Part 17

Ensor, to call her attention to his protests, punctuated his remarks at intervals with, “My dear Mrs.----” She took no notice, and if she heard, did not care to supply the name. Now and again Phillis would turn and smile, a sweet irresponsible smile, at him and sketch an inviting gesture. Ensor liked all children, and especially girls of that age, and after one of these little demonstrations followed with less travail of the spirit and fewer protests. He rather wanted, too, to see the Mary “be-damned” who was said to be waiting, cold, tired, and neglected in the car.

They had reached the outer fringe of booths, the raucous voices of cheap Jacks and the heartrending moos of the cows faded out of hearing, and the broad street in front of the Antelope Inn, before whose open yard door many conveyances stood, lay before him. He crossed the road and was now faced with the immediate problem of acceptance or refusal of Adelaide’s invitation.

There was another child in the motor, hunched up and cowering among the rolling swathes of the leather motor hood pushed back. She was obviously cold and tired of waiting. She seemed about ten years old. Her dull eyes fixed themselves on him stupidly, wearily, with a kind of painful animal interest.… She did not take them off him. Her white, wide, flat face did not light up in the least when Adelaide approached, and in reply to Ensor’s tacit inquiry, said briefly--

“No, not mine. The cook’s. You remember Gertrude--the cook that couldn’t cook? Ha! ha! Didn’t you worry me about it? I have Mary here for her health, and I leave her in the car because she’s afraid of cows. Now, Phillis, be quick, go and get the things at Storr’s, and come back. It’s a fairly long run home, Wald.…” She busied herself with some rugs.…

Phillis departed, saying in a child’s flirtatious way as she obeyed her mother’s request, “Now mind you come,” while Ensor slavishly entered the hotel, sought his room and gathered up his belongings. The other child seemed to him to have seconded the invitation too, in her own dreamy, spiritless way. It touched him. He fancied he might cheer her up a bit if he could once get her to take to him and gain her confidence. Children liked him.

When he came out of the hotel again Phillis and the other child were safely stowed away in the back of the car under one rug, pressed up against each other to keep warm. They seemed to get on very well together, Ensor was glad to see.

Adelaide invited her guest to take his seat in front beside her, and they started.

* * * * * * *

Adelaide drove in a careless, slapdash way which suggested the hand of little practice. She took risks, she showed ignorance of some fundamental rules of safety. This, however, did not disconcert Ensor at all, he had plenty of physical courage. Full tilt they ran along dull lanes and roads, blackish under foot, hedge-bordered in a sullen craven green. The Plain of York in all its mediocre dreariness unrolled itself before them. Adelaide, from between her pursed lips, made no attempt to point out landmarks or objects of interest. There were no interesting features to point out. Dull bryony shoots and clematis tendrils were spread over the hedges, like a dusty net coverlet on a lodging-house bed, neutral-tinted nettles carpeted them at the foot, and at due intervals in their extent, clean, neatly-made gates shut off the entry into fields each one like the other. The same kind of stupid, spiritless bird rose up now and again, and lighted on the tedious brown furrow that hid the one behind it. Mean clumps of trees that veiled no possible trysting-place, bordered the road or looked over it here and there. Ensor heard the little girls behind him whispering and chuckling in the well of the carriage where they had declined in laughing avoidance of the cold wind that blew steadily over the plain. At least he heard Phillis’s voice and took Mary’s for granted. The two seemed to be very good friends.

And then Adelaide began to talk to him in her wiredrawn inartistic tones which suggested to Ensor something like a rope, lashing, being trailed along a gravel walk, for he longed to bid her lift it, to try to get taut now and then. The crude passion that smouldered in her eyes, only lent an edge to her voice. It always did. When his mind dwelt on the changes in her, he could think of no feature that had altered much in twelve years, except her mouth which, from having been as nearly as possible straight, had now lost all suggestion of curve, and opening generally in raspishness, closed always in a helpless peevishness. Her face reminded him of the matronly yet at the same time old-maidish faces of those mentally starved, materially satisfied women of the Renaissance he had seen in pictures and reproductions. It was the same drawing over the cheeks, the same anxious slope of the flesh away from the consumptive peaks and hollows of the bones. Her nervous little hands, clawlike, handled the wheel with ill-regulated vigour and obstinate determination to excel. Her vanity amused Ensor, and since it made so decidedly for efficiency, commended itself to him. He liked women to show grit, and did not on the whole object to be managed by any person exhibiting marked competency.

As he reckoned, she had to give most of her real attention to the driving of the car. Her vanity stimulated her to attempt to pay off her guest with a conversation composed of ideas long since formulated by herself or others.

“Isn’t it a grim country?” she said cheerfully. “They say that there are more heirs and heiresses of solitary habit and tottering reason to the square inch here than in any other county in England. You see,” she knitted her brows, “these old feudal people have all along paid no attention to physiological rules; they have chosen to intermarry so fearfully.”

“Your old preoccupation, eh!” said Ensor, smiling.

“Don’t sneer, Wald. We met and took to each other on that ground, you remember, and I am keener on it than ever. I hate anything of a misbegotten or deformed nature like death or sin, which indeed it is.” She looked at him keenly. “Do you know if I was not a Christian woman I should find myself beating Mary here within an inch of her life?”

Ensor made a sound indicating his wish and his conviction that it were proper that she should lower her voice. Adelaide accepted the criticism and to some extent heeded its remonstrance, in the next few words she said.

“But as she’s poor faithful old Gertrude’s unique scion I stay my hand, and give her instead Parrish’s Food.”

“It’s very good of you,” Ensor murmured, oppressed. He remembered the baby in the chest of drawers, and, besides, he felt those big helpless opaque-seeming eyes of the child in the car behind, plumb in the middle of his back.…

“Dead against my own theories too,” Adelaide went on. “That sort of distinct evidence of a parent’s physiological failure ought to be stamped out at birth.”

“Perhaps,” said Ensor slowly and strainedly. “Perhaps she is going to be a poet? I fancy Keats had those beautiful suffering eyes.”

“Eyes of a sick monkey, pah!” ejaculated Adelaide, brutally, and as loudly as she had ever spoken before. “Let us not think of her. Tell me all about yourself.”

Wald Ensor obeyed and gave her an account of his doings during the last twelve years. As he talked in the even, rather tame manner which in him was accentuated, not diminished, by deep feeling, he was conscious all the time of a duel waged within him by two opposing but strong moods.

One side of him longed to lay his hand on Adelaide’s and get her to stop the car, and allow him to step out of the range of her puissant personality, which alarmed while it interested him. The other side, the explorer-adventurer side, divorced from her image, wanted to stay and see it through, and have another look at the two youthful beings for whom Adelaide was making herself responsible, more especially the cook’s ailing child. One long, attenuated, but distinct thread of passionate feeling linked him to her.… He had felt like that towards a monkey from a tropical island on the ship that the captain was bringing home to colder climes, and which resented it in sadness and melancholy.

With regard to adventure, he could not help wondering if when they reached a place called High Walls, where Adelaide said she lived, a fond husband would come to the portal, and welcome his wife and the stranger she had chosen to bring home. For Adelaide had volunteered no information about herself on that head, and he was too shy, or too apprehensive of difficulties to ask for any. He only gathered that she was well off and had bought High Walls herself, for Dr. Favarger had left his only daughter everything.

Ensor expected, he knew not why, that the car would turn in at some majestic drive, bordered by fine old trees. He was the more surprised when after going for half-a-mile or so along a bit of road bordered by hedges on one side, and a high brick wall on the other, overhung by heavy elm-trees, Adelaide stopped the car opposite a small sunk door in this very wall.

“I live here,” she said. “Wald, will you ring?”

Rooks cawed from their nests in the clumps of high trees that seemed to fill all the enclosure, and a dog barked, evidently hearing the noise of the car and anxious to welcome its mistress. Ensor, as he stood in the roadway after having pulled the long iron handle of the bell, had the sense of being at the postern gate of some embattled fortress standing tall and grimly self-contained in the gloomy plateau of the Wolds.

Time passed. No one came to the door, the dog inside barked fitfully. Adelaide’s voice sounded unreal in the great spaces.… Yet she was talking as people talk in cities.

“Nice old place!” she was saying jauntily. “I bought it, it went so well with my own peculiar mentality. It belonged to one of the crocky-minded noblemen I told you of; he came to need only one room--somewhere else and padded--so I got it cheap, freehold and all. It takes delightfully few servants to keep it up, and that’s what I like. I hate servants spying. What are mine about.… Hollo!”

She stood up in the car and called out. Her voice was not good. At last, a shuffling old manservant appeared, and stood holding the door, not attempting to make himself useful in any way. It was Ensor who helped Adelaide out. Then he turned to the two children.… Phillis had already leaped out. Ensor looked keenly at the other child, sitting or rather crouching in the wide seat. Their eyes met for a moment. Then Adelaide seemed to intercept them.

“Mary, stop in the car!… No, she may as well come round with us,” she said fussily.

The man got in and took the vehicle off somewhere, and piled with motor-rugs, Ensor stumbled after Adelaide and the two children. A narrow path, flagged with stones, not a carriage drive, led up the very short way to the house. On the steps an ugly puppy rushed at them, and covered Phillis with damp paw-marks. The child tried to abash and quieten it, in vain. Adelaide in her unnatural, would-be forcible tones, called it off, and bade it come to her. The dog obeyed, but in Ensor’s opinion, without enthusiasm.

Adelaide seemed to think differently. “You see,” she said. “He loves the hand that chastens him. I do the chastening. I have to, all these people are so tender-hearted, except Gertrude--she has good strong hands.”

“I do hate to hear it howling, Addie,” remarked Phillis.

“All young things,” said her mother, gravely, “need to go through a period of misery and due correction before they are fitted for social purposes. And this is a good dog, or you bet I shouldn’t keep him or trouble about him at all. I hate mongrels, human or otherwise, don’t you, Wald?”…

Her eyes hardened, embittered in expression, fell on the puny child, who held an immense rug that trailed on the ground beside her. She was evidently too shy or helpless to put it down or act at all until an order was expressly given her. Ensor took the rug from her. She did not look up. He began to think this instance of Adelaide’s philanthropic kindness was half-witted.…

“Go in, Mary,” said Adelaide sharply. “Don’t stand fiddling there!”

* * * * * * *

Some one did thrash the puppy next day, for Ensor heard it howling loudly beneath his bedroom window. Its cry was for all the world like that of a child that was being beaten. He could not rest in bed through the noise, though he knew well enough that dogs must be trained. He rose and employed the hour or so thus gained on the day to examine carefully the position of the room he was in, its means of exit, etc., in the style of all well-seasoned travellers. He then put on his hat and went out by a back entrance, half stumbling over and apologizing to a small child in a cotton frock who was scrubbing the steps of it. He examined the shape of the house, the extent of the garden, and counted the number of tall elm-trees that surrounded it, and were in their turn circumscribed by the high, dull brick wall that gave Adelaide’s house its name.

High Walls was a composite building, finished in late Georgian period, but including portions dating from almost every period after Elizabeth. The Elizabethan part was more or less built up in the interior. A Georgian architect of the worst years had carefully enclosed and hidden it away, and faced all with a frontage that offended every canon of art and taste and depressed every eye as well. The high brick wall, Ensor fancied, represented a still more recent addition, for the hideous expensive portal and colonnade of the façade which had been evidently designed to dazzle the countryside, was dwarfed and crushed out of all proportion by the encroaching circumference which ate up both air and space, and gave the house the air of an asylum or a prison.

His voyage of discovery ended, he went quietly in by the front door in the middle of the colonnade, and found himself in a shiny-floored hall, carpeted here and there with wild beast skins, among which he recognized his own handsome present to Miss Adelaide Favarger. One corner of the hall, rendered rather dark in daylight by the pillars of the colonnade, was palisaded off with old German screens, or arm-chairs that successfully fended off draughts from the front door, and permitted it to be used as a lounge and smoking-room.

It was panelled with oak and furnished in the old-fashioned regulation country-house style in dark browns and yellows. Several heavy antlered heads of deer hung on the walls. Their sad, glassy eyes leered down pensively. He noticed, as he went round, pince-nez in hand, that there were some very good engravings. But they all embodied the usual gloating cruelties of the sportsman. There was a print of the fighting deer of Landseer with antlers interlocked till death, another of the rabbit in the trap, and one of the stag pulled down by its yelping enemies. All these famous works of art were repugnant to Ensor. He was, if he thought about it, inclined to be anti-vivisectionist.

On the broad hearth, although it was July, charred logs rested on the iron dogs and fell slowly away into a bed of soft grey ash, the reduced ghosts of themselves. There was a growing heap of detritus that was never buried or cleared away. The gnawing flame lurked there somewhere at its heart, but gave no warmth, and the man, used to Californian summers, felt chilly and longed to stir the logs, though it was summer, into some semblance of wintry activity.

He knew how to behave, however, and taking up an out-of-date local paper that was lying about, he sat down with a patient eye on the main staircase which he expected his hostess to presently descend. The paper was dull to the uninitiated in local gossip, and he dropped it and began to go over again in his mind the last words that Adelaide had said to him as she ascended that very staircase last night. One small, finely-shaped foot was on the stair. With her small housekeeping letter-bag in one hand--the bag he had never seen her without since they came to High Walls--she had held out to him the other hand, saying gravely, without suspicion of vulgar archness--

“Good-night. Sleep well. I shan’t.”

He had said nothing, disconcerted, but had let her go. He was outraged, not so much by her words, as by the look with which she had punctuated them. It made him remember, with an intense, shy, conscious memory, the last time he had seen her eyes as she had turned to him on the gas-lit doorstep--the eyes of a sick monkey--she had given him the phrase herself--the yellow sofa in its corner at Portland Place--the wide gleaming doorstep again, when placated, reproachless, seeking not to bind him, she had let him out into the dawn.

He had begun by admiring her for her fine non-deprecatory attitude, her bold reliance on the social and moral efficacy of her own standards and principles. She denied nothing, deprecated nothing, dropped nothing. The yellow sofa was there, in the hall, he had recognized it overnight, a handsome piece of furniture. He had not supposed that she cared to invest it with sentimental recollections of her old home and her maiden days. Or did she?

He brooded over the ways of women, of which he proudly supposed himself to know nothing, when a female servant came through the outer hall, bearing to-day’s paper, which she laid down on the yellow cushions beside him. He had no time to ask her a question as to Adelaide’s morning plans, for she quickly passed back again through the red baize door that led, so Ensor imagined, to the kitchen region. She left the door open. A waft of sounds came to him, voices, one of which he fancied was the voice of the famous and omnipotent Gertrude, on whom so far he had never set eyes, while the other he knew to be Adelaide’s. She was already down and afoot, then; she was a good housekeeper, and gave her orders early?

She was evidently holding the handle of the door preparatory to coming through, finishing a sentence which he did not hear. The tone in which Gertrude permitted herself to answer her mistress set him against her; it was raucous, coarsely good-humoured, and her speech, of which he caught fragments here and there, grossly familiar.

“With me? You’ve told Phillis? Well, that’s quick work, I must say!”

“It’s got to be done,” Adelaide replied sturdily, he heard her. “And the sooner the better.”

“The other’ll miss her!”

“That can’t be helped. _You_ needn’t mind--Phillis’ll profit. This very day, mind!”

There was a pause. The cook had gone back into the kitchen some little way before she replied, and the vicious emphasis with which she spoke was accentuated by the clang of a dish, roughly set down on some pantry shelf or other.

“I don’t mind, but it seems a queer sort of way to go and treat your own flesh and blood!”

Adelaide let the door go sharply and, bag in hand, came forward to greet her guest. She had not expected to see him already down, and said so. She looked excessively handsome, if a trifle pale, as she pushed her hand through the cloudy swathes of hair that lay across her forehead. With characteristic crankiness, she arranged her hair across, not over or back from her forehead. It became her.

She stood chatting to her guest, telling him that breakfast was not ready yet, for that lazy little Phillis, whose business it was to make the tea, had had a fit of temper this morning early, and was not dressed yet. While she was speaking, Phillis looked over the banisters, and addressed her mother, calling her by her Christian name, a fashion that Ensor disliked. He fancied that perhaps the child was allowed, nay enjoined to do so, in order to minimize the effect of her size and the precocious development on the age-estimation of her mother, a natural weakness to which Adelaide, like other ladies, was probably prone.

“Oh, Addie!” the child said appealingly. “Mayn’t I really have Mary to sleep with me any more?”

“No,” replied Adelaide. “It is high time Gertrude began to train her.… Now, don’t worry, it would be poor kindness to keep her any longer with you, spoiling a good servant and unfitting her for her station. Go in and make tea.”

Phillis obeyed sulkily. Ensor was glad to see her put up a good fight for her companion.

Adelaide perched with a childish movement on the arm of the sofa, showing a pretty ankle in its openwork stocking. She looked like a handsome, capable gipsy, as she sat there, dangling her everlasting bag.…

* * * * * * *

“I’ve been asking Gertrude,” she said carelessly, “if she remembers you, and she says she does. You must look her up after breakfast.”

“But I never saw her!” he said, unwillingly, remembering her voice so lately heard. “You mean your cook in Portland Place?”

“Not much of a cook, was she? But so faithful. And I needed it. She needed me. She had a lover who was a prize-fighter, and he deserted her and left her with that wretched child you’ve seen, to keep.… It is a case of atavism, I expect, for he was a fine fellow.”

“Was that she beating the dog this morning?”

“Yes. She’s got good strong hands.”

An exultant gleam, an instantaneous flicker, as though by some new unexpected mode of invention, he had been afforded a kodak view of the suddenly protruded forked tongue of a viper, crossed Ensor’s excited vision. He shuddered. And Adelaide suddenly, but with an air of intense premeditation, slipped off the arm of the sofa and kissed him.

III

Impelled by the sudden fruition of all that was morbid in his nature, Wald Ensor, towards the end of the year, married Mary Adelaide Frances, the widow of J. Dibben, Esq. It is a fact that until he bestirred himself to apply for the licence, he had not known the name of the father of Phillis. Adelaide never refused but seemed to prefer not to speak of him. Ensor supposed that Dibben, a healthy, ordinary man of no preponderating degree of intellect, had quickly managed to alienate and embitter a capricious, easily-bored woman like Adelaide. He was too modest to imagine that he himself amused her or interested her to any great extent, but at all events, he thought she considered him adequate. In his company, she appeared to find the nearest approach, for her, to a state of repose. She took possession of him, body and soul. He realized it faintly. She even seemed to have made some slight sacrifice of her individuality with a view to enslaving him completely. Though to every one else her manner was curt, unpleasant and at times unbearably arrogant, she stayed her savage tongue and curbed her domineering temper whenever it came in direct contact with her husband. And even had she allowed her natural acerbity full play, the fact that she was now about to become a mother for the second time, called forth all Ensor’s chivalry and tenderness.

He rejoiced greatly at his approaching paternity. The want that had been created deep in his heart by the premature death of his child out in California was about to be completely satisfied; the void that for lack of a better he had filled with Adelaide’s child, Phillis Dibben, he had adopted openly; while, secretly, Mary, her foster sister, as he in his heart called her, was far dearer to him. Phillis Dibben was unsympathetic, he did not think hers was altogether a nice nature, but still she was a child, and Ensor’s love of children was a real and true sentiment.