Chapter IV (1)

Mrs. Dallas, after her young friend had left her, sat on for quite a long while on the veranda. The concentration of her recent enterprise effaced itself from her eyes and lips. Her glance, steeping itself again in indolent and melancholy retrospects, fell into a reverie. Once or twice, putting up a languid hand, she yawned.

When the whole garden lay in coolness, she went in and got her gardening apron and gloves and basket of implements. It was an ideal moment for layering her carnations. Tripping out again on her little high-heeled shoes, she placed her kneeling-mat before a splendid plant and set to work. She scorned complicated aids. A box of long hairpins were her chief allies, and a sharp knife. Deftly she selected a blue-gray shoot and stripped the narrow leaves, sharply cut a transverse slit into the tender stalk, firmly bent and pinned the half-severed spray into the heaped earth where it was to make new roots and establish itself in a new life. And, as she did so, her mind reverting to thoughts of Rupert and of her rough usage of him, a simile came to her that made her smile, her hard and not unkindly smile. She did not regret it, though unquestionably she had had her own moment of reluctance and of loss. It had hurt him terribly, no doubt, as, if they had feeling, it must now hurt her carnations to be cut and bent and pinned. But “It might be the making of him,” Mrs. Dallas thought.

STAKING A LARKSPUR

AS a matter of fact (one has often to take one’s stand on fact when thinking about Vera), it’s I who am the gardener; it’s I, that is to say, who draw the plans and compute the cost and give the orders and see that the men carry them out. I often lend a hand at carrying them out, too, for I love planting seedlings and staking plants and tweaking out weeds here and there when I’ve the chance. That wonderful blue border Vera had on the south terrace last summer,--it was just going over when the war broke out,--I put in all the new blue larkspurs myself, three hundred of them,--the larkspurs that Mrs. Thornton was to remind me of,--and I designed and planted and with my own hands helped to lay out the dream-garden, Vera’s special garden. It was she, certainly, who had had the idea, standing on the site of the little, old, abandoned sunken garden in its circle of stone wall and cypresses, and saying, “I see a dream-garden here, Judith; a place where one can come and sit alone and dream dreams.” She often has charming ideas, Vera, but she knows nothing about gardening. I sound already as if I were crabbing her, I know; and perhaps I am. Certainly I never think of her relation to her garden without a touch of irony, and this story, which begins in the dream-garden, isn’t to her advantage. It was there that I felt my first definite irascibility in regard to Vera and little Mrs. Thornton, and felt the impulse, as far as I was able, to take Mrs. Thornton under my wing.

It’s a rather clipped and confined wing, and yet I can do pretty much as I choose at Compton Dally; I don’t quite know why, for Vera doesn’t exactly like me. Still, she doesn’t dislike me, and I think she’s a little bit afraid of me; for I am as definite and determined as a pair of garden shears, and my silence is often only the good manners of the dependant, and Vera knows it.

I am her cousin, an impecunious cousin, my mother a sister of her father’s, old Lord Charleyford, who died last year. Vera herself was very impecunious until she married Percival Dixon; impecunious, but always very lovely and very clever, and she was on the crest of every wave, always, and never missed anything, except ready money and a really good offer, even before Percival Dixon came along--he came _via_ South Africa--and gave her all the money that even she could spend, and bought back Compton Dally for her. Compton Dally had been in the family for hundreds of years, and it was our grandfather, Vera’s and mine, who had ruined us all and finally sold it. It was everything for Vera to get it back, even if she had to take Percival Dixon with it; and I confess that for Compton Dally I could almost have taken Percival Dixon myself; but not quite, even for Compton Dally.

Well, she has always been fairly decent to me; not as decent as she might have been, certainly, but more decent than I, at all events, expected, whatever may have been poor mother’s hopes and indignations. I always thought mother unfair; there was no reason why Vera should go out of her way to give me a good time, and it showed some real consideration in her to have suggested, when mother died and while Jack was reading for the bar, that, until he and I could set up housekeeping in London together, I should come and be her companion and secretary and general odd-job woman; and for people like Vera to show any consideration is creditable to them. I am five years older than Jack, and our plan has always been to live together. I intend, of course,--though Jack at present doesn’t, dear lamb!--that he shall marry; but until then I’m to live with him and take care of him and help him with his work. All this if he ever comes back again. He is fighting at the front as I write, so that it remains to be seen whether I’m to go on always with Vera. If Jack doesn’t come back I shan’t find it more difficult than anything else. We have always been all in all to each other, he and I; but that is quite another story and one that will never be written. This one is neither about Jack nor me, but about Vera and her garden and little Mrs. Thornton and her husband and her clothes.

Vera had thrown open Compton Dally to wounded Tommies and wounded officers, and the Thorntons came in that way. He’d only been back from the Boulogne hospital for a week, was badly crippled, and had a very gallant record. Most of Vera’s officers before this had been colonials who had no homes to go to. The Thorntons weren’t colonials, but they had no home and were very poor, so that the arrangement for them to spend six weeks or two months at Compton Dally while Captain Thornton got back his strength--as far as he was able to get it back, poor man!--seemed an admirable one.

They came on a hot June afternoon both very tired, while we were all having tea on the west terrace. The Tommies--there were over a dozen of them, with two Red Cross nurses to take care of them--had their tea in the billiard-room, which is made over to them for their games and meals and almost constant gramophone, and the accurate laughter of Harry Lauder is wafted out to us on various music-hall strains at most hours of the day. He was laughing loudly and richly as the Thorntons arrived. After tea Vera led them about the garden. Vera’s garden is merely a part of her toilette, and plays almost as important a part as her clothes in her general introduction of herself; and that she intended to introduce herself gracefully to Captain Thornton was evident; and that I was to pilot Mrs. Thornton, I had known after Vera’s glance at her imitation Panama hat, her blue linen skirt, of an obsolete cut and a bad one at that, and her white blouse, shrunken in washing. Vera placed her swiftly as dull and dowdy, and it was my part, always, to pilot the dowdy and the dull.

I don’t mind that, however; even now, after three years of it, I always enjoy going over Compton Dally and the gardens with newcomers. It’s such a beautiful old place, so grave and so serene, its splendid Tudor front lifted high on stone terraces, and its courts and corners behind breaking out into all sorts of unexpected and enchanting antiquities. It symbolizes, if you begin with the Saxon arches in the cellars, the whole history of England, and means so much more than any person who has ever lived there, or who ever will live there, can ever mean. It’s worth the sacrifice of generations of younger sons and myriads of marriageable daughters. What could they all do better than to keep it going? I always recalled this when I wondered how Vera could have married Percival Dixon, and felt almost as much satisfaction as she could feel in the fact that two robust little boys, still at their preparatory school, stood reassuringly behind her and Percival; the elder, too, a thorough Compton, with hardly a trail of Dixon apparent on his ingenuous young countenance. I have the whole history of Compton Dally at the tips of my fingers, and if people give me an opening and show that they care about it, I can talk to them for hours as I take them round, feeling, for my little part and share in it, that, even if Vera weren’t as decent as she is, I should put up with a great deal to stay in it and take care of it.

We didn’t go about the house to-day. The Thorntons saw the big herbaceous border and the rose-garden, the rock-garden, tinkling with its little rivulet, the moat, and the lime-tree alley; and then Vera, trailing her gossamer draperies along the flagged path between the cypresses,--for Vera, even at this epoch of shortened petticoats, manages always to trail,--murmured, as I’ve heard her murmur, when she’s at Compton Dally, at least once a week, “And this is my dream-garden, where I come and sit alone and dream dreams.”

She led Captain Thornton down among the cypress boughs. He had a splinted leg and an unaccustomed crutch, and found the steps a difficulty; but Vera put a hand under his elbow and let him lean heavily on her shoulder, and he reached the dream-garden without, I hope, too many twinges.

It is really very lovely. I don’t like hearing it called a dream-garden, naturally; but I do feel always, when I come into it, that it is like sinking into the stillness and magic of a happy dream. The gypsophila wasn’t out yet, but it made a mist, like drowsiness; white peonies, grey santolina, white roses and silver sea-thistle, the dreamy spires of white foxgloves, low, purple pansies, and tall irises, white and grey and purple--these, in their twilight colours, were massed against the grey stone walls, and there were four bay-trees in stone urns at the corners. The beautiful old stone seat (I found it in Brompton Road, but it might have been made for Compton Dally three hundred years ago in Italy) was heaped with grey and purple cushions. In the centre rose the fluent shaft of the fountain, falling, with a musical rustle and murmur into the stone basin where pale goldfish move among the water-lilies.

We sat down, and Vera went on to say, as always:

“The other gardens are for friends. I plan them for them. I see them there. This is for loneliness, for my very self; and to me it is the heart of the whole, as solitude should be the heart of life.”

Vera, as a matter of fact (you see, the phrase recurs constantly), is never alone. If she is wan and strange and wistful, it isn’t from dreaming dreams, but from not having enough sleep and doing five times too many things and seeing five times too many people in the day. Vera, too, I may say it here, isn’t in the least an ass, though she may, on occasions she finds suitable, talk like one. Occasions are often suitable, so that, as I once told her, she’s in danger of making a habit of it. She looked at me, when I told her this, with the pausing, penetrating, ironic gaze she is so capable of, and finally, with a slight grimace, said, “I’ll be careful, Judith.”

I have moments of feeling fond of her and this was one of them. She is careful; I’ve very rarely heard her talk like an ass when the occasion was unsuitable; but so many people are stupid that these are rare, and I foresee that, as she gets on and sinks by degrees into the automatism that overtakes so many artificial people, it may become a habit, just as the touch of rouge on her pale lips is already becoming more emphasized.

Captain Thornton, I saw at once, as she did,--for she saw most things,--was not stupid; but he was very simple. There was a certain bewilderment on his handsome, sturdy face, wistfulness rather than delight, such as a soul newly arrived in Paradise might feel, unable to forget the passes of death and the companions left behind in suffering. He wasn’t forgetting; I felt that as I looked at him. So many of them forget. Vera, I am sure, hardly ever remembers what it all really means--all these wounded heroes. Perhaps it is natural that she shouldn’t; she has no one near in it.

Captain Thornton gazed about him quietly, and from the garden looked back at the angel who had led him there. Of course Vera must have looked like an angel to him. I haven’t described Vera, and she is difficult to describe. To say that she is pale and dark, with attenuated features and dwelling, melancholy eyes, is only the beginning of it. Of course she is getting on now,--she is nearing forty-five,--but she’s still lovely; her smile makes me think of a pearl dropped in wine, and behind the melancholy of her eyes is that well of waiting irony. She looks as soft, as tenderly encompassing, as a summer night; but she is really sharp, sharp, sharp. Thwart or vex her, and out leaps the stiletto; or, rather, it would be more exact to say, out come the claws. But women of the Vera type will always, to young men like Captain Thornton, be angels pure and simple. I don’t suppose, for one thing, that he’d ever talked intimately with any one quite like her. He came, I was to learn, from a remote country rectory where the great ladies of the neighbourhood had been unfashionable, matter of fact, and clothed for the most part in tweed and leather, and none of them would have been likely to make much, before the war, of a young soldier. Vera was making much of him, and a fashionable angel is an angel doubly equipped. He would not know what it was that made her so strange in her sweetness; but fashion of that achieved and recondite kind is like a soft incense wafted around a woman. She is first, everywhere, always, without an effort; and people who are first, if they also look like angels, win hearts as easily as they run and twist their fingers among their ropes of pearls, as Vera was doing now. She always wore her pearls; they fell together in a milky heap in her lap, and long earrings glimmered in the shadows of her hair.

Vera’s way of talking, too, is like a spell. Her voice is rather like the fountain, so low, so inarticulate, yet so expressive. She murmurs rather than speaks, with now and then a pause that is almost a soft gurgle. Sometimes it exasperates me to hear her, but sometimes even cross-grained I am charmed.

The voice purled and rippled and gurgled over Captain Thornton now. He sat on Vera’s farther hand, and Mrs. Thornton sat between Vera and me. Already, at tea-time, Mrs. Thornton had interested me. She had remained silent without seeming shy. Superficially, no doubt, she was dowdy, and superficially she looked dull, or, as I saw it, dulled; and dull and dowdy is what at tea they all put her down for. It’s curious, how in a group of highly civilized people, a newcomer, without a word or glance exchanged between them, is in a moment assessed and placed and relegated. Everybody was going to be very kind to Mrs. Thornton, that I saw, and everybody was going to relegate her; only the highly civilized can manage the combination.

Mrs. Thornton, from one point of view, had a pallid, podgy little face, with wide lips and short nose and a broad, infantile brow above eyes singularly far apart. All the same, and the more I looked at her the more I saw it, it was a delicious face; squared here, stubborn there, sweet by turns and glances. And she was of the loveliest colour, with a skin silver-white, and thick, shining, pale-gold hair, and eyes of a deep, dense, meditative blue. All her attributes, however, were invisible to Vera, and I was fully prepared for the glance with which, over Mrs. Thornton’s imitation Panama, she presently said to me:

“Darling, do take Mrs. Thornton round the water-garden. It’s so lovely at this hour. Captain Thornton must wait for it till to-morrow. He’s too tired to go farther now.”

Mrs. Thornton got up at once, with her air of vague acquiescence in anything proposed, and I led her up and out and down the lime-tree alley and through the copse, where Vera, in spring, has her wild garden, to the banks of the river, the clear, wandering little stream, bridged and islanded, golden in the afternoon light under its willows and reflecting irises and meadow-sweet.

“Now we can sit down,” I said, and on a bench under a willow we did sit, Mrs. Thornton with an involuntary sigh of weariness. “I expect your husband will soon get all right here,” I said presently. “It’s such good air. Is his leg badly damaged?”

“Well, you see, he can already get about quite well with it,” said Mrs. Thornton; “but I’m afraid he’ll never be able to do any of the things he most cares for again--riding and cricket, and his soldiering, of course. He will have to give up the army. I am afraid it’s afterwards one will begin to feel all the things that one must give up. Just now all that I can think about is that he has come back alive. Have you any one out there?” she asked.

I told her about Jack and how he had got a commission at the beginning of the war and gone out in January.

“It must be even more of a wrench to have them go when they aren’t already in the army,” said Mrs. Thornton. “A soldier’s wife ought not to feel it so much of a wrench. I’m afraid I did, though.”

I saw already that Mrs. Thornton had taken to me. It was natural that she should. I had taken to her quite tremendously, and she must have felt it; and, besides, a great many women do feel confidence in me at once. I, to be sure, look like anything but an angel, though I, like Vera, have small, pale features and dark hair. But mine’s not a melancholy or mysterious face. My eyebrows dip together over my nose, and my mouth is at once placid and irascible. I look, in my straight, austere clothes,--the silver buckles on my shoes and the fob of old trinkets at my waist for all adornment,--like a cross between a young priest in his soutane and a Blue-Coat boy; and I think it is the boyish woman, curt and kind and impersonal, who gains the confidence of others of her sex.

“I don’t know that it was more of a wrench,” I said. “I expect that you and I felt pretty much the same sort of thing on that Victoria platform when we said good-bye to them. What do you and your husband intend doing, now that he has to give up his profession?”

“Well, we had thought of having a chicken-farm somewhere. We are both so fond of the country, and I’ve a cousin who has a chicken-farm, and I’ve helped her with it, and she has made it pay. Even if Clive’s leg stays so bad, I am very strong. But we’ve had, really, no time yet to talk things over.”

“You don’t look very strong,” I observed, “but that may be because you are over-tired. You look very tired. I should say that you got up at six this morning, and raced around London shopping in the heat, and packed, and had no lunch, and a journey on top of it all. So no wonder you are tired.”

“How clever of you!” Mrs. Thornton cried, laughing. “That is exactly what I have been doing. And I’ve been in a Belgian refugee hostel ever since Clive went, and that is tiring, though it keeps one going, too. Don’t you find it difficult just to go on from day to day?” She was leaning forward on her knee now to look up into my face while I knitted. “I mean, when one wakes in the morning, for instance, to think that one has to get up and brush one’s teeth and do one’s hair and all the rest of it. It seems impossible when what one is feeling is that one wants to be chloroformed till it is all over. It was then that the hostel was so sustaining; one had to get up whether one felt like it or not.”

“I know; yes,” I said, nodding. “I’ve work, too, though it’s not so sustaining as a hostel. I’m my cousin’s secretary, and we have all these Tommies now; they take up a good deal of time. It must be curious, having it all over, all that weight of anxiety.”

“It is, it is,” said little Mrs. Thornton, eagerly, with her look of gratitude for finding some one with whom to talk about it. “It’s almost like losing a limb. I feel crippled, as well as Clive. Isn’t it absurd? But it’s almost like loss. And one is dazed with the relief of it.”

“How long have you been married?” I asked.

“Only a year and a half,” she told me, and that Clive’s mother and hers had been great friends, and that she had often gone to stay with his people in the country, so that she had always known him. Her mother had died when she was a child and her father only two years ago. She had lived in London with her father, who had been an artist. She was just twenty. And after she had told me about herself, she asked me about Jack, and I found myself telling her all about him and about those plans of ours for living together in London if he ever comes back.

The party at Compton Dally was small, and they were all there (except Sir Francis who was an old family friend and who was paying a long visit), to help Vera with her Tommies. The only other officer besides Captain Thornton was poor Colonel Appleby, a pale, frightened, middle-aged man invalided home with nervous shock. At dinner that night Lady Dighton, who is the embodiment of lassitude and acquiescence, had him, and Mrs. Travers-Cray had Sir Francis, and Vera had Captain Thornton, so that Percival fell to the share of Mollie Thornton, and I wondered how she liked him. If she was already feeling herself out of it, to have Percival at dinner wouldn’t make her feel herself in; quite the reverse. Percival’s appearance is always summed up to me by the back of his head: the wedge of fat, red neck above his high collar, the sleek, glittering black hair, and the rims of his red ears curving forward on each side. The back of his head seems really as characteristic as the front, though that is jovial and not unkindly. Percival looks sly over his food, and looks over his wine like the sort of man who is going to tell a story that no one else will find at all amusing. He told Mollie several such stories that night, I inferred, though she was evidently neither shy nor shocked; it was in the quality of her smile that I read her kindly endurance.

Milly, Vera’s girl, just seventeen and just promoted to late dinner, sat on Mollie’s other hand and did not, as far as I observed, address her once during the meal. But, then, Milly never makes efforts unless they are plainly useful. All Vera’s beauty had been spoiled in her by the Dixon admixture, and yet she is a most engaging-looking little minx, with broad, bold, black, idle eyes and a blunted nose, auburn hair and a skin of roses and carnations. Vera had seen to that. Poor Vera is quite fond of the child, a half-vexed, half-ironic constantly rebuffed tenderness. But Milly says to me, “Mother is such a bore, you know,” and likes me far better, who make no claim upon her and who, she must feel, like her very little. She will soon take flight, however, when a sufficiently advantageous occasion presents itself. The war has been a sad blow to her projects, and what I like in Milly is the fact that she has never uttered a word of complaint as to the shattering of her girlish gaieties. However, to get back to Mollie Thornton, I don’t think she could have enjoyed her companions at dinner.

After dinner I go and amuse the Tommies and talk to the nurses until bedtime, but, before I went, I observed that Vera, after her wont with the detrimental belongings of a guest, had placed Mollie in a corner with a book and the urgent, smiling murmur: “By a friend of mine. Quite, quite beautiful. I know you’ll love it.” It is a book called “Spiritual Control,” with a portrait of its author, who is a stock-broker, a sleek, stalwart, satisfied person whom Vera characterizes, why I can’t think, except that she had him once to stay after hearing his lecture, as her “friend.” A great many people find the book inspiring; Vera, as a matter of fact, doesn’t, and she found Mr. Cuthbert Dawson a terrible bore. It was plain from her giving poor Mrs. Thornton “Spiritual Control” to read, where she placed her.

When I came back an hour later she was still in her corner with “Spiritual Control,” but she wasn’t reading it. She had drawn the curtain at the window where she sat, and was looking out at the splendid, dramatic moonlight. Sir Francis and Colonel Appleby were reading the evening papers, Lady Dighton and Leila Travers-Cray talked together while they knitted, Milly had disappeared, and at the farthest end of the great room, on its farthest sofa, Vera, pale and pearly, was talking to Captain Thornton.

“Well,” I said, “how is your spirit? Is it more controlled?”

Mrs. Thornton looked up at me, and after a moment her smile of understanding merged into one of friendly enjoyment.

“How do you manage,” she said, “to be so austere in the daytime and so splendid at night? You make me think of a Venetian princess in that brocade.”

“It is nice, isn’t it?” I said. “And made by the littlest of dressmakers. I’m clever at clothes. But tell me how you like Mr. Cuthbert Dawson.”

“Well, he is very cheerful and sincere,” said Mrs. Thornton, kindly; “but I don’t seem to get much out of it. I’m really too tired and stupid to read to-night.”

“And it’s time your husband was in bed,” I said. “One of the nurses is coming for him.”

Mrs. Thornton looked down the long room at her husband.

“If only I’d had the Red Cross training,” she said, “I could have taken care of his leg then. I suppose I mustn’t ask to be allowed to. Isn’t it quite early?” she added. “He’s enjoying the talk with Lady Vera.”

“It’s half-past ten, and we are strict with our invalids. Here is nurse now. I’ll come up with you and see that you are comfortable.”

No one could have said that there was any creature comfort lacking in Mrs. Thornton’s reception at Compton Dally. Captain Thornton, as the invalid, had a larger room, but Mrs. Thornton’s room, next it, was quite as charming a one, pink and grey, with old French prints and hangings of _toile de Jouy_. She went up to the prints for a moment of silent appreciation before turning to me with a sigh, half pleasure and half wistfulness.

“How lovely everything is here! Papa would have been in rapture over those Cochins. I shall enjoy my sleep to-night.” And then,--it was her only sign of awareness,--“I suppose I’m to be allowed to go and say good-night to Clive when nurse has done with him.”

* * * * *

My study at Compton Dally, where I type and write and do accounts, opens on the west terrace, and from my bureau I seemed, at most hours of the days that followed, to have a view of Mollie Thornton’s little figure wandering, as it were, on the outskirts, not plaintive,--there was never a touch of plaintiveness,--but passive. With her sewing or knitting or a book she sat a good deal under the shade of the cedar that stands at the corner of the terrace, and she spent a good deal of time drifting up and down the vistas of the lawns and park watching birds, a binocular in her hand. She was certainly a most comfortable person to relegate, since she never looked melancholy and usually contrived to seem occupied, and Vera, when she passed behind her on the terrace on her way to the dream-garden, Captain Thornton beside her, would pause and put her hand on her shoulder and say, “Happy, dear?” in the most dulcet tone. And when Mrs. Thornton, lifting those meditative eyes, answered, “Yes, thank you,” Vera, all bland benevolence, would say, “That’s right,” and pass on. Leila Travers-Cray and Lady Dighton sometimes exchanged a few friendly remarks with her, and she read the morning papers to Colonel Appleby when his eyes hurt him; but she was relegated far, far away, as completely as any human being could be who could in any way count as a guest.

I was very busy and had not much time to be with her, though all the time I had was hers; but I knew accurately what she was feeling. I related it always with that dreadful Victoria platform, with those moments of pain and yet of rapture which we had both known, when we had felt ourselves, in our suffering, stand for England, lifted up in accepting sacrifice to the august and beautiful spirit that claimed our dearest. One would expect, after that transcendent suffering, to find as transcending a joy; but how was joy possible to a young wife caught into what might be to her husband a fairyland or a paradise, but to her was a cruel and complicated machine where her only part was to turn round with the other wheels and pretend to like it? I knew that it must not be taken too seriously. It was only to last for six weeks, and then she would have her Clive back again; yet while it lasted it must make the months of suffering passed through seem happy by comparison. There had then been nothing between them but distance and the fear of death; and now everything was between them--everything Vera stood for; her house, her friends, her smile, her pearls, her dream-garden.

On morning after morning I saw Vera leading him away to it, with her armful of books, and Chang, her Pekinese, trotting at her heels. I perfectly understood Vera’s state of mind in regard to Captain Thornton. There was no occasion for commonplace jealousy. He merely made her feel cheerful and rejuvenated. Everything she had to show and tell him was new to him. She became new to herself, poor old Vera! and gained from the quiet regard of his sane and simple eyes--handsome eyes under straight, dark brows--a sense of freshness and worth in everything. She liked him better than any of the wounded heroes she had yet had. Some of them had been merely stupid, and one or two had been gloomy, sardonic men--men of her own world, to whom nothing she had to say would seem new. Clive Thornton was neither stupid nor sardonic, and he was simple enough to accept Vera’s fancy tricks--her talk of dreaming dreams and solitude--as part of an angel’s manner, and he was just clever enough to be able to appreciate anything she had to say. I could quite see how endearing Vera must find his steady gaze and his considering silences. Even with my vigorous espousal of his wife’s side I never felt angry with him. His not seeing that she was unhappy was part of the same innocence that made him not see that Vera was a cat. Mollie, besides, took quite as much care to conceal her unhappiness as Vera to behave like an angel. It never crossed his mind that his wife was relegated; it never crossed his mind that they were separated. He did not feel separated; they were both, as far as he knew, in fairyland together. And yet I knew it might not all be so trivial and transient as it seemed. A new standard was being formed for him; a new idea of what it was to be an angel. It was possible that all unconsciously he would no longer think of Mollie as one when he left Compton Dally; and when I took this in I began to gather up my weapons.

I found Mollie one afternoon sitting on the bench under the willow-tree where we had had our first talk. She had her knitting, but her hands were still, and she was gazing before her at the water. If she were not a tragic figure, it was only because there are some things sadder than tragedy. She had faced everything, been through everything, she had gone down into the Hades where so many of us were still living, and now she found herself baulked and menaced by commonplace daylight. Tragedy is, in some ways, an easy thing to bear.

“Well, what are you doing here by yourself?” I asked her, advancing. There was a look on her face, startled and steadied, that showed me what she had been thinking about in the fancied security of her solitude. But she managed at once the vague smile that concealed so much, and said that she had been, as usual, resting. “I seem to find out every day more and more how tired I was,” she added.

“You didn’t care to go with the others, motoring?” I took my place beside her. “You’d have liked Marjorams. It’s a lovely old place. Some people think it beats Compton Dally, though, naturally, I’m not one of them.”

“I’m sure you’re not,” said Mollie, laughing a little. “That was one of the things that first struck me about you--how you loved it. I felt that you were a fiercely loyal person.”

“I think I am--narrow loyalties, but fierce ones,” I said. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

“About motoring? I don’t care much about it, you know. And there really wasn’t room enough for me.”

I knew there hadn’t been; but I was deliberately eschewing tact.

“Has Captain Thornton gone?” I inquired, knowing, also, that he hadn’t.

“No; Lady Vera is reading to him in the flagged garden,” said Mollie in the voice that showed me how little she had to learn about spiritual control. “Lady Vera is going to take him out for a run in her two-seater before dinner. He enjoys that a great deal more than the big car.”

“It’s far pleasanter, certainly,” I agreed. And I went on: “They are reading, you mean, in the dream-garden. You mustn’t forget that it’s a dream-garden--where one goes to be alone.”

She looked round at me quickly, and after a moment I saw that she faintly coloured. She said nothing, leaving it to me to follow up my graceless gibe. I was quite ready to follow it up.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, knitting the loops along the side of my heel, “Vera hardly ever is alone there. It’s always, with Vera, a _solitude à deux_. She’s not at all the sort of woman for real solitude. She is the sort of woman who likes to feel, or, rather, to look lonely and not to be alone.”

To this, after a pause, Mollie said:

“She is very charming; Clive finds her very charming.” And, forced to it, apparently, by my crudity, she added, “Aren’t you fond of her, then?”

“No, I’m not; not particularly,” I said. “Especially not just now. Vera is not at her best, to my mind, when she is being angelic to young married men.”

Mollie Thornton now blushed deeply.

“I am perfectly contented that she should be angelic to Clive,” she said.

“You are very loyal,” I returned. “But you’ll own that he is getting more out of it than you are. It’s a place, Compton Dally, for wounded heroes rather than for a wounded hero’s wife.”

“Do you mean,” she asked after a moment, “that I oughtn’t to have come?” She had indeed owned to everything in the bewilderment of the question. I laughed at it.

“Oughtn’t to have been with your husband at a time like this! Even Vera could hardly ask that, could she? And that’s my quarrel with her; that it’s the time of all times that you should be together and that she never lets you see him, practically.”

She looked away, and after a moment I saw that her eyes had filled with tears.

“He hasn’t an idea of it,” she said at last.

“That fact doesn’t make you happier, does it?”

“He thinks I’m as happy as he is. He thinks that we are together in it all, and that she is an angel to me, too,” said Mollie. “She always is an angel to me when she sees me.”

“All men are rather stupid when it comes to knowing whether their wives are happy,” I remarked. “I think your Clive is a great dear; but I like you best because you see things he doesn’t. You, for instance, see that Vera isn’t an angel, though she may look like one.”

“He has no reason to think anything else, has he?” said Mollie, and I saw that I had brought her to the point to which I had intended to bring her. “I don’t let him guess that I’m not happy; it would be horrid of me if I did, for it would only mean that he’d feel at once that we must go away, and all this loveliness would be over for him. A stuffy little flat in Bayswater isn’t a very alluring alternative; and that’s where we’d have to go--to my aunt’s--till Clive was better.”

“How you’d love the stuffy flat! How glad you’d be to be there with him! And, to do him justice, how happy he’d be there with you! He will be in a month’s time. The only question is, the month. No, Vera isn’t an angel. If she were an angel, she’d have seen to it that you were happy here, too. But when it comes to being nice to other women,--really nice, I mean,--she can be a cat. And what I’d like very much to see now is what she’d make of it if you could show her that you could look like an angel, too. It’s so much a matter of looks.”

“Make of it? But I couldn’t look like an angel.”

“You could look like a rival; that’s another way of doing it. You could look like another woman of her own sort. You could make her see you. She simply doesn’t see you now. I suspect that if Vera saw you and saw that you were charming, she’d show her claws. I’d like Captain Thornton to see her showing her claws.”

In silent astonishment, her blue eyes fixed upon me, Mollie gazed.

“No, I don’t hate Vera, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said. “I like you, that’s all, and I don’t intend that she shall go on making you unhappy.”

“But I don’t want Clive made unhappy,” Mollie said. “I can’t imagine what you mean; but, whatever it is, I don’t want it. I couldn’t bear all this to be spoiled for him. I couldn’t bear it not to be always, for him, a paradise.”

It was my turn to gaze at her, and I gazed penetratingly.

“And what if it all came to mean that you yourself, because of it, were never to be more to him than a second-rate paradise? What if she were to spoil you for him?”

I brought out the cruel questions deliberately, and for a moment Mollie faced them and me.

“Why do you say that? How cruel to say that!” she murmured, and then suddenly she bowed her head upon her hands. “It’s been my terror. I’m ashamed of myself for thinking it. And now--you see it!”

I put my arm around her shoulders.

“I’m not cruel. I only want us to see things together. I don’t really think they’d ever come to that; and, at all events, he would never know that they had.”

“But I should,” Mollie said.

“Yes, you would. And it’s horribly true that real things can be spoiled and blighted by false things. I’ve often seen it happen. You do see the danger, and you must take up the burden, my dear, of being cleverer than your husband, and save him along with yourself. If Vera were what she looks and seems to him, he might be right in feeling that he found in her something he couldn’t find in you. You must show him that she isn’t what she looks and seems and you must show him that you can be a first-rate paradise, too.”

“In a little flat in Bayswater! On a chicken-farm! No, it can’t be done. Paradises of this sort don’t grow in such places,” poor Mollie moaned.

“You can keep up the real paradise in them--the one he has already--when you get there. The point is that you must show him now that you can look like this one here. And the way to look it is to dress it. I’m sure you’ve realized the absolutely supreme importance of dress for women of the paradise type--the women you see here, all these sweet ministering angels to the Tommies and the young husbands. I don’t mean to say that, with the exception of Vera, they’re not as nice as you are in spite of being well dressed; but I do mean that if they dressed as you do they’d not be women of the paradise.”

Mollie’s hands had fallen, and she was gazing again with eyes childlike, astonished, and trusting.

“But, Judith, what do you mean?” she asked. “Dress? Of course you all dress beautifully. Haven’t I loved simply looking at you all, as if you’d been the most exquisite birds? But how could I do it? I haven’t the money; I never have had. If one has no money, one must be either æsthetic or dowdy, and I’ve always prefered to be dowdy.”

“Yes, I saw that; I liked you for that. There’s hope for the dowdy, but none for the æsthetic; the one is humble, and the other is complacent. Your clothes express renunciation simply--and the summer sales. But though it is a question of money, some women who have masses of money never learn how to dress. They remain mere dressmakers' formulas; and others, with very little, can’t be passed by. They count anywhere. You’ve noticed my clothes. I’ve hardly any money, yet I’m perfect. All my clothes mean just what I intend them to; just as Vera’s mean what she intends, and Mrs. Travers-Cray’s and Lady Dighton’s, and Milly’s, for Milly already is as clever as possible at knowing her thing. But you’ve abandoned the attempt to intend. You’ve sunk down, and you let the winds rake over you. You’ve always made me think of a larkspur, that blue and silver kind, all pensive grace and delicacy; but you’re a larkspur that hasn’t been staked. Your sprays don’t count; they tumble anyhow, and no one sees your shape or colour. Last night, for instance--that turquoise-blue chiffon: not turquoise, and not that sort of chiffon.”

“I know it. I hated it,” she said.

“Of course you did, and so does any one who looks at you in it.”

“But I couldn’t afford the better qualities,” she appealed. “And in the cheaper ones I couldn’t get the blue I wanted, the soft Japanese blue.”

“No, you couldn’t. And you thought it wouldn’t show if you had it made up on sateen. It always does show. No, it needs thought and time and computing, too much time, too much thought, to say nothing of too much money for many women, of course; for them it wouldn’t be worth it. There are other things to do than to live in paradise. But for you it is worth it; to show him that you can look like an angel, and to show him that Vera can look like a cat. No, _I’ll_ show him; mine is the responsibility. It’s worth it, at all events, to me. I’ll put in the stakes, and tie you and loop you and display you. You’ll see. I told you I’d a clever little dressmaker. That’s an essential. And we’ll scrape up the money. You shall be dressed for once as you intend.”

She was bewildered, aghast, tempted, and, on the top of everything, intensely amused. Her face was lighted as I’d never seen it before with pure mirth, and it looked like still, silver water that becomes suddenly glimmering, quivering, eddying, and sunlit. She was charming thus lighted. It was a sort of illumination of which Vera’s face is incapable; her gaiety is always clouded with irony.

“It is all too kind, too astonishing, too funny for words,” Mollie said. “Of course I should love to be well dressed for once, and I can’t see why I shouldn’t avail myself of your little dressmaker now,--especially now, since, as you tell me, I offend through my dowdiness. And I do really need some new clothes. I’m wearing out my trousseau ones, you know. Yes; wasn’t it a horrid little trousseau? But, don’t you see,” and the sunlight faded, “I can’t be a real, not a real angel, not a real paradise. It’s much deeper. It’s a question of roots. It’s the way they smile, the way they walk, the way they know what they want to say and what they don’t want to say.”

I nodded. “You know, too, and you’d say it, if people saw you and cared to hear what you said.”

“That would help, of course. I’ve never felt so stupid in my life as here. But, oh, it’s deeper!” said Mollie. “I don’t belong to it. How they all make me feel it! I’m an outsider; and why should I pretend not to be?”

“It wouldn’t be pretending anything to dress as you’d like to dress. No one who _sees_ is an outsider now a days, if they can contrive to make themselves seen. That’s the whole point. And there’s nothing you don’t see. You see far more than Vera does. Don’t bother about the roots. Take care of the flowers, and the roots will take care of themselves; that’s another modern maxim for you. Your flowers are there, and all that we need think of now is how to show them. Wait. You’ll see. We’ll go to London to-morrow,” I said; “and this very evening we’ll have a talk about your hair.”

* * * * *

You may be sure that I was on the spot to see a week or so later my larkspur’s début as an angel. We were all assembled in the drawing-room before dinner, and she was a little late, as I, not she, had intended that she should be. It was precisely the moment for a mild sensation. The day had been hot and long. Everybody, apart from being anxious,--for everybody was anxious, Sir Francis and Mrs. Travers-Cray with sons at the front and Lady Dighton’s husband in the Dardanelles--apart from that ever-present strain, everybody to-day was a little jaded, blank, and tired of one another. There reigned, as a symptom, that silence that in the moments before dinner falls sometimes upon people who know each other too well for surmise or ceremony. They stood about looking at the evening newspapers; they picked up a book; they sat side by side, knitting without speaking. Vera, sunken in a deep chair near my sofa, yawned wearily. No one, in fact, had anything to look to before bedtime except the stimulant of the consommé or a possible surprise in the way of sweets.

I had known that I could count upon Mollie not to be self-conscious when she appeared in her new array, but I hadn’t counted upon such complete and pensive simplicity. Her eyes were on me as she entered, her husband limping behind her, and they seemed to ask me, with a half-wistful amusement, if she came up to my expectations. She far surpassed them. I never saw a woman to whom it made more difference. “It,” on this occasion, was blue--the blue of a night sky and the blue of a sky at dawn, the blue, too, of my larkspurs, lapping at the edges here and there, as delicately as filaments of cloud crossing the sky, into white. It made one think, soft, suave triumph that it was, of breezes over the sea at daybreak and of a crescent moon low on a horizon and of white shores and blue Grecian hills; at least it made me think of these things, it and Mollie together; and with it went the alteration of her hair--bands of folded gold swathed round and round her little head. No one but myself had ever seen before that Mollie had the poise and lightness of a Tanagra figure nor that the shape of her face was curious and her eyes strange and her skin like silver; but I knew, as she advanced down the long room, that Vera, sunken in her chair, saw it all at last, drank in every drop of it, with an astonishment that, though it expressed itself in no gesture, I was able to gauge from her very stillness, her concentration of stillness, as she watched the relegated becoming visible at last. It’s not pleasant for anybody to have to own that they’ve been blind and made a mistake, and Vera was specially fond of discovering oddity and charm and of claiming and displaying and discussing a discovery. And here was oddity and charm which she had not only failed to discover, but had helped to obscure. Mollie was indeed visible, and every eye was on her as she drifted quietly forward in the evening light and sat down beside me. She was mine, and no one else’s; that was quite evident, too.

That Captain Thornton had received something of a revelation was also evident, though it had not probably amounted to more than seeing, and saying, that Mollie was looking awfully well; but it expressed itself in the fact that, instead of joining Vera, as was his wont, he came and sat down next to Mollie on my sofa. We began to talk, and, though the watching pause was prolonged for yet another moment, the others then began to talk, too. It was as if, not quite knowing what had happened to them, they were all a little cheered and exhilarated; as if they’d had their consommé and as if the sweet had been altogether a surprise. A spectacle of any sort has this effect upon a group of jaded people. Only Vera kept her ominous silence.

Dinner was announced, and we all got up. Percival, with a new alacrity, approached Mollie,--he almost always had Mollie,--the others paired off as usual, and Vera rose to Captain Thornton’s arm. It was then that she said, smiling thoughtfully upon Mollie:

“Aren’t you doing your hair in a new way, dear?”

I saw from Mollie’s answering smile that she was still ingenuous enough to hope that she might win Vera’s approval with that of the others, the hope, too, that while Clive might think of herself as a first-rate angel, he should never see Vera as a cat.

“It is new,” she said. “I’ve just learned how to; Judith showed me. Do you like it?”

Leaning on Captain Thornton’s arm, Vera, with gently lifted brows, rather sadly shook her head.

“I suppose I don’t care about fashions. It’s very fashionable, isn’t it? But I loved so that great, girlish knot. People’s way of doing their hair is part of their personality to me. Judith cares so much about fashion, I know. Do you care about fashion, Captain Thornton? Do you like this fashionable way? You know, I can’t help always thinking that it makes women’s heads look like cheeses; in napkins, you know--Stiltons.”