Part 18
“Well, then, to employ that somewhat homely proverbial expression,” she went on, “the fat got into the fire at the Bishop’s palace. Mrs. Rawley was kind enough to write and ask us to dinner, and she added that she had heard I sang, and wouldn’t I bring some music? But nobody had ever told me that it’s bad form in England to sing well. So, after dinner, when Mrs. Rawley said, ’Now, Miss Silver, do sing us something,’ I made the incredible blunder of singing as well as I could. I sang the Erlkônig, and Madame Dornaye played the accompaniment, and we both did our very bestest, in our barefaced, Continental way. We were a little surprised, and vastly enlightened, to perceive that we’d shocked everybody. And by-and-by the Bishop’s daughters consented to sing in their turn, and then we saw the correct British style of doing it. If you don’t want to be considered rowdyish and noisy in a British drawing-room, you must sing under your breath, faintly, faintingly, as if you were afraid somebody might hear you.”
“My poor dear young lady,” her cousin commiserated her, “fancy your only just discovering that. It’s one of the foundation-stones of our social constitution. If you sing with any art or with any feeling, you expose yourself to being mistaken for a paid professional.”
“Another thing that’s horrified the County,” pursued Johannah, “is the circumstance that I keep no horses. I don’t like horses—except in pictures. In pictures, I admit at once, they make a very pleasant decorative motive. But in life—they’re too strong and too unintelligent; and they’re perpetually bolting. By-the-bye, please choose a good feeble jaded one, when you engage our fly. I’m devoted to donkeys, though. They’re every bit as decorative as the horse, and they’re really wise—they only baulk. I had a perfect love of a little donkey in Italy; his name was Angelo. If I decide to stay in England, I shall have a spanking team of four donkeys, with scarlet trappings and silver bells. But the County say ’Oh, you must have horses,’ and casts its eyes appealingly to heaven when I say I won’t.”
“The County lacks a sense of situations,” he reflected. “It’s really a deliciously fresh one—a big country house, and not a horse in the stables.”
“Apropos of the house, that brings me to another point,” said she. “The County feels very strongly that I ought to put the house in repair—that dear old wonderful, rambling, crumbling house. They take it as the final crushing evidence of my depravity, that I prefer to leave it in its present condition of picturesque decay. I’m sure you agree with me, that it would be high treason to allow a carpenter or mason to lay a hand on it. By-the-bye, I hope you have no conscientious scruples against speaking French; for Madame Dornaye only knows two words of English, and those she mispronounces. There she is—yes, that little black and grey thing, in the frock. She’s come to meet me, because we had a bet. You owe me five shillings,” she called out to Madame Dornaye, as Will helped her from the carriage. “You see, I’ve brought him.”
Madame Dornaye, who had a pair of humorous old French eyes, responded, blinking them, “Oh, before I pay you, I shall have to be convinced that it is really he.”
“I’m afraid it’s really he,” laughed Will; “but rather than let so immaterial a detail cost you five shillings, I’m prepared to maintain with my dying breath that there’s no such person.”
“Don’t mind him,” interposed Johannah. “He’s trying to flatter you up, because he wants you to call him Jean mon fils, as if his name weren’t common William.” Then, to him, “Go,” she said, with an imperious gesture, “go and find a vehicle with a good tired horse.”
And when the vehicle with the good tired horse had brought them to their destination, and they stood before the hall-door of Silver Towers, Johannah looked up at the escutcheon carved in the pale-grey stone above it, and said pensively, “On a field argent, a heart gules, crowned with an imperial crown or; and the motto, ’Qu’il régne!’ If, when you got my first letter, Cousin Will, if you’d remembered the arms of our family, and the motto—if you had ’let it reign’—I should have been spared the trouble and expense of a journey to town to-day.”
“But I should have missed a precious experience,” said he. “You forget what I couldn’t help being supremely conscious of—that I bear those arms with a difference. I hope, though, that you won’t begrudge the journey to town. I think there are certain aspects of your character that I might never have discovered if I’d met you in any other way.”
That evening Johannah wrote a letter:
“Dear Mr. Burrell,—Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut. The first part of my rash little prophecy has already come true. Will Stretton is staying in this house, a contented guest. At the present moment he’s hovering about the piano, where Madame Dornaye is playing Chopin; and he’s just remarked that he never hears Chopin without thinking of those lines of Browning’s:
’I discern
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.’
I quite agree with you, he is a charming creature. So now I repeat the second part of my rash little prophecy: Before the summer’s over he will have accepted at least a good half of his paternal fortune. Ce que femme veut, le diable ne saurait pas l’empêcher. He will, he shall, even if I have to marry him to make him.—Yours ever, Johannah Silver.” III
Will left his room somewhat early the next morning, and went down into the garden. The sun was shining briskly, the dew still sparkled on the grass, the air was heady with a hundred keen earth-odours. A mile away, beyond the wide green levels of Sumpter Meads, the sea glowed blue as the blue of larkspur, under the blue June sky. And everywhere, everywhere, innumerable birds piped and twittered, filling the world with a sense of gay activity, of whole-hearted, high-hearted life.
“What! up already?” a voice called softly, from behind him.
He turned, and met Johannah.
“Why not, since you are?” he responded.
She laughed, and gave him her hand, a warm, elastic hand, firm of grasp. In a garden-hat and a white frock, her eyes beaming, her cheeks faintly flushed, she seemed to him a sort of beautiful incarnation of the spirit of the summer morning, its freshness, and sweetness, and richness.
“Oh, we furriners,” she explained; “we’re all shocking early risers. In Italy we love the day when it is young, and deem it middle-aged by eight o’clock. But in England I had heard it was the fashion to lie late.”
“I woke, and couldn’t go to sleep again, so I tossed the fashion to the winds. Perhaps it was a sort of dim presentiment that I should surprise Aurora walking in the garden, that banished slumber,” he suggested, with a flourish.
“Flowery speeches are best met by flowery deeds,” said she. “Come with me to the rosery, and I will give you a red, red rose.”
And in the rosery, as she stood close to him, pinning the red, red rose in his coat, her smooth cheek and fragrant hair so near, so near, he felt his heart all at once begin to throb, and he had to control a sudden absurd longing to put his arms round her and kiss her. “Good heavens,” he said to himself, “I must be on my guard.”
“There,” she cried, bestowing upon her task a gentle pat, by way of finish, “that makes us quits.” And she raised her eyes to his, and held them for an instant with a smile that did anything but soothe the trouble in his heart, such a sly little teasing, cryptic smile. Could it possibly be, he wondered wildly, that she had divined his monstrous impulse, and was coquetting with it?
“Now let’s be serious,” she said, leading the way back to the lawn. “It’s like a hanging-garden, high up here, with the meads and the sea below, isn’t it? And àpropos of the sea, I would beg you to observe its colour. Is it blue? I would also ask you kindly to cast an eye on that line of cliffs, there to the eastward, as it goes winding in and out away to the vanishing point. Are the cliffs white?”
“Oh, yes, the cliffs are white,” agreed the unwary Will.
“How can you tell such dreadful fibs?” she caught him up. “The cliffs are prismatic. White, indeed! when they gleam with every transparent tint from rose to violet, as if the light that falls on them had passed through rubies and amethysts, and all sorts of precious stones. That is an optical effect due doubtless to reflection or refraction or something—no?”
“I should say it was almost certainly due to something,” he acquiesced.
“And now,” she continued, “will you obligingly turn your attention to the birds? Tweet-weet-willow-will-weet. I don’t know what it means, but they repeat it so often and so earnestly, I’m sure it must be true.”
“It’s relatively true,” said he. “It means that it’s a fine morning, and their digestion’s good, and their affairs are prospering—nothing more than that. They’re material-minded little beasts, you know.”
“All truth is relative,” said she, “and one’s relatively a material-minded little beast oneself. Is the greensward beyond there (relatively) spangled with buttercups and daisies? Is the park (relatively) leafy, and shadowy, and mysterious, and delightful? Is the may in bloom? Voyons donc! you’ll never be denying that the may’s in bloom. And is the air like an elixir? I vow, it goes to one’s head like some ethereal elixir. And yet you have the effrontery to tell me that you’re pining for the flesh-pots of Great College Street, Westminster, S.W.”
“Oh, did I tell you that? Ah, well, it must have been with intent to deceive, for nothing could be farther from the truth,” he owned.
“The relative truth? Then you’re not homesick?”
“Not consciously,” said he.
“Neither am I,” said she.
“Why should you be?” he asked.
“This is positively the first day since my arrival in England that I haven’t been, more or less,” she answered.
“Oh?” he wondered sympathetically.
“You can’t think how dépaysée I’ve felt. After having lived all one’s life in Prague, suddenly to find oneself translated to the mistress-ship of an English country house,” she submitted.
“In Prague? I thought you had lived in Rome and Paris, chiefly,” he exclaimed.
“Prague is a figure of rhetoric,” she reminded him. “I mean the capital of Bohemia. Wasn’t my father a sculptor? And wasn’t I born in a studio? And haven’t my playmates and companions always been of Florizel the loyal subjects? So whether you call it Rome or Paris or Florence or Naples, it was Prague, none the less.”
“At that rate, I live in Prague myself, and we’re compatriots,” said Will.
“That’s no doubt why I don’t feel homesick any more,” she responded, smiling. “Where two of the faithful are gathered together they can form a miniature Prague of their own. If I decide to stay in England, I shall send for a lot of my Prague friends to come and visit me, and you can send for an equal number of yours; and then we’ll turn this bright particular corner of the British Empire into a province of Bohemia, and the County may be horrified with reason. But meanwhile, let’s be Pragueians in practice as well as theory. Let’s go to the strawberry beds, and steal some strawberries,” was her conclusion.
She walked a little in front of him. Her garden-hat had come off, and she was swinging it at her side, by its ribbons. Will noticed the strong, lithe sway and rhythm of her body, as she moved. “What a woman she is,” he thought; “how one feels her sex.” And with that, he all at once became aware of a singular depression. “Surely,” a malevolent little voice within him argued, “woman that she is, and having passed all her life with the subjects of Florizel, surely, surely, she must have had... experiences. She must have loved—she must have been loved.” And (as if it was any of his business!) a kind of vague jealousy of her past, a kind of suspiciousness and irrelevant resentment, began to burn, a small dull spot of pain, somewhere in his breast.
She, apparently, was in the highest spirits. There was something expressive of joyousness in the mere way she tripped over the grass, swinging her garden-hat like a basket; and presently she fell to singing, merrily, in a light voice, that prettiest of old French songs, Les Trots Princesses, dancing forward to its measure:
“Derrièr’ chez mon père,
(Vole, vole, mon cour, vole!)
Derrièr’ chez mon père,
Ya un pommier doux,
Tout doux, et iou,
Ya un pommier doux.”
“Don’t you like that song?” she asked. “The tune of it is like the smell of faded rose-leaves, isn’t it?”
And suddenly she began to sing a different one, possibly an improvisation:
“ And so they set forth for the strawberry beds,
The strawberry beds, the strawberry beds,
And so they set forth for the strawberry beds,
On Christmas day in the morning.”
And when they had reached the strawberry beds, she knelt, and plucked a great red berry, and then leapt up again, and held it to her cousin’s lips, saying, “Bite—but spare my fingers.” And so, laughing, she fed it to him, while he, laughing too, consumed it. But when her pink finger-tips all but touched his lips, his heart had a convulsion, and it was only by main-force that he restrained his kisses. And he said to himself, “I must go back to town to-morrow. This will never do. It would be the devil to pay if I should let myself fall in love with her.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve felt terribly dépaysée,” she told him again, herself nibbling a berry. “I’ve felt like the traditional cat in the strange garret. And then, besides, there was my change of name. I can’t reconcile myself to being called Miss Silver. I can’t realise the character. It’s like an affectation, like making-believe. Directly I relax my vigilance, I forget, and sink back into Johannah Rothe. I’m always Johannah Rothe when I’m alone. Directly I’m alone, I push a big ouf, and send Miss Silver to Cracklimbo. Then somebody comes, and, with a weary sigh, I don my sheep’s clothing again. Of course, there’s nothing in a name, and yet there’s everything. There’s a furious amount of mental discomfort when the name doesn’t fit.”
“It’s a discomfort that will pass,” he said consolingly. “The change of name is a mere formality—a condition attached to coming into a property. In England, you know, it’s a rather frequent condition.”
“I’m aware of that,” she informed him. “But to me,” she went on, “it seems symbolic—symbolic of my whole situation, which is false, abnormal. Silver? Silver? It’s a name meant for a fair person, with light hair and a white skin. And here I am, as black as any Gipsy. And then! It’s a condition attached to coming into a property. Well, I come into a property to which I have no more moral right than I have to the coat on your back; and I’m obliged to do it under an alias, like a thief in the night.”
“Oh, my dear young lady,” he cried out, “you’ve the very best of rights, moral as well as legal. You come into a property that is left to you by will, and you’re the last representative of the family in whose hands it has been for I forget how many hundreds of years.”
“That,” said she, “is a question I shall not refuse to discuss with you upon some more fitting occasion. For the present I am tempted to perpetrate a simply villainous pun, but I forbear. Suffice it to say that I consider the property that I’ve come into as nothing more nor less than a present made me by my cousin, William Stretton. No—don’t interrupt!” she forbade him. “I happen to know my facts. I happen to know that if Will Stretton hadn’t, for reasons in the highest degree honourable to himself, quarrelled and broken with his father, and refused to receive a penny from him, I happen to know, I say, that Sir William Silver would have left Will Stretton everything he possessed in the world. Oh, it’s not in vain that I’ve pumped the man named Burrell. So, you see, I’m indebted to my Quixotic cousin for something in the neighbourhood, I’m told, of eight thousand a year. Rather a handsome little present, isn’t it? Furthermore, let me add in passing, I absolutely forbid my cousin to call me his dear young lady, as if he were seven hundred years my senior and only a casual acquaintance. A really nice cousin would take the liberty of calling me by my Christian name.”
“I’ll take the liberty of calling you by some exceedingly unChristian name,” he menaced, “if you don’t leave off talking that impossible rot about my making you a present.”
“I wasn’t talking impossible rot about your making me a present,” she contradicted. “I was merely telling you how dépaysée I’d felt. The rest was parenthetic. So now, then, keep your promise, call me Johannah.”
“Johannah,” he called, submissively.
“Will,” said she. “And when you feel, Will, that on the whole, Will, you’ve had strawberries enough, Will, quite to destroy your appetite, perhaps it would be as well if we should go in to breakfast, Willie.” IV.
They were seated on the turf, under a great tree, in the park, amid a multitude of bright-coloured cushions, Johannah, Will, and Madame Dornaye. It was three weeks later—whence it may be inferred that he had abandoned his resolution to “go back to town to-morrow.” He was smoking a cigarette; Madame Dornaye was knitting; Johannah, hatless, in an indescribable confection of cream-coloured muslin, her head pillowed in a scarlet cushion against the body of the tree, was gazing off towards the sea with dreamy eyes.
“Will,” she called languidly, by-and-by.
“Yes?” he responded.
“Do you happen by any chance to belong to that sect of philosophers who regard gold as a precious metal?”
“From the little I’ve seen of it, I am inclined to regard it as precious—yes,” he answered.
“Well, then, I wouldn’t be so lavish of it, if I were you,” said she.
“If you don’t take care,” said he, “you’ll force me to admit that I haven’t an idea of what you’re driving at.”
“I’m driving at your silence. You’re as silent as a statue. Please talk a little.”
“What shall I talk about?”
“Anything. Nothing. Tell us a story,” she decided.
“I don’t know any stories.”
“Then the least you can do is to invent one,” was her plausible retort.
“What sort of a story would you like?”
“There’s only one sort of story a woman ever sincerely likes—especially on a hot summer’s afternoon, in the country,” she affirmed.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly invent a love-story,” he disclaimed.
“Then tell us a true one. You needn’t be afraid of shocking Madame Dornaye. She’s a realist herself.”
“Jeanne ma fille!” murmured Madame Dornaye, reprovingly.
“The only true love-story I could tell has a somewhat singular defect,” said he. “There’s no heroine.”
“That’s like the story of what’s-his-name—Narcissus,” Johannah said.
“With the vastest difference. The hero of my story wasn’t in love with his own image. He was in love with a beautiful princess,” Will explained.
“Then how can you have the face to say that there’s no heroine?” she demanded.
“There isn’t any heroine. At the same time, there’s nothing else. The story’s all about her. You see, she never existed.”
“You said it was a true love-story,” she reproached him.
“So it is—literally true.”
“I asked for a story, and you give me a riddle.” She shook her head.
“Oh, no, it’s a story all the same,” he reassured her. “Its title is Much Ado about Nobody.”
“Oh? It runs in my head that I’ve met with something or other with a similar title before,” she considered.
“Precisely,” said he. “Something or other by one of the Elizabethans. That’s how it came to occur to me. I take my goods where I find them. However, do you want to hear the story?”
“Oh, if you’re determined to tell it, I daresay I can steel myself to listen,” she answered, with resignation.
“On second thoughts, I’m determined not to tell it,” he teased.
“Bother! Don’t be disagreeable. Tell it at once,” she commanded.
“Well, then, there isn’t any story,” he admitted. “It’s simply an absurd little freak of child psychology. It’s the story of a boy who fell in love with a girl—a girl that never was, on sea or land. It happened in Regent Street, of all romantic places, ’one day still fierce ’mid many a day struck calm.’ I had gone with my mother to her milliner’s. I think I was ten or eleven. And while my mother was transacting her business with the milliner, I devoted my attention to the various hats and bonnets that were displayed about the shop. And presently I hit on one that gave me a sensation. It was a straw hat, with brown ribbons, and cherries, great glossy red and purple cherries. I looked at it, and suddenly I got a vision—a vision of a girl. Oh, the loveliest, loveliest girl! She was about eighteen (a self-respecting boy of eleven, you know, always chooses a girl of about eighteen to fall in love with), and she had the brightest brown eyes, and the rosiest cheeks, and the curlingest hair, and a smile and a laugh that made one’s heart thrill and thrill with unutterable blisses. And there hung her hat, as if she had just come in and taken it off, and passed into another room. There hung her hat, suggestive of her as only people’s hats know how to be suggestive; and there sat I, my eyes devouring it, my soul transported. The very air of the shop seemed all at once to have become fragrant—with the fragrance that had been shaken from her garments as she passed. I went home, hopelessly, frantically in love. I loved that non-existent young woman with a passion past expressing, for at least half a year. I was always thinking of her; she was always with me, everywhere. How I used to talk to her, and tell her all my childish fancies, desires, questionings; how I used to sit at her feet and listen! She never laughed at me. Sometimes she would let me kiss her—I declare, my heart still jumps at the memory of it. Sometimes I would hold her hand or play with her hair. And all the real girls I met seemed so tame and commonplace by contrast with her. And then, little by little, I suppose, her image faded away.—Rather an odd experience, wasn’t it?”
“Very, very odd; very strange and very pretty,” Johannah murmured. “It seems as if it ought to have some allegorical significance, though I can’t perceive one. It would be interesting to know what sort of real girl, if any, ended by becoming the owner of that hat. You weren’t shocked, were you?” she inquired of Madame Dornaye.
“Not by the story. But the heat is too much for me,” said that lady, gathering up her knitting. “I am going to the house to make a siesta.”
Will rose, as she did, and stood looking vaguely after her, as she moved away. Johannah nestled her head deeper in her cushion, and half closed her eyes. And for a while neither she nor her cousin spoke. A faint, faint breeze whispered in the tree-tops; now a twig snapped, now a bird dropped a solitary liquid note. For the rest, all was still summer heat and woodland perfume. Here and there the greensward round them, dark in the shadow of dense foliage, was diapered with vivid yellow by sunbeams that filtered through.
“Oh, dear me,” Johannah sighed at last.
“What is it?” Will demanded.
“Here you are, silent as eternity again. Come and sit down—here—near to me.”
She indicated a position with a lazy movement of her hand. He obediently sank upon the grass.
“You’re always silent nowadays, when we’re alone,” she complained.
“Am I? I hadn’t noticed that.”
“Then you’re extremely unobservant. Directly we’re alone, you appear to lose the power of speech. You mope and moon, and gaze off at things beyond the horizon, and never open your mouth. One might suppose you had something on your mind. Have you? What is it? Confide it to me, and you can’t think how relieved you’ll feel,” she urged.
“I haven’t anything on my mind,” said he.
“Oh? Ah, then you’re silent with me because I bore you? You find me an uninspiring talk-mate? Thank you,” she bridled.
“You know perfectly well that that’s preposterous nonsense,” answered Will.
“Well, then, what is it? Why do you never talk to me when we’re alone?” she persisted.