Part 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugh and his wife!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sudden paralyzing blankness fell upon Anne’s mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

She was amazed at the violence of her own emotions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why is she so dowdy then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hush!” The exclamation came swiftly from Hugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why Rome?” asked the Vicomte lazily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

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

He joined in his friend’s laugh.

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

“Just before she went.”

“Was I away then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“_Voilà, Monsieur!_”

François began to put the tea into the teapot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have some more tea? Well, another cigarette?

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

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

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

“And how did you get to know Anne?”

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

“Cantankerous?”

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

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

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

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

“Her figure was superb,” murmured the Vicomte.

“Yes.”

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

“But he was struck too?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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