Part 5

Its leaves were already yellow, and it rose like a fountain of gold towards the quiet September sky. All round the eaves of the house the swallows were skimming and crying, in the unrest of an imminent parting, and the hazy sunshine wrapped the garden in a dream of peace.

Anne too, sat dreaming. Ever since the visit of her friend, earlier in the summer, her thoughts had developed a tendency to wander back over the years before their meeting.

To-day it was of her first five years at Fairholme Court that she was thinking.

She remembered driving up to the house that was now her home.

She remembered walking through the hall into the drawing-room, distressfully conscious, even through her shyness, of the desecrated stateliness of a dwelling meant for beauty.

True, she would not in those days have known with what to replace the gaudy Axminster carpet in the hall, nor the arsenic green curtains at the drawing-room windows. But little as she had seen, little as she then knew of material loveliness, the right instinct she possessed for form and colour was outraged at every turn by the indications at once trivial and ponderous of Mid-Victorian taste.

As she entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Burbage rose from the sofa on which she had been lying, a woollen rug of rainbow hues thrown across her feet.

She was a little old woman with grey, corkscrew curls hanging in bunches over her ears, keen eyes, and a mouth which combined shrewdness and suspicion.

She looked Anne up and down with a penetrating glance.

“I didn’t think you would have grown so tall,” she remarked. “You were a little creature when I last saw you. Ring for tea, my dear, and then I dare say you would like to go to your room. Parker will show you. Make yourself at home, and amuse yourself in your own way, if you can find anything to do in this dull place. I don’t want you to think you need trouble about running after me, unless I ask for you. I hate fuss. There will be time enough for that when I get worse.”

The words struck the keynote of the future relationship between the two women.

Even at that time Anne’s benefactress was a semi-invalid who did not rise till noon, and usually spent the rest of the day on the sofa, knitting interminably. Her illness, not at first severe, made any but the slightest attention unnecessary. She was a woman a little eccentric, often difficult in temper, but never exacting in trifles.

Her great abhorrence was what she called “fuss” of any sort, and as she frequently preferred to be alone, she left Anne for the most part free.

Her duties gradually became those of general supervision of the household, which composed as it was of elderly well-trained servants, proved no arduous task.

Few callers came to the house. There was never anything in the nature of entertainment at Fairholme Court. The days went on. Monotonously, peacefully, spring glided into summer, summer to autumn; the winters came and went.

A good understanding, a quiet comradeship was gradually established between the old woman and her companion, who moved so gently, whose voice was so soothing, who was always at hand when she happened to be wanted--never in the way when her presence was not required.

Anne practically led her own isolated life. Too shy to make any advances, the people of her own grade in the village, from the outset, ignored the companion of a woman who had never been popular. She was just a quiet, harmless creature, lady-like certainly, but very dull, whom they occasionally pitied for being shut up with “that disagreeable Mrs. Burbage.”

Anne found the bedroom she had loved as a child, now her own, almost unchanged. The rosebuds on the wall were faded certainly, but the dimity valance at the window, the white curtains to the bed were fresh and spotless, and the “spindly” furniture remained. The white roses had grown much taller. They clambered round the window now, and far above her head, looked down at her as she opened it in the morning.

The library was also unaltered, and in this room, and in the garden, Anne found all the joy of her life.

She was permitted to do what she liked with the garden, and, under the direction of the old gardener, who rejoiced to find some one who loved the work, and, delighted in its results, Anne planned and planted and laid the foundation for the beauty that now surrounded her. The hours in the open air restored her health. Insensibly, she grew strong and straight. Her always graceful figure developed, and though it was marred by the ill-cut gowns of the village dressmaker, she carried it superbly.

Through the long winter days, the library was her solace and delight. At first, imperfectly educated as she was, unused to reading, owing to lack of time and lack of opportunity, she was bewildered by the numberless books through which she was free to range.

But gradually she found her way; made a path for herself, and followed it to find it leading her to distant prospects. Mr. Burbage, a gentle and scholarly recluse with a catholic taste in literature, had left a fine and widely representative library behind him, containing not only the masterpieces of French as well as English prose and poetry, but many curious and rare volumes dealing with the less frequented roads of mental travel.

Anne found history, biography, philosophy, in sufficient quantities to last her for a lifetime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Carfax gave an exasperated sigh.

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

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

Mrs. Carfax sighed again.

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

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

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

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

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

Her reply however, was non-committal.

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

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

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

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

“You wouldn’t like her to paint?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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