Chapter 25

"All the same, I should have brought you something. A bunch of wild flowers I can give you, and I will begin my nosegay with a branch of this honeysuckle. There are dog-roses in the hedges. I used to send you expensive flowers, but times have changed." And he insisted on returning to the brook, having seen, so he said, some forget-me-nots among the sedges. And with these and some sprays of a little pink flower, which he told her was the cuckoo-flower, they walked, telling and asking each other the names of different wayside weeds till they arrived at the cottage.

"There is my cottage."

And Owen saw, some twenty or thirty yards from the roadside, the white gables of a cottage thrusting over against a space of blue sky. Flights of swallows flew shrieking past, and the large elms on the right threw out branches so invitingly that Owen thought of long hours passed in the shade with books and music; but, despite these shady elms, the cottage wore a severe air--a severe cottage it was, if a cottage can be severe. Owen was glad Evelyn hadn't forgotten a verandah.

"A verandah always suggests a Creole. But there is no Creole in you."

"You wouldn't have thought my cottage severe if you hadn't known that I had come from a convent, Owen. You like it, all the same."

Owen fell to praising the cottage which he didn't like.

"On one thing I did insist--that the hall was to be the principal room. What do you think of it? And tell me if you like the chimney-piece. There are going to be seats in the windows. Of course, I haven't half finished furnishing." And she took him round the room, telling how lucky she had been picking up that old oak dresser with handles, everything complete for five pounds ten, and the oak settle standing in the window for seven.

"I can't consider the furniture till I have put these flowers in water." So he fetched a vase and filled it, and when his nosegay had been sufficiently admired, he said "But, Evelyn, I must give you some flower-vases.... And you have no writing-table."

"Not a very good one. You see, I have had to buy so many things."

"You must let me give you one. The first time you come up to London we will go round the shops."

"You'll want to buy me an expensive piece, unsuitable to my cottage, won't you, Owen?" She led him through the dining-room past the kitchen, into which they peeped.

"Eliza's cooking an excellent dinner!" he said. And they went through the kitchen into the garden.

"You see what a piece of ground I have. We are enclosing it." And Owen saw two little boys painting a paling. "Now, do you like the green? It was too green, but this morning I put a little yellow into it; it is better now." They walked round the acre of rough ground overlooking the valley, Owen saying that Evelyn was quite a landed proprietor.

"But who are these boys? You have quite a number," he said, coming upon three more digging, or trying to dig.

"They are digging the celery-bed."

"But one is a hunchback, he can't do much work; and that one has a short leg; the third boy seems all right, but he isn't more than seven or eight. I am afraid you won't have very much celery this year." They passed through the wicket into the farther end of Evelyn's domain, which part projected on the valley, and there they came upon two more children, one of whom was blind.

"This poor child--what work can he do?"

"You'd be surprised; and his ear is excellent. We're thinking of putting him to piano-tuning."

"We are thinking?"

"Yes, Owen; these little boys live here with me in the new wing. I'm afraid they are not very comfortable there, but they don't complain."

"Seven little crippled boys, whom you look after!"

"Six--the seventh is my servant's son; he is delicate, but he isn't a cripple. We don't call him her son here, she is nominally his aunt."

"You look after these boys, and go up to London to earn their living?"

"I earn sufficient to run my little establishment."

As they returned to the cottage, one of the boys thrust his spade into the ground.

"Please, miss, may we stay up a little longer this evening? It won't be dark till nine or half-past, miss."

"Yes, you can stay up." And Owen and Evelyn went into the house. "I do hope, Owen, that Eliza's cooking will not seem to you too utterly undistinguished."

"You have forgotten, Evelyn, that I have been living on hunter's fare for the last two years."

At that moment Eliza put the soup-tureen on the table.

"Why, the soup is excellent! An excellent soup, Eliza!"

"There is a chicken coming, Sir Owen, and Miss Innes told me to be sure to put plenty of butter on it before putting it into the oven, that that was the way you liked it cooked."

"I am glad you did, Eliza; the buttering of the chicken is what we always overlook in England. We never seem to understand the part that good butter plays in cooking; only in England does any one talk of such a thing as cooking-butter." And he detained Eliza, who fidgeted before him, thinking of the vegetables waiting in the kitchen, of what a strange man he was, while he told her that his cook, a Frenchman, always insisted on having his butter from France, costing him, Owen, nearly three shillings a pound.

"Law, Sir Owen!" And Eliza went back to the kitchen to fetch her vegetables, and Evelyn laughed, saying:

"You have succeeded in impressing her."

"You have cooked the chicken excellently well, Eliza, and the butter you used must have been particularly good," he said, when the servant returned with the potatoes and brussels sprouts. But he was anxious for her to leave the room so that he might ask Evelyn if she remembered the chickens they used to eat in France.

"Evelyn, dear, shall we ever be in France again?"

"My poor little boys, what would happen to them while I was away? For you, who care about sweets, Owen, I'm afraid Eliza will seem a little behind the times; afraid of a failure, we decided on a rice pudding."

"Excellent; I should like nothing better."

Owen was in good humour, and she asked him if he had brought something to smoke--a cigar.

"Some cigarettes. I have given up smoking cigars, stinking things!"

"But you used to be so fond of cigars, Owen?"

"Oh, a long time ago. Didn't you notice that man in the trap in front of us as we came from the station? That vile cigar, the whole evening smelt of it."

"My dear Owen!"

Then he got up from the table and went to the piano and waited there for Evelyn, who was talking to Eliza about the purchase of another bed and where it should be placed in the dormitory, a matter so trivial that a dozen words should suffice to settle it, so he thought; but they kept on talking, and when Eliza left the room she took up some coarse sewing. To bring her to the piano he struck a few notes, saying:

"The Muses are awake, Evelyn."

"No, Owen, no; I am in no mood for singing."

When he asked her if she never sang, the answer was, "Sometimes I go to the piano when I am restless; I sing a little, yes, a little into my muff; you know what I mean. But this evening I would sooner talk. You said we had so much to talk about." He admitted she knew what his feelings were better than he knew them himself. It would be a pity to waste this evening in music (this evening was consecrate to themselves), and from talking of Elizabeth and Isolde they drifted into remembrances of the old days so dear to him. But he had always reproached Evelyn with a fault, a certain restlessness; it was rare for her to settle herself down to a nice quiet chat, and this was a serious fault in a woman, a fault in everybody, for a nice quiet chat is one of the best things in life. He was prone to admit, however, that when the mood for a chat was upon her nobody could talk or listen as she could by a fireside. Yielding to her humour, like a bird she would talk on and on with an enthusiasm and an interest in what she was saying which made her a wonder and a delight; and seeing that by some good fortune he had come upon her in one of these rare humours, he did not regret her refusal to sing, and watched her at his feet listening to him with an avidity which was enchanting, making him feel that there was nothing in the world but he and she. She had once said, enchanting him with the admission, for it was so true, that if she were alone with a man for an evening he must hate her very much if he was not to fall in love with her. On reminding her of her saying she admitted that she had forgotten it. It seemed to him that his dead mistress had come to life again. Her eyes shone with something of their old light, and he said to himself, "The convent has faded out of her mind and out of her face." Interpenetrated with her sweet atmosphere, which had for ever haunted him, he breathed like one who hears music going by. Every moment was a surprise. The next great surprise being the discovery that the convent had not quelled the daring of her thought--it came and went swallow-like, as before.

"Because there were no men in the convent. Though I am virtuous, Owen, and must remain so, I can't live without men. If I am deprived of men's society for a few days I wilt."

The picture of herself painted in these few words, Evelyn wilting amid the treble of the nuns like a plant in an uncongenial soil, delighted Owen, enabling him to forget the sad fact that she was virtuous and would have to remain so. For she was still his Evelyn, a hero worshipper, with man for her hero always, even though it were a priest. A moment of the thought caused him a sigh, but he was in the seventh heaven when she told him the first letter she had written when she left the convent was for him. He had maligned her in thinking the past had no meaning for her. For who was so faithful to her friends? Again he forgot everything but himself sitting by her, seeing her bright eyes, listening to her voice, absorbed by her atmosphere; and talking and listening by turns he was carried away in a delicious oblivion of everything except the sensation of the moment. It seemed to him like floating down the current of some enchanted river; but even in enchanted rivers there are eddies, otherwise the enchantment of the current and the flowery banks under which it flows would become monotonous, and presently Owen was caught in an eddy. The stream flowed gaily while he told her of his experience in the desert; she was interested in the gazelles and in the eagles, though qualifying the sport as cruel, and in his synthesis of the desert--a desire for a drink of clean water. Nor did she resent his allusion to his meeting with Ulick at Dowlands, interrupting him, however, to tell him that Ulick had married Louise.

"Married Louise!"

Louise! What an evocation of past times was in this name! And their talk passed into a number of little sallies.

"Well, he'll spend a great deal of her money for her."

"No, he is doing pretty well for himself."

It seemed like listening to a fairy tale to hear that Ulick was doing very well for himself; and travelling back to the convent, by those mysterious roads which conversation follows, Owen learned that it was at the end of the first year of her postulancy that Evelyn had heard of her father's illness. Up to that moment he had not noticed a change in her humour, not until he began to question her as to her reason for suddenly returning from Rome to the convent. It was then that a strange look came into her face; she got up from her chair and walked about the room, gloomy and agitated, sitting down in a corner like one overcome, whelmed in some extraordinary trouble. When he went to her she crossed the room, settling herself in another corner, tucking herself away into it. His question had awakened some terrific memory; and perforce he did not dare to ask her what her trouble was, none that she could confide to him, that was clear, and he began to think that it would be better to leave her for a while. He could go out and speak with the little boys, for a memory like the one which had laid hold of her must pass away suddenly, and his absence would help to pass it. If she were not better when he returned it would be well for him to seek some excuse to sleep at the inn, for her appearance in the corner frightened him; and standing by the window, looking into the quiet evening, he railed against his folly. Any one but himself would have guessed that there was some grave reason for her life in the convent. Such an end as this to the evening that had begun so well! "My God, what am I to do!" And, turning impulsively, he was about to fling himself at her feet, beseeching of her to confide her trouble, but something in her appearance prevented him, and in dismay he wondered what he had said to provoke such a change. What had been said could not be unsaid, the essential was that the ugly thought upon her like some nightmare should be forgotten. Now what could he say to win her out of this dreadful gloom? If he were to play something!

A very few bars convinced him that music would prove no healer to her trouble. To lead her thoughts out of this trouble--was there no way? What had they been talking about? The bullfinches which she had taught to whistle the motives of "The Ring"; but such a laborious occupation could only have been undertaken for some definite purpose, to preserve her sanity, perhaps, and it would be natural for a woman to resent any mention of mental trouble such as she had suffered from on her return from Rome. Something had happened to her in Rome--what? And he sat for a long time, or what seemed to him a long time, perplexed, fearing to speak lest he might say something to irritate her, prolonging her present humour.

"If I had only known, Evelyn, if I had only known!" he said, unable to resist the temptation of speech any longer. As she did not answer, he added, after a moment's pause, "I think I shall go out and talk to those boys." But on his way to the door he stopped. "I wish that brig had gone down."

"That brig? What do you mean?"

"The boat which took me round the world and brought me back, and which I am going to sell, my travelling days being over." Seeing she was interested, he continued to tell her how the _Medusa_ had been declared no longer seaworthy, and of his purchase of another yacht.

"But you said you wished the brig had gone down."

And, seizing the pretext, he began to tell her of the first thing that came into his head; how he had sailed some thousands of miles from the Cape to the Mauritius, explaining the mysteries of great circle sailing, and why they had sailed due south, though the Mauritius was in the north-west, in order that they might catch the trade winds. Before reaching these there were days when the sailors did little else but shift the sails, trying to catch every breeze that fluttered about them, tacking all the while, with nothing to distract them but the monotonous albatross. The birds would come up the seas, venturing within a few yards of the vessel, and float away again, becoming mere specks on the horizon. Again the specks would begin to grow larger, and the birds would return easily on moveless wings.

"When one hears the albatross flies for thousands of miles one wonders how it could do this without fatigue; but one wonders no longer when one has seen them fly, for they do not weary themselves by moving their wings, their wings never move, they float month after month until the mating instinct begins to stir in them, and then in couples they float down the seas to the pole. There is nothing so wonderful as the flight of a bird; and it seemed to me that I never could weary of watching it. But I did weary of the albatross, and one night, after praying that I might never see one again, I was awakened by the pitching of the vessel, by the rattling of ropes, and the clashing of the blocks against swaying spars. I had been awakened before by storms at sea. You remember, Evelyn, when I returned to Dulwich--I had been nearly wrecked off the coast of Marseilles?" Evelyn nodded. "But the sensation was not like anything I had ever experienced at sea before, and interested and alarmed I climbed, catching a rope, steadying myself, reaching the poop somehow."

"'We're in the trades, Sir Owen!' the man at the helm shouted to me. 'We're making twelve or fourteen knots an hour; a splendid wind!'

"The sails were set and the vessel leaned to starboard, and then the rattle of ropes began again and the crashing of the blocks as she leaned over to port. Such surges, you have no idea, Evelyn, threatening the brig, but slipping under the keel, lifting her to the crest of the wave. Caught by the wind for a moment she seemed to be driven into the depths, her starboard grazing the sea or very nearly. The spectacle was terrific; the lone stars and the great cloud of canvas, the whole seeming such a little thing beneath it, and no one on deck but the helmsman bound to the helm, and well for him--a slip would have cost him his life, he would have been carried into the sea. An excellent sailor, yet even he was alarmed at the canvas we carried, so he confided to me; but my skipper knew his business, a first-rate man that skipper, the best sailor I have ever met. There are few like him left, for the art of sailing is nearly a lost art, and the difficulty of getting men who can handle square sails is extraordinary. But this one, the last of an old line, came up, crying out quite cheerfully, "Sir Owen, we're in luck indeed to have caught the trades so soon."

"Day after day, night after night, we flew like a seagull. 'Record sailing,' my skipper often cried to me, telling me the number of knots we had made in the last four-and-twenty hours."

"And the albatrosses, I hope you didn't catch one?"

"One day the skipper suggested that we should, the breast feathers being very beautiful; and, the wind having slackened a little, a hook was baited with a piece of salt pork, which the hungry bird seized. As soon as he was drawn on board he flapped about more helpless than anything I have ever seen, falling into everything he could fall into, biting several of the crew. You know the sonnet in which Baudelaire compares the bird on the wing to the poet with the Muse beside him, and the albatross on deck to the poet in the drawing-room. You remember the sonnet, how the sailors teased the bird with their short black pipes."

"But the breast feathers?"

"We didn't kill the bird; I wouldn't allow him to be killed. We threw him overboard, and down into the sea he went like a log."

Evelyn asked if he were drowned.

"Albatrosses don't drown. He swam for a time and fluttered, and at last succeeded in getting on the wing. I was very glad to see him float away, and was still more glad a few minutes afterwards, for before the bird was out of sight a sign appeared in the heavens, and I began to think of the story of 'The Ancient Mariner.' You know--"

"Yes, I know the story, how all his misfortunes arose from the killing of an albatross. But what was the sign?"

"A dull yellow like a rainbow, only more pointed, and my skipper said to me, 'Sir Owen, that is one of them hurricanes; if I knew which way she was going I'd try to get out of the way as fast as I could, for we shall be torn to pieces in a very few minutes.' I assure you it was an anxious moment watching that red, yellow light in the sky; it grew fainter, and eventually disappeared, and the skipper said, 'We have just missed it.' A few days afterwards we came into the Mauritius, and the first thing we saw was a great vessel in the ports, her iron masts twisted and torn just like hairpins, Evelyn. She had been caught in the tornado, a great three-masted vessel.... We should have gone down like an open boat."

"And after you left the Mauritius your destination was--"

"Borneo, Sumatra, the Malay Archipelago."

"But what were you seeking in the Malay Archipelago?"

"What does one ever seek? One seeks, no matter what; and, not being able to see you, Evelyn, I thought I would try to see everything in the world."

"But there is nothing to see in Borneo?"

"Well, you will laugh when I tell you, but it seemed to me that I'd like to see the orang-outang in his native forests. I had been to Greece, and I knew the Italian Renaissance--"

"And after so much art to see an orang-outang in a tree would be a new experience, Owen."

"Soon there will be no more higher apes, if medical science continues to progress; no more gorillas or chimpanzees."

"In a world without gorillas life will not be worth living. I quite understand."

Owen laughed.

"I should be sorry for anything to disappear. The poor mother is speared, for she will fight for her little one; ugly as he may be in our eyes he is beautiful in hers."

"But you didn't do this, Owen?"

"No; after two or three days in a forest one wearies of it; and after all it wasn't very likely that I should have got a snapshot. The camera is my weapon."

"And after the orang-outang which you failed to meet?"

"I spent some time in Japan."

"And then?"

"Well, then, I went to Manchuria, to the Amur, a country almost forgotten." And he told her how the eagles drove the wild sheep over the precipices, and of a wolf hunt with eagles."

"You have seen now everything the world has to show?"

"Very nearly, and after seeing it all I come back to the one thing that interests me."

Tears rose to Evelyn's eyes; such an avowal of love a woman hardly ever hears.

The voices of the children playing in the garden reached their ears, and Evelyn said:

"They should have been in bed long ago, but, Owen, your being here makes everything so exceptional."

"Really? I'm glad of that," he answered shyly, fearing to say anything which would carry her thoughts back among unpleasant memories. But it was quite safe to speak of her love of the poor, and of poor children. "What inspired you to start this home, Evelyn?"

"Well, you see, I had to have something to work for, some interest; and not having any children of my own... They really must go to bed."

"But, Evelyn, why will you interrupt our talk? Let us go on talking; tell me about the convent. Your adventures are so much more wonderful than mine. You haven't half told me what there is to tell--the Prioress and the sub-Prioress, you never liked her?"

A smile gathered about her lips, and he asked her what she was smiling at; and it was with some difficulty he persuaded her to tell him about Sister Winifred and Father Daly."

"Counterparts! counterparts!" he said. "And Cecilia giving the whole show away because her counterpart was a dwarf! How could you live among such babies?"

"After all, Owen, are they any more babies than we are? Our interests are just as unreal."

"Your interest here is not as unreal; their hope is to build a wall of prayer between a sinful world and the wrath of God. Such silliness passes out of perception."

"Your perception? We come into the world with different perceptions; but do not let us drift into argument, not this evening, Owen."

"Quite so, let us not drift into argument.... I am sorry you charged me with being disappointed that you didn't remain in the convent; you see I didn't know of the wonderful work you were doing here. Your kindness is more than a nun's kindness." But he feared his casual words might provoke her, and hastened to ask her about Sister Winifred, at length persuading her into the admission that Sister Winifred used to whip the children.

"I'm sure she liked whipping them. Women who shut themselves out from life develop cruelty. I can quite understand how she would like to hear them cry."

"Tell me more about the nuns."