Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

There was a stampede to the door, and when it closed on the last child, Mrs. Carfax turned to her husband.

“It’s most extraordinary about Mrs. Dakin, isn’t it?” she exclaimed. “And such a strange thing that this Madame Didier should be Major Lovell’s niece. I heard something once about a niece of his having married a Frenchman, but I never knew her name. I shall probably hear all about Mrs. Dakin from her.”

“Then my dear Mary, if you do, I hope you will be discreet.”

“Discreet, George? What do you mean? Am I not always discreet?”

The Vicar prudently disregarded the question.

“What I wish to point out, is this,” he returned. “The duty of taking broad and charitable views. There is a reasonable explanation of Mrs. Dakin’s absence. I met Dakin yesterday, and he told me it was a question of his wife’s health. She’s seeing some doctor in Paris, and going through a course of treatment.”

Mrs. Carfax sniffed. “With her own husband a doctor!”

“My dear, you know as well as I do that doctors seldom attend their wives.”

“You annoy me, George. You speak as though I should be glad to hear that there was any other reason. I’m sure I hope with all my heart it’s the true one. But everybody is talking about it, and I must say I think the poor man looks very unhappy.”

“Broad views,” returned the Vicar, clearing his throat, “are those which in Christian charity we should always endeavour to assume with regard to our fellows. Let us remember also, that we have neither part nor lot in this matter.”

“Why don’t you tell me straight out to mind my own business?” asked Mrs. Carfax angrily. “It’s what you mean. And we’re not in church, so you needn’t beat about the bush. You only take ‘broad views’ as you call them, when you want to be annoying and put me in the wrong. You know as well as I do that it’s not right for a wife to stay months away from her husband. Dr. Dakin must be a fool to allow it. At the same time, you know how delighted I should be if it _is_ all right. And yet you pretend to think that in a spirit of vulgar curiosity I’m going up to town on purpose to gossip and try to find out things which don’t concern me! My object in going, as you know, is to see Sylvia----”

“And to do some shopping. Yes, my dear. Yes. You’ve said so many times,” interrupted her husband, rising. “You’d better tell Mark to bring the trap round at half-past two.”

The Vicar closed the breakfast-room door with a slightly firm touch.

“Is mamma going to London to-day?” shouted Johnny, who regardless of lesson books, was sliding down the banisters outside.

“I believe so. I trust it may do her good,” answered his father piously. “Go upstairs, at once, and get ready for Miss Hope.”

He entered his study, and with some disinclination, sat down to the sermon for which a more deferential hearing might possibly be anticipated than that accorded in the home circle.

* * * * *

Mrs. Carfax arrived at Rushworth Terrace just in time to dress for dinner. Madame Didier, to whom she was presented in the drawing-room just before the gong sounded, was a tall young woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, with a sharp face and a thin pointed nose. Her fair hair was arranged neatly over her forehead, and her dress, though fashionable, was undistinguished.

“Helen doesn’t look a bit French, does she?” asked her aunt.

Mrs. Lovell was a fat comfortable woman with no figure, and less intelligence.

“I’m glad she’s kept so English. One would have thought that living in Paris so long would have made a Frenchwoman of her.”

“We should quarrel if it had!” declared the Major in a loud voice. “I don’t like foreigners. Can’t stand ’em. Beg your pardon, my dear. I forgot your husband!”

He laughed heartily. “But you must excuse me. I’ve never seen him, and I dare say you’ve made an Englishman of him. Hope so, I’m sure.”

“Oh, nothing would make an Englishman of Louis, I’m sorry to say,” answered Madame Didier. “He can’t bear England. We’re always fighting about it.”

“Well, come along! Dinner. Dinner. I’m famished,” declared the Major.

“Come along, Mrs. Carfax. How’s your husband? And the children? All well, eh? That’s right.”

“I’m so interested to hear that you know a neighbour of ours,” began Mrs. Carfax during the first favourable opportunity at dinner-time.

“Oh! Madge Dakin? Yes. Aunt Laura has been telling me that you are neighbours. She has been staying with us in Paris, as of course you know.”

“Yes. I’m so sorry to hear she is ill.”

Mrs. Carfax helped herself to bread sauce, and waited in suspense.

“Madge is never quite so ill as she thinks she is,” replied Madame Didier in her decisive voice. “It’s all a question of nerves with her. However, I suggested she should go to a doctor who did me a great deal of good some time ago. I’m a _real_ sufferer from nerves. And as I couldn’t keep her any longer--I had visits to pay and so on,--she is boarding with some people in Paris to go on with the treatment.”

The explanation, delivered in Madame Didier’s high thin voice, seemed sufficiently reasonable. Yet Mrs. Carfax was conscious of an under-current.

Her hostess was silent, but the Major, always garrulous, broke in with one of his pet grievances which lasted till the end of the meal, and ended by proving anew, through many ramifications, that the country was going to the dogs.

In the drawing-room, when coffee was served after dinner, and her host had gone to the smoking-room, circumstances for Mrs. Carfax were more propitious.

Madame Didier took out her embroidery, and Mrs. Lovell lay back in an easy-chair, and warmed her feet at the fire.

“Helen has been telling me a good deal about this Mrs. Dakin,” she began.

Her tone suggested that further confidences might be expected from Mrs. Dakin’s friend, and Mrs. Carfax sat upright in her chair, and leant forward a little.

“Oh, but if Mrs. Carfax is a friend----” objected Madame Didier.

“Well, dear, so are you,” put in Mrs. Lovell, who, as Mrs. Carfax suddenly decided, was really quite stupid.

Madame Didier’s offended expression might portend anything--even silence.

Innocent of psychology, Mrs. Carfax could not be expected to know that on this score, at least, she need have no apprehension.

“Of course I am Madge’s friend,” said Madame Didier, stitching very fast, “and that’s why I am so distressed at her foolish behaviour.”

“What has she----?” Mrs. Carfax paused. It was perhaps safer not to interrupt.

“Oh only that she rather annoyed me by flirting outrageously with a man who sometimes comes to our house. A man I don’t like. But he’s a friend of Louis’s, and so I have to put up with him. A Monsieur Fontenelle.”

“Why, I met him last spring, at a dinner-party!” interrupted Mrs. Carfax in surprise.

“So I heard.”

The brief words were enigmatic in tone, and Mrs. Carfax gave an uncomprehending gasp.

“He’s a celebrated man, as of course you know. He was made President of the International Art Congress this summer, here in London. And he’s naturally a splendid painter. But he’s not a nice man. Few Frenchmen are.”

Madame Didier shut her thin lips, and bent over her embroidery.

“You mean----?” began Mrs. Carfax timidly.

“If he were an Englishman, he would have a very bad reputation. But in Paris--well!” Madame Didier shrugged her shoulders. “There’s no such thing as morality. I need not tell you that _I_ have never grown accustomed to it. I still keep my English ideas as to right and wrong.”

“I’m thankful you do, dear Helen,” murmured her aunt.

“I warned Madge,” pursued her friend. “I told her all I had heard about him. Louis was angry with me, but I thought it my duty.”

“But she hasn’t----? I mean there isn’t any danger of--of a divorce, or anything of that kind?”

Mrs. Carfax involuntarily lowered her voice to a horrified whisper.

“Oh no! no! Let us hope it won’t come to that. Mind, I’m not accusing Madge of anything but foolish flirting. She made a dead set at him, I must say that. I don’t believe that otherwise he would have taken any notice of her. But Madge is so vain. And then she has an idea she isn’t happy with her husband. Well! a wife must make the best of the man she marries. I make a point of getting on with Louis.”

“I’m sure you do, dear,” interrupted her aunt. “You’re so wise.”

“But you think she’s really staying on to----?”

“I fear that the excuse of her illness is only half true. She’s staying on I believe to--well, to go on with the flirtation, let us say.”

Madame Didier laughed a little, and took a fresh thread of silk.

“Madge is a nice little thing, of course, but she’s very flighty. I can’t help thinking that she must have fallen under some bad influence lately. She comes from _such_ a good home. I used to stay with her at her father’s house just outside York, when we were schoolgirls. The Etheridges are county people, you know. Not very rich, but well connected, and in the _nicest_ set. No fastness or anything horrid of that sort. The right sort of quiet county people. You know what I mean. We rather thought she might have done better than a country doctor.”

“Dr. Dakin is _extremely_ well connected,” put in Mrs. Carfax a little stiffly. He was a neighbour after all, and she felt that the slighting reflection might easily extend from the faculty, to the Church, of which her husband was so distinguished an ornament.

“Oh yes, I’m sure of it,” Madame Didier hastened to reply. “And a clever man, I hear.”

“Extremely clever. And devoted to his wife. This will be a terrible blow.”

Mrs. Carfax leant back in her chair, and wondered whether she should write to George, or wait till her return. She decided to wait. A verbal recitation would be more effective.

“Oh! let us hope she will recover her senses and return to her home. I feel terribly distressed about it, as it was in my house she met Monsieur Fontenelle.”

“No! She met him first at Miss Page’s,” corrected Mrs. Carfax. “I _thought_ he seemed very attentive that evening. He was talking to her a long time after dinner.”

Madame Didier looked up sharply from her work.

“Who _is_ this Miss Page?” she asked. “How does she come to know Monsieur Fontenelle?”

“She’s a most charming woman. We are very proud of her at Dymfield. I suppose she met Monsieur Fontenelle abroad. She has travelled a great deal.”

“Ah!” Madame Didier took another thread of silk, and matched it carefully.

“I only wondered,” she went on, “because Madge was so reticent about her. Naturally, when I saw her becoming so very intimate with Monsieur Fontenelle, I inquired about the woman who was responsible for the first introduction. But I could gather nothing from Madge except that Miss Page was a beautiful woman, and apparently a paragon of all the virtues.”

Madame Didier sniffed slightly, and began to fold up her work.

“She’s certainly a striking looking woman, and most generous and charitable,” returned Mrs. Carfax. “My husband would not know what to do without her financial and other help, in the parish. Certainly we know very little about her life before she settled at Dymfield ten years ago,” she added rather uncertainly.

“Good works are the modern equivalent for the convent, aren’t they?” suggested Madame Didier.

“She’s a charming woman,” repeated Mrs. Carfax in a slightly dazed voice.

“No doubt. Yet I know one woman who doesn’t describe her in those terms. Did you ever meet a Mrs. Crosby? No? Well, she is firmly convinced that Miss Page robbed her of her inheritance.”

“If the doctor is at all wise, he will go and look after his wife,” suggested Aunt Laura, her remark making a timely but unconscious diversion.

“I’ll see what I can do,” observed Mrs. Carfax with significance.

Madame Didier looked a little alarmed. “Please don’t mention my name!” she begged. “Remember I have said nothing, and that, only in Madge’s interest.”

“Discretion is my strong point,” returned Mrs. Carfax with dignity. “I am no gossip, and the last thing in the world I should wish to do, is to make mischief.”

“You are always so wise, dear Mary,” murmured Mrs. Lovell.

The ladies talked till a late hour, and Mrs. Carfax went to bed full of an excitement which she was shocked to recognize as distinctly pleasurable.

XI

Tiring a little of hotel life, Anne had taken an apartment on the heights close to the Church of the Trinità dei Monti.

In her sunny room overlooking the city, in the intervals between her rambles, or the interchange of visits, she spent quiet happy hours. In Rome, as in no other Italian city, time slipped back, and the life of twenty years ago seemed often more real, more tangible, than her existence of to-day.

Over and over again, in Rome, she was startled to find herself living not in the present, but in the memory of an unforgetable past.

One morning, in walking through the Farnesina Palace, she stopped before a window to look down upon a narrow walled garden. The paths were mossy and weed-grown; the whole place pervaded by that air of neglect and decay, common to Italian gardens. But at the end of the enclosed oblong space, there was a beautiful old gate of marble. Orange trees in rows, ran the length of the right-hand wall, and between the glossy leaves, the fruit shone golden. In the centre grass plot, amidst the long unkempt grass, there were rose bushes with pale pink monthly roses upon them; and overhead a roof of sky blue as the heart of a gentian.

Miss Page turned her head quickly, a half smile upon her lips, as though to speak to some one at her side.

It was twenty years since she had looked down upon that quiet garden, but the illusion of a bygone day was so strong, that she expected to meet a responsive smile.

* * * * *

The summer of which François Fontenelle had spoken to his friend, as he sat beneath Anne’s portrait, was the summer which followed her visit to her brother and his wife.

Anne had returned with her inner life wrecked and shattered. Her peace of mind was gone. She spent no more quiet days in the library with her books. A feverish restlessness drove her out of doors, where while daylight lasted, she worked among her plants, digging, weeding, planting with such energy that from sheer physical fatigue, she forced herself to sleep dreamlessly till morning renewed her toil. She was uninterrupted. No one disturbed her. She had nothing else to do.

In spite of her protestations, Mrs. Burbage who had been growing steadily feebler through the winter, sent for a hospital nurse, and finally kept her bed.

“I will be looked after by the right people,” she declared with characteristic determination. “Trained nurses are the right people to tend the sick. I can afford to pay for them, and I will have them. You have had enough waiting upon invalids, my dear.”

Freed from nearly all her customary duties, therefore, Anne had the long spring days before her, and with the instinct of her healthy nature, she strove by hard physical work, to fill them, and at the same time to crush out the mental malady which tore at her heart.

“It’s a disease, but work will kill it,” she told herself.

And she set her teeth, and worked.

She worked; but she was burdened with a great fear and a great regret.

Immersed in books, as for the last five years she had become, she had not hitherto noticed the isolation, the narrowness of her life.

Not only had she failed to miss the intercourse of her fellow creatures, she had actually dreaded their approach.

Filled with a nervous mistrust of her own power to please, she had shunned humanity as represented by any living soul outside the gates of Fairholme Court.

“I know nothing about any one,” was the dreary burden of her thoughts. “I don’t understand anything about real men and women. My own life is empty, and so for me, the lives of others are empty too. I have nothing to say to them, no help to give them, I’m useless in a world of which I know nothing except at second hand. And as I grow older my heart will dry up and wither more and more, till I’m an old maid--the conventional old maid.”

She planted her sad thoughts with the beds of lilies; she dug them into the ground round the rose-bushes; and serenely, mockingly, the garden flourished and broke gradually into a flood of bloom.

It had never looked so beautiful as on the day when Mrs. Burbage’s maid came to her while she was watering the new rose hedge round the sundial, to say that visitors had called, and her mistress wished Miss Page to receive them.

The lilac bushes were cascades of amethyst bloom; the hawthorn trees were dazzling white, or rosy to their utmost branch. Anne had broken off great sprays of blossom which lay at the foot of the sundial, ready to be taken into the house.

She picked them up, and full of consternation and trembling shyness, made her way across the lawn, and entered the drawing-room by one of the long French windows.

It seemed to her that the room was full of men, and she put out her hand blindly to the tallest of them, murmuring incoherent words.

“I am René Dampierre,” he said. “I’m so sorry Mrs. Burbage is ill. She knew my mother, and me too when I was a child. I should like to have seen her.”

The words, spoken with the faintest foreign accent, were quite fluent, and the voice was beautiful, the gentlest man’s voice Anne had ever heard. She ventured to look at him, and involuntarily she smiled, her confidence restored.

He was very tall, she noticed, and big, and bronzed to the roots of his thick straw-coloured hair. His eyes were brown. Even at the moment, Anne was conscious of surprise. She had expected them to be blue. But they were eyes which drove away her shyness, and she was able to shake hands calmly with his friends as he introduced them.

“This is François Fontenelle, a painter like myself. And this is Thouret, who writes very bad verse and worse novels, and this is Dacier who does everything--also very badly. All my friends. And you--Mademoiselle?”

“I am Anne Page,” she said, and to her own amazement, she laughed.

They all looked so friendly, and they were not at all alarming.

“Anne Page? That is a Shakespeare name!” exclaimed the young man whom Dampierre had first introduced.

“Shakespeare?” repeated Dacier. “_Ah! Si je pouvais seulement parler Anglais, mademoiselle!_”

“I can speak a little French,” said Anne timidly. “But you mustn’t laugh at my accent.”

They surrounded her then, talking a babel of mixed French and English, and Anne found herself laughing with them, as she tried to reply to their questions.

“May we see the garden?” asked René Dampierre presently. “Oh no! don’t put down the flowers! I would offer to take them, but if they are not in your way, do carry them. They are just right.”

“Oh yes! the goddess of the garden must keep her flowers,” insisted Dacier.

Anne kept them uncomprehendingly, since her compliance seemed to please her guests.

She was mystified. But they were all friendly and kind, and easy to entertain. She had spoken to few men in her life, and she did not know there were any like these. It was a new sensation to be addressed with deference, and regarded with attention.

Never before had Anne felt flattered, and the sensation was agreeable.

She took them to her rose garden, and showed them the quaint old sundial, which, at her instigation, the gardener had brought from an outhouse in which she had discovered it, and set up in a space enclosed by clipped yews.

She showed them her borders of snowy pinks, with the lavender bushes behind them, and the garden she was making, a fancy of her own, (new then,) in which only Shakespeare’s flowers should grow.

“There are a great many, you see,” she told them. “And such nice old-fashioned plants. Rue and marjoram, and lavender, and marigolds. I love marigolds, don’t you? They won’t come yet, though.”

“No. They are ‘flowers of middle summer,’” quoted Monsieur Fontenelle. “You see I know your Shakespeare,” as Anne turned to him with a smile of pleased surprise.

“And the ‘_daffodils that come before the swallow dares_’ are nearly over,” said Dampierre. “But you still have some pale primroses and the violets.... Now don’t try to show off, François, because _I_ want to!... ‘_Violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes or Cytherea’s breath._’”

“You are wonderful!” laughed Anne. “You are Frenchmen, but you know _The Winter’s Tale_!”

“I ought to. I have been brought up chiefly in England,” returned Dampierre. “But Fontenelle is a disgusting genius. He knows the literature of all languages by instinct. He was born knowing them. In his nurse’s arms he terrified his relations by babbling in English, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic.”

Anne laughed again. “Then he would like to see the library,” she said. “I will take you there presently. I’m glad you approve my Shakespeare garden,” she added, with a touch of the shyness she had almost forgotten.

“It’s delicious!” declared René. “That old wall as a background, and the mass of wallflowers--gillyflowers, Shakespeare calls them, doesn’t he? And the beds of violets! The scent of it all! It smells of England. And I love England, because it’s my mother’s and Shakespeare’s country.”

“You have some of your own flowers growing here,” he added, stooping towards a bed of double narcissus, and glancing up at Anne with a smile.

“My own flowers?” she repeated, puzzled.

“Don’t you know the country name for these?” He was still smiling. “_Sweet Nancies._”

“And in Shakespeare your name is ‘sweet Anne Page,’” added Fontenelle, “the prettiest English name in the world.”

A faint colour came to Anne’s face. She glanced from one to another with a look half shy, half pleased, half pitiful.

It gave place to a little movement of dignity.

“I’m glad you like my name,” she said.

In her voice there was a suggestion of fear. The fear that these strange yet pleasant young men were laughing at her. She took them across the sunny lawn, where the beech tree’s silken leaves had still the freshness of spring. A thousand birds were singing and calling. The scent of the lilac hung in the air, and the hawthorns were drenched in fragrant snow.

Before the irregular charming front of the house, the men paused, and breaking into French, poured out ecstasies of praise.

“_Ravissant! Quelle belle ligne! Que c’est délicieux!_”

“This is the library,” said Anne, as the men followed her through the open window into the dim beautiful room.

It was the one room in the house unspoilt by modern furniture; left just as it had been in her old friend’s day, with its high-backed chairs of gilded Spanish leather, its heavy rich curtains at the window, and the books reaching from floor to ceiling, their bindings of calf and leather forming the most harmonious of decorations. Simultaneously, the men uttered exclamations of delight.

Fontenelle rushed to one of the shelves, and became absorbed in the titles of the books which he read aloud, calling to his companions now and again, when he had discovered a treasure. René Dampierre stood in the embrasure of one of the windows, with Anne.

“Do you read these books?” he asked, smiling down at her.

“Yes,” said Anne, simply. “I read them for nearly five years. But I haven’t read anything lately,” she added, involuntarily.

“No? Why not?”

Again the colour rushed to her cheeks, and her companion, suddenly curious, wondered what he could have said to destroy her composure.

“I don’t know,” she answered hurriedly. “I have been so busy in the garden. Shall we have tea out of doors? It’s quite warm enough.”

She left him to give the order, and when the library door closed, François abandoned the books, and crossed the room to him.

“But she’s charming!” he exclaimed, speaking in English. “Isn’t it an unusual type? That clear pale face and the soft hair, and the soft voice? I shall get her to sit for me.”

“She’s accustomed to be thought exceedingly plain,” remarked Dampierre.

Fontenelle made an impatient gesture.

“By the usual idiot perhaps. How do you know?”

“By her manner. She hasn’t any of the airs of a pretty woman. She thought we were laughing at her just now, in the garden.”

“If we made her think herself pretty, _mon cher_, she’d surprise us all. There are a thousand possibilities in that face.”

“_Allons!_ I for one am quite ready,” laughed Dampierre. “I believe you’re right. She could be beautiful, though she’s not young. What do you think? Thirty-two, thirty-three?--or more?”

François shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. She’s one of the women for whom age doesn’t count--except as an improvement.”

“An unusual case.”

“Of course. But she’s unusual. I’m going to paint her.”

“Tea’s ready,” said Anne, appearing again at the window. “It was in the drawing-room, so I just had it carried out.”

She was quite at her ease now, and tea was a delightful meal under the flickering shade of the beech tree.

The men praised her French, inquired how she had learnt it so well; laughed and chattered; and finally took their leave, with many invitations to Anne. She must come to their studio, which was really only a barn. She must come to tea at the Falcon Inn. It was quite worth seeing. Above all, they must come back to the most charming garden in the world.

“_Pour revoir la déesse du jardin_,” added Thouret, lifting his hat with a flourish, as she stood in the porch, watching their departure.

XII

“So René Dampierre has grown into a handsome man, has he?” said Mrs. Burbage, when Anne went to her room.

She was sitting up in bed, with a shawl thrown round her shoulders.

Her face was yellow and pinched, but the eyes that looked out from under the wasted forehead, were sharp and keen as ever.

“Well! so he ought. His mother was a beautiful creature, and his father was well enough, as men go. Jacques Dampierre was quite a celebrated man in Paris, thirty years ago, when I used to visit them. A writer; a novelist, I believe. I never read any of his books. In those days it wasn’t considered the correct thing for young women to read French novels. And quite right too. They’re all disgraceful.

“René’s a painter, you say? Well! much good may it do him. He won’t make money that way, though I suppose he must have come into a decent income through his father. He’s an only son.”

“His father is dead then?” Anne asked.

“Yes, my dear, dead long ago. He died a year after his wife, and that’s fourteen years now. She was a Leslie, one of the old stock, and as I say, a lovely girl. Fair, is he? Like his mother then. Hers was the only real gold hair I ever saw. And she had brown eyes, like a deer, or a fawn, or some creature of that sort.”

Anne remembered the brown eyes that ought to have been blue. He had his mother’s eyes as well as her hair then, evidently.

“Let me see, René must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight by this time,” the old lady went on. “I haven’t seen him since he was a baby of five or so. He was a pretty boy, then. They sent him over here to be educated, at that Catholic place. Beaumont isn’t it? He ought to be quite an Englishman, and I hope he is.”

“Well, he speaks English perfectly, with only the very slightest accent. But I don’t think he’s at all like an Englishman,” said Anne. “In manner, I mean,” she added.

“Humph! More’s the pity. I don’t like foreigners.”

Anne was silent. She thought she did.

“He brought friends, you say? Well, tell them to come whenever they like, my dear. You’re quite old enough to look after them. Catherine Leslie--Dampierre, I mean, was a good friend to me. I should like to show hospitality to her boy.”

She turned over on the pillow, her voice growing weak.

“That will do, Anne. Nurse will see to me. I can’t talk ten minutes now without this dreadful faintness.”

The nurse came up to the bed, and Anne stepped aside, pausing at the door, to throw a pitying glance at the sharp profile against the pillow.

The old lady was growing visibly weaker, and Anne sorrowed. She was so lonely, so desolate at the end of life. Childless, almost friendless, for brusque and downright in manner, she had never possessed the happy art of engaging the affection of others, she was going down to the grave almost unregarded.

Few of her own generation were alive, and with the younger race she concerned herself but little. Anne knew that she had a nephew, her sister’s child. She had occasionally spoken of him as her heir, generally with the dry comment that she grudged him the money.

“He’s a great gaby,” she often declared, “and his vulgar wife will make ducks and drakes of my fortune.

“But there, my dear, what does it matter? In the place where I go there’s neither knowledge nor understanding. It will be all the same to me.”

* * * * *

Anne left the sick-room, and from force of habit, wandered out into the garden.

“How lonely! How desolate!” she found herself thinking.

“And I shall be just as lonely, just as desolate when it comes to my turn.”

She turned her face towards the quiet evening sky, in which, despite one or two trembling stars, the flush of sunset still lingered, and again despair fell like a cold hand upon her heart.

All the afternoon she had felt so gay. She had been amused, interested, almost flattered.

Now the words she had just heard, recurred to her. “Tell them to come. You are quite old enough to look after them.”

A sudden miserable sensation of shame assailed her, to remember how young she had felt. In welcoming her visitors, she had not thought of her age at all. She had accepted them as equals and contemporaries.

The blinding tears which made her stumble on the path already dim with twilight, caused her to bow her head with the instinct of hiding them even from herself.

“I’m quite old--quite old,” she repeated with something that was partly a sob, partly a shiver. “They didn’t make me feel it, because they are kind, and they have charming manners. But they are young, and life is all before them. It’s all over for me--and I’ve never had it.”

The bats skimmed noiselessly past her, in the dusk. All the birds had ceased singing. It was nearly dark, but with a horror of returning to the house, of being shut within four walls, Anne sat at the foot of the sundial, and in the darkness her tears fell.

* * * * *

Yet next morning, in the sunshine, when René Dampierre came to ask her to the “studio,” it seemed not only easy, but natural, to smile, and be well pleased. When she found herself with her new friends, depressing thoughts fled like magic.

They were so obviously glad to see her. They interested her so much with their discussions, their enthusiasm, their talk, fresh and new to her, of methods, and values and style, in painting, in writing, in music, in the whole world of art to which hitherto she had travelled alone; speechless, like a ghost amongst ghosts.

From the outset, Anne saw that René Dampierre was regarded with a certain admiring respect by his companions. Already he was considered a great man; already they looked up to him as a leader, an authority.

Little by little, emerging from her provincial ignorance, she realized that a world of art existed in Paris, in which these young men had already made a place for themselves, and were recognized. From the first, it was chiefly through François Fontenelle that her imagination began to work, began to construct the life, the surroundings, the whole framework of existence, with its modern thought, its ideals, its ambitions, out of which her friends had for a moment stepped into the stagnant peacefulness of this English village. It was with François that she talked most easily. His fluent speech, his gift of picturesque narration and description, led her to realize a new world; gave sight to her eyes, gave her understanding.

Thouret and Dacier were delightful boys, younger by three or four years than the other two friends.

Anne liked them heartily, and was amused by their boyish high spirits, and nonsense talk, but her real interest was with François Fontenelle, and René Dampierre.

With René, her shyness lasted longer than with the others, and often as she searched her mind for the reason, she could never determine it, except that as she incoherently put it to herself, he was “so absurdly good-looking.”

His manner to her was charming, more charming perhaps than the manner of any of the others, though they all treated her with that flattering air of mingled deference and admiration to which she was growing accustomed. But despite herself, the little tremor of confusion when René addressed her, never ceased to trouble and embarrass her. In the company of François she was at her ease; interested, pleased, serene, ready to talk or to listen. René alone, though she loved him to talk to her, longed for it in fact with an intensity for which she often despised herself, never succeeded in effacing a secret inexplicable dismay.

The days passed on. May slipped into a radiant June. It was a brilliant summer, warm and sunny, the first happy summer Anne had ever known.

Early in their acquaintance Fontenelle had asked her to sit to him, and out of doors, in the garden of Fairholme Court, he made sketch after sketch.

He was always dissatisfied.

“It isn’t right!” he exclaimed time after time. “You are the most elusive creature in the world. I don’t think I know you well enough yet to get down what I want. But some day I will paint you. You are going to make my fortune!”

“Then you must come again--many times,” Anne said.

Even while she spoke, her smile died.

Next summer, who could tell where she might be? She could not blind herself to the seriousness of her friend’s illness.

And when she was gone?

Anne refused to look forward. Once long ago, Mrs. Burbage had told her she need not be anxious about the future.

“I shall see that you don’t starve, my dear,” she had said.

But Anne realized that her life would be very different. It would probably mean facing the world once more in some sort of struggle for existence, without the companionship, which quiet unemotional as it was, meant all she had ever known of a friendly home, and human affection.

Often as these reflections assailed her, she put them from her. This was her summer. She would not spoil it by thinking of cold rain and wintry days.

It was while she was sitting to François that they talked most; and always sooner or later, the conversation centred upon René Dampierre.

“He has genius,” François assured her with the generous enthusiasm of an artist for work that is beyond his own powers.

“We are all desperately excited about René’s career. He will be great, as Corot, as Daubigny are great. He is the coming man. You will see. In ten years time, he will be a leader, the founder of a new school of painting; a great power in France. Oh! we’re going to be proud of René! Unless, of course,” he added with a change of tone, “he plays the fool. There’s always that to fear with him. He must let women alone. They’re the very devil for smashing up a man’s work; and that’s René’s weak side. He’s a fool about women. Just the sort of sentimental fool who’s capable of marrying one of them. And if he does----” Fontenelle’s shrug of the shoulders and the gesture of his disengaged hand, completed the sentence.

“Why?”

Anne was accustomed to frank conversation from François Fontenelle. He discussed his own love affairs with perfect freedom. He told her of the adventures of his acquaintances in Paris, and with a Frenchman’s love of analysis, entered into long discussions on the psychology of love and passion.

Anne listened calmly. Ignorant as she was, except through her reading, of the phase of existence he described, she had by this time grown to form a very fair idea of the emotional life of the men in her friend’s set in Paris. Much of what François said, she heard with incomprehension, not of the facts, but of the feelings to which they corresponded. She was neither shocked nor surprised. François’ conversation never offended her. He talked to her frankly as to a grown woman of intelligence, and she accepted his confidences as simply as they were offered.

As yet, Anne knew little about herself. It had never occurred to her to analyze her own temperament. Throughout her life it never occurred to her, and in this circumstance lay the secret of a certain simplicity which to her dying day she preserved.

It never struck her that her character, formed in a seclusion unaffected by the clash of argument and conflicting ethical opinion, was wide and generous, and original. Free-thinking in the true sense of the word, inasmuch as her thoughts were her own, uncoloured by the prejudices and predilections of any sect or party. Her life had been forced into a narrow channel, but quite spontaneously, quite naturally, her nature accepted a wide outlook, and extended sympathy and tolerance to lives and standpoints of necessity different from her own.

To many men apparently, love as she had dreamed of it, was an utterly different conception from that she had formed for herself. She accepted the fact, merely trying to understand.

“Why?” she repeated. “He might find the right wife.”

François smiled as he looked up from his drawing, and met her blue eyes, candid as a child’s, but a woman’s eyes nevertheless.

“Sweet Anne Page!” he exclaimed. “Why shouldn’t he find the right wife? The chances are a million to one against it. Even if she exists. She would have to be a miracle of self-sacrifice and comprehension, and tact and wisdom, if she were not to stand in his way. René is an artist to his finger tips, and if only out of consideration for women, no great artist should marry. No! René must always love and ride away. And the women he loves must be those who are accustomed to see the cavalier depart, without grieving. The women who merely look out for the next.”

Anne was silent. It was a way of love she did not understand. Yet she could imagine its existence.

“Men must be very different,” she said after a long pause. “That sort of thing would hurt a woman so much. One sort of woman, I mean. I think it would kill the best in her, so that if she were doing any work like painting, for instance, far from helping her, it would _prevent_ her from doing as well as she might.”

“Men _are_ different. Most men. And if women would only recognize the fact, there would be fewer tears. Love is your whole existence, as one of your poets says, I believe. Bryon, is it? For us it’s often an episode,--more often a series of episodes. Sometimes, rarely, the other thing. But that for an artist is not a consummation to be desired. Think! His whole existence! What becomes of his work if it’s merged in the life of one woman? Why it goes to pot, of course,” he went on with one of his rapid descents into English slang, which combined with his foreign accent always made Anne smile.

“No, that’s the price an artist pays--if it’s a heavy price, which I doubt,” he added with the cynicism of youth. “No absorbing loves for him. Love is necessary for his imagination, of course. It fires him with enthusiasm. It gives him delight and gaiety, and bestows on him the joyous mind to work. But if he’s a wise man, no absorbing passions. Above all, no ties.”

Anne sighed. “I see what you mean. But it seems that art is very cruel.”

“It is.”

“Then I think if what you say is true, an artist ought to keep out of the way of any woman who--cares. But he wouldn’t if she pleased him,” she added softly.

François laughed. “In your wisdom you have divined the natural selfishness of man,” he said.

As the months passed slowly on, a change, or rather a development gradual but steady, was taking place in Anne’s nature, a development that presently made itself manifest in her appearance, in her attitude, in her demeanour, physical as well as mental.

Slowly but surely, she was waking to the consciousness of her womanhood, and of her power.

The men whom she had grown to know intimately, regarded her with obvious admiration.

In their eyes at least, the eyes of artists, it was evident that she was not as she had hitherto imagined, destitute either of beauty or of attractive charm.

_Ah! Voilà sweet Anne Page!_ She had grown used to the frequent exclamation when she appeared in the garden in which at Mrs. Burbage’s desire they were always free to come and go as they pleased.

It no longer made her feel embarrassed and uncertain as to its sincerity.

Her friends’ admiration for her had become a sort of cult. She was a new type, a woman to be praised--discreetly, with deference--yet praised. They brought to her the incense of a sincere flattery, and to Anne, starved of affection, unconsciously waiting for love, it was very sweet.

She accepted it humbly, gratefully, with a surprise as great as her pleasure. But it could not fail to produce results.

She began to take pains with her dress, and her natural taste made it easy to adapt the simple gowns she possessed, into becoming garments. When René Dampierre exclaimed how well something suited her, she went to the glass and looked at herself with innocent gratification and astonishment to find that he was right.

Her eyes grew softly bright. There was often a faint colour in her cheeks.

Even to the unobservant conventional bystander, that summer Anne was charming. If she scarcely recognized herself when she saw her reflection in the glass, the change in her mental personality still further surprised her.

By degrees, so slowly, so insensibly that it seemed a natural process, she had found herself, and in making that discovery, she had made others.

These men who had seemed so strange and wonderful at first;--beings from another planet, whose thoughts she did not understand, whom she watched with interested amazed eyes, became in one sense very simple people. People easily swayed and managed by a woman older than themselves, a woman naturally intuitive, but hitherto deprived of the opportunity of exercising gifts of which she had only recently become aware.

Her conversations with François Fontenelle, as well as her previous wide reading, had removed her ignorance of facts. The rest, now that she was freed from the shackles of self-mistrust, lay well within her natural powers.

To François Fontenelle, a quick observer, even then a man of the world, possessed of the keen and subtle intelligence which in later years was to stand him in good stead for the promotion of his material prosperity, the change was early discernible. He viewed it with secret amusement, and inasmuch as he felt himself to a large extent responsible, some pride, and finally a touch of uneasiness.

It was as though some gentle creature too inexperienced to know its strength, had unexpectedly without in any way losing its gentleness, become dangerous. Dangerous to itself, dangerous perhaps to others. He often found himself glancing uncertainly at René, and then reassuring himself by recalling his friend’s natural instinctive manner to women.

René was always a great success with women. His voice altered when he spoke to them; his attentions were very charming.

François had heard the voice, and witnessed the attentions many times before, and they had never meant anything more than the sort of thing which according to him, in the wisdom of his sapient youth, was “all right.” The love of a few weeks; at most, a few months. Nothing in short that from his point of view could affect the artist seriously, or jeopardize his position. Why then should he feel uneasy? Except of course, that this was a different matter. Anne’s was not the usual case; he could imagine no one further from the type of woman who with _sang-froid_ watches the departing cavalier.

The idea was preposterous, ludicrous to entertain side by side with the idea of Anne Page. If Anne fell in love--heavens! if Anne fell in love!

His brain almost ceased working at the bare notion.

“René would be done for,” he reflected incoherently. “I know his idiocy where women are concerned. And if a woman like Anne Page falls in love, there’ll be the devil to pay! He’d have to marry her. A woman years older than himself. And then exactions, tears, jealousy of him, of his work. Oh awful! Horrible!”

His rage at the bare possibility of such an event extended at moments to Anne. “I know these gentle women!” he told himself vindictively. “They’re worse than any of them, when it comes to a love affair. Tenacious, determined, implacable----”

And then Anne would enter the drawing-room to welcome him, or come across the grass. Anne with her sweet gay smile, and her gentle dignity, and his anger died.

It was all right, of course. What a fool he had been! The idea had never occurred to either of them, and all he had to do was to keep his preposterous notions to himself.

Moreover, September had arrived, and the time for the return of the whole party to Paris was approaching. René certainly seemed in no hurry to depart. But that was comprehensible.

He was working hard, and as François allowed, never had he worked better. There was a tenderness and grace in his landscapes which was new to them, inspired he said by the gracious beauty of Shakespeare’s county.

But he had finished the picture upon which lately all his efforts had been concentrated, and François was already urging that it was time to go.

They were all in the garden one afternoon, when the subject was first mentioned.

“This is delicious, charming, adorable!” exclaimed François, suddenly looking from the lawn across the level meadows, over which the sun was setting. “It has been a summer snatched out of Paradise. But we must be getting home to our daily toil.”

Tea was over, but the table, laden with silver and dainty china, had not yet been removed.

Anne sat near it, in a basket chair, an open book on her knee, from which at the men’s request she had been reading.

Her white muslin dress with its froth of frills trailed on the grass.

The muslin fichu crossed in front and knotted at the waist, revealed a glimpse of her long white throat.

Despite himself, François glanced at her curiously.

Her face was unmoved, but he fancied he detected the faintest tremor of the frills at her breast.

René was lying in a hammock slung beneath the beech tree, and the two younger men lay on the grass, smoking.

François’ remark was greeted with a torrent of invective from them.

Paris be consigned to everlasting perdition! It was still summer. Why talk of going?

René was silent. He raised himself in the hammock, and with half-closed eyes, looked at the evening fields.

“What a beautiful effect,” he said at last. “Look there, where the mist is rising. I must get that. There’s a picture.”

“You’ve finished your picture, _mon vieux_,” returned François, speaking in French. “I know the history of another one. You’ll mess about, and paint out, till the snow is on the ground. There isn’t time. No! The hour has arrived to pack up.”

“We can’t leave sweet Anne Page!” declared Dacier half seriously. He turned on his elbow, and glanced up at her, smiling. Without speaking, Anne returned his smile.

“She looks like an early Italian Madonna disguised as a Reynolds portrait,” thought François suddenly. “Why on earth has she grown so ridiculously attractive!” was his next irritable reflection.

“She must come to Paris,” declared Thouret.

“But of course she must come to Paris! When will you come, Mademoiselle Anne? At once, won’t you? It’s a magnificent idea. We’d take her to the Elysée Montmartre and to the Nouvelle Athènes. Yes! And to Versailles! Versailles in the autumn. Magnificent! And the little streets in Montmartre, and the Place Pigale! Seriously wouldn’t it be splendid to show our Paris to Anne Page?”

They talked all together, exclaiming and laughing, François joining them.

Dampierre alone said nothing. He was still gazing over the fields, now smouldering with faint gold, from which here and there like incense, a ghostly mist was rising.

“There’s a picture there,” he repeated.

“Hang the picture!” exclaimed Dacier and Thouret together. “Mademoiselle Anne Page is coming to Paris. Aren’t you, mademoiselle?”

Anne shook her head. “I never go anywhere.” She was still smiling, but François felt a sudden pang of pity and compunction. To his sensitive ear, the words were an epitome of Anne’s life.

When it was growing dusk, they rose, and this evening Anne did not ask them to stay.

Often when it was dull, or too cold to sit in the garden, she took them into the library, showed them her favourite books, sometimes read to them. Because as Dacier said, it was good for their English accent, and she had such a beautiful voice.

To-day she walked with them to the porch, and said good-bye, in a tone that was as friendly as ever.

“Tell me when you decide to go,” she said. “We must have a picnic or something for farewell.”

François turned at the gate, and saw her standing in the porch, her dress startlingly white in the dusk. He shrugged his shoulders, but involuntarily the troubling sense of having wounded some defenceless creature, returned to him. He told himself that he was a sentimental fool, but the illusion did not vanish.

XIII

For the next week, Anne saw little of her friends.

The day after the suggestion for their departure had been made, the old doctor who attended Mrs. Burbage, asked to see her.

“I’m not satisfied with our patient’s progress,” he said, closing the library door with much precaution. “I think, Miss Page, I should prefer to have another opinion, and I propose writing to-night to Dr. Mears of Harley Street.”

Anne listened with fear at her heart, and the next day, the specialist arrived from London.

After a lengthy visit, and a subsequent conversation between the doctors, she was told that the case was serious, and an operation would probably be necessary.

“Write to her relatives at once,” advised Dr. Mears, taking up his hat. “I can’t disguise from you that there’s cause for anxiety.”

Anne obeyed, and her letter was answered by a telegram, announcing the arrival of Mrs. Burbage’s nephew and his wife.

The intimation of their proposed visit was received by the patient with a grim smile.

“Let them come if they please,” she remarked. “I don’t propose to endure much of their society. I shall claim the privileges of a sick woman.”

They arrived the same evening; Mr. Crosby, a weak-looking undecided man of forty, whose thin fair hair was plastered over a retreating forehead, and his wife, a stout somewhat vulgar woman, arrogant and over-bearing.

The visit was not a success.

Mrs. Burbage, who once decided upon a course of action, remained characteristically obstinate, granted them one interview of ten minutes, after which her door was resolutely closed.

Mrs. Crosby, pleading solicitude for the relative who had always repulsed her advances, appealed to Anne, whom she at first treated with the superciliousness suitable to a dependent who had without doubt acquired for her own ends, a culpable ascendency over the old lady’s mind.

Three months previously, Anne would have been helpless in her hands; too nervous and self-mistrustful to cope with a blustering woman of the world.

Now, scarcely to her own surprise, so insensibly had the change in her been wrought, to all Mrs. Crosby’s attempted coercion, she preserved a self-possessed opposition.