Part 10

Her expedition to the New Forest took place a couple of days after Philip had given his first sitting to Evelyn Dundas. Madge at this time was looking rather pale and tired, so her mother thought, and, in consequence, she proposed to Madge that she should come with her. This pallor and lassitude, as a matter of fact, was a reasonable excuse enough, though had Madge looked bright and fresh it would not have stood in her way, since in the latter case the reason would have been that Madge enjoyed the country so much, and had the "country-look" in her eyes. In any case Lady Ellington meant that Madge should go with her, and if she meant a thing, that thing usually occurred.

To say that she was anxious about Madge would be over-stating the condition of her mind with regard to her, for it was a rule of her life, with excellent authority to back it, to be anxious about nothing. To say also that she thought there was any reason for anxiety would be still over-stating her view of her daughter, since if there had been any reason for it, though she would still not have been anxious, she would have cleared the matter up in some way. But her hard, polished mind, a sort of crystal billiard-ball, admitted no such reason; merely she meant to keep her daughter under her eye till she, another billiard-ball, it was to be hoped, went into her appointed pocket. Then the man who held the cue might do what he chose--she defied him to hurt her.

Yet Lady Ellington knew quite well what, though not the cause of any anxiety on her part, was the reason why she kept Madge under her eye, and that reason was the existence of an artist. Madge had cancelled an appointment she had made with him; the day after he had called, while she and her daughter were having tea alone together, and Madge had sent down word, insisted indeed on doing so, that they were not at home. She had at once explained this to her mother, saying that she had a headache, and meant to go to her room immediately she had had a cup of tea, and was thus unwilling to leave the guest on Lady Ellington's hands. That excuse had, of course, passed unchallenged, for Lady Ellington never challenged anything till it really assumed a threatening attitude. She reserved to herself, however, the right of drawing conclusions on the subject of headaches.

The idea, however, of the expedition to the New Forest Madge had hailed with enthusiasm. They were to go down there in the morning, lunch with the Hermit on lentils--she had particularly begged in her letter, otherwise rather magisterial, that they might see his ordinary mode of life--spend the afternoon in the forest, sleep at Brockenhurst, returning to London next day. His reply was cordial enough, though as a matter of fact Lady Ellington would not have cared however little cordial it was, and they travelled down third-class because there were fewer cushions in the third-class, and, in consequence, far fewer bacteria. The avoidance of bacteria just now was of consequence, hence the windows also were both wide open, and there would have been acrimonious discussion between Lady Ellington and another passenger in the same carriage, who had a severe cold in the head, had she not refused to discuss altogether.

The simplification of life had not at present in Lady Ellington's case gone so far as to dispense with the presence of a maid. She was sent on to the inn to engage rooms for them, and a separate table at dinner that evening, and the two took their seats in the cab that Merivale had ordered to meet them. He had not been at the station himself, and though Lady Ellington was secretly inclined to resent this, as somewhat wanting in respect, she had self-control enough to say nothing about it. Indeed, her own polished mind excused it; "physical exercises for the morning," she said to herself, probably detained him.

But the Hermit proved somehow unnaturally natural. He did not give them lentils to eat, but he gave them cauliflower _au gratin_ and brown bread and cheese, and to drink, water. Somehow he was not, to Lady Ellington's mind, the least apostolic, for these viands were indeed excellent, and, what was worse, he made neither an apology nor a confession of faith over them. It was all perfectly natural, as indeed she had begged it should be. Therefore the leanness of her desire went deep. After lunch, too, cigarettes were offered them, and she wanted one so much that she took one. True, he did all the waiting himself, but he did it so deftly that one really did not notice the absence of servants. Then, worst of all, when lunch was over, he put his elbow on the table, and was serious.

"What did you come down into the wilderness for to see, Lady Ellington?" he asked. "It is only a reed shaken by the wind. There is really nothing more. I cannot say how charming it is to me to see you and Miss Ellington. But I can't _tell_ you anything. You wanted to see a bit of my life, how I live it. This is how. Now, what else can I do for you? I am sure you will excuse me, but I am certain you came here to see something. Do tell me what you want to see."

This was quite sufficient.

"Ah, if there happened to be a bird of some kind," said Lady Ellington.

Merivale laughed.

"What Evelyn called a conjuring trick?" he asked. "Why, certainly. But you must sit still."

On the lawn some twenty yards off a thrush was scudding about the grass. It had found a snail, and was looking, it appeared, for a suitable stone on which to make those somewhat gruesome preparations for its meal, which it performs with such vigorous gusto. But suddenly, as Merivale looked at it, it paused, even though at that very moment it had discovered on the path below the pergola an anvil divinely adapted to its purpose. Then, with quick, bird-like motion, it dropped the snail, looked once or twice from side to side, and then, half-flying, half-running, came and perched on the balustrade of the verandah. Then very gently Merivale held out his hand, and next moment the bird was perched on it.

"Sing, then," he said, as he had said to the nightingale, and from furry, trembling throat the bird poured out its liquid store of repeated phrases.

"Thank you, dear," said he, when it paused. "Go back to your dinner and eat well."

Again there was a flutter of wings and the scud across the grass, and in a few moments the sharp tapping of the shell on the stone began. On the verandah for a little while there was silence, then the Hermit laughed.

"But there is one thing I must ask you, Lady Ellington," he said, "though I need not say how charmed I am to be able to show you that, since it interests you; it is that I shall not be made a sort of show. Evelyn Dundas was down here a few days ago, and he told me that all London was going in for the simplification of life. Of course it seems to me that they could not do better, but I really must refuse to pose as a prophet, however minor."

Lady Ellington gave no direct promise; indeed from the Hermit's point of view her next speech was far from reassuring.

"It is too wonderful," she said, "and now I can say that I have seen it myself. But do you think, Mr. Merivale, that you have any right to shut up yourself and your powers like that when there are so many of us anxious to learn? Could you not--ah, well, it is the end of the season now, but perhaps later in the autumn when people come to London again, could you not give us a little class, just once a week, and tell us about the new philosophy? I'm sure I know a dozen people who would love to come. Of course we would come down here"--this was a great concession--"not expect you to come up to London. You would charge, of course; you might make quite a good thing out of it."

Merivale tried to put in a word, but she swept on.

"Of course that is a minor point," she said, "but what is, I think, really important, is that one should always try to help others who want to learn. There is quite a movement going on in London; people deep-breathe and don't touch meat; the Duchess of Essex, for instance--perhaps you know her----"

Here he got a word in.

"I am so sorry," he said, "but it is absolutely out of the question. To begin with, I have nothing to tell you."

"Ah, but that thrush now," said she. "How did you do it? That is all I want to know."

He laughed.

"But that is exactly what I can't tell you," he said, "any more than you can tell me how it is that when you want to speak your tongue frames words. I ask it to come and sit on my finger--hardly even that. I know no more how I get it to come than it knows, the dear, why it comes."

"And what else can you do?" continued Lady Ellington, abandoning for the present the idea of a class.

Merivale got up without the least sign of impatience or ruffling of his good-humour.

"I can show you over the house," he said, "or walk with you in the forest, as you are so kind as to take an interest in what I do and how I live, and, if you like, I will talk about the simple life and what we may call the approach to Nature. But I must warn you there is nothing in the least startling or sensational about it. Above all, as far as I know, it is not possible to make short cuts; one has to tune oneself slowly to it."

This was better than nothing, for Lady Ellington had an excellent memory, and could recount all the things which Merivale told her as if she had suggested them to him and he had agreed. Also, if there was to be no simplification class, it would at least be in her power to say that he saw absolutely no one, but had been too charming in allowing Madge and her to come down and spend the day with him. Indeed, after a little reflection, she was not sure whether this was the more distinguished _rôle_, to be the medium between the Hermit and the rest of aspiring London. Thus it was with close attention that she made the tour of the cottage, and afterwards they walked up through the beech-wood on the other side of the stream on to the open heath beyond, to spend the afternoon on these huge, breezy uplands.

Now, it so happened that on this morning Evelyn, after rather a sleepless, tossing night, had gone up to his studio after breakfast to find there that, when he tried to paint, he could not. Somebody, as he had said once before, had turned the tap off; no water came through, only a remote empty gurgling; the imaginative vision was out of gear. There were three or four pictures in his studio over which he might have spent a profitable morning, but he could do nothing with any of them. He had only the afternoon before thought out a background for the picture he was doing of Philip, thought it out, too, with considerable care and precision, and all he had to do was to set a few pieces of furniture, arrange his light as he wished it over the corner which was to be represented, and put it in. Yet he could not do anything with it; his eye was wrong, and his colours were harsh, crude, or merely woolly and unconvincing. He could not see things right; it seemed to him that what he painted was in the shadow, or as if something had come between him and his canvas.

There was still one picture at which he could work, which he had not looked at yet, nor even turned its easel round from the wall, and he stood for some time in front of it, unable apparently to make up his mind as to whether he would touch it or not. Then suddenly, with a sharp, ill-humoured sort of tug, he wheeled it round. Yes, this was why he could not touch Philip's portrait; here in front of him, dazzling and brilliant, stood that which came between him and it. And as he looked his eye cleared; it was as if a film, some material film, had been drawn away from over it, and he examined his work with eager, critical attention. Though ten minutes ago he could not paint, now he could not help painting. He starved for the palette; his hands ached for the slimy resistance of the paint dragged over the canvas. On the convex mirror, which was to be on the wall behind the girl, reflecting her back and the scarlet shimmering of her cloak, he had, like a child saving the butteriest bit of toast till the end, reserved for the end the big touches of light on the gilt frame. The more difficult, technical painting of the mirror itself he had finished, putting the reflections in rather more strongly than he wished them eventually to appear, for he knew, with the artist's prescience, exactly how the lights on the gold frame would tone them down. And it was with a smile of well-earned satisfaction that he put these in now; he almost laughed to see how accurately he had anticipated the result. Then, after some half-hour of ecstatic pleasure--for at this stage every stroke told--he stepped back and looked at it. Yes, that too was as he meant it--that too was finished.

Slowly his eye dwelt next on the figure of the girl. Was Philip right after all? Did it indeed need nothing more? He felt uncertain himself. In ninety-nine other cases out of a hundred, if he had really not been certain, there was no one's judgment which he would have more willingly have deferred to than Philip's; but here he could not help connecting his insistence that nothing more should be done with the subsequent revelation that Madge did not wish to sit again to him. It was impossible to disconnect the two; coincidences of that sort did not happen.

Then the whole world of colour, of drawing, of his own inimitable art, went grey and dead, and from its ashes rose, so to speak, the thought that filled the universe for him, Madge herself. What, in heaven's name, did it all mean? What had he done that she should treat him like this? Search as he might, his conscience could find no accusation against him; yet he could not either believe that this was a mere wilful freak on her part. Then, again, he had called two days ago at an hour when she was almost always in, and the man had not given him a "Not at home" direct; he had gone upstairs. He felt absolutely certain that she had been in and had refused to see him.

For another hour he sat idle in his studio; he lay on his divan and took a volume from the morraine of old _Punches_, but found the wit flat and unprofitable; he took the violin, played a dozen notes, and put it down again; he leaned out of the window, and remarked that it was an extremely fine day. But as to painting any more, he could as soon have swum through the air over the roofs of the sea of houses below him. The studio was intolerable; his thoughts, with their dismal circle that ended exactly where it began and went on tracing the same circle again and again, were intolerable also; his own company was equally so. But from that there was no relief; good or bad, it would be with him to the grave.

Then suddenly an idea occurred to him which held out certain promise of relief at least, in that he could communicate his trouble, and he thought of the Hermit Merivale had always an astonishingly cooling effect on him; it was a pleasure in itself, especially to a feverish, excitable mind like his, to see anyone, and that a friend, who, with great intellectual and moral activity, was so wonderfully capable of resting, of not worrying; restful, too, would be the glades of the immemorial forest. And no sooner had the idea struck him than his mind was made up; a telegram to the Hermit, a hurried glance at a railway guide, and a bag into which he threw the requisites of a night, were all that was required. He had just time to eat a hurried lunch, and then started for Waterloo.

The day had been hot and sunny when he left London, and promised an exquisite summer afternoon in the country, where the freshness would tone down a heat that in town was rather oppressive. But this pleasant probability, as the train threw the suburbs over its shoulder, did not seem likely to be fulfilled, for the air, instead of getting fresher, seemed to gather sultriness with every mile. Evelyn was himself much of a slave to climatic conditions, and this windless calm, portending thunder, seemed to press down on his head with dreadful weight. Even the draught made by the flying train had no life in it; it was a hot buffet of air as if from a furnace mouth. Then, as he neared his destination, the sky began to be overcast, lumps of dark-coloured cloud, with hard, angry edges of a coppery tinge began to mount in the sky, coming up in some mysterious manner against what wind there was. This, too, when he got out at Brockenhurst, was blowing in fitful, ominous gusts, now raising a pillar of dust along the high road, then dying again to an absolute calm. Directly to the south the clouds were most threatening, and the very leaves of the trees looked pale and milky against the black masses of the imminent storm. Yet it was some vague consolation, though he hated thunder anywhere, to know how much more intolerable this would be in London, and he arrived at the cottage glad that he had come.

It was about four when he got there, and the first thing he saw on entering was a telegram on the table in the hall, still unopened, which he rightly conjectured to be the one he had himself sent. In this case clearly the Hermit was out when it arrived, and had not yet returned; so, leaving his bag at the foot of the stairs, he passed out on to the verandah. There, looking out over the garden, and alone, sat Madge. She turned on the sound of his step, and, whether it was that the dreadful colour of the day played some trick with his eyes or not, Evelyn thought she went suddenly white.

She rose and came towards him with a miserable semblance of a smile, not with that smile with which, in the portrait, she laughed at the worries of the world and all its ups and downs. She was not laughing at them now; her smile did not rise from within. Her voice, too, was a little strange; it faltered. And it was clear that speaking at all was an effort to her.

"This is quite unexpected, Mr. Dundas," she said. "I had no idea, nor, I think, had Mr. Merivale, that you were coming."

Evelyn said nothing; he did not even hold out his hand in answer to hers; he but looked at her, but looked with an unquenchable thirst. But then he found speech and a sort of manners.

"I did not know either till this morning," he said; "but then I telegraphed. I fancy Tom has not received it--not opened it anyhow; there is a telegram for him at least on the table inside, which I guess is mine. I did not know you were here either."

Then his voice rose a little.

"Indeed, I did not," he said.

The girl passed her hand wearily over her brow, brushing back her hair. She was hatless--her hat lay on the table, where still the platters of their frugal lunch remained, since they had started on their tour of inspection as soon as that meal was over.

"Oh, no, I believe you!" she said. "Why should you assert it like that? But there is a storm coming. I hate thunder. And I was alone."

Certainly the dreadful tension of the atmosphere had communicated itself to these two. Madge was, at any rate, frightfully aware that her speech was not wise. But wisdom had gone to the vanishing point. This meeting had been so unthinkably unexpected. In a way it stunned her, just as the approaching storm made her unnormal, unlike herself. But she had wits enough left to laugh--the conventional laugh merely, that is like the inverted commas to a written speech.

"I suppose I had better explain myself and my presence here," she said. "My mother asked Mr. Merivale if we might come down and see the simplification of life on its native heath. So we came and lunched here. Then we all three went for a walk, but I was tired and headachy, and turned back. They went on. I knew a storm was coming, though when we set out it was quite clear. I told them so. And in the last ten minutes it has come up like the stroke of a black wing. Ah!"

She shut her eyes for a moment as a violent flicker of lightning cut its way down from the clouds in the south, and waited, still with shut eyes, for the thunder.

"It is still a long way off," said Evelyn, as the remote growl answered.

"I know, but if you had seen the sky an hour ago. It was one turquoise. And I daren't go back to Brockenhurst. I must stop here and wait for them."

"May I take you back?" asked Evelyn.

"No; what good would that do? I may as well be terrified here as on the road. Also I can keep dry here."

Again she winced as the lightning furrowed its zig-zag path through the clouds. This time the remoteness of the thunder was less reassuring; there was an angry, choking clap, which suggested that it meant business.

By this time Evelyn had recovered himself from the first stabbing surprise of finding Madge alone here. Her terror, too, of the approaching storm had drowned his dislike of it; also, for the moment, at any rate, his ordinary, natural instinct of alleviating the mere physical fear of this girl drowned the more intimate sense of what she was to him. If only she might become thoroughly frightened and cling to him--for this outrageous possibility did cross his mind--how he would rejoice in the necessity that such an accident would force on him the necessity, since he knew that he would be unable to offer resistance, of saying that which he had told Merivale only a few days before he felt he could not help saying! But to do him justice, he dismissed such a possibility altogether; that it had passed through his mind he could not help, but all his conscious self rejected it.

Then, at the moment of the angry answering thunder, a few big splashes of rain began to star the dry gravel-path below them, hot, splashing drops, like bullets. They fell with separate, distinct reports on the leaves of the lilacs and on the path; they hissed on the grass, they whispered in the yielding foliage of the roses of the pergola, and were like spirit-rappings on the roof of the verandah.

And Madge's voice rose in suppressed terror:

"Oh, where are they?" she cried. "Why don't they come back? He can't make the lightning just sit on his finger like the thrush. Shall we go to meet them? Oh, go to meet them, Mr. Dundas!"

"And leave you alone?" he asked.

Madge's wits had thoroughly deserted her.

"No, don't do that," she cried. "Let's go indoors, and pull down the blinds and do something. What was that game you suggested once, that you should go out of the room while I thought of something, and that then you should come back and try to guess it. Anything, draughts, chess, surely there is something."

Evelyn felt strangely master of himself. At least, he knew so well what was master of him that it came to the same thing. He had certainty anyhow on his side.

"Yes, let us come indoors," he said. "I know my way about the house. There is a room on the other side; we shall see less of it there; I hate thunder too. But you need have no earthly anxiety about Lady Ellington. They may get wet, but that is all. There then, stop yours ears; you will hear it less."