Part 11

But he had hardly time to get the words out before the reverberation came. Again clearly, business was meant, immediate business too; the thunder followed nervously close on the flash. And at that Madge fairly ran into the house, stumbling through the darkness in the little narrow hall, and nearly falling over the bag that Evelyn had left there. True though it was that she disliked thunder, she did not dislike it to this point of utterly losing her head in a storm. But, just as her nerves were physically upset, so, too, her whole mind and being was troubled and storm-tossed by this unexpected meeting with Evelyn, and the two disorderments reacted and played upon one another. Had there been no thunderstorm she would have faced Evelyn's appearance with greater equanimity; had he not appeared she would have minded the thunderstorm less. But she braced herself with a great effort, determined not to lose control completely over herself. And the effort demanded a loan from heroism--physical fear, the fear that weakens the knees and makes the hands cold, is hard enough in itself to fight against, but to fight not only against it but against a moral fear, too, demands a thrice braver front.

She, too, remembered in their tour over the house the room of which Evelyn had spoken. It looked out, as he said, in the other direction, and she would, at any rate, not see here the swift uprush of the storm. It was very dark, not only from the portentous sootiness of the sky, but because the big box hedge stood scarcely a dozen yards from the window. Here Evelyn followed her, and, striking a match, lit a couple of candles. He also had by now got a firmer hand over himself, but at the sight of Madge sitting there, a sort of vision of desolateness, his need for her, the need too that she at this moment had for comfort, almost mastered him, and his voice was not wholly steady.

"There, you'll be better here," he said, "and candles are always reassuring, are they not? You will laugh at me, but I assure you that if I am alone in a storm I turn on all the electric light, shut the shutters, and ransack the house for candles and lamps. Then I feel secure."

Madge laughed rather dismally.

"Yes, thanks, that makes me feel a little better," she said. "It is something anyhow to know one has a companion in one's unreasonableness. I don't know what it is in a thunderstorm that agitates me; I think it is the knowledge of the proximity of some frightful force entirely outside the control of man, that may explode any moment."

Evelyn had turned to shut the door as she spoke, but at this a sort of convulsive jerk went through him, and involuntarily he slammed it to. There was something of deadly appropriateness in the girl's words; indeed, there was a force in proximity to her outside her control. He could not even feel certain that it was within his own, whether he was able to stop the explosion. But her previous conduct to him, her refusal to sit again, her saying that he bored her, her refusal even to see him when he paid an ordinary call, were all counter-explosions, so to speak.

The noise of the door that he had banged startled him not less than her.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I don't know how I did that. It flew out of my fingers, as servants say when they break something."

The first slow, hot drops of rain that had been the leaking of the sluices of heaven, had given place to a downpour of amazing volume and heaviness. In the windless air the rain fell in perpendicular lines of solid water, as if from a million inexhaustible squirts, rattling on the roof like some devil's tattoo, and hissing loud in the hedge outside. The gurgling of the house gutters had increased to a roar, and every now and then they splashed over, the pipes being unable to carry away the water. But for the last few minutes there had been no return of the lightning, and the air was already a little cooler and fresher, the tenseness of its oppression was a little relieved. And in proportion to this Madge again rather recovered herself.

"I really am most grateful to you, Mr. Dundas," she said, "for your arrival. I don't know what I should have done here alone. Did you come down from London this morning?"

Evelyn drew a chair near her and sat down.

"Yes, I settled to come quite suddenly," he said. "I had meant to work all day, and I did for half an hour or so, but everything else looked ugly, I could not see either colour or form properly...."

"Everything else?" said Madge unsuspectingly; his phrase was ambiguous; she did not even distantly guess what he meant.

"Yes, everything else, except my portrait of you," he said shortly.

There was a pause of unrivalled awkwardness, and the longer it lasted the more inevitable did the sequel become.

"I must ask you something," said Evelyn at length. "I ask it only in common justice. Do you think you are treating me quite fairly in refusing to sit for me again? For I tell you plainly, you cheat me of doing my best. And when one happens to be an artist of whatever class, that is rather a serious thing for anybody to do. It means a lot to me."

His words, he knew, were rather brutal; it was rather brutal too to take advantage of this enforced _tête-à-tête_. But he could not pause to think of that; he knew only that unless he said these things he could not trust himself not to say things less brutal, indeed, but harder for her to hear. He could not quite tell how far he had himself in control. She had put out one hand as he began, as if to ward off his question; but as he went on it fell again, and she sat merely receiving what he said, sitting under it without shelter.

"You have no right to treat me like that," he continued. "We part at my door, as far as I know, perfectly good friends one day, two days afterwards I am told that you cannot sit to me again. What can I have done? Have I done anything? Is it my fault in any way?"

She looked at him once imploringly.

"Please, please don't go on asking me," she said.

But she could not stop him now; his own bare rights justified his questions, and there was that behind which urged him more strongly than they.

"Is it my fault in any way?" he repeated.

Then a sort of despairing courage seized the girl; she would nerve herself to the defence of her secret whatever happened.

"No, it is not your fault," she said.

"Then when you told Philip that it was because I bored you----"

"Did he tell you that?" she asked.

"Yes, he told me. It was not his fault. I made him practically. He could not have refused me."

She thought intently for a moment, unable to see where her answer would lead her, or, indeed, what answer to give. In that perplexity she took the simplest way out, and told the truth.

"Yes, I said that," she said. "But it was not true."

"Then, again, I ask you why?" said he.

She felt that she must break if he went on, and made one more appeal.

"Ah, I beg of you not to question me," she cried. "You talk of justice too--is it fair on me that you use the accident of finding me alone here in this way? I can't go away, you know that, there is no one here to protect me. But if you by a single other question take advantage of it, I shall leave the house, just as I am, in this deluge, and walk back to the hotel. I must remind you that I am an unprotected girl, and you, I must remind you, are a gentleman."

She rose with flashing eyes; it had taxed all her bravery to get this out, but it had come out triumphant.

But the moment had come; all the force that had been gathering up was unable to contain itself in him any longer. One terrific second of calm preceded the explosion, and, as if Nature was following the lines of this human drama, for that second the downpour of the blinding rain outside was stayed. Inside and out there was a moment's silence.

"I know all that," he said quietly, "but I can't help myself. It is not for the picture--that doesn't matter. It is for me. Because I love you."

Madge threw her arms wide, then brought them together in front of her as if keeping him off, and a sort of cry of triumph that had begun to burst from her lips ended in a long moan. Then the room for a moment was so suddenly illuminated by some hellish glare that the candle burned dim, and simultaneously a crack of thunder so appalling shattered the stillness that both leaped apart.

"Oh, something is struck!" she cried. "It was as if it was in the very room: Is it me? Is it you? Oh, I am frightened!"

But Evelyn hardly seemed to notice it.

"That is why--because I love you," he said again.

For the moment Madge could neither speak nor move. That sudden double shock, the utter surprise of it all, and, deep down in her heart, the tumult of joy, stunned her. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him.

"You must go away at once, or I," she said. "We can't sit in the same room."

"But you don't hate me, you don't hate me for what I have said?" cried he.

"Hate you?" she said. "No, no, I"--and a sob for the moment choked her--"no, you must not think I hate you."

Just then the sound of a footfall outside and a voice in the hall struck in upon them, and Madge's name was called. In another moment the door opened and Lady Ellington entered, followed by Merivale.

"Ah, there you are, Madge!" she said. "Has it not been appalling? A tree was struck close to---- Mr. Dundas?" she said, breaking off.

Evelyn came a step forward. By a difficult, but on the whole a merciful arrangement, whatever private crisis we pass through, it is essential that the ordinary forms of life be observed. The solid wood may be rent and shattered, but the veneer must remain intact. This is merciful because our thoughts are necessarily occupied in this way with trivial things, whereas if they were suffered to dwell entirely within, no brain could stand the strain.

"Yes, I got here just before the storm began," he said, "and Miss Ellington and I have been keeping each other company. We both hate thunder."

Madge, too, played at trivialities.

"Ah, mother, you are drenched, soaking!" she cried. "What will you do?"

"I really urge you not to wait," said Merivale. "Let me show you a room; get your things off and wrap up in blankets till your maid can come from Brockenhurst with some clothes. I will send a boy in with a note at once."

Madge went upstairs with her mother to assist her, and Merivale came down again to rejoin Evelyn.

"I've only just seen your telegram," he said, "but I'm delighted you have come. That's a brave woman, that Lady Ellington. A tree was struck only a few yards from us, and she merely remarked that it was a great waste of electricity. But I'm glad it was wasted on the tree and not me."

He scribbled a few lines and addressed them to Lady Ellington's maid, and went off to get somebody to take the note into Brockenhurst. Then he came back to Evelyn.

The latter had not gone back to the room where he and Madge had sat during the storm, but was out on the verandah. Just opposite, on the other side of the river, was the tree that had been struck, not a hundred yards distant. One branch, as if in a burst of infernal anger on the part of the lightning, had been torn off, as a spider tears off the wing of a fly, and down the center of the trunk from top to bottom was scored a white mark, where the wood showed through the torn bark. But the tree stood still, no uprooting had taken place; but even now, in this windless calm, its leaves were falling--green, vigorous leaves, that seemed to know that the trunk and the sap that sustained them were dead. They fell in showers, a continuous rain of leaves, until the ground beneath was thick with them. All the pride of the beech's summer glory was done; in an hour or two the tree would be as leafless as when the gales of December whistled through it. What mysterious telegraphy of this murderous disaster had passed through the huge trunk, that had sent the message to the uttermost foliage like this; some message which each leaf knew to be terribly true, so that it did not wait for the dismantlement of the autumn, but even now, in full vigour of green growth, just fell and died? Somehow that seemed to Evelyn very awful and very inevitable; the citadel had fallen, struck by a bolt from above, and in the uttermost outworks the denizens laid down their arms. Something, too, of the sort had happened to himself in the last hour; he had told Madge the secret of his life, that which made every artery fill and throb with swift electrical pulsation of rapturous blood, and it had all passed into nothingness. She had said she did not hate him; that was all. His recollection, indeed, of what had happened after he had told her was still rather dim and hazy; there had been a terrific clap of thunder, she had said she did not hate him; then her mother and Merivale came in.

Then, as the falling leaves from the tree might be gathered and put in a heap, at any rate, the shattered fragments of the afternoon began to piece themselves together again. She had confessed that she had said he bored her, she had confessed also that that was not true. What did that mean? She had said she did not hate him. What did that mean? And was her utter disorderment of mind, that hopeless, appealing agitation which had been so present in her manner throughout, merely the result of the thunderous air? Or was there something else that agitated her, his presence, the knowledge that she had behaved inexplicably? And--was it possible that the tree should live again after that rending furrow had been scored on it?

Merivale soon returned, still smilingly unruffled, and still in soaking clothes. But he seemed to be unconscious of them, and sat down in the verandah by Evelyn. Since that terrific clap there had been no return of the thunder, but the rain was beginning to fall again, slow, steady, and sullen from the low and dripping sky. He saw at once that something had happened to Evelyn; he was trembling like some startled animal. But since he held that to force or even suggest a confidence was a form of highway robbery, he forbore from any questioning.

"So you were with Miss Ellington during the storm," he said. "How I love that superb violence of elements! It is such a relief to know that there are still forces in the world which are quite untamable, and that by no possibility can Lady Ellington divert the lightning into accumulators, which will light our houses."

Evelyn turned on him a perfectly vacant face; he seemed not to have heard even.

"What did Lady Ellington do?" he asked.

"She attended when I talked to her," said the Hermit, with pardonable severity.

Evelyn pulled himself together.

"Look here, something's happened," he said briefly. "It's--I've told her that I love her. And that's all; it's a rope dangling in the air, nothing more happened. She just said I had better go to another room. She made no direct answer at all; she wasn't even shocked."

Then the tiny details began to be gathered in his mind, as if a man swept the fallen leaves from the stricken tree into a heap.

"She gave a sort of cry," he said, "but at the end it was a moan. She threw her arms wide, and then held them to keep me off. What does it mean? What does it all mean?"

He got up quickly and began walking up and down the verandah.

"Where is she?" he said. "I must see her again. I must say what I said again, and tell her she must answer me."

The Hermit, for all his inhuman life, had some glimmerings of sense.

"You must do nothing of the sort," he said. "You don't seem to realise what you have done already. Why, she is engaged to Philip, to your friend, and you have told her you love her. Good gracious, is not that enough to make her moan?"

"I told you I should a week ago," said Evelyn.

"Yes, but you told me that conditionally. You said you would do so when you saw she loved you. Instead---- Good heavens! Evelyn, you must be unaware of what you have done. You were left with the girl during a thunderstorm, a thing that excites you and terrifies her, and you took advantage of your excitement and her terror to say this. It's ugly; it's beastly. But I can say it isn't like you."

Evelyn showed no sign of resenting this. As far as the mere criticism of what he had done was concerned, he appeared merely to feel a speculator's interest in how it all struck another spectator. Even Lady Ellington's hard, polished mind could not have presented a surface more impervious to scratches.

"You speak as if I did it all intentionally," he remarked. "But I never intended anything less. It had nothing to do with what I could control. I had no more power over it than I had over the thunderstorm. After all, you don't blame your thrush for eating worms. If one acts instinctively, nobody has any right to blame me. Besides, I don't want your moral judgment. I just want to know what it means. You have called me a Pagan before now, and I did not deny it. But there I am. I don't happen to like the colour of your hair, but I accept it. It seems to me buttery, if you want to know. And I seem to you Pagan, without conscience, you think I have acted uglily. Very well."

Merivale hesitated a moment; he had no desire to say hard things because they were hard. On the other hand, he felt that the game must be played, rules had to be observed, or human life broke up in confusion, as if the fielders in a game of cricket would not run after the ball or the bowler bowl. He himself did not go in for cricket, he deliberately stood aside, but the rules were binding on those who played. Yet it was no use trying to convince a person who fundamentally disagreed.

"Well, you asked me," he said, "and I have given you my opinion. That's all. Nobody's opinion is binding on anyone else. But I do ask you to think it over."

Evelyn gave a little click of impatience.

"Think it over!" he said. "What else do you suppose I should be thinking about, or what else have I thought about for days?"

Merivale shook his head.

"Try to get outside yourself, I mean, and look at what you have done from any other standpoint than your own. You say you couldn't help telling her. Well, there are certain things one has got to help, else----"

He stopped; it was no use talking. But Evelyn wanted to hear.

"Else?" he suggested.

"Else you had better not mix with other people at all," said Merivale. "You have better reason for turning hermit than I. You have told a girl who is engaged to your friend that you love her. Think over that!"

NINTH

In spite of her wetting Lady Ellington felt she had had a most interesting day, when, an hour later, she drove back with Madge and her maid to Brockenhurst. She was not in the least afraid of having caught cold, because her physical constitution was, it may almost be said, as impervious to external conditions as her mind. That frightful flash of lightning, too, which had shattered the now leafless tree, had also, as we have seen, been powerless to upset the even balance of her nerves, and had only evoked a passing regret that so much electric force should be wasted. She could, therefore, observe with her customary clearness that something had occurred to agitate Madge, and though the thunderstorm alone might easily account for this--where Madge had got her nerves from she could not conjecture, there was nothing hereditary about them, at any rate, as far as her mother was concerned--yet it required no great exercise of constructive imagination to connect Evelyn's sudden appearance with this agitation. She remembered also Madge's refusal to see him the other day, and her rather unaccountable postponement of the sitting. A few well-chosen questions, however, would soon settle this, and these she delivered that evening after dinner, firing them off like well-directed shots at a broad target. She did not, to continue the metaphor, want to make bull's eyes at once, a few outers would show her the range sufficiently well.

She had first, however, committed to writing on half-a-dozen sheets of the hotel paper her impressions of the day and the conversation of Mr. Merivale, in so far as it bore upon the simplification of life, and was pleased to find how considerable a harvest she had gathered in. Lady Ellington's literary style had in perfection those qualities of clearness and sharp outline that distinguished her mind, and her document might have been a report for an academy of science, so well arranged and precise was it. There were no reflections of her own upon the matter; it was merely a chronicle of facts and conversation. This having been written, revised, and read aloud to Madge, she then marched with her gun to her position in front of the target.

"It was odd that Mr. Dundas should have appeared so unexpectedly, Madge," she said. "You must have had some considerable time with him if he arrived before the storm began."

Madge had been rather expecting this, and she winced under her mother's firm, hard touch.

"Yes, he had been there about an hour before you came in," she said. "I think your account is quite excellent, mother."

This, if we consider it as an attempt to draw Lady Ellington off the subject of Evelyn, was quite futile. She did not even seem to notice that such an attempt had been made.

"And did you arrange about your further sittings?" she asked.

"I don't think any more will be necessary," replied Madge. "Philip agrees with me too."

"And Mr. Dundas?"

"I don't think he will ask me for any more either."

Lady Ellington considered this a moment.

"But surely you had settled to have one more," she said, "the one which you postponed."

"Yes, but I think we all agree now that as far as I am concerned the picture is finished."

Lady Ellington was not exactly puzzled; it would be fairer to say that though she did not quite know where this led, she was quite certain it led somewhere. It was not a puzzle; it was rather a clue. So she got behind a bush, as it were, and continued firing from there.

"He is a great friend of Philip's, is he not?" she said. "I suppose you will see a good deal of him after your marriage?"

This sharp-shooting was frightfully trying to Madge's nerves; she never knew where the next shot might be coming from. But in that it was now quite clear to her that shooting was going on, it was the part of wisdom to defend herself.

"Oh! I hope so," she said, "he is charming. I expect he will be constantly with us."

This was a little disconcerting; Madge had distinctly had the best of that exchange. But she was in the beleaguered position; she felt that at any moment she might have to give in. She had a wild desire simply to leave the room, for she wanted to be alone, and to think over all that she now knew, but the clock inexorably pointed to half-past nine only, and to say she was going to bed would simply strengthen whatever idea it was in Lady Ellington's mind that prompted her questions. Maternal anxiety and solicitude, though the point of view of the mother was perhaps a little predominant, were the moving causes of them, if they were referred back to primary motives; to put it more bluntly yet, Lady Ellington merely wished for a guarantee that nothing of any sort had occurred which might, however remotely, influence the matrimonial design for her daughter which she had formed and Madge had agreed to carry out. That she had fears that things were running otherwise than smoothly--by smoothly being meant that the marriage would take place on the twenty-eighth of the month--would be an overstatement of the idea that prompted these questions, but she certainly wished for some convincing word that she need have none.