Part 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My own flowers?” she repeated, puzzled.

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

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

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

It gave place to a little movement of dignity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No? Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

Fontenelle made an impatient gesture.

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

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

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

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

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

“An unusual case.”

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

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

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

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

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

XII

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

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

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

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

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

“His father is dead then?” Anne asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Anne was silent. She thought she did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was always dissatisfied.

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

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

Even while she spoke, her smile died.

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

And when she was gone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is.”