her recent
treatment of Damaris. It was a nasty moment, the more difficult to
surmount because of that wretchedly betraying squeak. Fury against
herself gingered her up to action. She must be the first to speak.

"Ah! how delightful to see you," she said, a little over-playing the
part--"though only for an instant. I was in the act of bidding Damaris
farewell. As it is I have scandalously outstayed my leave; but we had a
thousand and one things, hadn't we, to say to one another."

She smiled upon both father and daughter with graceful deprecation.

"_Au, revoir_, darling child--we must manage to meet somehow, just once
more before I take my family north"--

And still talking, new lavender dress, trinkets, faint fragrance and all,
she passed out on to the corridor accompanied by Sir Charles Verity.




CHAPTER XIII

WHICH RECOUNTS A TAKING OF SANCTUARY


Left alone Damaris sat down on the window-seat, within the shelter of the
wooden shutters which interposed a green barred coolness between her and
the brilliant world without. That those two, her father and Henrietta
Frayling, should thus step off together, the small, softly crisp,
feminine figure beside the tall, fine-drawn and--in a way--magnificent
masculine one, troubled her. Yet she made no attempt to accompany or to
follow them. Her head ached. Her mind and soul ached too. She felt spent
and giddy, as from chasing round and round in an ever-shifting circle
some tormenting, cleverly lovely thing which perpetually eluded her.
Which thing, finally, floated out of the door there, drawing a
personage unmeasurably its superior, away with it, and leaving
her--Damaris--deserted.

Leaving, moreover, every subject on which its nimble tongue had lighted,
damaged by that contact--at loose ends, frayed and ravelled, its inwove
pattern just slightly discoloured and defaced. The patterned fabric of
Damaris' thought and inner life had not been spared, but suffered
disfigurement along with the rest. She felt humiliated, felt unworthy.
The ingenious torments of a false conscience gnawed her. Her better
judgment pronounced that conscience veritably false; or would, as she
believed, so pronounce later when she had time to get a true perspective.
But, just now, she could only lamentably, childishly, cry out against
injustice. For wasn't Henrietta mainly responsible for the character of
her intercourse with Marshall Wace? Hadn't Henrietta repeatedly entreated
her to see much of him, be kind to him?--Wishing, even in her present
rebellion to be quite fair, she acknowledged that she had enjoyed his
singing and reading; that she had felt pleased at his eagerness to
confide his troubles to her and talk confidentially about himself. She
not unwillingly accepted a mission towards him, stimulated thereto by
Henrietta's plaudits and thanks.

And--and Colonel Carteret? For now somehow she no longer, even in
thought, could call him by her old name for him, "the dear man with the
blue eyes."--Could it be true, as Henrietta intimated, that he went
through life throwing the handkerchief first to one woman and then to
another? That there was no real constancy or security in his affections,
but all was lightly come and lightly go with him?

How her poor head ached! She held it in both hands and closed her
eyes.--She would not think any more about Colonel Carteret. To do so made
her temples throb and raised the lump, which is a precursor of tears, in
her throat.

No--she couldn't follow Henrietta's statements and arguments either way.
They were self-contradictory. Still, whose ever the fault, that the young
man Wace should be unhappy on her account, should think she--Damaris--had
behaved heartlessly to him, was quite dreadful. Humiliating too--false
conscience again gnawing. Had she really contracted a debt towards him,
which she--in his opinion and Henrietta's--tried to repudiate? She seemed
to hear it, the rich impassioned voice, and hear it with a new
comprehension. Was "caring in _that_ way" what it had striven to tell
her; and had she, incomparably dense in missing its meaning, appeared to
sanction the message and to draw him on? Other people understood--so at
least Henrietta implied; while she, remaining deaf, had rather cruelly
misled him. Ought she not to do something to make up? Yet what could she
do?--It had never occurred to her that--that--

She held her head tight. Held it on, as with piteous humour she told
herself, since she seemed in high danger of altogether losing it.--Must
she believe herself inordinately stupid, or was she made differently to
everybody else? For, as she now suspected, most people are constantly
occupied, are quite immensely busy about "caring in _that_ way." And she
shrank from it; actively and angrily disliked it. She felt smirched, felt
all dealings as between men and women made suspect, rendered ugly, almost
degraded by the fact--if fact it was--of that kind of caring and excited
feelings it induces, lurking just below the surface, ready to dart
out.--And this not quite honestly either. The whole matter savoured of
hypocrisy, since the feelings disguised themselves in beautiful sounds,
beautiful words, clothing their unseemliness with the noble panoply of
poetry and art, masquerading in wholesome garments of innocent
good-comradeship.

--A grind of wheels on the gravel below. Henrietta's neat limpid accents
and Charles Verity's grave ones. The flourish and crack of a whip and
scrambling start of the little chestnut horses. The rhythmical beat of
their quick even trot and thin tinkle of their collar bells receding into
the distance.

These sounds to our sorrowfully perplexed maiden opened fresh fields of
uneasy speculation. For those diverse accents--the speakers being
unseen--heard thus in conjunction, seized on and laboured her
imagination. Throughout the past months of frequent meeting, Damaris had
never quite understood her father's attitude towards Henrietta Frayling.
It was marked by reserve; yet a reserve based, as she somehow divined,
upon an uncommon degree of former intimacy. Judging from remarks let drop
now and again by Henrietta, they knew, or rather had known, one another
very well indeed. This bore out Damaris' own childhood's recollections;
though in these last she was aware of lacunae, of gaps, of spaces
unbridged by any coherent sequence of remembered events. A dazzling and
delicious image, the idol of her baby adoration--thus did memory paint
that earlier Henrietta. Surrounding circumstances remained shadowy. She
could not recall them even in respect of herself, still less in respect
of her father. So that question, as to the past, ruled the present. What
had parted them, and how did they to-day envisage one another? She could
not make out. Had never, indeed, attempted seriously to make out, shying
from such investigation as disloyal and, in a way, irreverent. Now
investigation was forced on her. Her mind worked independent of her will,
so that she could neither prevent or arrest it. Sir Charles showed
himself scrupulously attentive and courteous to General Frayling. He
offered no spoken objection to her association with Henrietta. Yet an
unexplained element did remain. Subtlely, but perceptibly, it permeated
both her father's and Henrietta's speech and bearing. She, Damaris, was
always conscious of a certain constraint beneath their calm and
apparently easy talk. Was their relation one of friendship or of covert
enmity?--Or did these, just perceptible, peculiarities of it betoken
something deeper and closer still?

Suspicion once kindled spreads like a conflagration.--Damaris' hands
dropped, a dead weight, into her lap. She sat, strained yet inert, as
though listening to catch the inner significance of her own unformulated
question, her eyes wide and troubled, her lips apart. For might it not be
that they had once--long ago--in the princely, Eastern pleasure palace of
her childhood--cared in _that_ way?

Then the tears which, what with tiredness and the labour pains of her
many conflicting emotions, had threatened more than once to-day, came
into their own. She wept quietly, noiselessly, the tears running down her
cheeks unchecked and unheeded. For there was no escape. Turn where she
would, join hands with whom she would in all good faith and innocence,
this thing reared its head and, evilly alluring looked at her. Now it set
its claim upon her well-beloved Sultan-i-bagh--and what scene could in
truth be more sympathetic to its display? 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."

The statement covered this case, also, to a nicety. It explained
everything. But what an explanation, leaving her, Damaris, doubly
orphaned and desolate! For the first case, that of which Faircloth
actually had spoken, brought her royal, if secret compensation in the
brotherhood and sisterhood it made known. But this second case brought
nothing, save a sense of being tricked and defrauded, the victim of a
conspiracy of silence. For nothing, as it now appeared, was really her
own, nor had really belonged to her. "Some one," so she phrased it in the
incoherence of her pain, "had always been there before her." What she
supposed her exclusive property was only second-hand, had been already
owned by others. They let her play at being first in the field, original
and sole proprietress, because it saved them trouble by keeping her quiet
and amused. But all the while they knew better and must have smiled at
her possessive antics once her silly back was turned. And here Damaris
lost sight of reasonable proportion and measure, exaggerating wildly, her
pride and self-respect cut to the quick.

It was thus, in the full flood of mystification and resentment, Charles
Verity found her when presently he returned. Sensible of something very
much amiss, since she stayed within the shadow of the closed shutters,
silent and motionless, he crossed the room and stood before her looking
down searchingly into her upturned face. Stubborn in her misery, she met
his glance with mutinous, and hard, if misty, eyes.

"Weeping, my dear? Is the occasion worth it? Has Mrs. Frayling then
taken so profound a hold?" he asked, his tone mocking, chiding her yet
very gently.

Damaris hedged. To expose the root of her trouble became impossible under
the coercion of that gently bantering tone.

"It's not Henrietta's going; but that I no longer mind her going."

"A lost illusion--yes?" he said.

"I can't trust her. She--she isn't kind."

"Eh?" he said. "So you too have made that illuminating little discovery.
I supposed it would be only a matter of time. But you read character, my
dear, more quickly than I do. What it has taken you months to discover,
took me years."

His frankness, the unqualified directness of his response, though
startling, stimulated her daring.

"Then--then you don't really like Henrietta?" she found audacity
enough to say.

"Ah! there you rush too headlong to conclusions," he reasoned, still with
that same frankness of tone. "She is an ingenious, unique creature,
towards whom one's sentiments are ingenious and unique in their turn. I
admire her, although--for you are right there--she is neither invariably
trustworthy nor invariably kind. Admire her ungrudgingly, now I no longer
ask of her what she hasn't it in her to give. Limit your demand and you
limit the risks of disappointment--a piece of wisdom easier to enunciate
than to apply."

Lean, graceful, commanding under the cloak of his present gentle humour,
Charles Verity sat down on the faded red cushion beside Damaris, and laid
one arm along the window-ledge behind her. He did not touch her; being
careful in the matter of caresses, reverent of her person, chary of
claiming parental privileges unasked.

"In the making of Henrietta Frayling," he went on, "by some accident soul
was left out. She hasn't any. She does not know it. Let us hope she never
will know it, for it is too late now for the omission to be rectified."

"Are you laughing at me?" Damaris asked, still stubborn, though his
presence enclosed her with an at once assuaging and authoritative charm.

"Not in the least. I speak that which I soberly believe. Just as some
ill-starred human creatures are born physically or mentally
defective--deformed or idiots--so may they be born spiritually
defective. Why not? My reason offers no scientific or moral objection to
such a belief. In other respects she is conspicuously perfect. But,
verily, she has no soul; and the qualities which--for happiness or
misery--draw their life from the soul, she does not possess. Therefore
she sparkles, lovely and chill as frost. Is as astute as she is cold at
heart; and can, when it suits her purpose, be both false and cruel
without any subsequent prickings of remorse. But this very coldness and
astuteness save her from misdeeds of the coarser kind. Treacherous she
has been, and, for aught I know, may on occasions still be. But, though
temptation has pretty freely crossed her path, she has never been other
than virtuous. She is a good woman--in the accepted, the popular sense of
the word."

Silence stole down upon the room. Damaris remained motionless, leaning
forward gathered close into herself, her hands still heavy in her lap.
Could she accept this statement as comfort, or must she bow under it
as rebuke?

"Why," she asked at last huskily--the tears were no longer upon her
cheeks but queerly in her throat, impeding utterance, "do you tell me
these things?"

"To prevent you beholding lying visions, my dear, or dreaming lying
dreams of what might very well have been but--God be thanked--never has
been--never was.--Think a minute--remember--look."

And once more Damaris felt the breath of high romance and touched drama
of rare quality, with those same two figures as protagonists, and that
same Indian pleasure palace as their stage; but this time with a notable
difference of sentiment and of result.

For she visualized another going of Henrietta, a flight before the dawn.
Saw, through a thick scent-drenched atmosphere, between the expiring
lamp-light and broadening day, a deserted child beating its little hands,
in the extremity of its impotent anguish, upon the pillows of a
disordered unmade bed. Saw a man, too, worn and travel-stained from long
riding throughout the night, lost to all decent dignities of
self-control, savage with the animalism of frustrated passion, rage to
and fro amidst the litter of a smart woman's hurried packing, a trail of
pale blue ribbon plucking at and tripping him entangled in the rowels of
his spurs.

All this she saw; and knew that her father--sitting on the cushioned
window-seat beside her, his legs crossed, his chin sunk on his
breast--saw it also. That he, indeed, voluntarily and of set purpose made
her see, transferring the living picture from his consciousness to her
own. And, as she watched, each detail growing in poignancy and
significance she--not all at once, but gropingly, rebelliously and only
by degrees--comprehended that purpose, and the abounding love, both of
herself and of justice, which dictated it. Divining the root of her
trouble and the nature of her suspicion he took this strange means to
dissipate them. Setting aside his natural pride, he caused her to look
upon his hour of defeat and debasement, careless of himself if thereby he
might mend her hurt and win her peace of mind.

Damaris was conquered. Her stubbornness went down before his sacrifice.
All the generosity in her leapt forth to meet and to acclaim the signal
generosity in him--a generosity extended not only towards herself but to
Henrietta Frayling as well. This last Damaris recognized as superb.--He
bade her remember. And, seeing in part through her own eyes, in part
through his, she penetrated more deeply into his mind, into the rich
diversity and, now mastered, violence of his character, than could
otherwise have been possible. She learnt him from within as well as from
without. He had been terrible--so she remembered--yet beautiful in his
fallen god-head. She had greatly feared him under that aspect. Later, she
more than ever loved him; and that with a provenant, protective and, baby
though she was, a mothering love. He was beautiful now; but no longer
terrible, no longer fallen--if not the god-head, yet the fine flower of
his manhood royally and very sweetly disclosed. Her whole being yearned
towards him; but humbly, a note of lowliness in her appreciation, as
towards something exalted, far above her in experience, in
self-knowledge and self-discipline.

She was, indeed, somewhat overwhelmed, both by realization of his
distinction and of her own presumption in judging him, to the point of
being unable as yet to look him in the face. So she silently laid hold of
his hand, drew it down from the window-ledge and round her waist.
Slipping along the cushioned seat until she rested against him, she laid
her head back upon his shoulder. Testimony in words seemed superfluous
after that shared consciousness, seemed impertinent even, an anti-climax
from which both taste and insight recoiled.

For a while Charles Verity let the silent communion continue. Then, lest
it should grow enervating, to either or to both, he spoke of ordinary
subjects--of poor little General Frayling's illness, of Miss Felicia's
plans, of his own book. It was wiser for her, better also for himself, to
step back into the normal thus quietly closing the door upon their dual
act of retrospective clairvoyance.

Damaris, catching his intention, responded; and if rather languidly yet
loyally played up. But, before the spell was wholly broken and frankness
gave place to their habitual reserve, there was one further question she
must ask if the gnawings of that false conscience, begotten in her by
Henrietta's strictures, were wholly to cease.