Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

She found curious memoirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as books on magic, on alchemy, on all the strange and recondite studies which at various periods have exercised human thought. French literature was well represented, and impelled by interest and curiosity, Anne began to recall the little of the language she had learnt with her governess as a child. In this endeavour she unexpectedly found a ready teacher in Mrs. Burbage, who, educated in a French convent up to the time of her marriage, spoke the language fluently, and liked to speak it. Naturally gifted as a linguist, Anne learnt quickly, and often from choice, as time went on, the two women spoke French together, rather than English.

But it was to the English poets that Anne most often returned. Poetry suited her nature. It was the form of art which to her, most fully expressed the heights and depths, the beauty and the terror, the haunting melancholy, the fear, the inexpressible longings, the regrets, the sadness, the innocent delights of life, which, in all its complexity, she had begun to recognize through the world of books.

In life, men went down to the sea in ships, and did business in great waters. In life, there had been beautiful cities, in which a many-coloured crowd of citizens and soldiers, of artists and thinkers, had jostled and fought, and painted their thoughts in churches, and on palace walls; built them into soaring towers, and mighty cathedrals; woven them into immortal books, and lived them in schemes for the regeneration of the world. In life, as Anne had come to know it through her reading, there had been, and still were, fierce passions of love and hate, swaying men and women as the trees of a forest are swayed by a rushing wind. Passions which had given birth to the great stories of the world--the stories of Helen of Troy, of Abelard and Heloise, of Launcelot and Guinevere, of Romeo and Juliet. In life, running like a dark mysterious stream, among the simpler sensations, the more elemental passions of humanity, there had been strange terrors, haunting curiosities, insatiable longings for the unattainable, the unknowable, the unrealized--the desire of the moth for the star.

In life too, there had always existed the fresh unspoiled delight in Nature’s loveliness; in the charming natural embroidery of earth’s garment. Delight in the simple things out of which, as her favourite Herrick told her, he rejoiced to make his songs.

“_I sing of Books, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers;
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers----_”

In poetry, as in a mirror, Anne found the result of all her reading reflected and transfigured.

It summed up for her all that she had learnt from other books, of love and life, and hope of immortality.

She began with Chaucer, and found him sweet and fresh and hardy as the hawthorn blossom with which he powders his English meadows. She found in him all the simple and tender emotions which have existed in the heart of man since he became human. The love of Custance for her child delighted her.

“Pees litel sone, I wol do thee no harm:
With that hire couverchief of hire hed she braid,
And over his litel eyen she it laid.

* * * * *

O litel child, alas! what is thy gilt
That never wroughtest sinne as yet parde?”

The gentle, natural words, written five hundred years ago, went to her heart. She loved the gaiety, the bustle, the gossip, the sense of colour and vitality in that long procession which wound from the Tabard Inn, along the white roads full of sunshine, which led to Canterbury.

She read the ballads which like vivid lightning flashes illumine the darkness of the Middle Ages, and show the mainsprings of human action to be ever the old mainsprings of love and hate.

She came to the Elizabethan poets--to the period when England had become “a nest of singing birds.” She found Spenser’s glorious love-song, and the wonderful cry in which Marlowe’s Faust links one great love-story to another.

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss----”

She learnt to know so well that they haunted her thoughts like music, the sonnets of Shakespeare, and the lyrics of all the “singing birds,” Lodge and Peele and Nash, Ben Jonson and Campion, who, a musician in every sense of the word, framed his “Ayres for one voyce with the Lute or Violl,” so as “to couple words and notes lovingly together.” She came to Milton, and the lighter poets of the Restoration, of whom her love was given chiefly to Herrick. The poets of comparatively modern times followed, and led her in due time to Keats and Shelley, who revealed to her the modern note of unrest, and the troubling effect on the human spirit, of beauty, whether revealed as to Keats in the material world, or as to Shelley in the intangible world of ideas. With these two poets, the library, formed in her old friend’s youth, paused abruptly in its representations of English poetry.

Anne found no volume of Browning, nor of Tennyson, on the shelves.

In her friend’s day they were young, untried men, as in a still greater degree, were Swinburne, Morris, and Meredith.

But without them, Anne, like Keats, had travelled in the realms of gold, and the new planet that swam into her ken was the very world in which for thirty years she had lived blind and a prisoner, ignorant of its beauty, deaf to its calling voices.

It was of her five years of solitary reading that Anne was thinking as she sat in the September sunshine with François’s letter open on her lap.

She had read, she had thought. Imaginatively, she had entered into the life of the great world outside her country home.

But of actual individual experience of one personal heart-beat, known to thousands of men and women past and present, she was as ignorant at thirty-five as she had been all through her quiet existence.

Like the Lady of Shalott, she sat weaving her tapestry of dreams before a magic mirror in which the pageant of the world was nothing but a reflection; a shadow-dance of figures, loving, hating, struggling; pursuing brave adventures, triumphing or defeated, hopeful or despairing.

Miss Page folded her letter, and replaced it slowly in its envelope.

It was the day for her class of village children, whom she taught to sew, and to whom, while they wrestled with long seams, she read fairy tales.

There was tea in the garden afterwards, and she had forgotten to tell Burks to put out the strawberry jam.

She rose, and went into the house to repair the omission.

VII

“We shall have a very dull winter,” complained Mrs. Carfax, “with so many of you away. Sylvia and Mrs. Dakin have gone already, and now you are going to desert us. We shall feel quite lost.”

It was a damp afternoon in mid-October, and the wood-fire in Miss Page’s drawing-room glowed cheerfully.

The tea-table was drawn up near its blaze, and Mrs. Carfax leant back comfortably in the corner of the sofa, sipping her tea and eating hot cakes appreciatively.

“So you’re going to Rome?” she continued. “We hoped as you didn’t go away last year you had become reconciled to an English winter.”

“I didn’t mean to go,” confessed Anne. “I was very happy here last year. But somehow this autumn I have begun to long for more sunshine. I know we’ve had a lovely summer, and I ought to be content, but the rain of the last fortnight has decided me.”

She glanced with a little shiver towards the drenched garden. The rain had been too persistent to make much sweeping of leaves practicable, and the grass was strewn with them, yellow, battered and rotting.

“Tell me about Sylvia!” she inquired. “I heard from her the other day, but I dare say you have later news. She seems very happy.”

“Oh, she writes in excellent spirits, as of course she would, now she’s got her own way.”

Mrs. Carfax’s expression was one of rather irritable displeasure, and Anne’s inward reflections turned on that deplorable yet possibly comprehensible antagonism which so frequently exists between children and parents; the tie of blood so binding, yet so provocative of mutual adverse criticism, involuntary irritation and impatience.

“Do you like the boarding-house?” she asked.

“Oh yes. Very nice. Her father and I took her there last week, you know. I couldn’t be easy till I’d seen what sort of place she was in. And men are no good at that sort of thing.” She helped herself to another tea-cake.

“Oh yes,” she repeated, “it’s a very comfortable house; on the Embankment, I think you call it. At any rate, it’s quite close to the school where she takes her lessons. Sylvia shares a sitting-room with Susie Villiers, one of her school-fellows who is studying at the Slade, is it? I always forget the names of these places. It’s a house built on purpose for students, I understand. _Most_ comfortable. Hot and cold water on every floor, and bathrooms, and a beautiful dining-room. To my mind it’s all _too_ luxurious. Everything is done nowadays, it seems to me, to tempt young people from their homes.”

Mrs. Carfax gave an exasperated sigh.

“But Sylvia has a great gift, dear Mrs. Carfax,” pleaded Anne. “It isn’t as though she leaves home to do nothing.”

“That’s what her father says now. He never used to. He always upheld me in maintaining that the place of the eldest daughter is at home. I don’t know what you could have said to change him so, Miss Page, but ever since he talked to you about Sylvia, his cry is that it’s sinful not to use the gifts with which God has endowed us. Men are so inconsistent; and if they’re clergymen they always seem able to quote some text to annoy you. I don’t mean to be profane, but sometimes I have found the Bible most trying.”

Mrs. Carfax sighed again.

“She has a lovely voice. You will be proud of her one day,” declared Miss Page, with her disarming smile.

“But what is she going to do with it? I would never consent to a child of mine singing in public, with her name in newspapers, and on placards and all that! It would break my heart.”

“Still you needn’t think of the future yet, need you? She has years of training before her.”

“But if she’s not going to do anything with it, what a waste of money!” exclaimed Mrs. Carfax, tragically. “I think it’s much better for girls not to have gifts,” she added.

Miss Page was rather disposed to consider that her guest had uttered a great truth.

Her reply however, was non-committal.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But if they _do_ possess them don’t you agree with Mr. Carfax that it’s right to cultivate them? A gift of any sort is such a worrying thing,” she added persuasively. “And if it’s allowed to rust, it chiefly worries its possessor. Now that she’s doing what she was born to do, Sylvia will be contented. I _don’t_ think it’s just because she’s getting her own way that she’s happy. It’s deeper than that. She’s satisfied because she’s fulfilling a need of her nature for which she’s no more responsible than she is for the colour of her very pretty eyes.”

Anne’s voice was so gentle, her smile so irresistible, that Mrs. Carfax was visibly softened.

“At any rate I’m glad it’s not art she’s got a taste for,” she conceded.

To Mrs. Carfax, painting, to the exclusion of all the other activities of the Muses, was art, as Miss Page understood.

“You wouldn’t like her to paint?”

“Oh landscapes and flowers, and that sort of thing is all right. A very nice amusement. I’ve got lots of water-colour sketches I did as a girl, and hand-painted screens, and sofa cushions too. But nowadays art is such a shocking thing, isn’t it? I hear that Susie Villiers draws from the nude, as they call it. To me, it’s a perfectly disgusting idea. And they draw _men_, as well as women. Imagine a young girl having the boldness to draw a man without his clothes!”

“Do have some of this toast before it gets cold,” urged Anne. “Oh! while I think of it I wish you would tell me how to make that delicious shortbread I tasted the last time I came to you.”

Mrs. Carfax, adroitly switched off the topic of art as she understood it, was on firm ground now that culinary operations held the conversational field.

She gave minute directions to which her friend listened with flattering attention.

“I must write that down before I forget it,” said Anne, opening a bureau to take from it her book of recipes.

“How beautifully orderly you are!” exclaimed her guest, glancing with admiration at the packets of papers tied with ribbon, the piles of little books which filled the pigeonholes. “What a pity you never married. You would have made _such_ a good wife. The wives of to-day are shocking housekeepers. Look at that flighty little Mrs. Dakin! The doctor, poor man, must suffer a good deal. I doubt whether he ever gets a decent meal. Don’t you think it’s very extraordinary of him to let her go away for such a long visit as she proposes to make? I think that kind of thing is a mistake, you know.”

Launched upon the stream of gossip for which she possessed a considerable weakness, Mrs. Carfax shook her head portentously.

“He thinks it will be good for her health. She’s not very strong, is she? And this place doesn’t suit her in the winter.”

“Oh! I don’t think there’s much the matter with her health,” answered Mrs. Carfax with a touch of scorn. “She hasn’t anything else to think of. She hasn’t enough to do, that’s what’s the matter with her. One or two children would soon make her forget her ailments. Poor Dr. Dakin! I _don’t_ think she’s very nice to him, do you? I often pity him.”

“But I’m quite sure they’re devoted to one another,” began Miss Page, hailing with relief the entrance of the Vicar, who had called to fetch his wife, and to bid their hostess farewell.

“Well, dear lady!” he exclaimed in his hearty voice. “So you’re off to the land of perpetual sunshine to-morrow. Lucky woman! And Rome too, a city which I have always had a great desire to visit. Most interesting. Most interesting. But you leave us desolate.”

“How kind of you to come and say good-bye! My farewells this week have made me quite sad,” declared Anne. “I hate last days.”

“We shall all miss you terribly. You leave a heart-broken community behind you,” said the Vicar. “Poor Dakin is already bemoaning his fate, bereft of his wife and of you. It’s a good thing Sylvia isn’t here, or we should have had nothing but lamentations till the spring.”

“You all spoil me,” Anne said in a moved voice. “We have been talking about Sylvia,” she went on rather hurriedly. “I’m so glad she’s happy.”

“Best thing for her. Quite the right thing!” declared the Vicar emphatically. “I’m always telling my wife that gifts are ours as a sacred trust. Moreover, when the girl comes back for the holidays and so on, she will appreciate her home, and we shall all get on much better in consequence. Girls as well as boys must find their own paths, and make their own lives. To thwart them only leads to unnecessary friction, and is after all unjust. Every girl should have her chance.”

If Miss Page smiled in secret to find the ideas she had implanted in the Vicar’s mind so well assimilated that they re-appeared in the form of original conviction, no trace of her amusement was visible.

“I’m sure Mrs. Carfax will find that you’re right,” was her remark, as she smiled at the lady in question.

Mrs. Carfax kissed her affectionately. “Good-bye. I’m sure we’re preventing you from looking after your packing,” she said.

“Good-bye,” echoed her husband, enclosing Anne’s frail hand in his vigorous clasp. “Don’t let Sylvia bother you with too many letters. I am convinced that I’ve done the right thing by the child in sticking to my own ideas.”

He smiled the manly smile of self-confidence and wisdom denied to women, and Miss Page, following her visitors to the hall-door, waved to them as they went down the drive together.

* * * * *

The amusement that she need no longer repress, was in her eyes, as she went upstairs to her room; the gentle tolerant amusement of a woman old enough to look at life with kindly sympathy for its absurdities, and that charity without which the spectacle has a tendency to move to a mirth as bitter and more cruel than anger.

She found Burks on her knees before a trunk, still engaged in packing.

“That will do, Burks. I’ll finish it myself,” she said. “You go down and get your tea.”

After the maid had left, Anne opened the door which led from her bedroom into her sitting-room, and examined the shelves with the idea of choosing one or two favourite books to take with her on her journey.

The books in this room were chiefly modern, supplementing the library downstairs.

She chose one or two French novels, and a little volume of Herrick, which had found its way to the shelves mostly devoted to French literature. Then she returned to the bedroom, which was already bright with lamp and firelight.

She hesitated a moment, then went to the bureau, from which several months before she had taken her old journal.

This time she sought for, and found another book. After adjusting the spring, and locking the writing part of the piece of furniture, she thrust this volume, without looking at it, deep into her nearly filled trunk.

VIII

Anne always returned with pleasure to Rome, a city which she knew well, and to which she was bound by many memories. She settled down happily with her maid in the little hotel in the heart of the city, at which she frequently stayed.

It had been chosen chiefly on account of the garden which her rooms overlooked--one of those charming Roman gardens, full of orange-trees in tubs, of oleanders, and of clambering vines.

A fountain splashed in the midst, and the sound of its falling water was music in her ears.

The deep blue sky, the dazzling sunshine never ceased to fill her with a sense of buoyancy and youth, and all her wanderings to distant churches, to ruined temples; amongst pictures, and statues, were a delight.

One morning, when she had tired herself by a long ramble through the halls and corridors of the Vatican, she returned with the determination to do nothing for the rest of the day, but read and be lazy.

She went to her room after lunch, her mind filled with the beauty of the Borgia rooms in which she had just lingered.

The ribbed ceilings, rich with the gorgeous colour of the emblems and coats-of-arms of the princely house, the marble pavements, the lofty windows, formed the empty frame into which her fancy painted pictures of the scenes those rooms had beheld. She heard the rustle of dresses stiff with gold and gems; she caught the backward glance of many a face; the face of Isabella d’Este, of Beatrice, of Lucrezia, framed in the golden hair she washed so frequently, and tended with such care.

“_What’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?_”

Browning’s words had come to Anne’s mind as she stood for a moment alone in one of the ante-chambers, and glanced about her as though expecting it to be full of ghosts.

She wondered how many of these golden-haired women had loved the painted walls upon which her eyes now rested. Those wonderful frescoes of Pinturicchio with their background of valley and mountain, and their flower-starred meadows; their animals and birds, their fantastic towers, their dainty figures, fanciful and charming as a fairy tale.

She hoped they had loved them, and praised the painter with their sweetest smiles.

Outside in the garden, the fountain splashed in the sunshine, and suddenly its melody was the melody of her own fountain in her own English garden at home.

She thought of it lovingly, and planned a new hedge of briar-roses in the sunny corner where the dovecote stood.

Gradually the memory of the garden filled her mind, and blotted out the stately visions of palaces and princes.

It grew peopled with well-known figures, with men who twenty years ago had walked with her across its green lawn, had sat with her under its trees, laughing, talking, reading, sometimes, but rarely silent.

Presently she rose, and took from a locked drawer the book she had brought from home, and till this moment, forgotten.

Sitting in the sunshine, with the splash of the fountain sounding in her ears, Anne opened it.

“_March 3._ Hugh came home last November to marry Alice,” were
the first words that met her eyes.

“They have taken a little furnished cottage by the sea, at St.
Margaret’s Bay near Dover, and they want me to stay with them
before they sail for New Zealand. Mrs. Burbage says of course I
must go, and I start to-morrow to be with them for a fortnight.
I long to see Hugh again, but I’m shy at the thought of meeting
his wife. I have never seen her.”

Except for the mention of her return to Fairholme Court, there was nothing written in the book from that date, till May of the same year, and the painful colour crept into Anne’s face as she noticed this.

There was no need for written record. Clearly, as though she had recently lived through the experience, she remembered that fortnight’s visit.

She remembered getting out of the train at the wayside station, the nearest station touched by the railroad, for St. Margaret’s Bay. Her heart was beating rather fast. It was eighteen years since she had seen Hugh. Should she recognize him? He would not know her. When he last came home she was a girl of seventeen. The thought of her present age struck her with a shock of dismay.

There were only two people on the platform. A big burly man, tall and bearded, and beside him a girl in a white serge dress.

Hugh and his wife!

“I am Anne,” she stammered, going up to them.

Hugh put his arms round her with his old impulsive roughness, and then held her away from him.

“Why, you’ve grown, Anne!” he cried gaily. “You were such a little thing! So slight, I mean. Darling, this is Anne. Isn’t she a damned fine woman?”

His old laugh rang out boyishly, as Anne turned shyly to his wife.

She was very small, very daintily made, very prettily dressed. Her face, despite her twenty-five years, was still babyish with its large blue eyes and rings of soft hair round a childish forehead. She took her sister-in-law’s hand and smiled, but even then, Anne did not miss the quick glance that scrutinized her quizzically from head to foot.

From that moment, she knew that for Alice she was merely a dowdily dressed woman; an old maid, some one to be treated with patronizing kindliness.

They drove from the station to the cottage, which was almost upon the seashore.

“Hugh loves the sea. He can’t be happy away from it, can you, darling?” Alice asked, slipping her hand into his, as they entered the little parlour where tea was spread.

“Now Anne, tell us all about it!” exclaimed Hugh as they sat down. “Bless my soul, it’s seventeen or eighteen years since I saw you. What have you been doing all this time?”

A sudden paralyzing blankness fell upon Anne’s mind.

What had she been doing? For thirteen years after her brother’s last departure, she had lived in the little house in Tufton Street, managing the house work, anxiously counting her weekly allowance for fear that with all her pains, both ends could not be made to meet. She had nursed a hopeless invalid, and tried to bear his exacting temper with patience. For the last five of the eighteen years she had read books, and worked in the garden. There was nothing to tell them.

Instinctively she felt that to these people who belonged to practical life, who lived and loved, who were in the mainstream of human activity, her world of books meant nothing.

The colour rushed to her cheeks, and left them white.

“I--I have done nothing at all,” she stammered. “You know I have been living with Mrs. Burbage for five years? She’s very kind. But she’s almost an invalid, so we’re--we’re very quiet. Tell me about yourself, Hugh. Things are always happening to you.”

“Well, _this_ has happened to me,” he returned with a laugh, slipping his arm round his wife’s shoulder. “The best thing that ever happened in my life.”

Alice drew close to him with a little nestling movement, and Anne suddenly felt a sickening pain at her heart.

“Don’t be so silly, Hugh! Any one would think we were lovers,” she declared, turning to her sister-in-law. “And we’ve been married ages. Nearly four months.”

“Well, aren’t we lovers?” demanded Hugh, shaking her. “Answer me at once. Aren’t we?”

She got up laughing, and kissed the top of his head.

“Of course we are. But don’t be silly!” she commanded. She blushed, but her eyes were bright with happiness.

“Oh never mind Anne!” said Hugh. “She’s one of the family. She doesn’t count.”

The light, kindly meant words caused Anne another strange pang. She didn’t count. Of course she didn’t count. Why should she?

“How lovely the sea is!” she exclaimed hastily. “I can’t look at it enough. You know I’ve only seen it once before.”

“Nonsense! How’s that?” asked Hugh, with the easy forgetfulness of a man who does not realize the straitened life in which he never had a part.

“I never went away,” said Anne, simply. “There was no money. Once when I was a child, Miss Atkins took me for a day to Broadstairs. You remember Miss Atkins?”

“Old Thomas? She was Anne’s governess, and exactly like a tortoise-shell cat,” he explained turning to his wife. “Yes, what’s become of her?”

“Dead,” said Anne. “She died ten years ago.”

“Poor old thing!” returned Hugh perfunctorily. “Darling, won’t you show Anne her room, and then we can go for a walk before supper. Isn’t it warm here!” he exclaimed, leaning from the open window. “It’s so sheltered you see with the cliffs at the back. Make haste, Anne. We’ll take you on to the downs, and show you the sea to your heart’s content.”

At supper the talk was all about Hugh. His past adventures, his future prospects. He had worked hard, and was now partner of the promising sheep farm in New Zealand, to which next month he proposed to return with his wife.

“I tell Alice it won’t be a very gay existence for her. She doesn’t look much like a farmers wife, does she?” He threw her an admiring glance. “But she declares she won’t mind.”

“_You’ll_ be there,” was Alice’s only comment.

“Oh yes! And there are neighbours too. Very jolly people. And Bob Holmes, that’s my partner, you know, Anne, is an awfully decent fellow. You’ll like his wife, Alice. She’s such a cheery little woman. Oh! it’s not so bad. And the climate’s splendid. Lord! how one misses the sun in this damp misty old country!”

“It will be lovely. I’m longing to go,” Alice exclaimed.

“You see she’s only got an uncle and aunt to leave,” explained Hugh, turning to his sister. “She’s a very lonely little person.”

“Not now,” said Alice, her voice full of content.

* * * * *

Before she had been with them two days, Anne had found herself filled with a passionate longing to return to her quiet home. To get back to the shelter in which she was not reminded twenty times an hour that she “didn’t count.”

She was amazed at the violence of her own emotions.

Every glance exchanged by the married lovers, every word of love, every caress, stabbed her afresh.

She had never before known what it was to feel acutely, and the suffering bewildered her. She was afraid of it. She wanted desperately to escape from herself, this new self which seemed all torn and bleeding.

There was a hunted look in her eyes like that of a starving and desperate animal. She shuddered at them sometimes when they met her suddenly in the glass. One evening, unable to bear the sight of their endearments, she had gone early to her room, pleading a headache. She groped her way to the window, in the dark, and kneeling down beside it, looked out upon the sea.

Every few minutes, a flash from the lighthouse on the cliffs momentarily illumined the still water. Far out, lights moved on the prow of passing ships. She could hear the wash and murmur of the waves, as they broke lazily on the pebbly shore.

For a long time she knelt there immovable, the sound of the sea lulling her into a sort of painless trance, till the hum of voices below gradually filtered to her senses. The evening was so warm that Hugh and his wife were sitting in the garden. At first, numbed and half conscious in mind, she scarcely heeded the murmur of talk, but finally a sentence in a man’s voice reached her consciousness.

“Nonsense, darling! She’s not at all bad looking. Well dressed, she’d be a fine figure of a woman.”

“Why is she so dowdy then?”

“She lives in the country, you see. I suppose there’s no one to dress for. And after all what does it matter?”

There was a little laugh. “No. She’s too old now. She’ll never marry.”

Again there was an incoherent murmur. “Yes I know, darling, it’s boring for you. But she’s had a dreary life, poor girl. I want you to be nice to her.”

“I _am_ nice,” the answer came in a hurt voice, and was followed immediately by a rustle.

“I know you are. You’re a darling. You’re the sweetest thing on this earth!”

There was a sound of a kiss, and Anne drew back from the window with a quick movement.

“Hush!” The exclamation came swiftly from Hugh.

“Oh! it’s all right. Her light’s out. She’s asleep.”

Anne closed the window noiselessly to shut out the voices to which she had listened without her will, scarcely conscious of how they had reached her. She threw herself on her bed in the dark. After all, as Hugh said, it didn’t matter. But she cried all night as though it did.

In the journal which Miss Page held open on her knee, she saw the date of her return recorded.

“_Came back to Fairholme Court, March 17th._”

She remembered her old friend’s greeting, as she went to find her in the morning-room, where she was lying on the sofa.

“Why, Anne! Sea air doesn’t suit you. You’ve got thin, my dear. You look quite ill. You mustn’t go away again.”

“No,” she said quietly. “I will never go away again.”

She remembered going into the library before she took off her walking things, looking round at the walls lined with books, and wondering why they had ever meant anything to her at all.

“Books are no good,” she said to herself, as she went upstairs.

“This also is vanity,” was what the words implied.

* * * * *

Miss Page looked out with a sort of surprise upon the garden steeped in sunshine. The fountain was still splashing gaily into its marble basin. In the blue overhead, two pigeons flashed and wheeled. She had been living over again the life of many years ago, with such intensity of vision and of feeling, that her present surroundings had the unreality of a dream.

After a few moments, she turned the next page, knowing well what she should find, yet curious to see the words in her own handwriting of twenty years ago.

“_May 15th.--We have had visitors to-day for the first time
almost, since I have lived here. They were all men, too, and
Frenchmen. The parents of one of them, Monsieur René Dampierre,
knew Mrs. Burbage long ago, and he called and brought three
friends with him._”

As Anne slowly turned the pages, isolated paragraphs met her eye.

“_I felt horribly shy at first, but only for a little while.
They were all so nice. I suppose Frenchmen have easier manners
than Englishmen, though I have had no experience of either._”

“_Monsieur Fontenelle is very amusing and clever. I like his
face, though he looks sarcastic, and I’m sure he can say bitter
things. But he never says them to me._”

“_Mrs. Burbage wanted me to describe Monsieur Dampierre in
whom she is chiefly interested, because she knew him when he
was a child. I found it very difficult. When I had said that
he was tall, and broad-shouldered, and very fair and handsome,
it seemed as though I had said nothing. It’s his smile and his
changing face which make up his personality--a very charming
one._”

All through that summer there were short entries concerning the little colony of Frenchmen that had settled in the village.

Anne glanced at them with a smile. It was a very sweet smile, scarcely sad, scarcely regretful. It was the smile of content with which a woman bends over a bowl of dried rose-leaves, and feels again the warmth of the sun, and sees the glitter and the blueness of the day when the leaves were red.

IX

It was grey and cheerless in Paris, while Anne sat in the sunshine of Rome.

Winter had set in early, and in François’s studio the stove piled with fuel was almost insufficient to warm the great room.

It was as he had suggested, the typical luxurious studio of a rich man.

A broad divan under the window, was piled with cushions, and supported by them in an attitude suggestive of extreme comfort, François sat and smoked while he talked to an old friend.

The Vicomte de Montmédy, rich now, through his marriage with an American heiress, was a lover of the arts, a connoisseur and a buyer of pictures.

Fontenelle had known him in the days when he was only a struggling and unsuccessful painter.

His title and his noble birth, had stood him in better stead than his talent. That this was of an inferior quality to his fine taste in art, François had early recognized, and his felicitations on the subject of his prudent marriage had therefore gained an added warmth and fervour of approval.

The two men had been talking while the daylight waned, and when François, finding his match-box empty, rose to refill it from a jar on a side table, he paused to glance with a shiver upon the prospect outside the window.

The studio looked upon the Luxembourg Gardens. The trees were bare now, and their branches showed black and stiff against a wintry sky.

The paths underneath them, in summer gay as the flower beds, with children and their nurses, were now lightly powdered with the first fall of snow.

“I ought to have gone abroad,” he declared, lighting a cigarette. “If it were not for these confounded commissions, I should be in Rome at this moment. There’s no light here. It’s abominable!”

“Why Rome?” asked the Vicomte lazily.

“I love Rome. And then sweet Anne Page is there, and she’s always an attraction.”

The other man looked up quickly. “By the way, it’s _her_ portrait the Luxembourg has bought, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He made a quick movement. “Good heavens man, it’s here, and I’ve never shown it to you. I forgot you hadn’t seen it. It goes next week. I kept it to do a little work on the background first.”

“Quick! Show me before the light goes,” urged his friend. “I was always curious about it.”

François crossed the studio rapidly, and returned with a large canvas.

“The best thing I ever did in my life,” he said deliberately, as he placed it on an easel in the middle of the room.

The Vicomte had risen, and in a silence that lasted for some time the men stood before the picture.

“Charming!” he murmured at last. “Adorable! They’ve picked out the right thing, _mon ami, hein_? The smile! How well one remembers it. So sweet, and so shy. And that flowered gown. Admirable! It suggests one of the Botticelli Madonnas. It might be a robe all sown with stars. And the hair, that delicious soft hair that was no particular colour--_couleur de miel_, perhaps.”

“Mistress Anne Page? She has brown hair, and speaks small, like a woman,” quoted François softly.

“What’s that?”

“It’s Shakespeare. And it’s Anne Page,” he answered smiling.

“And the flowers! The great sheaf of flowers she’s carrying. They’re English, and ‘sweet-Anne’ too.”

Fontenelle looked amused. “You always pronounced it like that,--as one word!” he said.

“I used to think it _was_ one word. Just a Christian name; a lovely name.”

He joined in his friend’s laugh.

“When did you do this?” he asked after a moment.

“Just before she went.”

“Was I away then?”

“You were just married. You had gone to America with your wife.”

“Yes. I stayed a year. But when I came back why didn’t you show it to me?”

“I put it away. She wouldn’t accept it, and I didn’t want to see it, after she had gone. I never looked at it again till last spring. Paul! Do you know that picture’s been painted eighteen years, and I’ve never done anything to touch it since? Encouraging, isn’t it? Something to congratulate one’s self upon.”

The last words were accompanied by a bitter laugh. His friend was silent.

“Here comes tea,” said François, with an abrupt change of voice.

His _femme de ménage_ entered with a tray which she placed on one of the tables. She went out, and re-entered with the spirit lamp and kettle.

“_Voilà, Monsieur!_”

François began to put the tea into the teapot.

“Antoinette brews it abominably; I always make it myself,” he remarked.

“This tea-habit dates from ‘Sweet Anne’s’ time, doesn’t it?” asked the Vicomte.

“I believe it does. Do you remember the flat in the Rue Vaugirard? And Anne pouring out tea on winter afternoons?”

Before the other man could answer, he turned to the picture again.

“I painted that as a sort of memory of the first day I saw her, in an old English garden. Did I ever tell you how we four, the old four, you know, first met Anne Page? _You_ only knew her here in Paris, when she had learnt to dress, when she had learnt to talk, when she had grown used to us and our ways. We saw her in her garden, when she knew no one, when from year’s end to year’s end she spoke to no one but the invalid old woman with whom she lived.”

“What were you four doing in her garden?” inquired the Vicomte, helping himself to sugar.

“Well, René was in England. He was often there, visiting his relations--his mother’s people.

“You know he was educated in England? Went to school there, to Beaumont, and afterwards lived some time in London. René was an Englishman with at least half his nature. And he loved England because of his mother. Well, he wrote to me that year--to Thouret, Dacier and me, to suggest that we should join him for the summer. He told us he’d found a gorgeous village, where we could all paint and write, and go on with our beastly art as much as we liked. We thought it wouldn’t be bad, so we said all right, and packed up our traps and went.

“Have some more tea? Well, another cigarette?

“Dymfield is in Warwickshire, _mon cher_,” he went on, striking a match, “and Warwickshire is Shakespeare’s county, and Anne Page is one of Shakespeare’s women. So it was all as right as it could be.

“We put up at the inn. The Falcon it was called. Such a jolly old place! Sixteenth century. Yawning fireplaces, beams, oak staircases, walls a yard thick. You know the sort of thing.

“And the village! Thatched roofs all stained with moss. Oh, the colour of those roofs! Cottage gardens full of hollyhocks and roses. Such a church! If you’ve ever seen a really beautiful English village, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Dymfield is one of them.”

“And how did you get to know Anne?”

“Well, René’s mother had been a friend of the rich woman of the place, an old lady who no more deserved to possess Fairholme Court than she deserved Anne as her companion.”

“Cantankerous?”

“I don’t know anything about her moral qualities. Her taste was execrable. Anyhow René made his mother responsible for taking us to see the place--a wonderful jumble of every style from the fifteenth century downward. But beautiful! _Mon Dieu_, beautiful as a dream. And Fate was kind. The old lady was ill in bed, and sweet Anne--I told you she was her companion, didn’t I?--was forced to do the honours.”

François got up, and began to pace up and down the floor as he talked.

“We were all packed into the drawing-room to wait, the first time we called, and while René was making absurd remarks about the sofa cushions, and the bead mats, and the whole chamber of horrors, I caught sight of Anne coming across the lawn.

“She wore that gown.” He nodded towards the portrait. “An absurd thing really, but it suited her because it showed her figure.”

“Her figure was superb,” murmured the Vicomte.

“Yes.”

Fontenelle paused a moment. “Even at the time,” he said rather slowly, “I wondered how she would strike René. Because she wasn’t really beautiful, you know. Certainly not in those days. Only remarkable looking, curious, and very sweet.”

“But he was struck too?”

“I remember he looked up suddenly, and said, ‘By Jove, who on earth is this? It’s some garden goddess or other. Flora. Yes, that’s it,--Flora. Good Lord, let’s run out and burn incense or something!’

“She had a heap of flowers, branches of lilac and hawthorn and things, in one arm, supported against her hip, and with the other hand she held her dress away from her feet. She was moving quickly across the grass. You know how she walks?

“Then she came into the drawing-room, and we saw her curious face.”

“There it is!” said the Vicomte, with his eyes on the portrait. “You’ve got it exactly. Something between a Botticelli Madonna and a pagan goddess--Flora is admirable. But it’s the sort of face that it takes a painter to admire.”

“She had been considered hideous all her life, of course. She thought herself desperately plain. Even when we burnt incense,--and René at once began to send it up in clouds,--she thought we were laughing at her.” François laughed gently himself.

“You remember Anne? You know how she would take praise. Adorably, like a little girl who is almost too shy to be pleased. It was absurd, of course. She was by no means young even then, remember. But somehow that only made it more piquante. Anne is one of the few women for whom age is an absurd convention. Quite meaningless, quite beside the point. The goddesses are immortal.”

“But there was nothing of the goddess about her nature,” objected his friend.

“Good heavens, no! Except physically. She’s a mortal woman if ever there was one. She’s just what she always was, sweet Anne Page.”

Twilight was creeping into the studio. The polished floor with its costly rugs, the pictures on the walls, the outlines of cabinets and tables, all were growing dim and indistinct. The last light from the window above the men’s heads fell across the face of the portrait on the easel. It looked down upon them gently with the wavering uncertain smile in the eyes, and on the lips, red and soft as the petals of a rose.

“René saw a great deal of her that summer, I suppose?” asked the Vicomte, breaking a silence.

“We all did. The gods for their own inscrutable purposes had decided Anne’s fate. The old lady got weaker and insisted upon having a hospital nurse. She was in her room all day in bed, and Anne was bidden to entertain us.

“When we were not in her garden, she was at the old barn which René and I had rigged up as a studio.

“She amazed us all. Do you know those tightly shut buds on a rose-tree, that you think will never open? And then the sun shines, and gradually, very slowly, a little every day, they grow pinker and sweeter, till at last they are roses?

“I think the sun came out for Anne that year, for the first time in her life.

“We made her laugh. I don’t believe she had ever laughed before. And we discovered that she had brains, and taste and understanding, and _instinct_ for everything that fired our young brains. Instinct is the word for Anne. It’s a sixth sense with her. The only sense it’s any good for a woman to possess. The very sense that nowadays with their education and their emancipation, and their ‘rights,’ women are doing their best to kill.

“And she’d read, _mon cher_. Good heavens, what she’d read! The modern English woman with her smattering of Latin and Greek, is an ill-educated prig beside her. For five years she had been shut up in a library, and I believe she had read everything worth reading in her own literature, and much of ours too, for that matter. And I, who like René am partly English by education at least, know what that means. It’s a magnificent literature for those who have ears to hear, and a heart to understand.”

He began to light one of the lamps, stooping over it as he talked.

“She used to read poetry to us sometimes. Thouret and Dacier knew very little English then, but they could understand the simple things when she read them. I can hear Thouret now, trying to say after her--

“‘_I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How Roses first came red, and Lilies white._’”

François laughed, as he mimicked the accent of his friend the novelist, who since the days of which he talked, had attained an almost European reputation.

“That’s Herrick. You don’t know him? Well, he’s an English seventeenth-century poet, and he wrote on purpose for a woman as simple and natural as Anne Page. She used to read him to us in an old walled garden, where in June that year, the lilies were ‘coming white.’”

“And Dampierre?” asked the Vicomte. “I didn’t know Dampierre in those days, remember. Tell me something about him.”

He spoke as one speaks of a great man who is dead, whose lightest word is of importance to the admirers who survive him.

“René was twenty-seven then,” said François, slowly. “He was a year younger than I. You know how he looked? He was like his mother. Quite magnificent. Oh sometimes absurdly handsome, when the right mood affected his face. He used to dress like an Englishman in those days, in white flannels. When he and Anne walked together they were worth looking at, I can tell you.”

“But she was, what was it? Seven--ten years older?”

“Yes. She remembered that,” returned François.

His companion glanced quickly in his direction. He had never heard the whole story, and his curiosity was roused; but something in his friend’s voice assured him that it would not be gratified.

He made a tentative effort, however, by a suggestion half seriously offered.

“_Mon ami_, you were in love with her yourself.”

François echoed his light laugh. “No,” he declared. “No. My feeling for her now is what it has always been. I have paid her the compliment of thinking of her in a different way from every other woman I ever met. And I’ve never arrived at defining that way to myself. An English writer--I’m boring you to death with English writers to-day,--comes nearest to it in his definition of religion. He says ‘_religion is morality touched by emotion_.’

“Well, I believe what I have always felt for Anne Page is affectionate morality,” he laughed again, “strict morality mind, touched with emotion.”

“Have you seen her lately?”

“I saw her last June, for the first time in three or four years.”

“She’s altered, of course?”

“She has. She’s more beautiful. She’s really beautiful now, so that even the turnip-headed people she lives among see and acknowledge it.”

“That’s rather wonderful.”

“You would think so, if you saw her with them. She’s the village goddess and oracle. Giving to charities with both hands, petitioned for advice and counsel, loved by every one, high and low. That’s not surprising. Nor is it more surprising, I suppose, that she’s happy. Her nature is essentially simple and maternal. She ought to have had children and children’s children by now.”

He got up and switched on all the lights, revealing the spacious room, and the beautiful things it contained; revealing also once more the portrait on the easel.

The Vicomte again examined it. “The Luxembourg has made a good choice,” he repeated. “It’s a beautiful thing, _mon cher_. Gracious, dignified, sweet--but sad. In spite of the smile, because of it, I suppose, profoundedly sad. But why? She was not, she is not a sad woman.”

François was moving about the room, rearranging the canvases against the wall.

“She was sad then.”

The Vicomte waited, but François said no more, and the conversation turned upon other matters.

As he rose to go, he stooped to examine a little sketch propped up on the top of a cabinet, against the wall.

“That’s rather nice,” he remarked critically. “It’s the little woman I met here the other day, isn’t it? Dark. Pretty. English. Who is she?”

“A Mrs. Dakin. By the way, she’s one of Anne Page’s friends. One of the people in her village. She’s staying here with Madame Didier.”

“Louis Didier’s wife? Did they know her then?” asked his friend quickly.

“Who? Anne? No. It was all ages before their time. Louis has only been in Paris five or six years.”

“So much the better. That woman’s a cat, _mon cher_. Sleek fur, claws and all.”

“Madame Didier? I agree,” returned François with a laugh. “The typical English devotee of Mrs. Grundy. Louis goes in mortal fear of her.”

“_Tant pis!_” exclaimed the Vicomte, with an accent of commiseration.

X

Towards the middle of December, Mrs. Carfax became possessed with the idea of going to London.

Various circumstances had combined to render her projected visit pleasurably fraught with interest.

There was shopping to be done, of course. There was also Sylvia to embrace;--Sylvia whose holidays were so short that she herself had suggested the advisability of staying in town for Christmas, in order not to interrupt her work.

Naturally Mrs. Carfax was anxious to see her child. Naturally also she looked forward to staying with the Lovells, who were old friends, and had a comfortable house in Bayswater.

Then too, she had been deeply interested to hear that the niece who was visiting Mrs. Lovell, was none other than the Madame Didier who had invited Mrs. Dakin to Paris.

Mrs. Dakin had not yet returned to Dymfield, and it was natural and neighbourly of Mrs. Carfax to feel as much interest in her protracted absence, as that which palpitated in every Dymfield breast. In a few days she would be in the position of knowing all that Madame Didier knew about her late guest. And then there was Sylvia of course, and the shopping, and the delight of meeting her dear friends the Lovells. Mrs. Carfax was quite determined to go.

“I shall take the three o’clock train this afternoon,” she announced to the Vicar at breakfast time, “and send a telegram to Laura. She is quite ready for me, and urges me to come at once.”

“Very well, my dear,” agreed the Vicar. “Please yourself of course, though I scarcely think it necessary. You were in town only three months ago.”

“You don’t think it necessary to see Sylvia, who is not coming home for Christmas?” demanded his wife. “Well, I do. I have the feelings of a mother after all, and I think it’s cruel to leave the poor child up there, with never the sight of a home face.”

“Please yourself, my dear, as I have already said. There seems to be a spirit of great unrest working amongst us,” he went on, stirring his second cup of coffee irritably. “There’s Miss Page abroad, and Sylvia away, and Mrs. Dakin not yet returned. And now you----”

“Children, go upstairs if you’ve finished your breakfast,” interrupted their mother. “Johnny, say grace. Now all of you go and get your lessons ready for Miss Hope. She’ll be here in a minute.”